Vote-By-Van Was Too Extreme Even for Wisconsin’s Left-Wing Supreme Court

The critical ruling bans Democrats from ballot harvesting on wheels, a win for election integrity advocates across the state

The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled June 11 in a unanimous decision to uphold a lower court’s ruling that bans the use of mobile voting sites. The ruling marks a rare win for those concerned about election integrity since the state’s supreme court flipped to a 4–3 liberal majority last April. The ruling came just ahead of Wednesday’s deadline for municipalities to designate alternate locations for voters to cast early, absentee ballots.

In the 2022 municipal elections, the city of Racine used a van as a traveling early voting precinct much like an ice cream truck. Racine purchased the van using funds it received in 2020 from the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), the nonprofit funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife as part of the infamous “Zuck bucks” scandal.

CTCL granted Wisconsin jurisdictions $10 million out of the $350 million Zuckerberg spent nationwide on the 2020 election. Ninety percent of Wisconsin’s share flowed to 20 cities that voted for Joe Biden.

Restoration News has reported that Wisconsin was “ground zero for rolling out Zuck bucks nationwide.” As early as June 2020, the state’s five largest cities submitted a joint proposal asking CTCL for funds to “facilitate voter participation” among “historically disenfranchised residents”—such as buying a get-out-the-vote van for likely-Democrat neighborhoods.

The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL), on behalf of the Racine County Republican Party, filed a complaint with the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) over Racine’s use of the van in the 2022 primary.

Wisconsin law prohibits locating early voting sites in places that give an advantage to any political party. WILL argued the van only went to Democrat areas, illegally boosting partisan turnout. The WEC dismissed the complaint four days before the November election, which WILL then challenged in court.

On Jan. 8, 2024, Racine County Circuit Court Judge Eugene Gasiorkiewicz ruled in favor of WILL and outlawed the use of the van to harvest mail-in ballots.

“The statute in question clearly and unequivocally indicates that chosen alternate absentee balloting sites cannot afford an advantage to any political party,” Judge Gasiorkiewicz stated in his ruling. “The filings in this case clearly indicated that the alternate sites chosen clearly favored members of the Democratic Party or those with known Democratic Party leanings.”

Racine officials, the Democratic National Committee and the far-left campaigning organization Black Leaders Organizing for Communities (BLOC) challenged Gasiorkiewicz’s ruling to the state supreme court—likely expecting an easy win from the court’s liberal majority.

BLOC is a get-out-the-vote project of Tides Advocacy—the advocacy arm of the left-wing, San Francisco-based Tides Foundation—which acts as BLOC’s fiscal sponsor, handling all its fundraising and administrative duties. Radical community organizer Angela Lang founded BLOC in response to former President Donald Trump’s surprise victory in the Badger State in 2016, specifically to boost turnout among the types of neighborhoods the Racine voter van visited in 2022.

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A Good Start to a Longer Campaign

Although the victory on mobile voting sites brings surprisingly good news for election integrity advocates, the 2024 election battle in the Wisconsin Supreme Court is far from over. As Restoration News has reported, the court is currently hearing a case to bring back illegal ballot drop boxes—the stationary kind—which are highly susceptible to voter fraud.

In the 2020 election, the state relied heavily on drop boxes funded by CTCL’s “Zuckbucks” to handle the early voting during Covid-19. Election officials set up over 500 drop boxes in more than 430 communities. More than a dozen each were placed in Madison and Milwaukee, the state’s two most Democratic cities.

In July 2022, the then-conservative majority court ruled ballot drop boxes unconstitutional. It stated that nothing in state law permits unmonitored drop boxes to be placed outside of election clerks’ offices. It also ruled that only the voter can return their ballot, banning the use of third-party ballot deliveries that makes fraudulent vote harvesting easier.

After liberal partisan Janet Protasiewicz won a seat on the court last year, the left-wing Priorities USA challenged the ruling, hoping the new one-seat liberal majority will reverse course.

Early signs in the case, Priorities U.S.A. v. WEC, do not look promising for those who believe in election integrity and following the rule of law. The original decision went 4–3, and Protasiewicz is unlikely to side with conservatives on the issue.

During oral arguments last month, liberal Justice Jill Karofsky wondered: “What if we just got it wrong?  Are we now supposed to just perpetuate that mistake into the future?”

Overturning its own precedent without any changes to the law or observed negative consequences from the previous ruling, however, would show that the court flops with partisan elections like the other branches of government. This would make it nothing more than a “super legislature,” noted conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley, who wrote the majority opinion in 2022.

For Democrats who take a win-at-all-costs approach, this doesn’t present a problem. If they can’t legislate constitutionally through elected representatives they are happy to see favorable laws invented from the bench.

The state’s partisan court already gave an indication of how it may rule on drop boxes in an egregious election ruling in January.  The court threw out legislative maps that Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and the Republican legislature carefully crafted through compromise in favor of gerrymandered maps that favor Democrats.

Protasiewicz campaigned on the issue last year, calling the maps that the executive and legislature worked out “unfair” and “rigged.” A partisan group founded by two Democratic lawyers and funded by left-wing dark money groups filed the lawsuit the day after her election.

Americans found out too late to save the 2020 elections from Zuckerberg’s meddling. Thankfully, Wisconsin voters this April banned the use of private funds in elections through a constitutional amendment. But as the Racine van and hundreds of locked drop boxes in the state attest, much of the infrastructure Zuckbucks built remains in place—awaiting judicial approval.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court’s ruling banning mobile voting sites is a surprising victory for election integrity and the rule of law. Although it likely does not predict the court’s pending ruling on drop boxes, it offers a reminder that all is not lost because of one bad election if people are willing to maintain the fight.

Jacob Grandstaff is a freelance writer in Tennessee. He graduated from the National Journalism Center in Washington, D.C.

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