Wisconsin state Senate Republicans, despite knowing full well that their enabling the “Red Mirage” of 2020 was basically the original sin that caused Trump and his cult to go completely apeshit over losing and the fact that the GOP majority lower chamber of the state legislature already passed the measure, are set to kill off a bill that would allow for absentee ballots to be tabulated the day prior to election day, citing bullshit reasons like leaking of possible lax security of counting or results leaking early, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports. “Counting the ballots should be driven by security not speed. Why would we want to give bad actors the chance to see ballots prior to Election Day?” said MAGA hell witch Rep. Janel Brandtjen, adding it “gives bad actors an extra day to cheat,” raising the question of whether these assholes even want elections at all.

Republican state Senator Kathy Bernier, a “RINO” who of course is retiring because she’s had enough of this shit, said the bill “would have helped with the number of ballots, and it’s all transparent,” adding that MAGA activists “who are all in an uproar over the ballot dumps now are the very same people screaming at legislators not to pass the Monday count bill.”

There are only ten states which do not allow any processing (meaning simply opening envelopes and otherwise prepping the ballots for tabulation, not even the tabulation itself) whatsoever of votes prior to election day and as shitty luck would have it three of those ten are the “Blue Wall” triumvirate of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Prior to the 2020 election, the GOP legislatures of all three resisted any and all pleas to let ballots be counted beforehand, which guaranteed the “big, massive dumps” of late night tallies for Biden that look suspicious to the dumbasses of the MAGA base and are sold exactly as such by the lying propagandists they love.

Tim Alberta, now of the Atlantic but with Politico in November 2020 wrote at the time that, in Michigan at least, it was because Republicans wanted “to avoid the perception of aiding a system the president was attacking as illegitimate and not only were they skeptical of the Democrats’ concerns of a drawn-out count. But many Republicans didn’t believe the election would be terribly close to begin with. A summer’s worth of polling, conducted for them privately at the local and statewide level, indicated that Trump stood little chance of carrying Michigan a second time,” which, no knock on Alberta writing in the immediate aftermath, is complete horseshit.

Yeah, maybe that was true among the softer, less unhinged Republicans in Michigan as their semi-privately held reason, but in the lead up to the 2020 election it was crystal fucking clear that MI/PA/WI Republicans’ true intent was to leave wide open a window for Trump to enact his absolute worst case-scenario assault on the counting process. Months and months of apocalyptic warnings of Proud Boys and MAGA loyal federal law enforcement storming vote counting places, seizing or destroying ballots, and assaulting election workers with the express goal of leaving the outcome of the election in doubt for an opening to declare martial law or God knows what else to remain in power never materialized, but not for lack of such ambition among the Trump regime’s loyalists.

It was just dumb luck and the hard work of elections officials that Michigan and Wisconsin powered through the count to make it clear enough for the networks to call them less than 24 hours after polls closed. Pennsylvania took 3 days longer for reasons not exactly clear – it could be with Arizona (allows early counting) and Georgia (allows pre-processing) much closer still outstanding at the time that most decision desks (save for one big exception in Arizona) wanted to be extra sure with the final call of a tipping point state. In any case, despite the not-too belated call in Wisconsin the damage was done. Now here we are with the state’s taxpayers shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay some fat fuck who still wears braces despite being in his 50s to “investigate” an election that was decided fifteen months ago. Oh and he thinks the outcome can still be decertified, as if that would have any effect whatsoever on a current presidency.

It’s really hard to see this and take away anything other than that Wisconsin state Senate Republicans want chaotic and inefficient vote counts, they want public faith in elections to be undermined, they want to create opportunities for bad actors to exploit, they want Mike Lindell to hold fucking “Cyber Symposiums” again in 2025 in the unlikely event he isn’t in prison or dead of a crack cocaine overdose by then. Otherwise we would be seeing some action here.