WISCONSIN - Days before the deadline of mailing ballots, the Supreme Court of the State of Wisconsin ordered on Thursday that they cannot mail out the absentee ballots until they decide whether to add the presidential ticket of the Green Party to the ballot.
1,850 municipal clerks need to mail out the absentee ballots on its September 17 deadline going to Wisconsin voters who asked for one as it is set in the state's law.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court had split the decision into 4-3 among partisan lines, three liberal justices dissented while the other four conservative justices agreed that mailing out the ballots should be paused.
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In Wisconsin, voting during this time of pandemic has already been the focus of legal fight as the Republicans insisted on keeping the April 7 schedule of the state won two of their legal battles in the spring, as the state Supreme Court blocked the bid of the Democratic Governor Tony Evers to delay voting until June but the United States Supreme Court reversed the lower court's ruling, giving voters six more days to bring back their ballots by mail.
The health department of the state of Wisconsin later that month shared that at least 19 of people in the state who stated that they will be voting in-person or worked the polls tested positive with COVID-19.
According to the chief election official for the state of Wisconsin who spoke to the reporters via media call when the court order came down, Meagan Wolfe, requested ballots in the state of Wisconsin were around 1 million and more than 300,000 of those requested ballots have already been prepared by the clerks in the local level to go out to voters.
Reporters also asked the chief election official if what would happen if the court justices order the addition of the other candidate to the ballots even after it was already printed.
According to NBC New York, the chief election official responded that it would be difficult and incredibly complicated for them as clerks who are coming from small jurisdictions all over the state most likely have sent a portion of the ballots to some of their voters but the exact number of sent ballots were not confirmed by Wolfe.
The high court of the said state mentioned that the Wisconsin Election Commission must inform the court before the day ends on Thursday despite absentee ballots have been mailed. The court requested for the names and addresses of everyone on the list who had received the absentee ballot on their mail, together with the date when the ballot was mailed. Aside from that, the court also ordered the commission to give out the names of the officials who requested the ballots to be printed along with the exact date and time when those requests were made.