“Souls to the Polls on Thursday called for the removal of the Republican Party of Wisconsin’s new executive director over Election Day 2020 text messages in which he asked about getting supporters of then-President Donald Trump to flood the Milwaukee voting rights group with requests to be taken to the polls.
“The group’s call came after the Journal Sentinel reported on the text messages from new GOP executive director Andrew Iverson when he was Wisconsin head of Trump Victory, a joint operation of the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee in 2020. …
“In a statement, Iverson said this week that the text messages were jokes and weren’t supposed to be taken seriously.
“Huffman [who was the recipient of the texts], however, told the Journal Sentinel he did not take it as a joke and contended Iverson was clearly trying to overwhelm and discourage Souls to the Polls by forcing the group to spend valuable resources taking Trump supporters to various Milwaukee polling locations, where they may or may not have voted.”
Advocates of Australian-style mandatory voting would say that this kind of situation wouldn’t happen if the U.S. had an electoral system in which every adult citizen was obligated to vote and procedures were in place to facilitate the exercise of that obligation. The idea of trying to overwhelm a voter turnout operation so that it cannot function as intended seems rationally malicious (i.e., Machiavellian) only if there is no expectation that every citizen will vote and resources are limited to encourage citizens to do so.