Are Absentee Drop Boxes Making a Wisconsin Comeback? Supreme Court to Rule!

The Wisconsin Supreme Court is set to hear arguments Monday in a dispute brought by Democrats to overturn a verdict that effectively ended the use of absentee ballot drop boxes in the swing state.

The court will rule within three months of the August 13 primary and six months of the November presidential election. A reversal might have repercussions for what is expected to be another close presidential campaign in Wisconsin. In 2020, President Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in Wisconsin by just under 21,000 votes, four years after Trump narrowly won the state by the same margin.

Since his defeat, Trump has alleged without evidence that drop boxes contribute to voter fraud. Democrats, election officials, and several Republicans all argued that the ballot boxes were secure.

The question is whether to overturn the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s July 2022 decision, which said that nothing in state law permitted for absentee drop boxes to be installed anywhere other than election clerk offices. The court was formerly ruled by conservative justices, but it shifted to liberal control last year, paving the way for a possible overturning of the verdict.

Changing the ruling now “threatens to politicize this Court and cast a pall over the election” and unleash a new wave of legal challenges, attorneys for the Republican National Committee and Wisconsin Republican Party said in court filings. There have been no changes in the facts or the law to justify altering the verdict, and it is too close to the election to make adjustments now, they argue.

Democrats say that the court misread the statute in its 2022 decision, determining that absentee ballots can only be sent to a clerk in their office rather than a drop box they control situated elsewhere. Attorneys say that clerks should be permitted to “decide for themselves how and where to accept the return of absentee ballots.”

Priorities USA, a liberal voter mobilization organization, and the Wisconsin Alliance for Retired Voters urged the court to revisit the 2022 decision. Democratic Governor Tony Evers and the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which oversees elections, both support reversing it. In court filings, attorneys for the groups that filed the case claim that drop boxes became problematic only “when those determined to cast doubt on election results that did not favor their preferred candidates and causes made them a political punching bag.”

Election officials from four counties, including the state’s two largest and most Democratic, filed a brief in support of overturning the decision. They contend that absentee ballot drop boxes have been used safely for decades to return voters’ votes.

More than 1,600 absentee ballots came at clerks’ offices after Election Day in 2022, when drop boxes were not in operation, and thus were not counted, Democratic attorneys argued. However, in 2020, when drop boxes were available and nearly three times as many individuals voted absentee, just 689 votes came after the election.

Drop boxes were used in 39 additional states during the 2022 election, according to the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project. The popularity of absentee voting skyrocketed during the pandemic in 2020, with more than 40% of all Wisconsin voters casting mail votes, a record high. For the election that year, more than 500 drop boxes were set up in over 430 municipalities, including more than a dozen each in Madison and Milwaukee, the state’s two most Democratic cities.

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