DSCC Files Motion in Wisconsin to Protect Voters’ Access to Secure Drop Boxes

Today the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee filed a motion in the 1st Branch of the Waukesha County Circuit Court to intervene against a voter suppression lawsuit in Wisconsin that would restrict voters’ access to ballot drop boxes. 

This litigation is part of the Democatic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s “Defend The Vote” program, a new multi-million dollar commitment to fight back against GOP voter suppression efforts in the U.S. Senate campaigns across the country. 

“The DSCC will use every tool at our disposal to fight back against Republicans’ tactics to restrict voting and protect Wisconsinites’ right to participate in our democracy,” said Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chair Sen. Gary Peters. “Wisconsin is a critical Senate battleground, and we are committed to ensuring that voters who want to continue using drop boxes to securely and easily cast their ballot can do so.”

Key points from the motion: 

• “There is no evidence whatsoever that the use of drop boxes facilitated voter fraud; it is clear, however, that they helped ensure that countless lawful voters were able to participate in the election, without having to bear the burden of long lines (a perennial problem in Wisconsin, particularly in the state’s denser population centers) or worry that the U.S. Postal Service would not deliver their ballot in time to be counted (a reality that, but for judicial intervention would have invalidated approximately 80,000 lawful voters’ ballots in the 2020 primary). In the post-election, several lawsuits were filed challenging drop box voting. All failed.” 

• “Plaintiffs seek to bar the use of this important form of access to the ballot box despite the absence of any evidence that voters misused drop boxes in 2020 or that the availability of them resulted in any voting fraud. The Wisconsin Elections Commission (“WEC”) has repeatedly endorsed the use of appropriately regulated secure drop boxes in guidance to local election officials. Far from allowing “unsupervised” drop boxes or “invit[ing] fraud and abuse,” as Plaintiffs claim (Compl. ¶ 11), the WEC’s drop-box guidance follows “best practices [that are] based on advice from the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and include[ ] information about drop box security and chain of custody procedures for securely emptying the drop boxes on a regular basis.”

• “The leaders of the Wisconsin Legislature (speaking through counsel) have emphasized that they ‘wholeheartedly support voters’ use’ of appropriately regulated secure drop boxes, and that such drop boxes are an ‘expressly authorized absentee ballot return method.’”

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