Absentee Ballot dropbox in Wausau. Image courtesy: Mayor Katie Rosenberg/Facebook
CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) – At least it was a small group of woefully uninformed citizens. About a dozen held a rally outside of Wausau City Hall where the city’s absentee ballot drop box used to be. It stayed there, bolted to the concrete but padlocked, for more than a year after the state Supreme Court ruled it was illegal. Doug Diny, Wausau’s new mayor, has ordered it removed and put into storage.
In Wisconsin, the state legislature makes election law. The Wisconsin Elections Commission offers guidance to local clerks on how to administer elections. And in Wisconsin, the legislature has never, ever, never taken a vote or passed a bill that allows for outdoor receptacles to be used as unstaffed collection points for absentee ballots.
And the legislature is right. Absentee ballot drop boxes are really ballot harvesting boxes. Suppose, for instance, a hyper-partisan worker at a nursing home thought that all the residents there should vote for Joe Biden or Tony Evers. If that rogue worker were to request absentee ballots for every patient, and then marked each ballot for the democrat candidate, how do you suppose they’d get them into the system to be counted? Surely they wouldn’t show up in person at a clerk’s office with dozens of ballots. That would raise questions. The jig would be up for this illegal ballot harvesting scheme. But if the same election fraudster shows up in the middle of the night with a backpack full of nursing home ballots and empties them into a dropbox – bingo! – all those illegally harvested ballots are suddenly legitimate votes.
You say that my scenario seems a little far-fetched. Not really. In fact, it’s already happened. Dozens of nursing home residents in Racine County, some who have dementia and no longer know their names, somehow managed to request ballots and cast votes in 2020. These votes almost certainly entered the system through drop boxes.
Yesterday the now-liberal state supreme court heard a new case on whether drop boxes are allowed. The case should be simple. The state legislature never approved drop boxes, and they fly in the face of election integrity in a state where a mere 20,000 votes determined the winner.
I’m certain our newly constituted court will ignore the law and the facts. Between now and election day, those uneducated protesters will practice up their dance routines and form a conga line around the drop box.
Chris Conley
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