Wisconsin voters can once again return ballots by drop box, state high court rules

Voters in Wisconsin once again have the option to return absentee ballots via drop box, the Wisconsin Supreme Court has ruled.

The 4-3 decision released Friday reverses a near-total ban on ballot drop boxes, which was handed down by the state's high court in 2022.

Friday's ruling comes just four months before November's presidential decision in a state where close elections are the norm. In 2020, Democrat Joe Biden won Wisconsin by just over 20,000 votes, which was a statewide margin of victory of less than 1 percentage point.

In 2022, the Wisconsin Supreme Court concluded in another 4-3 ruling that unsupervised ballot drop boxes outside of clerk's offices are illegal, because they're not specifically authorized in Wisconsin law.