The left-wing legal-industrial complex is targeting the battleground state of Wisconsin ahead of the 2024 election. Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias and friends are filing lawsuits in both state and federal courts, searching for a court that will be sympathetic to their cause. The newly elected Wisconsin Supreme Court is exactly that, but the federal judges appointed by President Obama have proven less sympathetic.
Recently, the Wisconsin Supreme Court heard arguments on whether Wisconsin law allows for the return of absentee ballots in unmanned ballot drop boxes. Although the rules don’t mention ballot drop boxes at all, the left is trying to force the installation of ballot drop boxes just two years after that very same court ruled that they were illegal.
Elias filed the same lawsuit and lost in 2022. At the time “Top Gun: Maverick” was a box office hit, the court ruled that in Wisconsin, the law is black and white, and absentee ballots must be returned to a human clerk, not an inanimate object like a drop box.
But in another example of their “litigate ’til you’re blue” strategy, the left went back to the Wisconsin Supreme Court and re-argued the exact same case. The astute reader may be thinking, “The Court doesn’t rehear a case without cause. What has changed since April 2022?” The answer is very simple: there was an election in Wisconsin, the composition of the Court has tipped to the left, and the forum has become much more receptive to left arguments.
So we are experiencing judicial deja vu: we are back in the same court, debating the exact same issues, with the only difference being that there is a new liberal majority on the court.
Why are they pushing so hard for ballot drop boxes? In addition to voting in person, Wisconsin allows absentee voting. Absentee voters can mail their ballot or return it to their precinct clerk. This is easy and secure, but the left doesn’t like it. They want unmanned, unsecured and unregulated ballot drop boxes sprinkled throughout jurisdictions.
This is convenient because state laws do not account for the placement of ballot boxes, nor do they set standards for how or when they should be placed, opening the door to partisan game-playing and late-night ballot drop-offs. We have seen problems with “secure” ballot boxes. In a place like Washington That wasn’t the case at all.
The lawsuit is a continuation of Elias’ efforts to seize control over election rules by shifting decisions about how elections work from the legislature to the courts — a tactic that has been used elsewhere, such as to block Montana from moving up its voter registration deadline by even a day.
It’s also a rehash of the left’s coronavirus-era argument that if it’s not prohibited by law, it must be allowed. This model has been used early and often in places like Houston to push previously unthinkable voting “innovations,” like drive-thru voting and 24-hour voting.
Unfortunately, Wisconsin’s new court majority appears poised to overturn the court’s previous decisions and take on the task of micromanaging Wisconsin’s elections. As the Legislature’s lawyers pointed out during oral argument, if the court continues down this path, it will have the opportunity to hear the case a third time when the court’s makeup inevitably changes again.
But it’s not all doom and gloom in the courts and in Wisconsin. Elias recently suffered a major defeat in federal court, a case that involves another of the left’s tactics: digging up old, limited statutes to apply to current practice.
This concerns a practice called “bouncing,” a Jim Crow-era voter suppression tactic in which registered voters had to vouch for their eligibility in order to vote. For African-Americans trying to vote, there were too often no registered voters willing to make that pledge.
Congress banned endorsements in the Civil Rights Act of 1965. Now, no state can require voters to prove their eligibility with someone else’s endorsement. Once the practice was banned, it disappeared from the voting process, and most people have forgotten it ever existed.
But now Elias and his team are trying to change the definition of witnessing, arguing that a witness signature on an absentee ballot is a requirement and therefore amounts to a Jim Crow-era tactic used to deny African-Americans the right to vote.
It would be sad if this wasn’t typical. Fortunately, an Obama-appointed judge didn’t buy it and dismissed the case, ridiculing Elias’ claims in the process.
Don’t expect the left to change its stance: Elias will simply seek out a friendlier court, such as the Wisconsin Supreme Court or another that puts partisan politics above the rule of law.
Chad Ennis is vice president of the Honest Elections Project..
