Food inspectors face increased workloads and loss of union protection, making it more difficult to notice and report safety violations at food processing plants.
The post Food safety experts warn cuts, staff shortages could lead to preventable outbreaks appeared first on WPR.
The parents of two Minnesota teens killed in a drunken driving crash in July have filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the woman at the heart of a dispute between the Dane County Sheriff's Office and federal immigration authorities.
The post Woman at center of immigration dispute sued by parents of teens killed in crash appeared first on WPR.
For seven years, 82-year-old retiree Terry Lauerman has been donating his time to Safe Haven Pet Sanctuary. His specialty? Lying down and taking a snooze with the shelter’s special-needs cats.
The post Wisconsin’s viral ‘Cat Napper’ is living every cat lover’s dream appeared first on WPR.
This year’s team will get its first major test on Sunday when the Packers take on the division rival Detroit Lions at Lambeau Field.
The post After blockbuster trade, the Green Bay Packers face ‘great challenge’ to start the season appeared first on WPR.
Milwaukee officials are pledging to crack down on those involved in "street takeovers" characterized by reckless driving after a wave of the events over Labor Day weekend.
The post Milwaukee officials call for end to ‘outrageous’ street takeovers appeared first on WPR.
A Milwaukee County Board committee is urging the organization in charge of high school sports in Wisconsin to address hate speech and harassment that happens during games.
The post Milwaukee County wants WIAA to address hate speech in high school sports appeared first on WPR.
Two experts in navigating the financial aid system for college students highlight how federal changes this year are affecting loans.
The post Student loan changes make paying for college both easier and more complex appeared first on WPR.
Psychologist Shilagh Mirgain joined "The Larry Meiller Show" to offer strategies for improving self-confidence, which she emphasized is a skill that can be strengthened.
The post Not just born with it: Self-confidence is a skill that can be strengthened, psychologist says appeared first on WPR.
Union workers in Rhode Island protest a Trump administration stop-work order at an offshore wind farm under construction in August. Friday's jobs report shows the fewest gains in August since 2010. (Photo by Laura Paton/Rhode Island Current)
The United States added only 22,000 jobs in August, and previously reported gains in June were revised down to a loss of 13,000 jobs in a Bureau of Labor Statistics report issued Friday morning.
The August jobs increase was the lowest for that month since 2010 in the aftermath of the Great Recession. June’s decrease was the first jobs loss since a December 2020 COVID-19 surge shuttered restaurants and hotels.
A recent Stateline analysis showed that Virginia and New Jersey may be among the states most affected by recent hiring slowdowns, based on surveys and layoff reports, while California and Texas appeared to continue job gains.
Job openings fell to a 10-month low in July, according to a separate government report issued Sept. 3, and there were more unemployed people than jobs available for the first time since 2021.
Last month’s revisions to the jobs report enraged President Donald Trump when they first appeared Aug. 1. The revisions showed the nation had 258,000 fewer jobs than initially reported in May and June.
In response, Trump declared the numbers were wrong, fired the Bureau of Labor Statistics chief, Erika McEntarfer. He offered as a replacement E.J. Antoni, a loyalist who has proposed suspending the jobs report entirely. Trump falsely said in a Truth Social post at the time that the revised jobs numbers were “RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”
Friday’s report showed August job losses in business and professional services (-17,000), government (-16,000), manufacturing (-12,000), wholesale trade (-11,700) and construction (-7,000), but gains in health care and social assistance (+46,800) and hospitality (+28,000).
The unemployment rate in August ticked up to 4.3%, from 4.2% in July and 4.1% in June. It increased the most for people with less than a high school diploma, up from 5.5% in July to 5.7% in August.
Unemployment ticked up for Black workers (to 7.5% from 7.2%) and Hispanic workers (to 5.3% from 5.0% in July). The rate went down for Asian workers (to 3.6% from 3.9%) and remained the same for white workers at 3.7%.
Editor’s note: This story was updated to add details about changes in industry job numbers and the unemployment rate.
Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.
This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Wisconsin Examiner, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
A 3-year-old girl gets an MMR vaccine at a clinic in Texas in March. Texas was among the states with the most public funding grants canceled by the Trump administration earlier this year. (Photo by Jan Sonnenmair/Getty Images)
After the Trump administration slashed billions in state and local public health funding from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention earlier this year, the eventual impact on states split sharply along political lines.
