Wisconsin’s Warning for the November Election

Updated at 2:53 p.m. ET on April 6, 2020.

“I’m accused of trying to conduct a voter purge in the state of Wisconsin,” Rick Esenberg told me by way of introduction. Esenberg runs the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, which is suing to force the state’s election commission to remove hundreds of thousands of “inactive” voters from the rolls.

I had called Esenberg to ask about the in-person election that Wisconsin was planning to hold tomorrow even as its citizens are under a statewide directive to stay at home amid the coronavirus outbreak. Democrats, including Governor Tony Evers, want to conduct the election by mail so that Wisconsinites don’t have to risk their health to go to the polls. The Republican-controlled state legislature is rejecting that idea—even though some studies suggest that voting by mail helps Republican candidates more than Democratic ones.

Why would Republicans oppose a measure that