Debunking the Wisconsin Supreme Court's Drop Box Opinion

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“On his social media site Truth Social, Trump wrote a flurry of posts following the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s decision to ban drop ballot boxes. He has insisted this means he won the state and called on the Legislature to ‘do something’ about this outcome.”

democracydocket.com
Debunking the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s Drop Box Opinion
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12:00 PM · Jul 21, 2022

https://www.democracydocket.com/news/debunking-the-wisconsin-supreme-courts-drop-box-opinion/

On July 8, 2022, the Wisconsin Supreme Court released a 4-3 opinion banning ballot drop boxes in the state. The ruling originated from a case, Teigen v. Wisconsin Elections Commission, filed by the conservative activist group, Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL), in June 2021, seven months after Wisconsin held a successful, high-turnout election in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The state is unique in its election administration; it vests this authority in a bipartisan body called the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC). In March 2020, the WEC issued guidance to local clerks outlining “options for ensuring that the maximum number of ballots are returned” for the upcoming primary election. The options included drop boxes and indicated that “clerks should ensure they are secure, can be monitored for security purposes, and should be regularly emptied.” Additionally, the WEC stated that “a family member or another person may also return the ballot on behalf of the voter.”

The two guidelines in this memo — encouraging the use of ballot drop boxes and permitting a third party to return a ballot on behalf of another voter — were the target of WILL’s lawsuit. After winding up before the Wisconsin Supreme Court, conservative Justice Rebecca Grassl Bradley wrote a majority opinion that found that both ballot drop boxes and third-party ballot collection were not expressly authorized in Wisconsin law and thus were illegal. She was joined by three other conservative justices, although Justice Brian Hagerdorn split with the majority at several key, and most extreme, points.

Today, we’re not rebutting the legal analysis — the dissent written by the other Justice Bradley on the court, liberal Justice Ann Walsh Bradley, did a good job at that — but we are identifying and responding to particularly harmful conclusions reached by the majority.

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