The Wisconsin I grew up in was mostly a pleasant, comforting place – a Great Lakes state filled with gently sloping parks, dairy farms dotted with Holstein cows, ethnic festivals at the beachfront, and families who lived in brick houses for a long time. Despite sharp racial disparities and income inequality, Wisconsin earned its reputation as a purple state with mostly civil, moderate politics marked by midwestern humility and decency.

OK, so that bucolic vision vanished a while ago. I haven’t lived in Wisconsin for years. But on Tuesday the last faded shade of purple was washed away entirely when the divisions turned downright murderous. After a drawn-out battle between a Democratic governor and Republican legislature, the conservative Wisconsin supreme court issued a last-minute order telling confused election officials to proceed with the state’s primary election – despite a pandemic.

With coronavirus numbers in Wisconsin up sharply in recent days, the court’s decision risks sending countless (Democratic) voters to early and painful deaths. In contrast to the 15 states which have postponed primary elections, Wisconsin alone will send voters to the polls in April.

The decision is mind-boggling. It gets even worse: on Tuesday, the entire city of Milwaukee had just five polling places, down from the usual 180. Officials were reportedly preparing for as many as 10,000 people at each one.

How could this be possible? The last few weeks have brought us irrefutable evidence that self-quarantine and social distancing save lives. Conversely, allowing normal gatherings to go forward – like New Orleans Mardi Gras, the Michigan primary, even a single party of jet-setters in Connecticut – leads to soaring death rates.

Just look at the difference in Covid-19 cases from Michigan, which went ahead with their primary, and Ohio, whose Republican governor helped shut theirs down. As of Saturday, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Michigan had 14,225 cases and 540 deaths; Ohio had 3,739 cases and 102 dead. Epidemiologists believe the states’ contrasting primary decisions may have played a role.

Or, look at New Orleans: experts say the city’s decision to hold its annual Mardi Gras festival – despite that being a demonstrably terrible idea – helped turn the city into a global center for coronavirus. The revelers-in-denial included one evangelical pastor from Virginia, Landon Spradlin, who decried the “hysteria” surrounding the coronavirus, even after he got sick from it. He died on 25 March.

We shouldn’t need to cite any of this in order to talk Wisconsin out of cramming thousands of people together into vastly fewer voting sites. But then, Wisconsin has its own Mardi Gras-level deniers. The other day former state lawmaker Michelle Vos posted on Facebook: “My GOD we’re over reacting … Yes, people will die of this. It just isn’t worth shutting down our whole economy.”

Unfortunately, Vos’s husband, the Republican speaker of the Wisconsin assembly, Robin Vos, harbors similar views. He and fellow GOP leader Scott Fitzgerald, the state’s Senate majority leader, insisted that the primary go forward, over the objections of the Democratic governor, Tony Evers.

“Our Republic must continue to function,” the two GOP leaders wrote in a joint statement, blaming a “feckless” Evers, who had supported the election until recently before endorsing all mail-in balloting. “There’s no question that an election is just as important as getting take-out food” – a disingenuous comparison that equates a low-risk one-on-one exchange with mass gatherings of (Democratic) voters.

But it is not just Republicans who failed to protect Wisconsin voters. Joe Biden played his part, too. “That’s for the Wisconsin courts and folks to decide,” he punted.

Many Democrats have accused Trump of having “blood on his hands” for his weeks of denials, delays and failure to procure testing and personal protective equipment. By one estimate those failings may end up costing 90,000 American lives. But Biden’s position, now aligned with the conservative Wisconsin court, may lead to hundreds more deaths, possibly more.

Bernie Sanders, who accused Wisconsin Republicans of being “willing to risk the health and safety of many thousands of Wisconsin voters”, yesterday pledged not to engage in traditional get-out-the-vote efforts. Biden, far ahead in the Wisconsin polls, was silent on the matter. But Biden should have joined Sanders in refusing to urge voters to the polls – if for no other reason than preserving Democratic voters for November. In 2016 Trump won Wisconsin by barely 22,000 votes. The Democrats need living voters in order to win in 2020. Over the weekend the death toll from Covid-19 in Milwaukee county jumped 44%, suggesting a frightening surge has arrived. Now more than ever, putting voters at mortal risk makes no sense – morally or strategically.

Biden’s stance is baffling; in the end, however, the decision to risk voters’ lives rests squarely with Wisconsin Republicans and the state’s conservative supreme court. With no more Hail Marys available to the state’s Democrats, the election went forward as planned – and almost certainly, many more of my fellow Wisconsinites will die.