Democratic-led states that sued to block the cuts kept much of their funding, while Republican-led states lost the bulk of theirs, according to a new analysis from health research organization KFF.
The uneven fallout underscores how politics continues shaping health care in the United States. The nearly 700 CDC grants were worth about $11 billion and had been allocated by Congress during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, state and local health departments had spent or planned to spend the money not just on COVID-related efforts, but also on prevention of other infectious diseases, support for mental health and substance use, shoring up aging public health infrastructure, and other needs.
The CDC grant terminations initially affected red and blue states about evenly, according to KFF. California, the District of Columbia, Illinois and Massachusetts — all led by Democrats — had among the largest numbers of terminated grants.
But then nearly two dozen blue states and the District of Columbia sued the Trump administration in April, asking the court to block the grant terminations. They argued the federal government lacked the authority to rescind funding it had already allocated.
“The Trump administration’s illegal and irresponsible decision to claw back life-saving health funding is an attack on the well-being of millions of Americans,” said New York Attorney General Letitia James in an April statement announcing the lawsuit.
“Slashing this funding now will reverse our progress on the opioid crisis, throw our mental health systems into chaos, and leave hospitals struggling to care for patients.”
A federal judge sided with the blue states and blocked the cancellations — but she limited her injunction to the jurisdictions that filed in the lawsuit.
Nearly 80% of the grant cuts have now been restored in blue states, according to the KFF analysis, compared with less than 5% in red states.
Now four of the five states with the most canceled grants are led by Republicans: Georgia, Ohio, Oklahoma and Texas. California, which is dominated by Democrats, kept all of its grants that had been initially terminated.
In the West and Midwest, Democratic-led Colorado — which joined the lawsuit — had 10 of its 11 grant terminations reversed. Its Republican-led neighbors that did not sue, including Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Utah and Wyoming, lost all of their grants, according to the KFF analysis.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the photo caption. Stateline reporter Anna Claire Vollers can be reached at avollers@stateline.org
This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Wisconsin Examiner, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
A man waits for health care at a temporary health clinic in Terre Haute, Ind. President Donald Trump’s new tax and spending law will likely force more than half the states to reduce payments to doctors and hospitals that treat Medicaid patients, a change critics warn could reduce health care options for people in rural areas. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
President Donald Trump’s new tax and spending law will likely force more than half the states to reduce payments to doctors and hospitals that treat Medicaid patients, a change critics warn will be particularly harmful to rural hospitals struggling to stay afloat.
Medicaid, the joint state-federal health insurance program for low-income people, reimburses doctors, hospitals and nursing facilities for treating enrollees. But in many cases, the program doesn’t fully cover the cost of care, straining providers that serve a large share of Medicaid patients.
To help providers cover losses and continue to serve poorer populations, the federal government allows the 41 states, plus the District of Columbia, that have contracted with Medicaid managed care organizations (MCOs) to run their Medicaid programs to direct them to pay providers more — in some cases, as much as commercial plans.
Ultimately, taxpayers cover the costs of these so-called state directed payments — and those costs are growing. As of August 2024, the higher payments were projected to add $110.2 billion per year to Medicaid spending, nearly 60% more than the previous year’s projection.
That higher spending attracted the attention of conservatives on Capitol Hill.
Beginning in 2028, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will cap the payments, forcing state Medicaid programs to reduce reimbursement rates by 10 percentage points each year until they reach either 100% or 110% of what Medicare pays. States that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act would be capped at the lower rate.
The new law will reduce Medicaid spending by $149 billion over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office, and reduce Medicaid provider payments in as many as 31 states, according to KFF, a health policy research group. A separate analysis by The Commonwealth Fund, another research group, found that Medicaid payments to hospitals would drop by at least 20% in 19 of the 25 states that had publicly available data.
Critics say the change could be disastrous for hospitals, many of them in rural areas, that see a large share of Medicaid patients.
“This is all on top of an already pretty strained financial situation for rural hospitals,” Alexa McKinley Abel, director of government affairs and policy at the National Rural Health Association, a group representing rural health care providers, said in an interview. “We are worried about seeing service line closures at hospitals in an environment where OB-GYN and chemotherapy service lines are already being cut.”
Supporters of the change say the extra payments inflate federal spending on the Medicaid program, giving hospitals “windfall profits.”
