WASHINGTON—A distressing followup has emerged from this month’s Wisconsin presidential primary and local elections. After Republican party efforts forced the election to go ahead as scheduled, it appears that fears about in-person voting during the pandemic were justified: health officials there have drawn a possible connection between 19 confirmed cases of the virus and voting day.

The election-pandemic connection ought to draw nationwide attention. After all, there’s a presidential election taking place in November, and while everyone hopes the worst of the pandemic will have passed by then, the chances a second wave of infection could be underway mean officials may want to prepare by planning for widespread mail voting.

That’s certainly the lesson Milwaukee officials took from their primary experience: the city council there has announced it will mail absentee ballot applications to all 300,000 registered voters in the city as part of “SafeVote” pandemic provisions approved in the wake of what one elected official called the “horrific election day” last week.

Most Americans agree with that course: a poll released this week by NBC and the Wall Street Journal showed two-thirds want every voter to be able to mail in their ballot this year. At least 32 states are preparing to do so, having indicated they’ll use federal funds to increase mail voting efforts, according to ABC News.

This just seems prudent, though President Donald Trump and Republicans have remained opposed to voting by mail. Though he cast an absentee ballot himself this year in Florida, Trump has baselessly suggested such voting is an invitation for fraud. Republicans in general — with exceptions in Florida and a few other sunshine retirement states where the party has long relied on absentee ballots — are thought to oppose it based on the logic that making voting easier for more people hurts their chances. It’s a position Trump seemed to frame earlier this year when he said of proposed absentee voter initiatives: “They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” (The results from Wisconsin, in which a liberal judge defeated a conservative for a supreme court seat based in part on a great advantage in mail-in votes, may harden this suspicion.)

The stage seems set for Republicans to continue to oppose popular efforts to allow mail voting. However, there could be another wrinkle in the dynamic. Older voters — those most at risk from coronavirus — are most likely to vote Republican but if a second wave of the illness is underway by November, or fear of one is prevalent, they could be more likely to want to vote by mail, or to stay home from the polls. Republican officials in Georgia and Nevada have made moves to mail all voters absentee ballots for primaries and state elections this spring.

The decisions on how broadly to allow mail-in voting is set to define the election. It’s possible that allowing more absentee ballots could affect who decides to vote and alter the results. But it’s also possible that insisting on in-person voting could lead to a widespread resurgence of coronavirus infections.

“We’re just concerned about the transmission of COVID-19,” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, told ABC News, saying his efforts to mail everyone a ballot was just a means of “putting voters first.” That, strategic considerations notwithstanding, is what you would hope everyone in a democracy would want to do.

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