If only Hillary Rodham Clinton had Gone To Wisconsin, they say, all of this could have been avoided and, in truth, staying away wasn’t the smartest thing any candidate ever did. After all, she was the first Democratic candidate to lose the state in almost 30 years, and she lost it only by roughly 23,000 votes. In the immediate aftermath, Governor Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage this particular Midwest subsidiary, and a guy who couldn’t even make the starting line in his own party’s presidential primaries, scoffed at HRC as someone who wasn’t “an aspirational candidate.” Of course, there were non-aspirational factors at play everywhere in the state, as the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports.

The study by University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Ken Mayer concluded 16,800 to 23,250 voters in the two counties — the Democratic strongholds of Wisconsin — did not vote because of the voter ID law. The $55,000 survey was paid for with property tax money by Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell, a Democratic opponent of the law. Key portions of those surveyed said they did not vote because they did not have ID that would allow them to or did not believe the IDs they had could be used under the voting law. The study found the ID law disproportionately affected African-Americans and low-income people.

Largely under the radar, the entire premise of democratic elections in this country is completely up for grabs. Some of it, like this legislative ratfcking in Wisconsin, is self-inflicted. Meanwhile, we seem to be inching ever closer to the possibility that the Russian ratfcking may have involved hacking into election systems and, more speculatively, monkeywrenching results.

Wisconsin is one of 21 states that, last week, confirmed that there were Russian attempts to hack its voting system. All it will take is one precinct somewhere in which hackers juggled the numbers and the confidence Americans have in their elections will drop to almost nothing. (And what still makes me nervous is the possibility that 2016 actually began as a dry run that succeeded beyond the dreams of its planners.) This is a terrible time to have our own politicians still playing mischief with the franchise themselves.

"As the clerk who serves the largest population of African-Americans in the state, I was shocked by the numbers and am furious to see that Jim Crow laws are alive and well," Milwaukee County Clerk George Christenson said in a news release.

At a time in which every institution seems fragile, this is the one institution that cannot be. Without the legitimacy of the franchise, and without its extending it as widely as possible, the American system of government is in the first case a deliberate fraud and in the second case an empty husk. This is a genuine crisis in the middle of a virtual epidemic of them. None of them can be put off. All of them have to be confronted now. Not all existential threats announce themselves.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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