OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court has issued a ruling that could significantly impact the presidential election.
In a 4 – 3 decision on Friday, the court ruled to allow ballot drop boxes in the 2024 election using what some might call legal gymnastics. Elections have consequences, and when the Wisconsin Supreme Court struck down the use of ballot boxes after the 2020 election, it leaned conservative at the time.
But after Democrat operatives poured funding into the election of a liberal justice, the court now leans liberal, and the decision has changed.
Justice Ann Walsh Bradley agreed that the state Constitution does not explicitly allow drop boxes, but it does allow voters to leave their ballots with the County Clerk, and therefore, the County Clerk may choose to use drop boxes, Just The News reported.
“By mandating that an absentee ballot be returned not to the ‘municipal clerk’s office,’ but ‘to the municipal clerk,’ the Legislature disclaimed the idea that the ballot must be delivered to a specific location and instead embraced delivery of an absentee ballot to a person,” Justice Bradley, who penned the decision, said. “Given this, the question then becomes whether delivery to a drop box constitutes delivery ‘to the municipal clerk.”
“A drop box is set up, maintained, secured, and emptied by the municipal clerk. This is the case even if the drop box is in a location other than the municipal clerk’s office. As analyzed, the statute does not specify a location to which a ballot must be returned and requires only that the ballot be delivered to a location the municipal clerk, within his or her discretion, designates,” the Justice said.
Justice Rebecca Bradley penned her dissent to the majority decision.
“The majority again forsakes the rule of law in an attempt to advance its political agenda,” the Justice said. “The majority began this term by tossing the legislative maps adopted by this court … for the sole purpose of facilitating ‘the redistribution of political power in the Wisconsin Legislature.’ The majority ends the term by loosening the Legislature’s regulations governing the privilege of absentee voting in the hopes of tipping the scales in future elections.”
“To reach this conclusion, the majority misrepresents the court’s decision in Teigen, replaces the only reasonable interpretation of the law with a highly implausible one, and tramples the doctrine of stare decisis,” she said.
But the majority opinion disagrees, saying that clerks are not required to use drop boxes, only that they may.
“Our decision today does not force or require that any municipal clerks use drop boxes,” she said. “It merely acknowledges what has always meant: that clerks may lawfully utilize secure drop boxes in an exercise of their statutorily-conferred discretion.”
Wisconsin is a major 2024 battleground state that Donald Trump won in 2016 and Joe Biden won in 2020.
During the election for a new Justice in 2023 the Democrat candidate Janet Protasiewicz outraised her conservative opponent Daniel Kelly to the tune of more than 5-to-1 in, which was due in part to more than $8.8 million from the Wisconsin Democrat Party.
WisPolitics reported: “Protasiewicz reported nearly $12.4 million raised between Feb. 7 and March 20, $10.6 million spent and almost $2.1 million cash on hand. She’s now detailed more than $14.5 million in contributions since the start of 2022. Kelly, the former justice, reported $2.2 million raised over the pre-election period, $2 million spent, and $395,098 in the bank. Since launching his campaign, he’s raised more than $2.7 million.”
“For both candidates, their overall fundraising totals include the late contributions they’ve detailed to the state since the pre-election reporting period closed last week. During the most recent period, the state Dem Party gave just over $8 million to Protasiewicz in monetary donations along with more than $800,000 in in-kind donations for expenses such as polls, online ads, and mail. Protasiewicz then plowed a good chunk of that money into TV, reporting $8.3 million in expenditures on TV ads during the six-week period,” the outlet added.
