Opinion | You Shouldn’t Have to Risk Your Life to Vote

Republicans insist that widespread mail voting would be an “invitation for voter fraud,” even though evidence suggests fraud is actually lower in states with all-mail balloting. They also argue it would be logistically impossible to print and mail so many ballots before Tuesday. If so, then why not just push back the election, as Mr. Evers has proposed? The answer can only be that Republican legislators don’t want people to vote.

These are the same Republicans, you might recall, who in 2011 gerrymandered Wisconsin’s legislative district maps so egregiously that they were able to win more than 60 percent of the seats while losing the statewide popular vote to Democrats.

These are the same Republicans who, with that ill-gotten majority, passed a strict voter-ID law that denied ballot access to black and Latino Wisconsinites at far higher rates than whites. The law reduced turnout in 2016 by 200,000 votes from 2012, in a key battleground state that Donald Trump won by fewer than 23,000.

And these are the same Republicans who, knowing that Wisconsin could be a decisive state in the 2020 election, are hoping to lock in a state judge’s recent purge of more than 230,000 voters, disproportionately from Democratic-voting areas. The judge’s ruling, which targeted voters believed to have moved, has been appealed to the State Supreme Court.

On Thursday, a federal judge declined to delay the primary, but he extended the deadline for returning absentee ballots and loosened the requirement that ballots be signed by a witness. These fixes don’t come close to creating the conditions for a fair election, but they are both clearly necessary given the more than one million absentee ballots that have been requested — a number that is many times higher than average and is already overwhelming understaffed elections offices. Republican lawmakers immediately appealed the ruling.

In their zeal to ram through this vote, Republicans are subjecting Wisconsinites to the worst of both worlds: a turnout that will be sharply reduced because so many voters will continue to do the right thing and abide by the stay-at-home order, and yet one that will still be large enough to inundate the few precincts that will be open, and expose untold numbers of people to potential infection.

Turnout is likely to be especially lower in Democratic-leaning cities like Milwaukee, which holds a large majority of the state’s minority voters and which has been hit hardest by the pandemic.