This story first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

They are squat, stationary and seemingly innocuous. But ever since the high drama of the 2020 presidential election, humble drop boxes have been more than a receptacle of absentee ballots; they’ve morphed into a vessel for emotion, suspicion and even conspiracy theories.

In the battleground state of Wisconsin, especially, the mere presence of these sidewalk containers has inspired political activists and community leaders to plot against them, to call on people to watch them around the clock and even to hijack them.

They’ve been the subject of two state Supreme Court decisions, as well as legal memos, local council deliberations, press conferences and much hand-wringing.

Wausau Mayor Doug Diny was so leery of the box outside City Hall that he absconded with it on a Sunday in September, isolating it in his office. It had not yet been secured to the ground, he said, and so he wanted to keep it safe. The escapade was met with a backlash but also won the mayor some admirers online before he returned it.

“COURAGE IS CONTAGIOUS! WELL DONE SIR!” one person wrote on the conservative social media site Gettr.

As early voting for the November election begins and Wisconsinites receive their absentee ballots, they have choices on how to return them. Mail them. Deliver them in person to the municipal clerk. Or, in some communities, deposit them in a drop box, typically located outside a municipal building, library, community center or fire station.

Though election experts say the choices are designed to make voting a simple act, the use of drop boxes has been anything but uncomplicated since the 2020 election, when receptacles in Wisconsin and around the country became flash points for baseless conspiracy theories of election fraud. A discredited, but popular, documentary — “2000 Mules” — linked them to ballot stuffing, while a backlash grew over nonprofit funding that helped clerks make voting easier through a variety of measures, including drop boxes.

The movie’s distributor, Salem Media Group Inc., removed it from circulation in May and, in response to a lawsuit, issued a public apology to a Georgia voter for falsely depicting him as having voted illegally. A federal judge dismissed Salem Media Group as a defendant, but the litigation is proceeding against the filmmaker and others.

With all that fuss in the background, Wisconsin’s conservative-leaning Supreme Court outlawed the boxes in 2022. But then this summer, with the court now controlled by liberals, justices ruled them lawful, determining that municipal clerks could offer secure drop boxes in their communities if they wished.

The court’s latest ruling made clear it’s up to each municipal clerk’s discretion whether to offer drop boxes for voters. But the decision has done little to change minds about the boxes or end any confusion about whether they’re a boon to democracy or a tool for chicanery.

This year, four of Wisconsin’s largest cities are using drop boxes — Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay and Racine. But numerous locales that offered drop boxes in 2020, including Kenosha, the fourth-largest city in the state, have determined they will not this year.

Voters have been getting mixed messages from right-wing activists and politicians about whether to use drop boxes, as the GOP continues to sow distrust in elections while, at the same time, urging supporters to vote early — by any means.

“Look, I’m not a fan of drop boxes, as is no great surprise, but if you have to have them, this is not a bad situation,” Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of True the Vote, which has fostered doubt about election integrity and helped inspire “2000 Mules,” said on a video posted to social media on Sept. 30. It showed her giving a brief tour of a drop box in Madison, Wisconsin’s capital and a bastion of Democrats.

With the camera trained on one of the boxes, Engelbrecht extolled that “the slot is really small, so that’s a good thing,” and that “most of these drop boxes appear to be close to fire stations,” which she also declared a good thing. About a week later, she wrote in a newsletter that True the Vote had collected exact drop box locations statewide and was working to arrange livestream video feeds of them.

Unlike in 2020 when Trump warned against the use of absentee ballots, this year he is urging supporters to “swamp the vote.” And the Wisconsin Republican Party is not discouraging voters from using ballot drop boxes if they are available in their community and are secure.

Still, Wisconsin’s GOP candidate for the U.S. Senate, Eric Hovde, has urged citizen surveillance brigades to watch the boxes. “Who’s watching to see how many illegal ballots are being stuffed?” Hovde told supporters in July, according to a recording of his remarks obtained by The Washington Post. “Look, we’re probably going to have to have — make sure that there’s somebody standing by a drop box everywhere.”

