The use of ballot drop boxes was the focal point of much election misinformation and chaos for election-denying Republicans following the 2020 election. But now they might be coming around to embracing it.
As the Wisconsin Supreme decides whether or not to reinstate the use of ballot drop boxes ahead of the 2024 election, Republican lawmakers in the state have suddenly changed their perspective, saying they would encourage Republican voters to use drop boxes and other early voting methods that they had previously claimed was a source of election manipulation and ballot harvesting.
The about face is also out of necessity. If Republicans have any hope of carrying Wisconsin in 2024, they’re going to have to change their messaging around absentee voting and ballot drop boxes, election experts told TPM.
“One of the two parties decided that their path to victory perhaps involved making repeated false claims about certain voting processes,” David Levine, senior elections integrity fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, told TPM. “And not only does that get you potentially in a world of legal trouble, but it can also increase your likelihood of losing, so now we’re seeing an adjustment.”
Republicans in Wisconsin have begun to “read the tea leaves,” Jay Heck, executive director of the non partisan Common Cause Wisconsin similarly told TPM, knowing that the liberal majority on the state Supreme Court will likely rule in favor of ballot drop boxes and absentee voting — an effective and safe way to cast a ballot.
The strategy now for Republicans, as the Wisconsin Supreme Court weighs this decision, will likely be twofold, he said. They will continue to play into the hands of election conspiracy theorists, all while urging their voters to use drop boxes.
“The strategy will be, on the one hand, urging their [Republican] voters not to wait till the last minute and rely on the U.S. mail if they’re voting by absentee ballot and use the drop boxes,” said Heck. “But on the other hand, raise the specter of fraud.”
It’s a line-straddling strategy the national Republican Party, and Donald Trump himself, has had to embrace as well post-2020 as Republican strategists and party officials realized that relentlessly demonizing non-Election Day voting practices, like mail-in voting, did not help Republicans win elections in 2020 and 2022.
In July 2022, the state Supreme Court’s then-conservative majority ruled in a case brought by two Waukesha County voters who were represented by the right-wing Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty that ballot drop boxes were illegal in Wisconsin, noting in that 4-3 decision that the Wisconsin Elections Commission incorrectly told local election clerks in 2020 that ballot drop boxes are a permissible way for voters to return ballots. According to the court, because state law did not expressly allow drop boxes to be used, they were not legal, ruling that absentee ballots now needed to be delivered directly to municipal clerks.
Although the use of drop boxes expanded during the 2020 election due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the practice had been legal for decades in Wisconsin and elsewhere across the country prior to 2020.
“The illegality of these drop boxes weakens the people’s faith that the election produced an outcome reflective of their will,” the 2022 opinion read. “The Wisconsin voters, and all lawful voters, are injured when the institution charged with administering Wisconsin elections does not follow the law, leaving the results in question.”
Earlier this year, however, the left-leaning political action committee Priorities USA challenged the 2022 Supreme Court decision, in a lawsuit joined by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and state Attorney General Josh Kaul.
“…before drop boxes became so politically charged, there was consensus that they were lawful and appropriate,” reads a brief from Evers.
And now this month, Brian Schimming, Republican Party of Wiscosin Chair has said more than once that he will encourage Republican voters to use ballot drop boxes in the fall, if they are to become legal.
“All I can tell you as chairman is I’m not going to leave any potential advantage that we might have on the table,” Schimming said at a state Republican convention, according to USA Today.
“This messaging is a sharp turn from 2020 and something of a break with President Trump’s disparaging of methods of voting outside of the traditional election day experience,” Barry Burden, political science professor at at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Director of the Elections Research Center, said in an email to TPM.
The rationale for the flip-flop is mostly practical and due to the fact that Republicans have been losing statewide elections in Wisconsin since Trump came to office. “There is a sense that Democrats have gotten an edge over the GOP by utilizing all voting practices rather than limiting themselves to traditional ways of voting,” Burden noted.
Levine emphasized, however, that even though Wisconsin Republicans may be embracing the use of ballot drop boxes now, that is likely to change.
“You support the voting method until you’re losing,” he said. “What we’ve seen is that for some folks who are losing, they’re willing to go to pretty much any ends to try and ensure they can win.”
