In the middle of a pandemic, in a state that has already seen more than 2,500 confirmed coronavirus cases and close to 100 deaths, Wisconsin voters are facing a stark choice: Shelter-in-place as officials have ordered, or exercise their right to cast a ballot. After a last-minute push by Democratic Governor Tony Evers to delay in-person voting and to extend its absentee ballot deadline to June, the state’s conservative Supreme Court overturned the executive order, forcing the Tuesday primary to proceed as planned. That decision was backed up late Monday by the nation’s right-leaning high court, which delivered a blow to voting rights in Wisconsin and the nation as a whole in a 5-4 ruling. “Either they will have to brave the polls, endangering their own and others’ safety,” Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in the Supreme Court’s dissent. “Or they will lose their right to vote, through no fault of their own.”

“The Court’s order, I fear, will result in massive disenfranchisement,” Ginsburg added.

Wisconsin had been under pressure to postpone its primary, as other states holding April contests had done as the COVID crisis escalates across the United States. “People should not be forced to put their lives on the line to vote,” Bernie Sanders said last week, urging the Badger State to postpone its election. But the Republican-controlled legislature had resisted those calls, and Evers had been reluctant to force the issue, concerned it could hurt his standing to get a coronavirus relief package deal with GOP lawmakers in the state, Politico reported. But Evers relented, first asking the legislature to postpone the election and expand absentee voting, then issuing an order himself when lawmakers shot him down. Republicans took their objection to the courts, where they won out. “We don’t live in a banana republic where the executive can just cancel elections because he doesn’t want to hold them,” Republican Robin Vos, speaker of the Wisconsin state assembly, tweeted Monday.

The result of those court decisions is now a pending public health and voting rights disaster. Wisconsin residents are being asked to violate the state’s lockdown order, which Evers issued last month, or to forgo their right to vote. The state is facing a logistical nightmare in holding the election, with a lack of polling workers forcing widespread location closures—and, it seems, dangerously long lines at those sites that are open.

The New York Times’ Astead Herndon reported Tuesday that voters in Milwaukee are anticipating hours-long waits to cast ballots—this in the middle of a week that the U.S. Surgeon General warned would be akin to 9/11 or Pearl Harbor. “This is going to be the hardest and saddest week of most Americans’ lives,” Jerome Adams said Sunday. That the state is proceeding with its in-person vote in the midst of that is as stunning as it is unconscionable, and almost certain to significantly depress turnout, particularly in Democratic-leaning areas like Milwaukee, which is down from 180 polling sites to just five. “This is not what democracy looks like,” Ben Wikler, chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, wrote as voters waited in long lines early Tuesday to cast ballots in the primary between Sanders and frontrunner Joe Biden.