Wisconsin’s Left-Led Supreme Court Could Bring Back ‘Illegal’ Widespread Ballot Drop Boxes
After leftists narrowly flipped the balance of the Wisconsin Supreme Court last year, the bench agreed to hear a case that could overturn a prior decision prohibiting ballot drop boxes.
The new Democrat-aligned majority agreed to hear a challenge brought by leftist election meddler Marc Elias’ law group to undo a 2022 decision that said voters must return their absentee ballots in person to a clerk’s office, the executive director of the Board of Elections Commissioners, or another alternate site designated by election officials.
The Elias Law Group brought the suit on behalf of Priorities USA — a George Soros-backed political action committee — Wisconsin Alliance for Retired Americans, and a sole voter. Priorities USA also committed at least $75 million to helping President Joe Biden win reelection.
Oral arguments are set to begin May 13.
Chief Justice Annette Ziegler and Justice Rebecca Bradley dissented from the court’s decision to take up the case, saying the left-wing bench “aims to increase the electoral prospects of its preferred political party.”
“Finding the decision politically inconvenient, and emboldened by a new makeup of the court, this new majority embraces the opportunity to overturn (the 2022 ruling). The majority’s decision to do so will upset the status quo of election administration mere months before a presidential election and lead to chaos and confusion for Wisconsin voters and election officials,” Bradley wrote in her dissent.
The court ruled in 2022 that unelected officials do not get to usurp the authority of the state legislature and unilaterally change election laws, as the Wisconsin Elections Commission did by issuing guidance in 2020 permitting the use of ballot drop boxes, contrary to state law. Wisconsin statute clearly states that an absentee ballot “shall be mailed by the elector, or delivered in person, to the municipal clerk.”
The ruling found the Wisconsin Elections Commission had no authority to permit drop boxes and that voters must instead deliver their ballots to one of the aforementioned locations.
“An absentee ballot must be returned by mail or the voter must personally deliver it to the municipal clerk at the clerk’s office or a designated alternate site,” the court ruled in a 4-3 decision, noting that “ballot drop boxes are illegal under Wisconsin statutes.”
The initial suit came after several cities used illegal, unmanned drop boxes during the 2020 presidential race. It alleged that cities like “Milwaukee, Madison, Racine, Kenosha, and Green Bay made an agreement with the nonprofit Center for Tech and Civic Life to use drop boxes to get these cities’ residents to vote,” according to a statement from Thomas More Society Special Counsel Erick Kaardal.
“This so-called ‘Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan,’ involved $8.8 million of private grants to these five cities, to target specific populations to vote,” Kaardal said. “It had little, if anything at all, to do with keeping voters safe from Covid-19, as it purported to do.”
As The Federalist’s Shawn Fleetwood points out, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg financed CTCL, which then distributed grants to 31 cities and townships — where just eight of the recipient localities were won by Trump, according to a report from the Capital Research Center.
During the Covid pandemic, more than 40 percent of Wisconsin voters voted via absentee ballot and utilized more than 500 drop boxes, according to The Associated Press. Former President Donald Trump lost Wisconsin by roughly 20,000 votes. In Milwaukee, which had more than a dozen unmanned drop boxes, according to AP, Trump lost to Biden by more than 100,000 votes.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.
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