Madison, Wisconsin
CNN
—
A central Wisconsin mayor who ran for office on a platform of opposing absentee ballot drop boxes said he saw nothing wrong Wednesday when he donned work gloves, donned a hard hat and used a dolly to wheel a drop box outside City Hall.
Wausau Mayor Doug Dinnie posed for a photo on Sunday to mark the removal of the city’s only ballot drop box, which had been installed outside City Hall around the same time that absentee ballots were sent out to voters last weekend.
“This is no different than a maintenance guy moving it there,” Dinnie said Wednesday. “I’m a member of staff. There’s nothing illicit going on here. I’m hopeful it will come out well.”
Dinnie ran as a conservative and was backed by the Republican Party in the nonpartisan mayoral race and is in his first year as Wausau’s mayor since being elected in April.
The move, which sparked protests in the city on Tuesday night and angered ballot box supporters, is the latest example of a fight in the battleground state of Wisconsin over whether local governments should be allowed to set up absentee ballot drop boxes.
Several Republican-governed municipalities, including six in Milwaukee County, two in Waukesha County and three in Dodge County, have chosen not to use the ballot drop box in November’s presidential election, while Democratic-majority cities such as Milwaukee and Madison have welcomed its use.
Drop boxes were widely used in 2020 as absentee voting increased dramatically due to the coronavirus pandemic. At least 500 drop boxes were installed in more than 430 communities in that year’s election, including more than a dozen each in Madison and Milwaukee. Drop boxes were also used in 39 other states in the 2022 election, according to the Stanford University/MIT Healthy Elections Project.
After former President Donald Trump lost the state in 2020, he and other Republicans claimed, without offering any evidence, that the ballot boxes facilitated fraud. Democrats, election officials and some Republican lawmakers maintained that the ballot boxes were secure.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court, then dominated by conservatives, banned drop boxes in 2022.
But in July, the now-liberal court overturned that ruling, ruling that drop boxes can be used, but left it up to individual communities to decide whether to install them.
In guidance sent in July to all of the more than 1,800 clerks who administer Wisconsin’s elections, the Wisconsin State Elections Commission said it is the responsibility of city clerks to decide where to place ballot drop boxes.
Wausau, a city of about 40,000 people, was one of the cities that did not use absentee ballot drop boxes in the state’s August primary. Wausau is in Marathon County, which Trump won by 18 points in both 2016 and 2020.
Dinnie said he had never discussed the drop boxes with City Clerk Kaitlyn Bernarde until the boxes were installed outside City Hall last weekend. Dinnie said he decided to act on Sunday when he realized the boxes were “not secure.”
Bernarde did not respond to email and voicemail messages seeking comment Wednesday.
Dinnie said he wanted the city council to have a say in what to do with the drop boxes. If the city council had voted in favor of installing them, Dinnie said, he wouldn’t have had the power to remove them.
Dinnie said he generally opposes drop boxes, but he hasn’t taken a position on whether they should be installed for ballots that are currently in voters’ hands and can be returned until Election Day.
“As it stands, I’m not involved,” Dinnie said. “I just want to see it done properly, with proper public input and consent.”
In Wisconsin, it is a felony to impede or obstruct “the free exercise of the right to vote at an election.” The Wisconsin Election Commission urged clerks to contact police if they see anyone tampering with ballot boxes or trying to disrupt their use.
The U.S. Election Assistance Commission has issued a series of recommendations to ensure the security of ballot drop boxes that are not located in buildings, including placing them under video surveillance, in secure and well-lit areas, and establishing clear storage paths for ballot retrieval. The Wausau drop box was under video surveillance but had not yet been bolted down.
Dinnie has maintained he did nothing wrong. City attorney Ann Jacobson did not respond to a message seeking comment Wednesday.
“If someone put it in a pickup truck and drove off, the police would be pursuing them for theft,” Dinnie said. The drop box is being kept in City Hall until the problem is resolved, he said.
Wausau resident Pamela Bannister spoke at Tuesday night’s city council meeting, asking Dinnie to apologize and return the drop box.
“This is the kind of action designed to stir things up,” Bannister said. “It does nothing to curb the rhetoric we’re all facing during this election cycle. It accomplishes nothing good and, in my view, amounts to voter suppression and intimidation.”
