This is a very ominous sign for what will happen in November. There will be battles across the country over how the upcoming election will be conducted — whether it will be fair, whether everyone will have access to the ballot and whether we’ll be able to trust the result.

And the Supreme Court will be there to put a thumb on the scales for the Republican Party.

As we’ve seen, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers attempted to postpone the state’s primary scheduled for Tuesday, issuing a last-minute executive order after failing to get the Republican-controlled state legislature to agree to a delay. Because the state had been deluged with absentee ballot requests — causing some voters not to get their ballots in time — a federal judge had ordered the state to accept ballots postmarked for an additional six days. Republicans sued to get that ruling overturned and to force the election to go on as scheduled.

Why were they so eager to have the election in the middle of this pandemic? The key race was for a seat on the state supreme court, which will help them solidify their conservative majority, which is in turn vital to maintaining the system of minority rule in Wisconsin. That includes the extraordinary partisan gerrymander of state legislative districts engineered by Republicans, a gerrymander so brutally effective that in the 2018 state assembly elections, Democrats won 53 percent of the votes but Republicans won 63 of the 99 seats.

Republicans know their voters are more likely to have already voted absentee or live in less-populated areas where they can vote safely at a less-crowded polling place. Democrats, on the other hand, are being forced to literally risk their lives to vote. In Milwaukee, a city of 600,000 people, the number of polling places was reduced from 180 to five.

Late Monday, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that Evers didn’t have the authority to postpone the election, so it had to go forward.

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On top of that, in a 5-4 decision along party lines, the U.S. Supreme Court then overruled the federal judge’s previous decision, thereby requiring that only ballots postmarked by Tuesday could be counted.

In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote, “The Court’s order requires absentee voters to postmark their ballots by election day, April 7 — i.e., tomorrow — even if they did not receive their ballots by that date,” she wrote. “That is a novel requirement.”

She added that the majority’s insistence that the pandemic does not create a fundamentally different situation than ordinary elections “boggles the mind.”

So the Republicans will succeed in rigging the Tuesday election in Wisconsin; they’re no doubt giving each other high-fives as they see the long lines in Milwaukee. But what does this portend for November?

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“This entire mess in Wisconsin is a cautionary tale," Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, told me. “It’s a real warning of what could happen in many places across the country if we don’t put in place new systems to run the election in the face of the pandemic.”

The problem is that Republicans from President Trump on down are now openly acknowledging that making voting too easy — for instance, by mailing every registered voter an absentee ballot so they don’t have to gather at the polls — would mean too many people voting, which would be bad for the GOP. So they’ll do what it takes to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Weiser points out that in many places, “election officials, both Republicans and Democrats, are recognizing the need” to make accommodations for November’s election, even in some states with bad records on voting rights. But in every state, Republicans will want to limit any changes that risk making voting too inclusive.

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Which leads me to my own nightmare scenario, in which there are 50 lawsuits in 50 states over whatever accommodations are made to an election during a pandemic. In Republican-run states, Democrats will sue to force the state to change rules to make voting safe and fair, and in Democratic-run states, Republicans will sue to stop Democrats from doing the same thing.

Then the Supreme Court will rule with the Republicans every time.

When I presented that to Weiser, she offered a more measured assessment. “There will undoubtedly be litigation across the country,” she said, but stressed that there might be ways to reach settlements to make pandemic voting easier in many states between now and November.

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But we’re still left with a Supreme Court that has spent the last decade systematically hacking away at voting rights and shows no inclination to let up now — or to ever rule against the interests of the Republican Party in an election case.

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One final point: By the end of the next presidential term, Ruth Bader Ginsburg will be 91 years old and Stephen Breyer will be 86. Should Trump be reelected, he could fill at least two more seats on the Supreme Court, creating a 7-2 conservative majority. The court will be so conservative that Samuel Alito could sit at its ideological midpoint.

And if you think voting rights are under threat now, you’ll wind up looking back on this as the good old days.

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