By Nate Raymond
(Reuters) – A divided Wisconsin Supreme Court on Friday cleared the way for voters to be able to return absentee ballots through drop boxes, with the court’s new liberal majority overturning a decision from just two years ago that had outlawed the practice.
The court on a 4-3 vote sided with the progressive advocacy groups Priorities USA and the Wisconsin Alliance for Retired Americans in a lawsuit they filed three months after the April 2023 election of liberal Justice Janet Protasiewicz.
That judicial election, the most expensive in U.S. history, flipped the court to a 4-3 liberal majority after 15 years of conservative control, giving Democrats an advantage in legal battles over abortion, voting rights and electoral maps.
Wisconsin is a key battleground in the 2024 presidential election. In 2016, Republican former President Donald Trump won the state by fewer than 25,000 votes out of 2.8 million cast, and in 2020, President Joe Biden, a Democrat, carried Wisconsin by fewer than 21,000 votes out of 3.2 million cast.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Democrats pushed voters to use drop boxes to cast ballot and have remained supportive of them. Republicans, by contrast, have sought to limit the use of absentee ballots after the 2020 election.
Under its prior conservative majority, the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2022 held that under state law, ballots had be returned to a clerk’s office or another designated site, not an “inanimate object” such as an unstaffed box.
But liberal Justice Ann Walsh Bradley on Friday called that decision “unsound in principle,” and that a state statute governing absentee voting has always allowed clerks to in their discretion use secure drop boxes to collect ballots.
Bradley, who dissented in 2022, said the earlier ruling was based on a fundamental misinterpretation of a Wisconsin law requiring absentee voting be “carefully regulated,” and the “skeptical” view court took of the procedure as a result.
“It is not up to this court to ‘regulate’ absentee voting,” Bradley wrote. “Such ‘regulation’ falls to the legislative process and Wisconsin’s 1,850 municipal clerks through our decentralized system of election administration.”
Lawyers for the plaintiffs and the state’s Republican-led legislature did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Friday’s decision was joined by the three other justices in the court’s liberal wing including Protasiewicz. All three conservative justices dissented including Justice Rebecca Bradley, who had authored the 2022 decision.
In a dissenting opinion, she accused the liberal majority of overturning the 2022 decision because of politics, not law, saying they “believe using drop boxes is good policy, and one they hope will aid their preferred political party.”
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Alistair Bell)
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