The new Yorker:

The situation in Wisconsin is this: with an assist from conservative judges at the highest levels of government, local Republican leaders are forcing their state to participate in an Election Day that will exacerbate a pandemic. The consequences that this will lead to have been apparent for weeks. Citizens will have to choose between their health and their vote; tens of thousands will be disenfranchised; and, inevitably, people who go out to vote on Tuesday, and people who work the polls—including members of the National Guard, who have been deployed to make up for poll-worker shortfalls—will get sick. The election forecasters and polling gurus might consider crunching the numbers on the likelihood that people will die.

This unfolding electoral tragedy is the product of a standoff between the politicians who run the state government there. On one side is Tony Evers, the Democratic governor. On the other are the Republicans who control the state legislature—who have resisted every step Evers has attempted to take to address the crisis. On March 23rd, with four hundred and sixteen confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the state, Evers announced a stay-at-home order. The top Republicans in the state, Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, denounced the move, saying that it had “created mass amounts of confusion.” On March 27th, with eight hundred and forty-two confirmed cases, Evers called for mailing every registered voter in Wisconsin a ballot so they could vote by mail. Vos rejected the suggestion, calling it “careless and reckless.” On April 1st, with a thousand five hundred and fifty confirmed cases, a federal judge warned that proceeding with the election could make the state’s outbreak worse, and Evers called on the state’s legislative leaders to postpone it, saying that, if he had the legal authority to do so, he would. Fitzgerald declared, “For Democrats to suggest now that their hands were somehow tied is pure cowardice.”

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