Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R)

Republicans in Wisconsin have gone to great extremes to undermine democracy via gerrymandering and voter suppression, but their latest moves are little different. On Tuesday, GOP state senators voted along party lines to remove Wisconsin's chief election administrator, Michael Haas, from his post, despite bipartisan support on the state's elections commission for his continued leadership. This move comes just weeks before the Feb. 20 primary, where Republicans are defending the seat of a conservative state Supreme Court justice who isn't seeking re-election. Meanwhile, Republicans are trying to cancel elections altogether just because they may lose them.

Back in 2015, Republican legislators and Gov. Scott Walker dismantled the nonpartisan Government Accountability Board that had run Wisconsin elections and ethics investigations for several years. They created new commissions that were widely seen as an attempt to inject partisanship into the process and undermine GAB investigations into Walker’s administration. But in 2016, election commissioners unanimously chose Haas to lead them, even though he’d previously worked for the GAB, which Republicans despised. However, Haas had only been serving on an interim basis, allowing Republican senators to claim they were merely denying him their consent that he serve permanently, not removing him from the post, which the law reserves as a power for the commission.

Consequently, this fight will likely spill into the courtroom. The elections commission, which has three Democrats and three Republicans, subsequently voted 4-to-2 to keep Haas on the job through April 30 to oversee the spring primary elections. But Republican Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald called that vote illegal, and the GOP has resolved to replace Haas with a figure who may end up being more partisan.

Meanwhile, Democrats flipped a heavily Republican state legislative district in a special election earlier in January, but Walker is putting his thumb on the scale to make sure that doesn't happen again.