4
REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE v.
DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE
GINSBURG, J., dissenting
ballot requests. ___ F. Supp. 3d, at ___–___, 2020 WL
1638374, *4–*5. The Court’s suggestion that the current
situation is not “substantially different” from “an ordinary
election” boggles the mind. Ante, at 3. Some 150,000 requests for absentee ballots have been processed since
Thursday, state records indicate. 2 The surge in absenteeballot requests has overwhelmed election officials, who face
a huge backlog in sending ballots. ___ F. Supp. 3d, at ___,
___, ___–___, ___–___, 2020 WL 1638374, *1, *5, *9–*10,
*17–*18. As of Sunday morning, 12,000 ballots reportedly
had not yet been mailed out. 3 It takes days for a mailed
ballot to reach its recipient—the postal service recommends
budgeting a week—even without accounting for pandemicinduced mail delays. Id., at ___, 2020 WL 1638374, *5. It
is therefore likely that ballots mailed in recent days will not
reach voters by tomorrow; for ballots not yet mailed, late
arrival is all but certain. 4 Under the District Court’s order,
an absentee voter who receives a ballot after tomorrow
could still have voted, as long as she delivered it to election
——————
2 See Wisconsin Elections Commission, Absentee Ballot Report, Apr. 2,
2020, https://elections.wi.gov/node/6806; Wisconsin Elections Commission, Absentee Ballot Report, Apr. 3, 2020, https://elections.wi.gov/node/6808; Wisconsin Elections Commission, Absentee Ballot Report, Apr. 4, 2020, https://elections.wi.gov/node/6814; Wisconsin
Elections Commission, Absentee Ballot Report, Apr. 5, 2020, https://elections.wi.gov/node/6815.
3 See Wisconsin Elections Commission, Absentee Ballot Report, Apr. 5,
2020, https://elections.wi.gov/index.php/node/6815.
4 See, e.g., Tr. 18–19 (Apr. 1, 2020) (testimony that mail delivery “can
take up to a week” or longer, threatening “the opportunity for the voter
to receive [the absentee] ballot by mail”); id., at 35 (testimony that the
“transaction time from the time the clerk puts [an absentee ballot] in the
mail to the voter receiving it could take up to a week”); id., at 40 (testimony agreeing that “there will be some people who request . . . [an] absentee ballot [on April 2] who will not be receiving it in time to put it in
the mail by April 7th”); Brief for City of Green Bay as Amicus Curiae in
No. 3:20–cv–00249 (WD Wis.), p. 5 (“[D]elays at the post office are . . .
affecting the speed with which voters receive their ballots . . . .”).