MADISON, Wis. (CN) — The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled on Friday that state law permits the use of drop boxes to collect absentee ballots, authorizing the absentee voting option in the battleground state four months ahead of the 2024 general election.
The high state court’s 4-3 decision split along ideological lines, with the liberal majority outnumbering the conservative justices’ lockstep dissent. Almost two years ago to the day, the court banned drop boxes when it had a conservative majority.
Priorities USA, a progressive PAC, targeted multiple state rules restricting absentee voting in its lawsuit against the Wisconsin Elections Commission last year. A Dane County Circuit Court judge tossed most of their constitutional claims in January, prompting the political action committee to drop its suit and try its luck with the state Supreme Court, which agreed to hear only its claim about drop boxes.
During arguments in May, the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s liberal justices seemed skeptical that state law’s silence on drop boxes meant they were prohibited, as was the reasoning of the court’s previous decision on the matter.
Writing for the majority on Friday, longtime liberal Justice Ann Walsh Bradley said the previous decision incorrectly interpreted state law and was unsound in principle. Wisconsin statutes permit, but do not mandate, drop boxes for the purpose of collecting absentee ballots, she said.
“Our decision today does not force or require that any municipal clerk use drop boxes. It merely acknowledges what [state law] has always meant: that clerks may lawfully utilize secure drop boxes in an exercise of their statutorily-conferred discretion,” Walsh Bradley said.
The heart of both Friday’s majority ruling and the court’s 2022 decision turned on the question of whether returning an absentee ballot to a drop box set up by the municipal clerk satisfied state law’s requirement that absentee ballots, if they are not mailed, must be delivered in person to the municipal clerk.
Whereas the previous conservative majority held that inanimate drop boxes cannot stand in for the municipal clerk, Walsh Bradley disagreed, essentially saying returning an absentee ballot to a drop box is the same as returning it to the clerk.
She further noted that in 2021 the Legislature tried to revise statutory language specifically to require ballots to be returned to the clerk’s office, but Governor Tony Evers vetoed the effort.
Evers, a Democrat, applauded the court’s decision in a press release on Friday, calling it a “victory for democracy.”
“Today’s Wisconsin Supreme Court decision affirms what voting rights advocates, local elections officials, and countless others have argued all along: drop box voting is safe, secure, and legal, and local clerks and election administrators should be empowered at the local level to make decisions that make sense for their local communities,” the governor said.
Evers intervened in the suit, siding with the progressive PAC. Though the elections commission was the nominal defendant, the Republican-controlled Wisconsin Legislature intervened as a defendant, making a lawsuit that was facially a matter of dry statutory interpretation seem more like an election-year fight between opposing political interests in a swing state where elections are routinely decided by a few thousand votes.
Walsh Bradley, who in April announced she will not seek reelection next year, was joined in the majority by fellow liberal Justices Rebecca Dallet, Jill Karofsky and Janet Protasiewicz.
Justice Rebecca Grassl Bradley, a conservative who two years ago wrote the decision banning drop boxes, dissented on Friday, joined by Justice Brian Hagedorn and Chief Justice Annette Ziegler, also conservatives.
Grassl Bradley pointed out that her liberal colleagues started the court’s term by throwing out the state’s legislative voting maps — which were widely considered to be gerrymandered in Republicans’ favor — so they could be replaced by maps more friendly to Democrats. They ended the term, she said, by ignoring precedent and easing absentee voting restrictions “in the hopes of tipping the scales in future elections.”
Nothing has changed since the 2022 decision banning drop boxes except the politics of the court’s majority, Grassl Bradley said. She predicted that Friday’s decision would only “fuel the fires of suspicion” caused by partisan political battling and a lack of trust in institutions and the legitimacy of elections.
“The majority’s activism marks another triumph of political power over legal principle in this court,” Grassl Bradley said.
An attorney for the Legislature could not be immediately reached for comment on Friday.