(Headline USA) After out-of-state billionaires and activist organizations successfully secured a radical leftist majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, newly elected justice Janet Protasiewicz and her colleagues have acted with deliberate speed to help shift the battleground state’s landscape permanently blue.
Thus far, that has included controversial decisions on abortion and gerrymandering—the latter essentially assuring that the Republican backstop in the state legislature, which has been the only remaining check against the overreaching authority of Democrat Gov. Tony Evers, will flip blue in the next election.
Now, in order to seal the deal, the court aims to reinstate some of the dubious election policies that were illegally enacted during the 2020 race, even after the court’s earlier iteration ruled them unconstitutional.
Most of the arguments for again allowing ballot drop boxes in Wisconsin hinged on what the state’s absentee voter law did and did not say.
The new far-left-majority court heard oral arguments Monday on whether it should overturn a 2022 decision from the then moderate-conservative-majority court that outlawed ballot drop boxes.
“[The 2022 court] read a restriction into the statute that simply is not there and in doing so made it harder for municipal clerks to carry out their duties and for Wisconsin voters to return their ballots for no adequate legal reason,” David Fox, attorney for Priorities USA told the court Monday morning.
Changing the ruling now “threatens to politicize this Court and cast a pall over the election” and unleash a new wave of legal challenges, attorneys for the Republican National Committee and Wisconsin Republican Party argued in court filings.
There have been no changes in the facts or the law to warrant overturning the ruling and it’s too close to the election to make changes now anyway, they contend.
However, Fox claimed the 2022 decision was “unworkable” and unconstitutional.
“It is very important for clerks and voters to know what the statutes, in fact, require,” Fox told the justices.
Although the Obama-linked super-PAC leading the case is funded by many of the same dark-money oligarchs who underwrote Protasiewicz’s 2022 campaign, there is no indication that the justice planned to recuse herself from voting.
Conservative Chief Justice Rebecca Bradley, however, was quick to point out that Wisconsin law doesn’t specifically allow for ballot drop boxes or anything like them.
“The law in the state of Wisconsin is that there is a right to vote, but there is not a right to vote absentee. That is a privilege that was granted legislatively,” Bradley said.
She added that lawmakers intended to have absentee voting be “heavily regulated.”
“So, is it your argument—you’re asking this court to give municipal clerks absolutely free rein to disregard the carefully regulated regime established by the people’s representatives in the legislature, and they can do whatever they want as long as it’s workable?” Bradley asked.
Fellow conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn pushed Fox on a different angle of the legal theory behind voting at unmanned drop-off sites.
“My understanding is that you are arguing that it is unconstitutional to not have drop boxes as a method of returning absentee ballots,” Hagedorn said. “I don’t understand that at all.”
However, the leftist judges focused more on dismantling the last ballot-drop-box decision than what Wisconsin’s absentee-voting law says.
Democrats claim the court misinterpreted the law in its 2022 ruling by wrongly concluding that absentee ballots can only be returned to a clerk in their office and not to a drop box they control that is located elsewhere.
Clerks should be allowed “to decide for themselves how and where to accept the return of absentee ballots,” attorneys argued in court filings.
“What if we just got it wrong?” Justice Jill Karofsky asked. “What if we made a mistake? Are we now supposed to just perpetuate that mistake into the future?”
In the spring of 2022, just before the old court outlawed ballot drop boxes, there were nearly 600 ballot drop boxes in use.
The court’s ruling will come within three months of the Aug. 13 primary and within six months of the November presidential election. A reversal could have implications on what is expected to be another razor-thin presidential race in Wisconsin.
President Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in Wisconsin by just under 21,000 votes in 2020, four years after Trump narrowly took the state by a similar margin.
However, evidence—including that turned up by a special-counsel investigation that the state legislature commissioned—turned up serious indications of vote fraud in the six biggest urban areas, including parts of Milwaukee where there were more votes than registered voters, an illegal ballot-harvesting operation in nursing homes in Racine County, and a Green Bay election office that was essentially being run by an outside left-wing activist.
Election officials from four counties—including the two largest and most heavily Democratic in the state—filed a brief in support of overturning the ruling.
They claimed absentee-ballot drop boxes had been used for decades without incident as a secure way for voters to return their ballots.
More than 1,600 absentee ballots arrived at clerks’ offices after Election Day in 2022, when drop boxes were not in use, and therefore were not counted, Democratic attorneys noted in their arguments. But in 2020, when drop boxes were in use and nearly three times as many people voted absentee, only 689 ballots arrived after the election.
Drop boxes were used in 39 other states during the 2022 election, according to the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project.
The popularity of absentee voting exploded during the pandemic in 2020, with more than 40% of all voters in Wisconsin casting mail ballots, a record high.
Much of that was due to the promotion of their use by Democrats during the pandemic, including Mark Zuckerberg’s Center for Tech and Civic Life, which dedicated nearly half a billion dollars nationwide to what it claimed were pandemic-friendly to facilitate the election.
However, reports later showed that the money was a de-facto campaign donation to Democrats, principally in the urban centers of red battleground states, for get-out-the-vote operations.
The so-called Zuckerbucks came with certain demands, including that leftist operatives be installed in the election offices themselves, a clear violation of standard election-integrity practices. Wisconsin has since joined other states in banning outside funding of elections, although it remains to be seen whether the leftist court attempts to roll back that law.
Resulting in part from the CTCL stipulations, more than 500 drop boxes were set up in more than 430 communities for the election that year, including more than a dozen each in Madison and Milwaukee, the state’s two most heavily Democratic cities.
Headline USA’s Ben Sellers and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
