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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
‘We are fed up’: Ballot drop boxes are dividing neighbors in
Wisconsin
By Casey Tolan and Sara Murray, CNN
Updated:
6:00 AM EDT, Wed October 16, 2024
Source: CNN
In one conservative Wisconsin county, the sheriff appeared onstage at a
Donald Trump campaign rally last week to brag about his efforts to ban
ballot drop boxes.
“I have something very important I think you’re going to want to
hear,” Sheriff Dale Schmidt told Trump. “In Dodge County, in this
2024 election, there are zero drop boxes for the election.”
That – but the crowd cheered, and Trump offered the sheriff a double
thumbs-up.
Around the crucial battleground state of Wisconsin, ballot drop boxes
are a political flashpoint, with a tool that made absentee voting
easier and safer during the pandemic-era 2020 election now highly
contested.
In the state’s two biggest and most liberal cities, drop boxes are
plentiful, with voters able to drop off their ballots at more than a
dozen locations in each city, from fire departments to libraries. In
some other cities and towns, however, local leaders have rejected them.
The controversy comes as the legal landscape on the issue has shifted
dramatically from election to election: Drop boxes were legal in
Wisconsin in 2020, then mostly banned in 2022, and now are legal once
again after liberals took control of the state Supreme Court.
According to data from the Wisconsin Elections Commission, there are at
least 78 drop boxes being used in the state during the general
election, although that is likely an undercount because local clerks
are not required to report drop box locations to the state commission.
Still, that’s far lower than the that the commission was aware of in
2020.
Whether to use them is largely left up to the more than 1,800 local
officials who administer the state’s elections. The cities of
Milwaukee and Madison will each be using 14 drop boxes, and other
cities and towns across the state are using one or several.
Nick Ramos, the executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign,
a voting rights group that has pushed for more drop boxes, said he was
discouraged by the number of municipalities that had decided not to use
drop boxes this election.
“We’re watching almost what feels like a coordinated campaign by
some bad actors here in this state to apply pressure and bully clerks
into not putting drop boxes out,” Ramos said. “It’s become a
lightning rod.”
Polls have shown Wisconsin to be one of the closest swing states in
this year’s presidential race – four years after President Joe
Biden won the state by less than 1 percentage point.
Blowup in Wausau
The most dramatic fight over drop boxes this election season has been
in Wausau, a city of about 40,000 people that’s a blue dot in a red
county.
Last month, Wausau Mayor Doug Diny, a Republican, put on a white hard
hat and high-visibility gloves and wheeled the city’s ballot drop box
into his office. The drop box was locked and not in use at the time.
Diny documented his action by sending photos of himself moving the box
to the city clerk and other local officials. But under a state Supreme
Court decision this summer, decisions about drop boxes were left up to
local clerks, not mayors. His actions went viral.
Now the Wausau drop box is back in place in front of City Hall, where
it is secured to the ground, locked and emptied daily by local
officials. Meanwhile, the city clerk referred the controversy to the
county prosecutor, and the state Department of Justice is investigating
Diny’s actions.
In an interview with CNN, Diny said he hadn’t done anything illegal
and had moved the drop box because it was unsecured at the time.
“For all I know, you know, somebody could have grabbed it, thrown it
in the river,” he said. “Now we would have a real crime on our
hands.”
Asked whether he regretted the move, Diny responded, “there’s a
saying that dogs don’t bark at parked cars. I’ve had to get
attention here from time to time to upset the status quo.”
But voting rights advocates condemned his actions.
“No one person gets to take the law into their own hands and
interfere with someone else’s right to vote,” said Jeff Mandell,
the general counsel of Law Forward, a public interest law firm in the
state that has worked on voting rights cases. “If he finds that drop
box to be problematic, of course he is welcome, like anyone else, to
voice his opinion. … What he can’t do is unilaterally interfere
with other peoples’ rights to lawfully vote.”
At a raucous City Council meeting last week, supporters and detractors
of Diny packed the council chambers. One voter blasted what they called
the “the deep state right at work in little Wausau,” while another
said the controversy made her “embarrassed” for her city. Diny
proposed spending $3,000 on additional security for the drop box, but
the council did not vote on his proposal.
Outside City Hall, police officers were on hand to ensure tensions
didn’t boil over between protesters supporting the drop box – who
showed up wearing their own hard hats – and those who opposed it.
“We are fed up with politicians using conspiracy theories, no matter
which party you support,” said Nancy Stenzel, a Wausau resident, to
boos from opponents. “Drop boxes are safe, they are reliable and
secure.”
Changing legal status
For years, ballot drop boxes were legal in Wisconsin with little
controversy or attention, and in 2020, they became a key tactic for
municipalities to encourage safe voting during the coronavirus
pandemic.
