The Governor of the State issued a postponement order, but the Wisconsin Supreme Court blocked the decision.
People in gauze bandages lined up at least 2 meters apart in line for polling stations in Wisconsin, where the primary elections to nominate delegates to national congresses of the Democratic and Republican Parties are held on Tuesday. Earlier, State Governor Tony Evers had ordered the postponement of elections until 9 June, but the State Supreme Court blocked the decision on Monday night.
According to CNN, the Wisconsin State Elections Commission, in conjunction with the State Department of Health, has developed special voting procedures designed to minimize contact between voters and electoral staff. Queue markings have been made in polling stations to ensure that voters do not approach each other closer than 2 meters, to set a maximum number of voters who can be indoors at the same time, and to require voters to use hand sanitizers before and after ballots are filled.
Wisconsin is the first state in the U.S. to vote in a coronavirus proliferation environment, CNN said. Due to the fact that some election officials have not been deployed, about 300 members of the State National Guard are assisting with voting.
From the state of Wisconsin, 84 delegates are to be elected to the Democratic Party’s national convention, where Donald Trump’s rival in the presidential election is to be named, and the Republicans are to nominate 52 delegates to their convention. The results of the Wisconsin primary election will not be announced until April 13, when the deadline for counting mailed ballots expires.
Previously, the 15 states, as well as the United States-affiliated island nation of Puerto Rico, had decided to postpone the primary election and party activist meetings or to hold a mail-order vote. On April 2, the National Committee of the Democratic Party, in light of the unprecedented health crisis facing the United States, decided to postpone the dates of the general party convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, from July 13-16 to a week beginning August 17.
According to Johns Hopkins University, more than 378 thousand cases of infection with coronavirus have been registered in the USA, almost 12 thousand people died.