Are Drop Boxes Returning To Wisconsin In Time For 2024?

Drop boxes were one of the worst features of the 2020 election, thanks to tens of millions of dollars from Mark Zuckerberg. Armed with a left-wing majority—thanks to Janet Protasiewicz—they may make a comeback for the 2024 election.

Buckle up for America’s second-ever all-mail election in 2024.

Restoration News has revealed how the Left is codifying every election policy Democrats hastily adopted during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, making things like vote-by-mail a permanent feature of American elections from now ‘til Doomsday. The next stage of that effort is unfolding in Wisconsin, where “progressives” seized control of the state supreme court in April and are using their new power to bring back drop boxes en masse.

Election Season

Close observers will recall that privately funded ballot drop boxes played a key role in Wisconsin’s 2020 election, when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg dumped $10 million into the state’s election offices through an intermediary, the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), juicing Democrat turnout in key cities like Madison and Milwaukee to narrowly flip the state for Joe Biden.

Nearly 85 percent of that sum, or $8.5 million, flowed to the state’s five biggest cities. Why?

Months before Election Day 2020, left-wing activists realized their path to unseating President Donald Trump lay in generating an unprecedented number of mail-in ballots. If COVID-19 made transitioning to a virtually all-mail election possible, Zuckerberg’s drop boxes made collecting those mail-in ballots feasible—without relying on the ever-unreliable U.S. Postal Service.

In fact, the Badger State was the first to be targeted by CTCL’s “Zuck bucks” as far back as June 2020. That was when Wisconsin’s largest cities (now called the Zuckerberg Five) announced their “Safe Voting Plan,” which requested millions of dollars from a then-unknown private donor—come September, CTCL—to “facilitate voter participation” among “historically disenfranchised residents and communities,” code for likely Democratic voters per the Southern Poverty Law CenterFairVoteBrennan Center, and Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

That’s after Democratic election officials retooled state rules to dramatically expand absentee ballots and change mail-in ballot deadlines, while groups like the Center for American Progress urged them to go further and dump voter ID laws and cancel in-person voting altogether.

Key to the Safe Voting Plan was money for dozens of drop boxes sprinkled throughout the Zuckerberg Five. In August 2020, the six-person Wisconsin Election Commission (WEC) green-lit the use of drop boxes for the November election. It wasn’t until July 2022 that the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that ballot drop boxes are unconstitutional under state law and the WEC had issued inappropriate guidance, with support from Sen. Ron Johnson (R–WI).

Democrats predictably accused the court of disenfranchising “young people and people of color” and threatening the “state’s democracy.” Yet Gov. Evers handily won reelection in 2022 and Republican Van Orden flipped the state’s 3rd Congressional District even as voter registration rates soared about 2018 levels and nearly 600,000 Wisconsiners voted via absentee ballot—no drop boxes needed.

Mass mail-in balloting is one of the hallmarks of a corrupt, unfair, or rigged election in developing countries. That was made worse in 2020 by shunting millions of absentee ballots into privately funding, unaccountable drop boxes, often with lax security and located outside of secure polling places—as when arsonists set fire to drop boxes in Los Angeles and Boston in 2020.

Drop boxes also harm states’ ability to ensure chain-of-custody for absentee ballots, making it impossible to trace a particular ballot’s lifespan from the time it’s mailed out to when it’s received and counted.

As of writing, 11 states have banned drop boxes, 5 states have restricted their use, and another 5 don’t use them in elections. Not surprisingly, they’re more prevalent in blue Northeastern states and large, rural Western states, where absentee balloting has been more prevalent.

Georgia wisely limited their use in 2021, pointing out that the COVID-19 “emergency rules” which prompted their adoption have since “expired,” while Florida added new regulations to beef up drop box security. That’s a good start, but our ultimate objective must be to restore as much in-person voting as possible and ultimately eliminate ballot drop boxes altogether.

As for Zuck bucks, many “progressives” think billionaires are a threat to democracy. Does privatizing election funding with billionaire bucks threaten democracy, too? Gov. Tony Evers (D) must not think so, since he vetoed not one, but two bills after the 2020 election which would’ve prohibited election officials from accepting private funding without the WEC’s permission. To date, at least a dozen Wisconsin counties have issued their own Zuck bucks bans and a dozen more are considering their own bans.

Here We Go Again

And there the matter lay, until Janet Protasiewicz’s April 2023 election to the Wisconsin Supreme Court created new avenues for Democrats to stack the deck in their favor just in time for the 2024 presidential election.

In July, the Democratic super PAC Priorities USA filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn the court’s prohibition on ballot drop boxes, waive the witness requirement for absentee ballots (the most basic safety measure in place), and extend the deadline to “cure” ballot errors from Election Day to the Friday after Election Day.

Those provisions are only “reasonable” if you’re staking everything on mass mail-in balloting to save the day, election integrity be damned.

Priorities USA is one of the Democratic Party’s top super PACs, meaning it’s allowed to spend an unlimited sum on ads attacking Democrats and savaging Republicans. (Interestingly, the super PAC as a vehicle was effectively created by Democrat super-lawyer Marc Elias, who joined the board of Priorities USA in 2017.) In 2020, the group brags that it was the largest outside pro-Biden spender, raising and spending $250 million to defeat President Trump thanks to big checks from Michael Bloomberg, Donald Sussman, and the Arabella Advisors-run Sixteen Thirty Fund.

In the 2022 midterms, it spent $28 million to elect Sens. John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, Mark Kelly in Arizona, and Raphael Warnock in Georgia, while battling Republicans in other swing states.

In short, it’s a safe bet that Priorities USA sees vote-by-mail as the safest path to Democrat victory in 2024—and drop boxes as the surest way to hoover those ballots up.

In response, the Republican National Committee and Wisconsin Republican Party filed a motion to intervene in the case in August, followed by the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty on September 11 (full document here). Their aim is clear: Preserve the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s rulings and safeguard elections. God willing, they’ll succeed.

Hayden Ludwig is Managing Editor of Restoration News and Research Director for Restoration of America

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