BREAKING.🚨

The Wisconsin Supreme Court has *REINSTATED* the use of ballot harvesting and absentee drop boxes, reversing a ruling the court made just two years earlier that effectively *BANNED* the practices.

This is a massive setback for election integrity in the important… pic.twitter.com/C2RG18JZcX

— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) July 5, 2024

...The 4-3 decision was a win for Democrats who argued that allowing voters to file ballots into locked, unmanned and unsupervised boxes made voting more accessible. Voter convenience is not a “right” under Wisconsin state election law and the use of absentee ballots is a privilege. 

In July 2022, the Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision that found that the Wisconsin Elections Commission and clerks in Madison, Milwaukee, Racine, Kenosha and elsewhere “broke the law by allowing absentee voting drop boxes and ballot harvesting in 2020, 2021 and 2022.” 

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL), which had filed a complaint in Waukesha County Circuit Court in 2020, established in court that the absentee ballot drop boxes violated state law.  “Absentee ballot drop boxes were used widely during Wisconsin elections in 2020. The Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) issued memos to Wisconsin clerks in March and August of 2020 encouraging their use, stating that absentee ballots do not need to be mailed by the voter or delivered by the voter, in person, to the municipal clerk, but instead could be dropped into a drop box. According to WEC, ballot drop boxes can be unstaffed, temporary, or permanent,” WILL stated. 

“This advice was contrary to state law,” WILL continued. “Voting is a constitutional right, but state law makes clear that, ‘voting by absentee ballot is a privilege exercised wholly outside the traditional safeguards of the polling place’. There are just two legal ways in Wisconsin to submit an absentee ballot. When voting by absentee ballot, state law says ‘[t]he envelope [containing the ballot] shall be mailed by the elector, or delivered in person, to the municipal clerk issuing the ballot or ballots’.” 

“An unstaffed, unsupervised absentee ballot drop box does not meet either of these legal options,” WILL notes. “And it raises significant concerns that elections are not being conducted legally and that Wisconsin voters will not have certainty that their votes will be counted if cast in this manner.” 

WILL’s Review of the 2020 Election found that “the widespread adoption of absentee ballot drop boxes, not provided for under Wisconsin law, was correlated with an increase of about 20,000 votes for Joe Biden, while having no significant effect on the vote for Trump.” 

Wisconsin is now one of ten states that have no clear guidelines on who may return absentee ballots for alleged voters into drop boxes, including, as of June 2024: Delaware, Hawaii, New York, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Washington and Wyoming. 

The Wisconsin Supreme Court thus has weakened voter integrity laws ahead of the critical 2024 election. The court ruling undermines trust in the democratic process and opens the state up to widespread voter fr*ud.