These are the instructions now, simple and bleak: Stay home if you can. Only essential personnel report for duty. Do not travel unless absolutely necessary.

And here, on Tuesday, were the attendant questions, at least as grim:

Are voters essential personnel in a pandemic?

Is an election — that grand replenishing of government, where the supply shelves can feel bare — absolutely necessary under these conditions?

Can staying home really be the civic duty this time? And what good is politics if that’s true?

There are no clean answers and, this week, no particularly consistent ones. The collision of social distancing and the social fabric seemed to threaten the aims of both, producing a Primary Day at once disjointed and borderline dystopian.

Three states — Florida, Illinois and Arizona — pushed ahead with their elections amid public health guidelines to avoid large crowds, and the virus, if nothing else, often yielded an in-person electoral thinning that allowed many participants to conform. They marked their choices at times in the eerie quiet of polling places that smelled of disinfectant wipes or, more troubling, nothing at all. (Poll workers in Chicago complained about a dearth of proper cleaning supplies.)