The winner of Wisconsin's hard-fought 10 electoral votes will probably be known on or right after Election Day, not the following week.
That's because a federal appeals court has reversed a judge who had decided that absentee ballots postmarked by Nov. 3 should be counted so long as they arrived by Nov. 9. Thursday's ruling by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals means the cutoff for getting an envelope into the local election office will match the polls' closing time.
Democrats signaled they would take their bid for the six-day extension to the Supreme Court, but the odds there look extremely long — the appeals court's rationale mirrored that of the justices when they rejected another easement this week.
The-back-to-back rulings may not bode well for several other recent courthouse victories relaxing absentee voting rules.
"The Republican side may be far more successful in blocking lower court orders sought by Democrats and voting rights groups seeking to expand voting by mail," Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine, wrote for Slate this week. "Although Democrats in particular have crowed about some of their (sometimes partial) victories, things are far from over."
Republicans are appealing similar delayed-in-the mail extensions ordered by courts in Michigan and Pennsylvania, the other most prominent Great Lakes battlegrounds. The combined 46 electoral votes of the three are central to the outcome of the election. President Trump won all of them last time, although each by a fraction of 1 percentage point. Polling now shows former Vice President Joe Biden solidly in the lead in all three — so it's possible the winners will be clear before the stacks of mail are opened.
The extensions were all described by the lower courts as necessary to protect voting rights in an extraordinary year, when Postal Service delays are widespread and a rush of last-minute decision-making to vote by mail is expected in light of the coronavirus pandemic.
But the 2-1 majority for the 7th Circuit disagreed, for two main reasons. Changes to voting rules should almost always be decided by legislatures, not judges, and it's way too close to the election for courts to be stepping in except in extraordinary circumstances. The judges cited the 2006 Supreme Court ruling in Purcell v. Gonzalez as precedent for judges rarely altering election rules close to the election.
"A last-minute event may require a last-minute reaction. But it is not possible to describe Covid as a last-minute event," the majority said. "The fundamental proposition that social distancing is necessary has not changed since March."
The appeals court was echoing Justice Brett Kavanaugh's explanation for why the Supreme Court on Tuesday reversed another appeals court, which cited the risk of Covid-19 exposure in suspending witness requirements for mail-in ballots in South Carolina.
The statehouses of both Wisconsin and South Carolina are in the hands of Republicans who rejected many proposals to ease mail-in voting rules this year.
The Wisconsin ruling also blocked a one-week extension of the deadline for registering, meaning it will remain Oct. 14, and it stopped potential electronic delivery of certain ballots.
In dissent, Judge Ilana Rovner said the Purcell precedent had been applied way too loosely by the Supreme Court in a series of election cases this year, essentially dealing the judicial branch out when it comes to addressing last-minute forms of unconstitutional disenfranchisement.
"It is not unreasonable for Wisconsin voters to view the option of in-person registration and voting as a form of Russian roulette," wrote Rovner, who like the other two 7th Circuit panelists was nominated by a GOP president. "Good luck and G-d bless, Wisconsin. You are going to need it."
Wisconsin generated the first voting chase to reach the high court during the pandemic, during its first peak in April, when the justices ruled 5-4 to reverse an 7th Circuit decision that would have permitted the counting of primary ballots delayed in the mail. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in one of her final high-profile dissents, said the ruling "boggles the mind" and "I fear, will result in massive disenfranchisement."
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.