In advance of the election that year, Republican leaders in the state
acknowledged that drop boxes were secure. In a in September 2020
objecting to a separate ballot collection process, A lawyer
representing Robin Vos, the speaker of the State Assembly, and Scott
Fitzgerald, then the state Senate majority leader, included drop boxes
as ballot delivery methods they supported, citing state rules.
“We wholeheartedly support voters’ use of any of these convenient,
secure and expressly authorized absentee-ballot-return methods,” the
letter said.
But after Trump’s loss, Republican leaders changed their tune. When
the Wisconsin Supreme Court Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020
results in December of that year, three of the court’s conservative
members suggested that drop boxes were not actually legal under state
law.
And in his January 6, 2021, speech just before the Capitol riot, Trump
specifically singled out Wisconsin’s drop box policies, falsely
claiming that drop boxes in the state “disappeared” for days.
A conservative group to ban drop boxes in Wisconsin, and the state
Supreme Court’s conservative majority sided with them in 2022,
banning drop boxes except ones inside clerks’ offices. That ruling
– which was applauded by – was in place for the election that year.
Then in 2023, liberal Judge Janet Protasiewicz won a seat on the
state’s high court, shifting the 4-3 conservative majority to a 4-3
liberal one. A few weeks before Protasiewicz joined the court, the
Democratic group Priorities USA challenging the 2022 drop box decision.
In July, the court overturned the 2022 ruling, with the liberal
justices arguing it was incorrectly decided. The new court majority
left it up to Wisconsin’s more than 1,800 municipal clerks to decide
whether to use drop boxes during the upcoming general election.
Now, Wisconsin voters are facing a patchwork of local policies on drop
boxes. Some cities that used drop boxes in 2020, including Kenosha, the
state’s fourth-largest, have decided not to use them this election.
Elsewhere in the state, cities are using the same drop box locations
they used four years ago. In Milwaukee, most drop boxes are in front of
libraries, and in Madison, the state capital and a Democratic
stronghold, officials decided to locate almost all of their drop boxes
in front of fire stations.
Dylan Brogan, a spokesperson for the Madison city government, said the
city’s drop boxes were under constant video surveillance, and that
the fire stations were well-suited to host the boxes because they were
staffed 24/7 and spread out around the city.
“This is just a very convenient, easy option that voters can really
trust,” he said.
Conservative pressure
Wausau isn’t the only place in Wisconsin where conservative elected
officials have tried to take drop boxes out of commission this year.
In Dodge County, a county of about 90,000 people that voted heavily for
Trump in 2020, Schmidt, the elected sheriff, urged local clerks not to
use drop boxes.
“I strongly encourage you to avoid using a drop box,” he wrote in
an August email to three clerks in his county obtained by the website ,
saying that doing so would “degrade trust in our system.”
When Schmidt told the clerk in one town that her municipality would be
the only one in the county to use a drop box, she wrote back 15 minutes
later to say that she had decided to close the box, WisPolitics
reported.
Earlier this month, Schmidt took a victory lap at a Trump rally in
Juneau, Wisconsin, where the former president offered him the double
thumbs-up. Schmidt told CNN that Trump personally called him up to
the stage.
“If we have an area of the law which is constantly being subverted,
we’re going to find ways to put roadblocks in the way of individuals
that are going to break the law,” Schmidt said.
When pressed on the lack of evidence that drop boxes were violating any
law, Schmidt said, “there is the appearance that that it is
occurring, and we are making sure that it is not going to happen.”
Watching over drop boxes
Eric Hovde, the Republican nominee for US Senate in Wisconsin, has also
promoted doubts about drop boxes.
“We’ve got to make sure that there’s somebody standing by that
drop box literally 24 hours a day, you know, for, you know, 45 days to
make sure that you don’t have people just jumping, jamming fake
ballots,” Hovde told supporters in July, The Washington Post .
Some conservative activists say they are planning efforts to do just
that kind of surveillance. The conservative group True the Vote, which
has pushed conspiracy theories about voting fraud, sent staff across
Wisconsin in recent weeks to collect “exact drop box locations” in
advance of setting up video livestreams of the boxes, the group’s
director, Catherine Engelbrecht, wrote in an email to supporters
earlier this month.
“True the Vote is providing camera gear, hotspots, and streaming
support,” Engelbrecht wrote. “We’ve also written to states,
counties, cities, and other municipalities, requesting ballot dropbox
video footage, from the time the dropboxes are opened until close on
Election Day. Unlike what happened in 2020, we are now very well
prepared on this front.”
Another activist with the group described True the Vote’s efforts as
creating “a dropbox surveillance reality show” in a Truth Social
post that was later deleted, .
Mandell, of Law Forward, said that plans like those raised concerns
about voter intimidation.
“Of course people have the right to observe the drop off of absentee
ballots,” he said, “but there’s a very thin line between that
observation and intimidation.”
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