Friday's ruling comes just four months before November's presidential decision in a state where close elections are the norm. In 2020, Democrat Joe Biden won Wisconsin by just over 20,000 votes, which was a statewide margin of victory of less than 1 percentage point.
In 2022, the Wisconsin Supreme Court concluded in another 4-3 ruling that unsupervised ballot drop boxes outside of clerk's offices are illegal, because they're not specifically authorized in Wisconsin law.
But since then, the balance of the state's highest court has shifted.
Liberals gained a majority last August when newly elected Justice Janet Protasiewicz took office to replace retiring conservative Justice Patience Roggensack.
Conservatives on the court opposed taking up the case, citing the legal principle that compels courts to honor precedent.
"Finding the decision politically inconvenient, and emboldened by a new makeup of the court, this new majority embraces the opportunity to overturn [the 2022 ruling]," Justice Rebecca Bradley wrote this spring in a dissent joined by Chief Justice Annette Ziegler. "The majority's decision to do so will upset the status quo of election administration mere months before a presidential election and lead to chaos and confusion for Wisconsin voters and election officials."
In their newly released decision, however, liberals on the court concluded the 2022 ruling was wrongly decided.
“Our decision today does not force or require that any municipal clerks use drop boxes,” Justice Ann Walsh Bradley wrote in Friday’s majority opinion. “It merely acknowledges what [Wisconsin state law] has always meant: that clerks may lawfully utilize secure drop boxes in an exercise of their statutorily-conferred discretion.”
Friday's decision makes it easier for Wisconsinites to vote, by reinstating a "convenient and reliable option," said attorney David Fox, who argued the case on behalf of Priorities USA.
"If you put the ballot in the mail, you don't know when it'll get delivered, and voters worry about whether it will get delivered in time and whether it will be counted," said Fox of the Elias Law Group. "But if you put it in a drop box by the deadline, you know that it's going straight to election officials and it will be counted."
Wisconsin's Republican Party blasted the decision on Friday.
“In a setback for both the separation of powers and public trust in our elections, the left-wing justices on the Supreme Court of Wisconsin have obeyed the demands of their out-of-state donors at the expense of Wisconsin," state GOP Chair Brian Schimming said in a statement. "This latest attempt by leftist justices to placate their far-left backers will not go unanswered by voters.”
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