“Not only do these programs sidestep the truly needy on Medicaid and favor special interests instead, but all this is financed by growing the federal debt, leading to inflation and higher interest rates for all Americans,” the Paragon Health Institute, a conservative think tank that helped draft the bill, stated in a policy brief.
Hospital leaders dispute that. Earlier this year, the American Hospital Association asserted that without the extra payments, Medicaid managed care organizations in 2023 only covered about two-thirds of the actual cost of care.
Cindy Samuelson, senior vice president of the Kansas Hospital Association, said the additional payments are especially critical in a rural state such as Kansas, where some researchers have found that 87% of rural hospitals are in the red. Kansas is one of 10 states that did not expand Medicaid, and like other nonexpansion states, it will have to begin reducing direct payments to 110% of what Medicare pays starting in 2028.
“Over time, commercial payers are paying less and less,” Samuelson said. “Many hospitals in our state are at risk of closure.”
Samuelson said that in rural areas, health care providers see fewer patients, which makes it hard to spread out the cost of care and make up for losses that come from serving underinsured, Medicaid and Medicare patients. One result is that rural hospitals are trimming services. A report published this year by Chartis, a health care consulting firm, found that between 2011 and 2023, nearly 300 rural hospitals across the country stopped offering obstetrics care, and 424 rural hospitals ceased chemotherapy services.
In Hutchinson, Kansas, Benjamin Anderson, CEO of the rural and community-owned Hutchinson Regional Health System, said his hospital barely broke even this year, and lower Medicaid payments will take a toll. The 190-bed hospital serves more than 65,000 people in the central Kansas region, and sees a lot of patients who are struggling with mental health issues and substance use disorders.
When we think about the cuts to Medicaid, it isn't simply about cutting services to the poor. It's threatening services to everyone.
– Benjamin Anderson, CEO of Hutchinson Regional Health System
“We are closely managing our workforce expenses. We’re going to be relying more heavily on philanthropy,” Anderson said, adding that the hospital wouldn’t lay off staff but would reduce the number of workers by not filling open positions.
He said his hospital has some cash reserves that should enable it to keep going, but that many other rural hospitals lack such a cushion.
“When we think about the cuts to Medicaid, it isn’t simply about cutting services to the poor. It’s threatening services to everyone, because in a rural community, we all get care in the same place,” he said. “If we cut out the safety net that’s sustaining these hospitals, everyone’s health care is threatened.”
Three hours northeast of Hutchinson is the rural town of Holton, where about 3,400 people live. Holton Community Hospital is a 14-bed critical access hospital, meaning that it provides emergency care around the clock for a rural community. For the past two years, it has been struggling, according to Carrie Lutz, the hospital’s CEO.
Lutz said the hospital is not part of a broader health care group, and it relies on philanthropy and local taxes. Due to financial strains, it’s in the process of selling off its home and hospice services to another health care facility. The cap on extra payments will be an additional barrier, she said.
Samuelson said Kansas is applying for money under the five-year, $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Program, which Congress added to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act amid concerns about its impact on rural hospitals. She expects Kansas to get at least $500 million between 2026 and 2030.
Rural hospitals in Mississippi also hope to tap into those funds. The Mississippi Hospital Association, which is advising state leaders on their application, said it expects Mississippi to get at least $500 million over the next five years.
Like Kansas, Mississippi did not expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care, a decision that deprived it of additional Medicaid patients and thus extra revenue.
“A few years ago, we had several rural hospitals that were facing some imminent closure challenges, and so our enhanced supplemental payment based on the average commercial rate has been a lifeline,” said Richard Roberson, president and CEO of the Mississippi Hospital Association.
“What we’re concerned about is that when those payments start to decrease, then we’re going to be right back to where we were in 2022, with concerns about rural hospitals again.”
Roberson said Medicaid, with the additional payments, had become “one of the best payers, if not the best payer, for our hospitals over the last two years,” and helped a lot of hospitals stay out of the red.
He said the new rural health care fund is promising, but noted that Mississippi will decide where to spend any money it gets, and some rural hospitals might miss out.
“We want to make sure we’re working with the state to provide sustainable solutions, not one-time fixes,” Roberson said. “The big wild card is the Rural Health Transformation fund and what the state chooses to do with that money.”
Stateline reporter Shalina Chatlani can be reached at schatlani@stateline.org.
