Boxing Match

To hear Republicans tell it, voting drop boxes will destroy American democracy. Democrats swear they’ll save it.

Neither is true. There’s no evidence that drop boxes increase voter participation. We got along without them for 250 years or so and democracy survived all that time.

But, on the other hand, there’s no evidence that drop boxes contributed to voter fraud. That was yet another lie told by Donald Trump and his followers to try to obscure the fact that he lost the last election fair and square.

Our own view here at YSDA is that drop boxes are fine. If they make voting more convenient, well, why not. We actually think we should go back to the expectation that everyone will vote at a polling place in person on election day, but that’s just not going to happen.

As the November election nears drop boxes have become a hot topic yet again. The latest volley in the box wars is happening in Wausau where the conservative new mayor, Doug Diny, had nothing to do on a Sunday, so he decided to make himself a hero of the hard-right. Diny staged a photo of himself personally removing the city’s lone drop box and carting it off inside city hall where it couldn’t ruin democracy.

I don’t watch Fox News or frequent right-wing websites, but I can imagine Diny scored big with the hard-right paranoid crowd. Wausau sits in Marathon County which went for Trump by 18 points in 2020, so this was hardly an act of political courage. It was pandering to a ludicrous extent.

Diny probably broke election laws. The Wisconsin Supreme Court has ruled that the boxes are legal and the Elections Commission has said that it’s up to clerks to decide where they are located if they want to use them at all. The mayor has no role (or roll) to play in any of this. There are some requirements and guidelines, one of which is that the boxes must be secured to the ground or to a building. This particular box had not yet been secured, which was Diny’s feeble excuse for removing it. But the box was also locked and no votes were being cast there. Securing it as required had been planned for this week.

Something similar happened recently in Dodge County where the sheriff — again, an elected official with no role in administering elections — threatened clerks with outing on social media if they used the boxes. Three had intended to do so but backed down after his threat. That was even more egregious than what Diny did because elections officials have faced physical threats and the sheriff was apparently prepared to unleash those against clerks who were simply acting within the law. The truly lawless person in all of that was Sheriff Dale Schmidt.

This is all just insane. Drop boxes are legal in Wisconsin as long as they’re operated within some perfectly reasonable rules and guidelines. They will not encourage fraud nor will they tip an election one way or the other. We could get along just fine without them, but they’re also a convenience for some voters and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Yes, the Democrats make too much of the damn things, but the real bad actors here are hard-right extremists like Diny and Schmidt.