Wisconsin bans ballot drop boxes in latest attack on voting in crucial swing state

Republicans have sought to ban the use of drop boxes while promoting false claims of election fraud

Election 2022 Oregon (Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved)

Unmanned drop boxes used across the country by voters to cast their ballots are now banned in Wisconsin following a ruling by the state’s Supreme Court.

The conservative-controlled court ruled that voters must now deliver their absentee ballots by mail or in-person to their clerks, a decision that is likely to disproportionately impact Democratic voters.

The ruling could have a significant impact on the next presidential election. President Joe Biden won Wisconsin by fewer than 21,000 votes in 2020, and the state is likely to be a battleground again in 2024.

Ballot drop boxes have been used for years in Wisconsin without issue. Their use greatly expanded in the 2020 election, when Republicans and Democrats promoted the boxes as a way to vote safely during the coronavirus pandemic. Republican legislators called them “a convenient, secure, and expressly authorised” method of absentee voting.

More than 500 drop boxes were set up in nearly every county across the state, including more than a dozen each in Madison and Milwaukee — the state’s two most heavily Democratic cities. Absentee ballots cast by mail or in person made up about 60 per cent of the total number of ballots, an increase that was fuelled by the use of drop boxes.

However, when Donald Trump lost the state and promoted false claims of a rigged election in Wisconsin and across the country, conservative activists and Republican legislators began to allege that drop boxes facilitated cheating and sought to have them banned, despite providing no evidence to back their claims.

Republicans have made similar moves since Mr Trump’s defeat to tighten access to ballots in other battleground states. The restrictions especially target voting methods that have been rising in popularity, erecting hurdles to mail balloting and early voting that saw explosive growth during the pandemic.

The new voting restrictions in Wisconsin come amid a wave of similar changes to election rules being pursued by Republican legislatures across the country, most of which are fuelled by the same bogus claims that the 2020 election was stolen from Mr Trump.

Since leaving office, Mr Trump has continued to peddle false claims about the election, and only endorsed local and state candidates who back his false claims.

The conservative law firm Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty sued in 2021 to prevent the further use of drop boxes. The state Supreme Court in February barred the use of drop boxes outside election clerk offices in the April election for local offices, such as mayor, city council and school board seats. The court ruled Friday on the question of whether to allow secure ballot boxes in places such as libraries and grocery stores.

In the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s 4-3 ruling, the justices cited a statute that declares absentee ballots "shall be mailed by the elector, or delivered in person, to the municipal clerk issuing the ballot or ballots."

The majority opinion stated: “An inanimate object, such as a ballot drop box, cannot be the municipal clerk. At a minimum, accordingly, dropping a ballot into an unattended drop box is not delivery ‘to the municipal clerk.’"

The opinion references claims that ballot boxes are susceptible to fraud, and references Saddam Hussein and North Korea.

“If the right to vote is to have any meaning at all, elections must be conducted according to law. Throughout history, tyrants have claimed electoral victory via elections conducted in violation of governing law. For example, Saddam Hussein was reportedly elected in 2002 by a unanimous vote of all eligible voters in Iraq (11,445,638 people),” the justices wrote.

In dissenting, the minority opinion criticised the ruling as a weakening of democracy.

“But despite the majority/lead opinion’s bald assertion that voter fraud is actually a ‘serious problem,’ […] studies have demonstrated extremely low rates of voter fraud in United States elections. The majority/lead opinion’s sky-is-falling rhetoric not only defies the facts, but also is downright dangerous to our democracy.”

— With additional reporting from Associated Press