If you’re somehow operating under the illusion that the 2024 presidential election will yield a free and fair result, please dissuade yourself of that notion immediately. 

Here’s the story, from Todd Richmond at AP News:

Wisconsin Supreme Court changes course, will allow expanded use of ballot drop boxes this fall

The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled Friday that officials can place ballot drop boxes around their communities in this fall’s elections, overturning its own ruling two years ago limiting their use in the presidential swing state.

Sure, Remington Research currently has President Trump leading by +6 in the state, The Hill/Emerson puts his lead at a +3, and Bloomberg News-Morning Consult has him up by +1, but none of that really matters now that ballot boxes will see “expanded use” in local communities.

For a breakdown of the current polling, aggregated by RealClearPolling, see below:

Image: Screenshot from RealClearPolling website on July 5, 2024.

But “expanded use” doesn’t really mean in the rural red areas, only the blue problem centers like Milwaukee and Madison:

The popularity of absentee voting exploded during the pandemic in 2020, with more than 40% of all voters casting mail ballots, a record high. At least 500 drop boxes were set up in more than 430 communities for the election that year, including more than a dozen each in Madison and Milwaukee — the state’s two most heavily Democratic cities.

Per Richmond, the state’s supreme court restricted the use of ballot boxes a couple of years ago, requiring that they could only be placed “in local election clerks’ offices” and dropping off a ballot had to be done by the voter himself. Obviously, the latter part of the ruling was meant to safeguard against ballot harvesting practices. But then… Wisconsin voters elected Janet Protasiewicz to the state’s high court (or did they?), handing control to leftist activists in black robes, and in February, “a progressive voter mobilization group” asked the court to revisit the ballot box issue. Lo and behold, the progressives on the court gave the progressive petitioners exactly what they wanted.

And who’s really behind the drop boxes? Well, here’s this, from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel today:

In September 2020, Milwaukee installed 15 unstaffed absentee ballot drop boxes with a $70,000 grant from the Center for Tech and Civic Life, an organization financed by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.

Ahhh, that’s right, the Zuckerbucks scandal; so we’re back to that.

Wisconsin is no longer in play.

Image: Sarah Stierch, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr, unaltered.