MADISON, Wis. (NEWSnet/AP) — Liberal justices who control the Wisconsin Supreme Court showed signs Monday of being willing to overturn a ruling that has nearly eliminated the use of absentee ballot drop boxes in the state.

At issue is whether the court should overturn its July 2022 ruling that said nothing in Wisconsin law allowed for absentee drop boxes to be placed anywhere other than in election clerk offices.

Conservative justices controlled the court then, but the court flipped to 4-3 liberal control last year, setting the stage to possibly overturn the ruling.

Democrats argue the Wisconsin Supreme Court misinterpreted the law in its 2022 ruling and wrongly concluded that absentee ballots can only be returned to a clerk in their office and not to a drop box they control that is located elsewhere.

The current law is unworkable because it’s not explicitly clear where ballots can be returned, said David Fox, attorney for the groups that brought the challenge.

“What if we just got it wrong?” liberal Justice Jill Karofsky said of the earlier absentee ballot ruling during arguments. “What if we made a mistake? Are we now supposed to just perpetuate that mistake into the future?”

The court heard arguments three months before the Aug. 13 primary and six months ahead of the November presidential election. Given the numbers of voters who used drop boxes in 2020, a reversal could have implications on what is expected to be another razor-thin presidential race in Wisconsin.

President Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in Wisconsin by just under 21,000 votes in 2020, four years after Trump narrowly took the state by a similar margin.

Election officials from four counties, including the two largest and most heavily Democratic in the state, filed a brief in support of overturning the ruling. They argue absentee ballot drop boxes have been used for decades without incident as a secure way for voters to return their ballots.

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.

Drop boxes were used in 39 other states during the 2022 election, according to the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project.

The popularity of absentee voting jumped during the pandemic-affected election year of 2020, with more than 40% of all voters in Wisconsin casting mail ballots, a record high. More than 500 drop boxes were set up in more than 430 communities for the election that year, including more than a dozen each in Madison and Milwaukee, the state’s two most heavily Democratic cities.

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