Wisconsin
Wisconsin Supreme Court considers expanding use of absentee ballot drop boxes
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — The Wisconsin Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments Monday in a case pushed by Democrats to overturn a ruling that all but eliminated the use of absentee ballot drop boxes in the swing state.
The court’s ruling will come within three months of the Aug. 13 primary and within six months of the November presidential election. A reversal could have implications on what is expected to be another razor-thin presidential race in Wisconsin.
President Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in Wisconsin by just under 21,000 votes in 2020, four years after Trump narrowly took the state by a similar margin.
Since his defeat, Trump had claimed without evidence that drop boxes led to voter fraud. Democrats, election officials and some Republicans argued the boxes are secure.
At issue is whether to overturn the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s July 2022 ruling that said nothing in state law allowed for absentee drop boxes to be placed anywhere other than in election clerk offices. Conservative justices controlled the court then, but the court flipped to liberal control last year, setting the stage to possibly overturn the ruling.
Changing the ruling now “threatens to politicize this Court and cast a pall over the election” and unleash a new wave of legal challenges, attorneys for the Republican National Committee and Wisconsin Republican Party argued in court filings.
There have been no changes in the facts or the law to warrant overturning the ruling and it’s too close to the election to make changes now anyway, they contend.
What to know about the 2024 Election
Democrats argue the court misinterpreted the law in its 2022 ruling by wrongly concluding that absentee ballots can only be returned to a clerk in their office and not to a drop box they control that is located elsewhere. Clerks should be allowed “to decide for themselves how and where to accept the return of absentee ballots,” attorneys argue in court filings.
Priorities USA, a liberal voter mobilization group, and the Wisconsin Alliance for Retired Voters asked the court to reconsider the 2022 ruling. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which administers elections, support overturning it.
Attorneys for the groups that brought the challenge say in court filings that drop boxes became controversial only “when those determined to cast doubt on election results that did not favor their preferred candidates and causes made them a political punching bag.”
Election officials from four counties, including the two largest and most heavily Democratic in the state, filed a brief in support of overturning the ruling. They argue absentee ballot drop boxes have been used for decades without incident as a secure way for voters to return their ballots.
More than 1,600 absentee ballots arrived at clerks’ offices after Election Day in 2022, when drop boxes were not in use, and therefore were not counted, Democratic attorneys noted in their arguments. But in 2020, when drop boxes were in use and nearly three times as many people voted absentee, only 689 ballots arrived after the election.
Drop boxes were used in 39 other states during the 2022 election, according to the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project.
The popularity of absentee voting exploded during the pandemic in 2020, with more than 40% of all voters in Wisconsin casting mail ballots, a record high. More than 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.
(WLUK) — Wisconsin State Patrol troopers are teaming up with truckers to better spot dangerous driving behaviors.
The annual Trooper in a Truck initiative kicks off next week in Wisconsin.
Troopers will ride along with with semitruck and bus drivers to use the higher vantage point to spot dangerous driving behaviors, especially near commercial motor vehicles.
Troopers will be looking for risky driving behaviors, including distracted driving, speeding, following too closely and seatbelt violations. When an officer identifies a violation from the truck or bus, they will radio to patrol cars in the area for appropriate enforcement action.
Drivers can expect to see Trooper in a Truck enforcement in the following areas:
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- Monday, July 13: Eau Claire
- Tuesday, July 14: Waukesha
- Wednesday, July 15: Madison
- Thursday, July 16: Green Bay
- Friday, July 17: Wausau
New Wisconsin athletic director Shawn Eichorst, who spent the last eight years at Texas, believes his new and old schools have much in common.
Both are well-regarded research universities in state capitals that belong to major conferences and have relatively similar enrollments.
He also pointed out one difference.
“There’s swag at Texas, right?” Eichorst said Tuesday during his introductory news conference. “There’s 30 million people in Texas. We’ve got swag, too, but we have a little humility with that deal. We need to get our shoulders up. We need to feel good about what it is that we’re doing.”
Wisconsin could gain more of that Texas swagger if its football program gets back to winning the way it did the last time Eichorst was employed in Madison. Eichorst, who most recently worked as a deputy athletic director at Texas, received a five-year deal worth $1.6 million annually, with provisions for increases and incentives. He was hired 2½ months after Chris McIntosh left to become the Big Ten’s deputy commissioner for strategy.
