SCOTUS Votes 5-4 to Suppress Voting in Wisconsin: Will More States Follow Suit?

"By a 5–4 vote, SCOTUS lets Wisconsin throw out tens of thousands of ballots," reads a Monday headline in Slate. In a nutshell, the US Supreme Court's ruling will "nullify the votes of citizens who mailed in their ballots late — not because they forgot, but because they did not receive ballots until after Election Day due to the coronavirus pandemic," the article says. How dangerous of an issue is this?

The United Nations has named Tuesday, April 7, as the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Rwanda Genocide. "In just 100 days in 1994, about 800,000 people were slaughtered by ethnic Hutu extremists" in the central African nation once colonized by Belgium, the BBC reported in an article last year. "They were targeting members of the minority Tutsi community, as well as their political opponents, irrespective of their ethnic origin." And just a few days ago, "remains were discovered in a valley dam that authorities said could contain about 30,000 bodies, more than a quarter-century after the country’s genocide in which 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and Hutus who tried to protect them were killed," the Associated Press reported Sunday. Have we learned anything 26 years later?

As the number of COVID-19 cases continues to climb, "over 100 human rights groups have issued a joint statement warning that governments' response to the coronavirus pandemic 'must not be used as a cover to usher in a new era of greatly expanded systems of invasive digital surveillance,'" Common Dreams reported on April 2. How big of a concern is this?

"Who is going to pay for it? Those were the last words a patient dying of COVID-19 asked Derrick Smith, a certified registered nurse anesthetist in New York City," Alan MacLeod wrote in a Monday article in MintPress News."The man appeared more concerned about the potential cost he and his family might incur than the loss of his own life." COVID-19 is exposing some real holes in the US health care system.

GUESTS:

Dr. Clarence Lusane — African-American author, activist, lecturer and chair of the Political Science Department at Howard University.

Iyabo Obasanjo — Professor at the College of William and Mary. The daughter of former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, she was appointed commissioner for health in the Ogun State of Nigeria in 2003 and elected to the Nigerian Senate in 2007, where she was the chair of the Health Committee.

Chris Garaffa — Web developer and technologist.

Alan MacLeod — Academic and journalist. He is a staff writer at MintPress News and a contributor to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), as well as the author of "Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting."