By now, just about everyone and their uncle caught the video of Robin Vos, the Republican Speaker of the Assembly, who was a driving force Tuesday's shitshow of an election, making a fool of himself by telling people that it was perfectly safe to come out to vote in Tuesday's elections in Wisconsin while he is bedecked in full PPE, including gloves, facemask, goggles and a full length hospital gown. What a lot of people missed is that Vos was an "Election Inspector" in a drive-thru polling station in the small city of Burlington with a population of 10,000. This means that while other workers, who were not nearly as protected as Vos, would go up to the cars to get the person's Voter ID and signature and run them to Vos who entered them into the computer to verify them. Vos had absolutely zero contact with any members of the public.
Also missing was the whole clip, included in this tweet, which showed Vos explaining that if people applied for an absentee (mail in) ballot but hadn't received it, they could just email the clerk's office and have one emailed back to them:
This is Wisconsin’s @SpeakerVos, depressing the vote. He misinforms voters, who actually don’t have recourse if they didn’t request an absentee ballot by last Friday. Even the way he is dressed sends the clear message Republicans want to convey: stay home. pic.twitter.com/xNsB0Ctr2B
— Jamil Smith (@JamilSmith) April 7, 2020
However, this advice was completely false, as reported by PolitiFact when another person gave the same misinformation:
"He was wrong," Magney said.
And later in the day, so was state Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, who made a nearly identical claim to a reporter while working as an election inspector.
His staff later admitted the error. Spokeswoman Kit Beyer confirmed Vos was mistaken, saying the elections commission "had guidance recently on that fact, which staff hadn’t briefed him on."
Vos' third (or is fourth now?) wife, Robin Litgens Vos, did no better. She was also an election inspector in the small village of Rochester, Wisconsin, a population of 3,600 people. She posted on Facebook that is was perfectly safe to vote, but as Dan Bice of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel pointed out, there were no voters there:
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos' wife -- former state Rep. Michelle Litjens Vos -- highlights that no one appears to be voting at her polling location in Rochester, Wis. Where could they be? pic.twitter.com/TofW6NfatW
— Daniel Bice (@DanielBice) April 7, 2020
But what can you expect from a woman who, while a state representative herself, abandoned her husband and children to have an adulterous affair with Vos?
Nor was this Litjens Vos' first foray into the realm of the super stupid. In March, she also shared her opinion that the reactions to COVID-19 were "way overblown:"
Michelle Litjens Vos, a conservative pundit and former state lawmaker, called the country's coronavirus prevention and mitigation efforts an overreaction in a series of posts on her personal Facebook page.
"I want to go on record and say we could be unnecessarily destroying our economy," she wrote.
"COVID IS NOT AIRBORNE (droplets yes, airborne no)," she wrote. "My GOD we're overreacting."
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has stated that respiratory droplets — "produced when an infected person coughs, sneezes or talks" — can carry the disease from person to person.
A New England Journal of Medicine study found that the virus could remain suspended in air between a half-hour and up to three hours,
[...]
In another post, Vos wrote, "Yes people will die of this. It just isn't worth shutting down our whole economy - except grocery stores. In my opinion."
I wonder if these two asshats even realize they already have blood on their hands from all the people that will die from forcing the elections Tuesday.
