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DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE v. WISCONSIN 
STATE LEGISLATURE 
GORSUCH, J., concurring 

mail but also by bringing them to a county clerk’s office, or 
various “no touch” drop boxes staged locally, or certain poll-
ing places on election day.  Never mind that those unable to 
vote on election day have still other options in Wisconsin, 
like voting in-person during a 2-week voting period before 
election day.  And never mind that the court itself found the 
pandemic  posed  an  insufficient  threat  to  the  health  and 
safety  of  voters  to  justify  revamping the State’s  in-person 
election procedures. 
  So it’s indisputable that Wisconsin has made considera-
ble  efforts  to  accommodate  early  voting  and  respond  to 
COVID.  The district court’s only possible complaint is that 
the State hasn’t done enough.  But how much is enough?  If 
Wisconsin’s statutory absentee voting deadline can be dis-
carded  on  the  strength  of  the  State’s  status  as  a  COVID 
“hotspot,”  what  about  the  identical  deadlines  in  30  other 
States?  How much of a “hotspot” must a State (or maybe 
some sliver of it) be before judges get to improvise?  Then 
there’s  the  question  what  these  new  ad  hoc  deadlines 
should  be.    The  judge  in  this  case  tacked  6  days  onto  the 
State’s election deadline, but what about 3 or 7 or 10, and 
what’s  to  stop  different  judges  choosing  (as  they  surely 
would)  different  deadlines  in  different  jurisdictions?    A 
widely shared state policy seeking to make election day real 
would give way to a Babel of decrees.  And what’s to stop 
courts from tinkering with in-person voting rules too?  This 
judge declined to go that far, but the plaintiffs thought he 
should have, and it’s not hard to imagine other judges ac-
cepting invitations to unfurl the precinct maps and decide 
whether  States  should  add  polling  places,  revise  their 
hours, rearrange the voting booths within them, or maybe 
even supplement existing social distancing, hand washing, 
and ventilation protocols. 
  The  Constitution  dictates  a  different  approach  to  these 
how-much-is-enough questions.  The Constitution provides 
that state legislatures—not federal judges, not state judges,