Ballot drop boxes have been popular in Wisconsin for decades. And like every other state, there was a tremendous surge in their popularity in 2020 during the COVID pandemic. Then Trump came along with his Big Lie and tried to cast dispersion and doubt on drop boxes, saying they allowed tremendous amounts of fraud. In response, frauditors came out of the woodwork, looking for panda crap on the ballots and who knows what else. But they all came up empty, including the fraudit done by the misnamed right wing nut group Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL), a wholly owned subsidiary of the Bradley Foundation.

Despite finding nothing wrong, WILL still sued the state over drop boxes, arguing that they were illegal because there was no law explicitly allowing them, while ignoring that there was also no law forbidding them. WILL even went so far as to try to argue that there were no disabled voters in the state, so there was no need for drop boxes.

In 2022, the then conservative heavy state Supreme Court agreed with the nonsense and ruled that drop boxes were the scourge of the land and thus illegal.

As is happening so many times in the past year, after the state supreme court changed balance with the election of Justice Janet Protasiewicz, people petitioned the court to revisit this ruling and to restore justice. On Monday, the court heard the case. The court came prepared, the Republicans' attorney did not.

Justice Rebecca Dallet took it to them, pointing out that the Republicans were all for drop boxes right up to Election Day in 2020:

On Monday, the court's liberal justices questioned the court's 2022 decision to ban the boxes, with some arguments focusing on the state Legislature's past statements of support for their use.

"This was not something you were obviously concerned about at all in 2020 when you said that these boxes were expressly authorized and lawful," Justice Rebecca Dallet said Monday to an attorney representing Republican legislative leaders, who are in court defending the 2022 ruling outlawing drop boxes against the challenge brought by liberal group Priorities USA and the Wisconsin Alliance for Retired Voters.

"At that point in 2020 no one had raised any legal objections to drop boxes," Misha Tseytlin, an attorney representing the Legislature, said in response.

The Democrat's attorneys also did their homework. When the Republicans argued that there was no harm done by banning the drop boxes, the Democrats were ready:

More than 1,600 absentee ballots arrived at clerks’ offices after Election Day in 2022, when drop boxes were not in use, and therefore were not counted, Democratic attorneys noted in their arguments. But in 2020, when drop boxes were in use and nearly three times as many people voted absentee, only 689 ballots arrived after the election.

With the closeness of elections in Wisconsin, those extra votes could make a difference in the outcome.

Along the same line of thought, the Republicans' argument is fallacious since it's perfectly legal for a person to put the absentee ballot in a mailbox, which is by no means as secure as a drop box. The only reason that we're even having to have this discussion is because an orange shitgibbon couldn't accept losing and the Republicans don't have the spine or the testes to stand up to him.

On top of that, they just can't stand the idea of democracy because they know - say it with me! - when people vote, they lose.