The Sconi

Five Democratically-run cities have agreed to no longer use unsecure drop boxes for the depositing of mail ballots in the face of lawsuits brought by the Wisconsin Voter Alliance (WVA) and a recent state Supreme Court ruling declaring the boxes violated state election laws.

The cities are Green Bay, Madison, Kenosha, Racine and Milwaukee.

President of the WVA Ron Heuer, who refers to the cities as the “WI 5” over the acceptance of private money to fund the 2020 elections, recently announced that Milwaukee was the last to join the other cities in declaring it would no longer use drop boxes.

“The City of Milwaukee along with Green Bay, Kenosha, Racine and Madison have all agreed to changing their local policies and to comply with the Supreme Court decision that made drop boxes illegal in Wisconsin,” Heuer told The Sconi. “This is a big win for Wisconsin as we know these five cities, have in the past, been reluctant to accept the ruling and have continuously been trying to find a way to facilitate their ballot harvesting.”

Special Counsel for the Thomas More Society Erick Kaardal, who represented WVA and Wisconsin voters in lawsuits against the cities over their use of the drop boxes, called the developments a “victory for voters.”

“Wisconsin’s elections have been riddled with illegal practices as a result of financial inducement by a partisan player infusing the state’s electoral process with dark money,” Kaardal said in an Aug. 31 statement. “We are pleased that the Wisconsin Supreme Court has vindicated our lawsuits by affirming the use of these unmanned absentee ballot drop boxes as illegal. However, there is still much work to be done the root out the infection that has corrupted the Wisconsin vote.”

The WVA lawsuits alleged that the use of the private funds, money donated by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg through a nonprofit, was illegally used to buy the drop boxes leading up to the 2020 general election.

In late July, the state Supreme Court ruled that most drop boxes violated state law that requires mail ballots to be delivered to election officials through the mail or personally dropped at the City Clerk’s office.

The WVA has also been working with the state’s counties to declare they will no longer allow the use of drop boxes. So far, Walworth, Ozaukee, Kenosha and Winnebago counties have signed on.