Amid coronavirus outbreak, Wisconsin will vote Tuesday under a stay home order and a massive poll worker shortage

Thousands of poll workers have called off the job. Hundreds of voting locations have been consolidated. Tens of thousands of requests for mail-in absentee ballots are backlogged.

Wisconsin's voting system is teetering under the weight of the coronavirus pandemic, but Tuesday's election will go on as scheduled after Republican state legislative leaders, the Democratic governor and a federal judge have refused to postpone it.

Ballots will be cast even as Gov. Tony Evers has issued a "safer at home" order directing Wisconsinites only to venture outside for essential tasks such as seeking medical treatment, buying food and, apparently, voting.

"We are in an unprecedented moment, and the statutes and laws weren't written with a situation like this in mind," said Charles Franklin, a political science scholar and director of polling at the Marquette University Law School. "We have had a gigantic surge in request of absentee ballots - more than 1 million - and we have no idea at this moment how many of those will get sent out in time or how many people will show up in person on Tuesday to vote. This is uncharted water."

Wisconsin will soldier on at a time when 15 other states have either delayed their elections or switched them entirely to vote-by-mail with later deadlines.

But unlike many of those elections, Wisconsin's contest isn't just