Supreme Court ruling spurs Wisconsin to get early votes in

MADISON, WIS. » Democrats and Republicans in the battleground state of Wisconsin were pushing Tuesday to get 320,000 outstanding absentee ballots returned by the close of polls on Election Day, after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to extend the deadline to receive and count ballots as Democrats had wanted.

“This is an all-hands-ondeck final push,” said Ben Wikler, who chairs the Wisconsin Democratic Party, which has been advocating absentee voting more aggressively than Republicans.

But the message is the same for Republicans who decided to mail in their ballots amid a surge in coronavirus cases in Wisconsin.

“If you do it absentee, do it now, do it quickly,” said Andrew Hitt, chairman of the Wisconsin Republican Party.

Democrats argued in a federal lawsuit that more time should be allotted for ballots to arrive by mail and be counted because of the challenges posed by the coronavirus pandemic. Republicans countered that voters had plenty of options to vote on time and that the rules shouldn’t be changed so close to the election. The Supreme Court, in a 5-3 decision Monday along ideological lines, affirmed an appellate court ruling that had blocked the extended count.

It’s not clear if the ruling will benefit one side or the other in Wisconsin, which President Donald Trump won by fewer than 23,000 votes in 2016, said Barry Burden, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor and the director of the Elections Research Project.

Trump was campaigning in Wisconsin on Tuesday and his Democratic challenger Joe Biden was scheduled to visit the state on Friday.

“The fact that Democrats are using mail voting more than Republicans are suggests that the Biden campaign would be hurt more by ballots that come in late,” Burden said.

However, since the appellate ruling nearly three weeks ago, Democrats have been working under the assumption that the deadline for returning ballots would be 8 p.m. on Election Day and have helped shatter the state record for returning absentee ballots, Burden said.

As of Tuesday, more than 1.4 million ballots had been returned, including 352,000 that were cast early in person. That is 48% of the total Wisconsin votes cast in the 2016 presidential election. About 10 times more ballots have been returned bymail than in typical presidential elections.