Shortly after the Supreme Court decided Citizens United, a friend was near hysterical about its implications for judicial elections. Mind you, I’m no fan of judicial elections, it being the worst of the bad methods of selecting judges. But I really couldn’t get very worked up about the notion that money would be the issue, that huge sums of money would be invested in getting a judge elected because the value of buying a judgeship just wasn’t all that great.

I mean, sure, it might prove better to have judges you preferred over judges you didn’t, but for the most part, judges didn’t wield all that much influence since they were limited by the cases that made it before them and most judges still felt constrained by reason and integrity. But then, I didn’t think about Elon Musk back then.

Fueling that perception is roughly $20 million that Elon Musk and groups allied with him have spent to boost the conservative candidate, Brad Schimel, a judge who also got President Trump’s endorsement not long ago. The liberal candidate, Susan Crawford, another judge, has decried Mr. Musk’s spending as an attempt to place a lackey on the state’s top court.

The idea that anyone would pony up a cool mil for a judicial election would have struck me as a ridiculous waste of money. But $20 million? That’s nuts. Beyond nuts. Unless you have so much money that you can afford to burn it over a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Whichever candidate wins will tip the seven-member high court’s political balance, which liberals currently control with a 4-to-3 majority.

And what about that majority is so important, so critical, that it’s worth $20 million?

At face value, an election on Tuesday will decide whether conservatives or liberals control the Wisconsin Supreme Court, a result that could shape the fate of essential policies in the state from abortion to congressional district maps.

Granted, abortion wasn’t on the docket years ago, and given that the majority of Americans favor a limited right to abortion, it’s hard to imagine that political capital to push something against the will of most Americans is a good investment. It’s harder still to imagine it’s worth $20 million in a judicial election.

But gerrymandering is another matter. A curiously complex term to capture the imagination of a public that shuns multi-syllabic words, it can spell the difference between which party owns a state legislature or who gets sent to the worst job in Washington. It’s really about legislative politics more than law, and the limited role judges play in the drawing of districts in order to assure one party or the other can capture the district can potentially have far-reaching impacts.

Still, the role is limited, and can only overcome so much political unpopularity. Is it really worth $20 million? To Musk, apparently so, although he might also see it as a referendum on how his, not to mention Trump’s, presidency is doing. Narcissism drives people to do strange things, like spend a lot of money on relatively trivial things.

The flip side is that the people of Wisconsin know that Musk is trying to buy a justice. It’s not enough that he bought a president, and he’s not above putting cash on the barrelhead.

Mr. Musk’s backing of Judge Schimel, a former Wisconsin attorney general, has been among the most dominant and divisive issues in the race. A super PAC funded by Mr. Musk has spent millions to boost conservative turnout and has offered $100 payments to voters who sign a petition “in opposition to activist judges” — a tactic, which some critics say is legally questionable, that he employed in last year’s presidential election to help Mr. Trump.

Of course, a registered voter could always sign his petition, pocket his money, and vote any damn way he pleases. Some would consider it wrong to take Musk’s money under false pretenses, but others consider Musk’s effort to buy support to be more wrong, and so two wrongs make someone $100 richer. Or maybe more.

At a town hall in Green Bay on Sunday, Mr. Musk also gave $1 million checks each to two people who had already voted in the election; the Democratic state attorney general had sued to block those payments, but the State Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

For a Supreme Court with a 4-3 liberal majority, that one vote doesn’t seem to be helping the Dems here much, particularly given how flagrantly unlawful Musk’s payments are. And no one knows for sure who the two welfare recipients voted for, so it could be that the joke’s on Musk.

How do the citizens of Wisconsin feel about being bought? How does Judge Brad Schimel feel about being the goods for sale? Will he have a special Musk hotline next to his bench seat to tell him how to vote? Or will he believe that he’s just so groovy that Musk is throwing $20 million at him, no strings attached? Either way, the taint of money will color every decision he makes should he be elected, and the way Wisconsin is perceived going forward as a state that is up for sale.