The Supreme Court's corrupt intervention in Wisconsin's mail-in balloting overturned a lower federal court's ruling that ballots post-marked by Nov. 3 could be counted up to six days after the election. Now all ballots must be in election officials’ hands on Election Day. This is while Wisconsin is being ravaged by new coronavirus infections, which are the very reason Democrats and voting rights organizations were seeking the six-day grace period for ballots to be returned.
That's led Wisconsin officials to sound the following alarm to voters who've requested to vote absentee: Get your ballots in immediately. There are still about 327,000 outstanding absentee ballots in the state, while more than 80% of those requested already have been returned—about 1.45 million out of 1.79 million requested. Voters in Wisconsin have until Thursday at 5 PM to request one, a deadline the state is saying is too late for turnaround by mail. "We want citizens to choose the option for voting that works best for them, but time is running out," Meagan Wolfe, administrator for the Wisconsin Elections Commission, said. That means delivering your ballot by hand to a clerk's office, putting it in an official drop box, or surrendering it at a polling place and voting in person.
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Mailing a ballot in is just too risky—in Wisconsin or really in any state—even as the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) has been ordered by a federal judge to pull out all the stops to make election mail arrive on time. Particularly in the majority of states that won't count mail-in ballots received after Election Day, regardless of postmark date. What the judge has ordered is reassuring news for absentee ballots already being sent back via the mail, however.
Judge Emmet Sullivan of the Washington, D.C. District Court is ordering the Postal Service to tell its employees that late and extra delivery trips are allowed and to prioritize ballot delivery by state deadlines. "To be clear," his order reads, "late and extra trips should be performed to the same or greater degree than they were performed prior to July 2020 when doing so would increase on-time mail deliveries. Any prior communication that is inconsistent with this instruction should be disregarded." He has also ordered that both the USPS and administration lawyers appear before him every day until Nov. 3 to provide daily updates on mail delivery.
Again, that's great news for people who are waiting now for their absentee ballot, or have already mailed one in. It increases the likelihood that they'll be received on time. But after today, no one should be relying on the Postal Service to get their ballot to elections officials on time, particularly in the states with an Election Day deadline. It's not worth taking the chance.
Trump needs to be defeated resoundingly and clearly by Nov. 4. That's the best way of avoiding what could be a lengthy, potentially violent, and chaotic attempt by him to fight the results. He's refused multiple times to commit to a peaceful transfer of power and he means it. He'll have to be forced into it by having no path to fight it. That means as many ballots as humanly possible counted on Election Day and a decisive win for Joe Biden when we wake up on Nov. 4.