The Moral Urgency of Voting By Mail

Voting should not be a matter of life and death.

Last week, Wisconsin voters faced a dismaying choice: Exercise their right to vote or protect their health and safety. As the coronavirus spread, so many voters applied for absentee ballots before the April 7 primary that election officials couldn’t send them out in time. The legislature had refused to postpone the election; the courts turned down Governor Tony Evers’s attempt to change the rules by executive order. So voters who hadn’t received their absentee ballot had to go to the polls despite the pandemic; the plight of poll workers went unaddressed. Wisconsin’s case was described as “a narrow technical question about an absentee ballot,” according to the 5–4 majority opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court. It was not. It was a matter of life and death.

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