The Supreme Court Just Signed a Death Warrant for Voters

Holding an election amid a deadly pandemic is a tricky thing. Health officials are recommending everyone stay home to protect themselves and each other, but the stakes of voting have never been higher, as everyone sees so clearly the vital importance of putting the right people in charge of public health. Wisconsin's Democratic governor, Tony Evers, tried to solve that problem by extending the deadline for absentee ballots in the state's primary election Tuesday so that more people could vote remotely. This seems like a no-brainer that the federal government should get behind, as well: ensuring that everyone can vote by mail at a time when showing up to polls risks public health. But Republicans in Wisconsin challenged that move. And on the eve of the state's primary election, the U.S. Supreme Court brazenly sided with the GOP and shut down Evers's solution to expand voting, overruling two lower court decisions.

In a 5-4 ruling, the high court's conservative majority, including the recently-confirmed Brett Kavanaugh, essentially voted to force Wisconsinites to risk their health standing in long lines at the polls on Tuesday or not to vote at all. Hypocritically, the justices cast these votes remotely-and are canceling oral arguments in some of their other cases-to protect themselves from the coronavirus, while they are forcing Wisconsin's voters to choose between risking their lives, and the safety of their communities, versus their right to participate in democracy. The move further exacerbates voter suppression, seven years after SCOTUS gutted the Voting Rights Act.

Predictably, the voting situation in Wisconsin Tuesday morning-particularly in the urban areas, where coronavirus tends to spread more rapidly- was a nightmare. Milkwaukee voters who decided to brave the pandemic stood in hours-long lines, as all but five of the city's 180 polling locations for almost 600,000 residents were shut down because poll workers refused to go to work. Waukesha, a suburb of the city, had only one polling place open for its 70,000 residents. In Green Bay, only two of 31 polling locations were operating. Some more rural areas had drive-through voting options, and therefore less disruptions. This is exactly what Republicans wanted in a primary election with a crucial state supreme court seat on the ballot: to depress turnout in the urban areas, which tend to be more heavily Democratic. In other words, as Crooked Media podcaster Brian Beutler put it bluntly, "Republicans and their agents on the courts will kill people if it means a better shot at retaining power."

The Supreme Court's unsigned majority opinion argued that extending the deadline for absentee ballots by six days "fundamentally alters the nature of the election" and that there was insufficient evidence to suggest that voters on Tuesday "would be in a substantially different position from late-requesting voters in other Wisconsin elections." None of the conservatives justices even wanted to claim responsibility for that decision by putting his name on it.

In a scathing dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg-who, as an 87-year-old cancer survivor, understands better than anyone the risks of exposing oneself to the coronavirus-said the majority's argument "boggles the mind."

"The question here is whether tens of thousands of Wisconsin citizens can vote safely in the midst of a pandemic.... With the majority's stay in place, that will not be possible," Ginsburg wrote. "Either they will have to brave the polls, endangering their own and others' safety. Or they will lose their right to vote, through no fault of their own. That is a matter of utmost importance-to the constitutional rights of Wisconsin's citizens, the integrity of the state's election process, and in this most extraordinary time, the health of the Nation."