This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Wisconsin Examiner, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
LeVar Wilson, a Milwaukee glazer, describes how a project labor agreement that included requirements for local hiring made it possible for him to learn his trade and build a career. A bill to repeal a state ban on project labor agreements is part of a "Build a Stronger Wisconsin" package that Democratic lawmakers proposed Thursday. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)
Democrats in the state Legislature began circulating draft legislation Thursday that they said would strengthen the state’s economy by supporting workers and undoing policies that undercut union-represented employees.
The package includes four bills: restoring Wisconsin’s prevailing wage law, repealing a ban on project labor agreements, repealing the state’s “right to work” law, and strengthening laws against wrongly classifying employees as independent contractors.
“We know that these are popular policies that the people of Wisconsin need to be able to thrive in our state,” said Assembly Minority Leader Greta Neubauer (D-Racine) at a press conference in the Assembly chamber Thursday morning. “We have all 60 members of the Assembly Democrats and the Senate Democrats signed onto these bills.”
A crowd of union members and supporters occupied the Assembly, packed in rows where the body’s leaders usually sit as well as bunched throughout the seats that lawmakers typically use during floor sessions.
One draft bill would undo Wisconsin’s “right-to-work” law enacted during former Gov. Scott Walker’s second term. The law bars employers and unions from requiring in their labor contracts that all union-represented employees pay union dues or fees to cover the union’s operational expenses.
Sen. Mark Spreitzer (D-Beloit) said the law “allows private sector workers to benefit from union protections without paying their share of union dues.” Spreitzer recalled he was in his first Assembly term when the measure was enacted in 2015 and spoke twice against it during an all-night floor session.
“Under federal law, unions are required to represent all employees in a workplace, but right-to-work laws like Wisconsin’s allow non-dues paying employees to receive the benefits of belonging to a union — such as bargain contracts for higher wages and union representation in employment disputes —without having to pay union dues,” Spreitzer said.
“That is not fair. It is well past time to return to the requirement that every union represented worker pays their dues for that privilege in Wisconsin,” he added.
Nurse Colin Gillis, a member of SEIU Wisconsin, called the law’s name “a misnomer.” Union members deride such laws as “right-to-work for less” because they tend to weaken wage gains, he said.
Right-to-work laws were first enacted in the segregated South after World War II. “Right-to-work laws were designed to divide and conquer and prevent us from joining together and increase living standards for working families from all races and backgrounds,” Gillis said. “Repealing ‘right to work for less’ will give me and my union siblings back the freedom to organize.”
A second bill would repeal another Walker-era law, enacted in 2017, that bars state and local governments from requiring contractors on public works projects to sign a project labor agreement with relevant unions. It also forbids government bids that require the bidder to have a union contract.
“Repealing the ban on project labor agreements, or PLAs, gives power to local and state governments to utilize a tool that would streamline the building process for public construction projects,” said Rep. Joan Fitzgerald (D-Fort Atkinson).
LeVar Wilson, a journeyman glazer represented by the Painters Union in Milwaukee, said he got his start as an apprentice 25 years ago when the Milwaukee baseball stadium, then known as Miller Park, was being built. The stadium project labor agreement guaranteed a percentage of jobs would go to Milwaukee County residents.
“I was one of those workers hired under this provision,” Wilson said. “It led me to a sustainable career that’s allowed me to raise a family of four without the struggle of poverty that I went through when I was a child.”
A third bill would increase enforcement and penalties for businesses that misclassify workers as independent contractors.
State Rep. Christine Sinicki (D-Milwaukee) said that when employers misclassify workers, they dodge state and federal payroll taxes, evade minimum wage laws and overtime payment requirements, and don’t pay into the worker’s compensation and unemployment insurance programs.
“By avoiding these costs, dishonest employers often successfully undercut their competitors with very low bids,” Sinicki said. “In this way, misclassification harms the law-abiding employers and their employees and also the taxpayers who have to pick up the slack.”
The draft bill would increase the penalties for lawbreakers and expand outreach both to contractors and the public about misclassification.
The legislation would “level the playing field for business owners like us, who play by the rules,” said Larry Statz, a second-generation union painting contractor with 30 employees who said that he’s seen more contractors misclassify employees in recent years.
“We refuse to break the law or shortchange our workers. But it’s getting harder to compete with dishonest companies who cut corners,” Statz said. “State laws on misclassification do not have enough teeth in them, and these cheating companies too often avoid being caught.”
