Here’s a clip from the complaint filed Monday against the Wisconsin Elections Commission by plaintiffs Richard Teigen and Richard Thom, represented by the “Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty”, described by Madison.com as a “A non-profit conservative law firm”:
“Under § 6.87(4)(b)1, there are only two methods allowed for casting an absentee ballot: (1) the U.S. Mail, and (2) handing the envelope containing the ballot in person to the municipal clerk. 5. This requirement with respect to how to cast an absentee ballot must be read in conjunction with Wis. Stat. § 12.13(3)(n) which provides that no person may ‘receive a ballot from or give a ballot to a person other than the election official in charge.’ Together these statutes require that the voter shall mail the envelope containing the ballot, or the voter shall deliver it ‘in person’ to the municipal clerk. There is no statutory basis to permit a third person to take possession of the ballot to mail it or to deliver it in person… Despite this requirement in the statutes, WEC Commissioners sent a memo to municipal clerks dated August 19, 2020, (the ‘August 2020 WEC Memo’) stating that absentee ballots do not need to be mailed by the voter or delivered by the voter, in person, to the municipal clerk but instead could be dropped into a drop box and that the ballot drop boxes could be unstaffed, temporary, or permanent. But a drop box is not the ‘municipal clerk.’ It is an unsupervised, inanimate object. Allowing ballots to be cast by placing them into an unsupervised, inanimate object invites the fraud and abuse that the Legislature was attempting to prevent by requiring strict compliance with the requirement that absentee ballots could only be cast by the two methods allowed under § 6.87(4)(b)1: (1) the U.S. Mail, and (2) handing the envelope containing the ballot in person to the municipal clerk.”
You really have to appreciate how blatantly these assholes are trying to have it both ways here. They say “Allowing ballots to be cast by placing them into an unsupervised, inanimate object invites the fraud and abuse that the Legislature was attempting to prevent” while also saying using the USPS is perfectly fine, as if an outdoor blue public mailbox could not be described as having the exact same attributes of a different “unsupervised, inanimate object”. If you can’t “give a ballot to a person other than the election official in charge” then why is it okay to give it to a USPS employee?
Now I may be underestimating these assholes, that my ignorance of appellate law and how MAGA lawyers play the long game – intentionally making this sound stupid to expose the inconsistencies and get the state’s mail-in ballot system blown up eventually, I guess. I just don’t quite get how a judge doesn’t immediately look at this complaint and say “get the fuck out of my courtroom”.