Nick Ramos of Wisconsin Democracy Campaign speaks at a press conference in Madison Thursday about the Wausau mayor removing his city's ballot drop box | Photo by Ruth Conniff

The mayor of Wausau, Wisconsin, made a national media splash this week when he dressed up in a hard hat and carted away his community’s only absentee ballot drop box, outraging local voters, city officials and voting rights advocates statewide.

“Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would see a sitting mayor dressed up like Bob the Builder physically take a ballot drop box … and illegally place it in his office,” said Nick Ramos of Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. 

Ramos spoke at a press conference outside the Madison City County Building Thursday, standing beside a poster-sized photo of Wausau Mayor Doug Diny caught in the act.

“We cannot continue to allow bad actors to think this type of behavior is acceptable,” Ramos declared, calling for a thorough investigation of the mayor’s action.

Drop boxes were uncontroversial for many years in communities across Wisconsin. But after their use increased during the pandemic election of 2020, conspiracy theorists connected them to false claims of “massive voter fraud” and blamed their use for former President Donald Trump’s loss. A Republican-friendly majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court banned drop boxes in 2022. In July, the new liberal court majority reversed that decision. 

So now drop boxes are back and so are the election conspiracies swirling around them, along with grandstanding by Republican politicians like Diny, who turned his caper stealing the Wausau drop box into a photo op. 

Diny admitted Tuesday to the Wausau Pilot & Review, which broke the story, that he’d taken the drop box last Sunday and locked it in his office, and snapped a few photos to memorialize the act. The mayor had argued with the city clerk about setting up the drop box in the first place, the paper reported — something the clerk was specifically empowered to do by the state Supreme Court decision and subsequent guidance from the Wisconsin Elections Commission. 

Diny defended his unilateral move to override her authority and take the box, telling the paper, “I was hired to tighten things up at city hall. This action is consistent with my overall position and what I heard from residents when I was knocking on doors.”

But in a later radio interview, the Wausau paper reported, Diny backpedaled and claimed he was only trying to protect the drop box, which had not yet been bolted to the ground or unlocked for use, since he was afraid someone would “take it and throw it in the river.”

Diny may already be regretting his caper, which is now the subject of a criminal probe by the Marathon County district attorney. As City Council President Lisa Rasmussen told the Wausau Pilot & Review, “I have huge concerns about this behavior, as there is no place for elected officials to manage, alter or tamper with drop boxes, whether they agree with their use or not.” 

How worried should Wisconsinites be about efforts like Diny’s to undermine voting rights and the smooth operation of elections?

In a Thursday afternoon press call, former U.S. ambassador and national democracy expert Norm Eisen denounced the stunt by the Wausau mayor and “terrible, frivolous challenges” to the regular administration of elections, including the “complete, utter nonsense charge that noncitizens are voting.” 

The point of all these political attacks on voting is “to create the false impression that elections are unreliable” and to help set up a challenge by Trump if the 2024 election results don’t go his way.

The good news, Eisen said, is that it didn’t work last time and it won’t work this time, either. “They will not get away with it,” he declared. Other panelists on the press call agreed.

“We have secure, safe, well-managed, fair elections in Wisconsin,” said Jeff Mandell, general counsel of Law Forward, which brought a lawsuit against Wisconsin’s fake electors, forcing them to admit they tried to overturn the legitimate results of the last election and to agree not to serve as Trump electors this year.

Because of all that happened in 2020, Mandell said, Wisconsin is better prepared to prevent election interference this year. 

Both Eisen and Mandell celebrated accountability for key figures involved in trying to overturn election results in 2020, including Trump attorney Rudolph Giuliani, who was finally disbarred in Washington, D.C. on Thursday. 

Mandell ran down a list of reasons Wisconsinites should feel encouraged about the strength of democracy in our state, including the replacement of gerrymandered voting districts with new, fair maps, the reinstatement of drop boxes, and the defeat of voter purges and efforts to disqualify absentee voters for technicalities.

Sure, there is a lot of political grandstanding by MAGA Republicans, Mandell said, “but none of these things are doing real damage.”

Even the former top elections official in Milwaukee, Claire Woodall — who endured death threats when she was at the center of the MAGA storm while administering the 2020 election — sounded sanguine when I talked to her on the phone about the Wausau ballot box imbroglio.

“I think that the security of our elections and the integrity of our elections has always been in a good spot in Wisconsin,” Woodall said.

When Woodall suddenly left her job this year, apparently after being pushed out by Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson, she joined an exodus of election officials in Wisconsin that has created an unprecedented number of clerks administering the 2024 election who’ve never handled a presidential race before.

But that doesn’t worry Woodall (who said she can’t comment on her own departure).

For years, Wisconsin has been known “as a nationwide example of how to run elections in a nonpartisan manner and not let politics dictate practice,” she said. “And so I think while you have new clerks, there’s always been new clerks. It’s always been a high turnover job. So that fact doesn’t really bother me.”

What does bother Woodall is the political pressure on nonpartisan clerks from partisan elected officials like the mayor in Wausau. 

“It’s just unfortunate that they’re putting clerks in that position,” she said. “Clerks are not well paid by any means,” and yet “they’re working around the clock right now, and they will be until at least two weeks after the election.”

Woodall agrees with Eisen and Mandell that Wisconsin voters can be reassured about the election. 

“You have 1,800 clerks who are members of your community. Whether they’re newer at their jobs or they’ve been doing it for 20 years, they’re following procedures that haven’t changed, that were also the same in 2016 when President Trump did win.”

She also thinks the conspiracy theories are easy to puncture. The drop box issue, which has become so politicized, is  “the most simple issue for people to understand,” she said. “How on earth is a drop box that’s under video surveillance, bolted to the concrete and checked by two election officials, less secure than a United States Post Office blue box in a neighborhood, under no surveillance whatsoever, and picked up by one postal carrier?”

Other misinformation about elections is also easily dispelled if people look at the evidence. 

“You know, has anyone actually vandalized and taken ballots out of a drop box? Have we seen anyone actually voting in large numbers who shouldn’t be? … you start to realize that elections are, and have been and will continue to be really well run.”

So cheer up, Wisconsin. 

In Wausau, while citizens wait for the mayor to give back their drop box, the municipal clerk has instructed voters they can return their absentee ballots the same way they pay city fees — by dropping them in a secure mailbox at City Hall.