Absentee Ballot dropbox in Wausau. Image courtesy: Mayor Katie Rosenberg/Facebook
CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) – Here comes another case where Wisconsin’s newly-liberal state Supreme Court is prepared to act as a super-legislature. They’re going to revisit the issue of whether absentee ballot drop boxes are legal.
The obvious answer is ‘no’.
Our state constitution could not be more clear. The state legislature determines election law in Wisconsin. And there are pages and pages of law about how ballots are issued, used, dropped-off, and processed. And nowhere, ever, has the legislature voted and approved the use of drop boxes. We had them in the 2020 election because of an opinion from the state Elections Commission… and they over-stepped their boundaries. The Elections Commission was created by the legislature to oversee elections, to administer the process of voting. They do not make election law. They issue guidance on how elections are carried out. And back when conservatives had the majority on the state Supreme Court, they ruled, correctly, that the legislature, not the Elections Commission, gets to decide on ballot drop boxes.
The problem is the ballot drop boxes are not that at all. They are, in fact, ballot harvesting receptacles. And we’ve had many ballot harvesting cases from the last general election in Wisconsin. Nursing home residents with amnesia and Alzheimer’s disease, who, in some cases didn’t even know their own names, managed to request and cast ballots in the fall of 2020. How did that happen? Partisan nursing home workers. And how would someone who gathered dozens of nursing home ballots get them into the system? Not by showing up at the city hall clerks office. Questions would be asked about that. Instead the ballots are slipped into a drop box when no one was looking.
Wausau’s drop box, outside of city hall, is locked but is just waiting to be reopened with the issuance of a favorable court ruling. It should have been removed as soon as it was ruled illegal.
Tony Evers is governor after beating Scott Walker by just 29,000 votes. Donald Trump lost the state to Joe Biden by 20,000. In a state that’s this close, election integrity remains the critical issue.
Chris Conley
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