Nate Raymond
(Reuters) – A divided Wisconsin Supreme Court docket on Friday cleared the best way for voters to have the ability to return absentee ballots by drop packing containers, with the court docket’s new liberal majority overturning a call two years in the past that banned the observe.
The court docket voted 4-3 in favor of progressive advocacy teams Priorities USA and the Wisconsin Alliance of Retired Individuals in a lawsuit they filed in April 2023, three months after liberal Justice Janet Protasiewicz was elected.
The judicial election was the costliest in U.S. historical past, and the court docket’s 4-3 liberal majority gave Democrats the higher hand in authorized battles over abortion, voting rights and electoral maps after 15 years of conservative management.
Wisconsin is a key battleground within the 2024 presidential election. In 2016, Republican former President Donald Trump received the state by fewer than 25,000 votes out of two.8 million forged, and in 2020, Democratic President Joe Biden received it by lower than 21,000 votes out of three.2 million forged. Wisconsin.
Democrats have pushed for voters to make use of drop packing containers to vote through the COVID-19 pandemic and have persistently supported them. In distinction, Republicans sought to restrict the usage of absentee ballots after the 2020 election.
Underneath a earlier conservative majority, the Wisconsin Supreme Court docket dominated in 2022 that beneath state legislation, ballots ought to be returned to the clerk’s workplace or different designated location and to not “inanimate objects” comparable to unattended packing containers. .
However liberal Justice Ann Walsh Bradley on Friday known as the choice “unreasonable in precept” and stated state statutes governing absentee ballots have at all times allowed clerks to make use of safe drop packing containers for assortment at their discretion vote.
Bradley, who filed a dissent in 2022, stated the earlier ruling was based mostly on a elementary misunderstanding of Wisconsin legislation that requires “cautious regulation” of absentee voting and that the court docket due to this fact took a “skeptical” view of the method.
“This court docket shouldn’t ‘regulate’ absentee voting,” Bradley wrote. “Such ‘regulation’ is the duty of the legislative course of and Wisconsin’s 1,850 municipal workers by our decentralized election administration system.”
Legal professionals for the plaintiffs and the state’s Republican-led Legislature didn’t instantly reply to requests for remark.
Three different justices from the court docket’s liberal wing, together with Protasiewicz, joined in Friday’s resolution. All three conservative justices dissented, together with Justice Rebecca Bradley, who authored the 2022 ruling.
In a dissent, she accused the liberal majority of overturning the 2022 resolution out of politics moderately than legislation, saying they “imagine the usage of drop packing containers is sweet coverage they usually hope the coverage will assist them Favourite political social gathering.