Wisconsin’s Conservative Justices Temporarily Block Mailing of Ballots for Knife-Edge Presidential Contest

For President Donald Trump to have any chance of staying in power, he needs to repeat his 2016 shock victory in Wisconsin. So the president will surely be cheered by the state’s supreme court decision to tell election officials—just one week before the legal deadline to send out ballots to voters—that they have to hold off for the time being. According to CNN, the 4-3 decision saw all four conservative justices agreeing that the process of mailing out ballots must be paused, while the three liberal justices dissented. The conservative justices argued that the mail-out must wait until the court decides whether to add the Green Party’s presidential ticket to the ballot. Including Green candidate Howie Hawkins on the ballot could prove decisive in what appears to be an extremely close Wisconsin race between Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden. Trump has spent months baselessly attacking the concept of mail-in ballots. The decision came as Wisconsin reported a daily record of 1,547 new coronavirus cases, with a staggering state testing positivity rate of 17.5 percent.