Madison — The justices announced Tuesday that the Wisconsin Supreme Court may overturn its own absentee ballot drop box ban. In July 2022, the court declared that absentee drop boxes can only be utilized in election offices and only voters can return ballots.
In April 2023, Janet Protasiewicz won the election, bringing liberal justices to the court and flipping the ruling. Last month, progressive voter mobilization group Priorities USA urged the court to revisit the verdict.
The justices ordered early Tuesday evening that they would revisit the drop box prohibition but not other portions of the case. Conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley dissented that there's no cause to reexamine the judgment and that the liberal majority is indicating a "shameless effort to readjust the balance of political power in Wisconsin" by legalizing drop boxes.
Bradley said that overturning the verdict two years later is a politicized move to benefit the majority party in the election. “This is not neutral judging.”
Wisconsin will again be a contested state in the 2024 presidential election, so a reversal might be significant. After Trump narrowly won Wisconsin four years earlier, President Joe Biden won the state in 2020 by just under 21,000 votes.
Democrats hope simplifying absentee voting will boost turnout. The U.S. Vote Foundation reports 29 states with absentee ballot drop boxes.
During the 2020 pandemic, over 40% of voters voted via mail, a record high. For the election, more than 430 towns had at least 500 drop boxes, including more than a dozen in Madison and Milwaukee, the state's two most Democratic cities.
Trump and Republicans said drop boxes enabled cheating without evidence. Democrats, election officials, and some Republicans claimed the boxes were secure.
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