Molly Beck
MADISON - Nearly 50,000 mail-in ballots are en route to Wisconsin voters and three have already been returned as President Donald Trump seeks permission from the U.S. Supreme Court to upend the rules for absentee voting ahead of November's midterm election.
Trump on Sunday made a last-ditch appeal to the nation's highest court to allow his administration to implement new restrictions on mail-in voting − rules that would require absentee voters to be deemed eligible to receive ballots using a master list governed by the U.S. Postal Service and a barcode system.
As of Monday, 49,606 absentee ballots were mailed to voters or are ready to be mailed, according to the Wisconsin Elections Commission. That number doesn't distinguish between the number of labels that have been printed and ballots that have actually been mailed, according to the commission.
Don Millis, Republican chairman of the bipartisan state elections commission, said if the Supreme Court sides with Trump, voters who have not yet returned their ballots may decide to hand-deliver the ballots to clerks instead of trying to mail it back under the new rules because there's a chance the Postal Service may not deliver the ballot.
"If you're a clerk and you've received the ballot in mail, it's going to be counted," Millis said. "If you're a voter and you've not mailed your ballot in, you have to make a decision about what you're going to do."
Trump's appeal to the conservative-controlled U.S. Supreme Court came after a U.S. District Court Judge in Massachusetts on Friday extended an order blocking the Postal Service from implementing the new rules. The injunction was part of a lawsuit filed by a number of states, including Wisconsin.
John Sauer, U.S. solicitor general, said in the Sunday filing the extended injunction "risks sowing confusion and chaos."
"Once those ballot envelopes enter the mailstream, there is no retrieving them," Sauer wrote in the filing to the Supreme Court.
Millis said the administration's plan is going to "hurt Republicans more than it's going to hurt Democrats" because Democratic voters tend to live in cities, which have more options to return ballots.
"There's a saying that many people will say, just follow the science, right? ... and people who say that will often claim that those on the other side are letting their ideology get in the way. Well, that's what's happening with this rule."
"Someone's letting their ideology get in the way because in this attempt to go after probably a handful of non-citizens voting, you're going to end up screwing Republicans big time," he said. "And it's going to be Georgia in 2020 all over again, where the national party ended up giving two Democratic seats in the Senate to Georgia."
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