The fourth bill would reinstate Wisconsin’s prevailing wage law, which set a standard for what workers on state and local government projects are paid. The prevailing wage law was repealed in the state budget Walker signed in 2017.
State Sen. Bob Wirch (D-Somers) said Republican lawmakers who voted to repeal the law “promised it would save the taxpayers money. Well, the opposite has happened.”
A study published in 2020 by the Midwest Economic Policy Institute found that in the years that followed the repeal, construction workers’ wages fell by about $2,600 a year and highway construction costs increased.
At the time the report was published, a co-author, economist Kevin Duncan, said that the findings “underscore the longstanding academic consensus” that doing away with prevailing wage requirements leads to a lower-skilled, lower-wage workforce and doesn’t save money.
“Instead, it creates new inefficiencies in the form of workforce turnover, quality, cost overruns and safety problems,” Duncan said in a news release announcing the report.
Senate Minority Leader Dianne Hesselbein (D-Middleton) said she has sought to persuade GOP Senate Majority Leader Devin Le Mahieu (R-Oostburg) to pursue bipartisan lawmaking.
“I do not know if the Senate Republicans have caucused on any of these measures, but I’d encourage them to do so,” Hesselbein said.
Neubauer said the Assembly Democrats would continue advocating for the measures, but also tacitly acknowledged that they might not advance until after the 2026 election — when Democratic leaders are hoping to flip one or both chambers.
“We will continue pushing for them as long as it takes,” Neubauer said of the bills. “And if that’s next session, so be it.”
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On Sunday, May 4, 2025, Messiah Lutheran Church celebrated the completion of a 64-kilowatt solar array on its rooftop with a heartfelt dedication and ribbon-cutting ceremony, signifying a bold investment in creation care and the future of its ministry.
The ribbon-cutting and dedication service reflected the joy and hope behind the project. Lead Pastor Jeff Vanden Heuvel and Associate Pastor Dan O’Brien led the congregation in prayer and blessing, dedicating the panels to God’s work of renewal and stewardship. Members of the Building Team, including John Nerad and Business Manager Tim Coulthart, were recognized for their leadership, along with the Parish Council, which supported the vision from start to finish.
For more than 60 years, the church has been a place of welcome, service, and love for its Madison community. Guided by the mission “to be the heart and hands of Jesus to our neighborhood, city, and the world,” Messiah has long lived out its values through food and supply drives, youth and senior programs, and partnerships that strengthen local schools and organizations.
“We’ve come to realize one huge aspect of our faith is advocacy,” Pastor Dan said. “Advocating for social justice is vital, but none of that will matter if our world becomes too toxic to live on. Taking real steps to improve the health of this planet is so important, and this solar project is one way we are responding to our responsibility as stewards of the earth.”
The new rooftop solar array, installed by Eagle Point Solar, consists of 121 panels and is anchored with concrete blocks to protect the roof. The system will generate approximately 85,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity each year and offset 98 percent of the church’s annual energy use.
In addition to powering the church itself, the panels also power compassion, learning, and justice for neighbors near and far. The roughly $9,000 annual utility bill savings will flow back into Messiah’s many community partners, including Goodman Community Center, Porchlight, Second Harvest Food Bank, and many others. These organizations provide year-round support to local children and families in need.
The church approached the decision to invest in solar with both practicality and financial benefits in mind. Solar will reduce operating costs, protect against rising energy prices, and free up resources for mission-driven programs while serving as a public testament to the congregation’s values. Messiah utilized its capital funds project reserve and a Focus on Energy incentive to develop its solar project. The Couillard Solar Foundation, through the Solar for Good program administered by RENEW Wisconsin, helped offset costs further by donating half the solar panels for the project.
“As we move into the future, we at Messiah feel that a part of our calling is to be good stewards of the earth,” Pastor Dan said. “Being the heart and hands of Jesus, in our vision, is to both respond to the direct needs of our communities and to work toward dismantling systems that have caused harm to people and the world. This solar project is one way we hope to do this in a positive way.”
