Is Wisconsin the ultimate test of trust in voting?
On a wintry night in 1854, a small band of citizens gathered in a one-room schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin, to address a looming crisis for their young democracy. Meeting by candlelight, they agreed to form a new political party aimed at stopping the spread of slavery, uniting a fractious coalition of Whigs, Free-Soilers, and anti-slavery Democrats around the urgent effort to keep slavery out of the territories of Kansas and Nebraska.
Alvan Bovay, the lawyer who called the meeting, named the party res publica, or Republican. It would become the dominant anti-slavery party in subsequent years of tumult, which culminated in a bloody Civil War under a Republican president, Abraham Lincoln.
Today, Mr. Bovay’s political heirs are grappling with another brewing clash – one that may prove as consequential for the union as the struggles of the 1850s. It’s playing out in legislative chambers and courtrooms, on social media and talk radio, and it centers on an existential facet of democracy: Who controls how elections are run – and what happens when citizens lose trust in the legitimacy of the vote?
The issue has been rankling states across the nation, driven by the ongoing assertions of former President Donald Trump and his allies – despite all evidence to the contrary – that the 2020 election was stolen. And perhaps nowhere has it been as contentious as in Wisconsin, a pivotal swing state that Mr. Trump lost to Joe Biden by just under 21,000 votes, after winning by nearly 23,000 four years earlier.
A decade of bitter partisan combat here has shrunk the political center, to the point where neither side trusts the other to play fair. Even among Republicans who dismiss Mr. Trump’s false claims of fraud, suspicions linger that Democrats took advantage of electoral rules under pandemic conditions to
