“It’s clear,” she said, “that the backlog in issuing ballots has impacted voters’ abilities to return them by April 7.”

What that meant was that, for a substantial portion of the electorate, Election Day presented a harsh choice. Those who had applied for absentee ballots but not yet received them, and those who had not applied for an absentee ballot by last Friday’s deadline, were forced to decide whether to risk exposure to the coronavirus in order to exercise their right to vote.

That was an unreasonable demand. Outlining the awful calculus, Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele said, “If we hold this election, it is a 100% certainty that we will have more transmission than we otherwise would, and that will lead to more loss of life.”

For that reason, civil rights and voting rights groups, and the mayors of Wisconsin’s largest cities, pleaded with the governor to intervene.

The governor went out of his way to find common ground with Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald. Yet, the Republicans mocked the governor’s efforts to protect the health and safety of Wisconsinites who, by a 51–44 margin in the latest Marquette University Law School poll, favored postponing the election.

When Evers called a special session of the legislature for Saturday, Vos and Fitzgerald refused to take the issue seriously. They took the Assembly and the Senate in an out of session in a matter of seconds. Their obstruction in a time of emergency — when epidemiologists were urging postponement — was not a matter of ideology or partisanship. Democratic and Republican leaders, conservatives and liberals, in more than a dozen other states have agreed to election delays since the COVID-19 crisis began.

Vos and Fitzgerald threw tantrums at a point when everyone else was working to save lives, keep people healthy, stabilize the economy and preserve democracy. And the judicial activists on the high court sided with these legislative charlatans.

No one should imagine that Vos, Fitzgerald and their judicial cronies acted as conservatives.

Honest conservatives have already acted to postpone elections. Three weeks ago, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine made the same choice that Evers made — to suspend in-person voting on the eve of his state’s primaries. DeWine, a conservative Republican, announced on March 16, “During this time when we face an unprecedented public health crisis, to conduct an election tomorrow would force poll workers and voters to place themselves at an unacceptable health risk of contracting coronavirus.”

DeWine put partisan and ideological considerations aside and did the right thing, so that Ohioans would not have to choose between maintaining their health and casting their ballots. And the Ohio Supreme Court backed him up.