Most boxes have security cameras trained on them. Those surveillance tapes could be used as purported evidence in legal cases if Trump loses on Nov. 5.

Already, Engelbrecht has filed a public records request with the Dane County Clerk’s Office for “copies of video recordings from security cameras used to surveil all exterior and interior ballot drop boxes in Dane County for the November 2024 Election.” The county, whose seat is Madison, does not have access to camera footage, which is kept by municipalities, the county clerk told ProPublica.

After this year’s state Supreme Court ruling allowing the drop boxes, the Wisconsin Elections Commission issued guidance to the state’s roughly 1,800 municipal clerks recommending more than a dozen security practices related to the boxes.

The instructions include that they be “affixed to the ground or the side of the building,” “sturdy enough to withstand the elements,” “located in a well-lit area,” “equipped with unique locks or seals” and “emptied often.”

The commission recommended that clerks keep a record of the times and dates of retrieval, number of ballots retrieved and the names of the people doing the retrieving.

It also referred clerks to federal guidelines.

But even with updated guidelines in place and ballot harvesting prohibited in Wisconsin (individuals can only submit their own ballot, unless helping a disabled person), concerns persist.

In August in Dodge County, some 60 miles northwest of Milwaukee, the sheriff, Dale Schmidt, emailed three town clerks, telling them he had “serious concerns” about drop boxes, according to records obtained by the news site WisPolitics. “I strongly encourage you to avoid using a drop box,” he wrote. The sheriff asked the clerks numerous questions about the boxes, explaining that: “Even if set up the best way possible to avoid the potential for fraudulent activity, criminal activity many times finds ways to subvert even the best plans.”

Two of the clerks — from the towns of Ashippun and Beaver Dam — replied to the sheriff that they would not use them and the clerk from Hustisford told Wisconsin Public Radio that, while she received Schmidt’s email, the town board had already decided against using a drop box out of security concerns. In an email to ProPublica, Schmidt said, “No one was intimidated into choosing not to use the boxes and none of them had heartburn over not using them.”

Brittany Vulich, Wisconsin campaign manager for the nonpartisan voting rights group All Voting is Local, is bothered by how mayors, council members and other officials are seeking to influence these decisions. She notes that municipal clerks — the vast majority of whom are women — are the top election officials in each municipality.

“It’s the undermining of their authority. It’s the undermining of their office,” she said. “It’s the undermining of their autonomy to do their job and to make that decision on whether to use drop boxes or not. And that is what is very alarming.”

Other towns have also balked.

In the city of Brookfield, the Common Council took up a resolution Aug. 20 and voted 10-4 not to have a drop box after reviewing a memo by City Attorney Jenna Merten who found the recommended precautions burdensome.

“The guidance states that for unstaffed 24-hour ballot drop boxes, the City would need a video surveillance camera and storage of the video footage, as well as decals, extra keys and security seals,” she wrote. “Removing the ballots from the drop box would require at least two people and the completion of chain of custody logs.”

During the debate, Alderman Gary Mahkorn, an opponent of drop boxes, argued that they served a purpose during the COVID-19 pandemic but then “became a hugely political issue, and that’s what makes me want to, you know, puke in a way.” He worried that “the further we get away from people trusting our elections, the more our democracy is at stake.”

Instead of having drop boxes, the city will have extended voting hours, 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., most weekdays during in-person absentee voting for the two weeks prior to the election.

In Wausau, the box that Diny took to his office is back, bolted to the ground and being used for early voting.

At first, Diny resisted pressure from the city clerk and members of the City Council to return it. The clerk, Kaitlyn Bernarde, reported the matter to the Marathon County District Attorney’s Office and the state elections commission. And Diny arranged to have the clerk reclaim it.

The Wisconsin Department of Justice is investigating. There have been no charges. Diny told ProPublica he believes he did nothing wrong, saying: “None of this was done in a nefarious, secret way.”

At a City Council meeting on Tuesday night, Diny attempted to force a vote on allocating additional funds for drop-box security. But the council showed no interest.

During the public comment period, residents both praised and lambasted the mayor. One local resident rose to say, “Arguing about a box is dumb.”