Wisconsin primary election: April 7, 2020

Liberal challenger Jill Karofsky has won a 10-year term to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, defeating Trump-backed conservative incumbent Dan Kelly, according to our partners at DecisionDesk. As of Monday evening, Karofsky had raked in roughly 53 percent of the vote to Kelly’s 47 percent, when the race was called.

The competition for the state’s Supreme Court seat was among the most closely watched of the races that took place during a tumultuous Wisconsin primary last week. The court will still have a conservative majority, but it’s now narrowed to a 4-3 split.

Wisconsin held the first in-person election on Tuesday in the middle of the US coronavirus outbreak. In some precincts, it was an event plagued by hours-long waits and a tremendous shortage of both polling workers and stations, prompting civil- and voting-rights activists to call the legitimacy of the election into question before polls even closed.

State Republicans on Monday won a recent and bitter back-and-forth with Wisconsin’s Democratic Gov. Tony Evers on whether to postpone the election and further expand absentee ballot access. The Republican-majority state Supreme Court ruled the election would go ahead on April 7 as planned, and a separate US Supreme Court ruling late Monday night meant no extension for absentee ballots — effectively cutting many voters out of the process. Election results are expected to come in by next Monday.

Polls opened at 7 am in Wisconsin despite the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, despite the Democratic governor’s attempts to delay the election because of said epidemic, and despite calls from public-health experts to stay home.

The result by mid-morning was what critics feared: Voters were queued up in long lines, waiting for hours to vote in crowded and understaffed polling stations.

In the middle of a coronavirus pandemic, Wisconsin is voting on Tuesday.

Gov. Tony Evers (D) has repeatedly tried to delay the state’s elections, citing fears that in-person voting could bolster the spread of coronavirus. But Wisconsin Republicans and the state’s Supreme Court, which is controlled by conservatives, rebuffed Evers. Republicans also fought off Evers’s efforts to mail ballots to every voter and allow ballots to be counted beyond the original April 7 election date.

The Wisconsin election is moving forward despite fears about the coronavirus and days of wrangling over whether to postpone voting until the summer, as multiple other states have done. The results won’t come quite so speedily.

It’s Joe Biden versus Bernie Sanders on the Democratic presidential primary ballot. Heading into Tuesday’s election, Biden held a firm lead over Sanders, according to FiveThirtyEight’s average of polls, which had the former vice president at 53 percent support and the Vermont senator at 36 percent support.

The Supreme Court’s Republican majority, in a case that is literally titled Republican National Committee v. Democratic National Committee, handed down a decision that will effectively disenfranchise tens of thousands of Wisconsin voters. It did so at the urging of the GOP.

The case arises out of Wisconsin’s decision to hold its spring election during the coronavirus pandemic, even as nearly a dozen other states have chosen to postpone similar elections to protect the safety of voters. Democrats hoped to defend a lower court order that allowed absentee ballots to be counted so long as they arrived at the designated polling place by April 13, an extension granted by a judge to account for the brewing coronavirus-sparked chaos on Election Day, April 7. Republicans successfully asked the Court to require these ballots to be postmarked by April 7.

Wisconsin’s plan to hold an election in the middle of a pandemic is back on.

On Monday, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers attempted to reschedule an election the state is planning to hold on Tuesday, handing down an order suspending in-person voting until June 9 “unless the Legislature passes and the Governor approves a different date for in-person voting.” On a party-line vote, however, the Republican-controlled state Supreme Court struck down Evers’s order, meaning that the state is now on track to hold its election as originally scheduled.

Wisconsin’s Republican-controlled state legislature has rejected Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’s last-second bid to delay the state’s fast-approaching elections in light of concerns about the spread of coronavirus.

On Saturday, state lawmakers ended a special session intended to consider Evers’s request to make the election on Tuesday, April 7, an all-mail election and to allow ballots to be sent in through late May within seconds of convening.

The state of Wisconsin plans to hold an election on Tuesday, April 7, a vote that will include a Democratic presidential primary and an election for a seat on the state Supreme Court.

Yet, due to the web of laws governing absentee ballots in that state and the unique constraints imposed by the coronavirus pandemic, the election was on track to be a debacle. Tens of thousands of voters were likely to be disenfranchised by laws imposing obstacles on voters who cannot leave their homes to go to the polls.

Here’s a headline you never want to read less than one week before a state election: “Gov. Tony Evers to use National Guard members to work the polls amid massive shortage of workers.”

Wisconsin is planning to hold an election next Tuesday, April 7, which will include the state’s Democratic presidential primary race and an election for a seat on the state Supreme Court. It plans to hold this election despite the fact that Evers, a Democrat, issued a stay-at-home order a week ago to help slow the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.