Eichorst worked at Wisconsin from 2006-11 when Barry Alvarez was AD and Bret Bielema was leading the football program. He followed that up with stints as an athletic director at Miami (2011-12) and Nebraska (2012-17) before Texas athletic director Chris Del Conte hired him in 2018.
He returns to Wisconsin with the Badgers coming off back-to-back losing seasons in football, a notable fall for a program that had 22 straight winning seasons from 2002-23. Wisconsin coach Luke Fickell has gone 17-21 after posting a 53-10 record with one College Football Playoff appearance in his last five years at Cincinnati.
Eichorst hasn’t worked with Fickell before but said he’s encouraged by their initial conversations.
“Obviously he’s won every place he’s been,” Eichorst said. “My expectation is more of me than him, meaning I need to pour into him, learn more about his program, how he has things set up, how his athletes are taken care of, how we’re supporting that endeavor. And then we can figure out, as we move along, what that might look like.”
Football struggles led to Eichorst’s downfall the last time he was an athletic director.
He fired Nebraska coach Bo Pelini in 2014 and hired Mike Riley, who had gone 93-80 in 14 seasons at Oregon State. Eichorst was dismissed shortly after Nebraska suffered an early-season loss to Northern Illinois in 2017. Riley was fired at the end of that season after going 19-19 in three years.
When Eichorst’s hiring was announced last week, he spoke about how much he had grown from that Nebraska stint. Wisconsin interim chancellor Eric Wilcots led the search and has emphasized Eichorst’s accomplishments at Texas, which has won the Learfield Directors’ Cup all-sports standings five times in the last six years.
Texas ranked anywhere from fifth to ninth in the Directors’ Cup standings in the five years before Wilcots’ arrival. Texas’ football team went a combined 23-27 from 2014-17 but has made two College Football Playoff appearances in the last three years.
“Everybody looks at the end result of what we did at Texas,” Eichorst said. “When we got there in 2018, we weren’t very good in a lot of areas. And that didn’t change overnight.”
Eichorst said one thing that has caught his attention about Wisconsin is the overall quality of its head coaches.
“You’re going to be as good as your coaches,” Eichorst said. “That’s it. If you have an elite group of coaches who are working together and uniting and galvanizing and learning from one another and taking it out to their individual programs, I think you can start to build something special. I go back to Texas. We built a room of really elite head coaches and put them at the top of everything we did to help guide us.”
Eichorst said this job is particularly important to him because of his Wisconsin roots. He was born in Lone Rock, about 45 miles northwest of the Madison campus.
He treasured his previous stint at Wisconsin and says he believes this school “represents everything that is great about higher education and college athletics.”
“Nobody will work harder for Wisconsin athletics,” Eichorst said. “I love this state, and I love everything that it represents. The passion is there. You can see it. I don’t have to make it up. I’ve lived it. It’s in my heart.”
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AP college sports: https://apnews.com/hub/college-sports
Wisconsin
South Milwaukee, Wisconsin, officials in standoff with homeowner over year-round skeleton display
The city of South Milwaukee, Wisconsin, has ordered a homeowner to take down his year-round giant skeleton display or face fines, but the homeowner is standing firm and refusing, even as the deadline to remove the display has passed.
Now there’s a skeleton standoff.
The city cited ordinance violations in their order for Sean Oster to dismantle the lawn decorations. The notice specifically references “large Halloween decorations being displayed not during the appropriate time of year.”
Oster was also ordered to make other improvements to his property.
But Oster has refused to take down the display, which is re-dressed as the year goes on and is currently sporting a Fourth of July theme. The Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm, has come to his aid, saying the city’s actions violate Oster’s First Amendment rights.
City administrators declined to comment, citing a pending investigation. Neighbors have been divided by the display; some say they’re fine with it, and think it brings fun and positivity to the neighborhood, but some others want to see it removed and say the lawn should be kept up better and more consistently.
Oster said he’s hoping to reach an agreement with the city, and said he’s corrected all other violations outside of the display.
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