WATERTOWN, Wis. — Election laws are changing again in the battleground state of Wisconsin.
The unelected State Board of Elections on Thursday approved unenforceable rules for the operation of unmanned ballot drop boxes in the November election. More than 1,800 local election clerks will decide whether and how to use unmanned ballot drop boxes after the Wisconsin Supreme Court overturned a 2022 ban on unmanned ballot drop boxes, thanks to the court’s new liberal majority.
Commissioners disagreed on some of the finer points of the new rules. Republican Commissioner Bob Spindell wanted to include guidelines instructing voters to seal their absentee ballot envelopes before placing them in the ballot box.
“Bob, that’s too cheesy,” he said, running the meeting. The box behind Biden He traveled to Madison for a rally last Friday, the same day the state Supreme Court ruling was handed down.
Commissioners debated rules about how and when ballot boxes should be emptied, disagreeing on whether to include chain of custody language. Jacobs prevailed over Spindell’s concerns, and her preferred language became the guideline: “Ballots retrieved from the ballot box must be securely transported to the clerk’s office.”
Absentee voting has been a contentious issue in Wisconsin, with a history of human error wreaking havoc on election night and former President Donald Trump filing a lawsuit challenging the state’s 2020 presidential election results, which included absentee ballots.
A liberal judge in Dane County changed state election law this month, ruling to create an exception to absentee voting rules for voters with disabilities.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court last week overturned an earlier ruling on the legality of unmanned ballot drop boxes in the case Teigen v. Wisconsin State Election Commission.
The move comes just months before the election and overturns a 2022 ruling in which the Supreme Court, with a conservative majority, ruled that Wisconsin’s election law did not allow for unattended ballot drop boxes.
“The legitimacy of the election continues to be called into question, with each side accusing the other of ‘election interference’ and ‘threats to democracy,'” said the conservative Judge Rebecca Bradley “Or undermines the very foundations of our constitutional republic,” she wrote in her dissent. “The majority’s decision in this case will only add fuel to the fires of doubt.”
Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty The lawsuit was filed in 2021. The lawsuit, filed on behalf of two voters, led to the first ruling banning the use of unmanned ballot drop boxes to collect absentee ballots after the state used them in the 2020 election.
“We did a report on the 2020 election, and one of the conclusions was that there was no uniformity in how drop boxes were handled. Some municipalities did a good job of monitoring drop boxes and keeping the contents safe,” WILL president and general counsel Rick Esenberg told The Washington Post. “Some municipalities did not.”
Former county clerk and state senator Kathy Bernier recently retired as state representative for Keep Our Republic, whose mission is “to protect our republic of laws and strengthen the checks and balances of our democratic electoral system.” She believes establishing a record of ballot collection should be the standard. “There should be a record of who collected ballots from the drop box, how many they collected,” Bernier told The Washington Post. “And when they collected them.”
“Record-keeping means keeping a record of what you did and how you did it,” Bernier explained. “There’s record-keeping for a lot of things in the election process.”
A chain of custody creates a record of an absentee ballot that can be verified by the clerk or the voter who cast it. There is a concern that without a documented chain of custody, neither voters nor election officials will be able to determine where or how their absentee ballot was delivered (whether it was mailed, delivered in person, or dropped off in a ballot drop box).
“That information is invaluable,” Bernier said. “It’s who, what, when, where and how they voted.”
“If they want to apply this rule to elections, they’re going to have to enact emergency rules,” Esenberg told The Post before the committee met to discuss the guidelines.
Because the commission did not vote to enact emergency rules, the guidelines do not have the full force of law and are not enforceable. Individual city and town officials can use the guidelines, and many do, but Wisconsin’s municipalities will decide this fall how to use unmanned ballot drop boxes in presidential elections.
“The problem with the state Supreme Court ruling is they made it up,” Esenberg said. “Ballot drop boxes are not allowed. [in state law] — which obviously excludes them.”
