‘We are fed up’: Ballot drop boxes are dividing neighbors in Wisconsin
CNN
In one conservative Wisconsin county, the sheriff appeared onstage at a Donald Trump campaign rally last week to brag about his efforts to ban ballot drop boxes.
In one conservative Wisconsin county, the sheriff appeared onstage at a Donald Trump campaign rally last week to brag about his efforts to ban ballot drop boxes. “I have something very important I think you’re going to want to hear,” Sheriff Dale Schmidt told Trump. “In Dodge County, in this 2024 election, there are zero drop boxes for the election.” That wasn’t accurate – but the crowd cheered, and Trump offered the sheriff a double thumbs-up. Around the crucial battleground state of Wisconsin, ballot drop boxes are a political flashpoint, with a tool that made absentee voting easier and safer during the pandemic-era 2020 election now highly contested. In the state’s two biggest and most liberal cities, drop boxes are plentiful, with voters able to drop off their ballots at more than a dozen locations in each city, from fire departments to libraries. In some other cities and towns, however, local leaders have rejected them. The controversy comes as the legal landscape on the issue has shifted dramatically from election to election: Drop boxes were legal in Wisconsin in 2020, then mostly banned in 2022, and now are legal once again after liberals took control of the state Supreme Court.
Democrats have outspent Republicans on television advertisements in the races that will be crucial to deciding control of the US House of Representatives, with California and New York seeing the highest spending by the two parties, according to a CNN analysis of advertising data from the first full month following the end of primary season.