Messiah’s commitment to sustainability is deeply intertwined with its broader work. From supporting students at Kennedy Elementary School with backpack drives and bus funding, to hosting a robust Senior Adult Ministry, to providing rental assistance and aid through the Gundlach Family Fund, the church consistently meets community needs with creativity and compassion. Messiah also actively engages in racial and social justice work through partnerships with Nehemiah and MOSES, book groups that challenge bias, and its public stance as a Reconciling in Christ congregation welcoming LGBTQIA+ individuals.
As the sun now powers Messiah Lutheran Church, its light shines beyond the walls of the sanctuary, fueling ministries that nurture children, comfort the elderly, advocate for justice, and uplift neighbors in need. The solar project is a legacy that will serve generations to come, proving that faith, action, and sustainability can work hand in hand to bring healing to the world.
The post Messiah Lutheran Church Celebrates a Bright Future with Solar Energy appeared first on RENEW Wisconsin.
Wisconsin Watch partners with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. Read our methodology to learn how we check claims.
Interstate truckers in the U.S. are required to read and speak English under guidance by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (MCSAP).
The federal register states that interstate drivers must read and speak enough English that they can “sufficiently converse with the general public” and respond to official inquiries. English-speaking regulations for drivers first came into effect in 1937 under the Interstate Commerce Commission. In 2016 the Obama administration relaxed enforcement, but in April the Trump administration rescinded that directive.
Enforcement of the rules vary from state to state. The U.S. Department of Transportation claimed in a press release that California, Washington and New Mexico have failed to enforce English requirements for commercial drivers.
On Aug. 26, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced the federal government would withhold all MCSAP funding for these states unless they “adopt and enforce” English requirements within 30 days.
This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.
Are US interstate truckers required to read and speak English? is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.
The federal government’s demands that states turn over their voter rolls and related information highlights long-standing conflicts over how to ensure that only eligible voters are registered without endangering voting rights.
The U.S. Justice Department has sent letters to several states — and plans to send many more — asking them for copies of their voter lists and for detailed information about how they maintain them. The department has said it’s seeking to enforce requirements in federal law that President Donald Trump has ordered it to prioritize.
It has already sued North Carolina, alleging that the state has not been properly verifying voter identity, and sued Orange County, California, for refusing to provide full records for 17 people who have been removed from the rolls in connection with a probe of potential noncitizen voting. And it has threatened to sue or withhold federal funding from other states if they do not comply with their requests for information.
Everyone agrees that a “clean” voter list — cleared of people who have died or moved out of the jurisdiction, or who otherwise aren’t eligible to vote — is good practice. But they differ on how aggressively election officials should move to remove potentially ineligible voters, what exactly federal law requires election officials to do, and how to balance election security with the risk of wrongly removing and disenfranchising eligible voters.
Rhetoric and false claims can make the debate harder to follow. Here’s a guide to understanding the issues and arguments.
There are two key federal laws that govern the maintenance of voter rolls.
The National Voter Registration Act requires election officials to make a “reasonable effort” to remove voters who become ineligible to vote because they move or die, a process known as list maintenance. The Help America Vote Act, enacted about a decade later, requires states to use a computerized statewide list of every registered voter and assign them a unique identification number. It also requires them to remove duplicated names.
Beyond that, it’s up to state and local governments to set their own policies for how and when to perform list maintenance, and it’s up to federal courts to decide what is “reasonable.” That term isn’t defined in the law, and it’s often where voting rights groups and advocates for stricter list maintenance disagree.
In a recent case in Michigan, for example, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that the state’s actions to remove the names of thousands of dead voters from the rolls were sufficient, even though the plaintiff, the Public Interest Legal Foundation, claimed to have identified thousands more on the rolls.
Logan Churchwell, research director at the foundation, said in an interview that the court’s decision amounted to giving Michigan an “E for effort.” He said his organization believes there should be a higher standard that would reduce the risk of fraud and administrative error.
For her part, Lata Nott, director of voting rights policy for Campaign Legal Center, said the National Voter Registration Act’s requirement for a “reasonable effort” at maintaining lists is designed to set a floor, but it doesn’t prevent states from creating extreme policies that lead to eligible voters being mistakenly removed.
The main disagreement is over how aggressive list maintenance should be. A recent congressional hearing highlighted the differences between Democrats and Republicans on this question.
House Republicans claimed dirty voter rolls enable fraud and said ensuring that only eligible voters are on the list increases election security and voter confidence. They dismissed the idea that their efforts are meant to purge certain types of eligible voters from the rolls, such as people of color.
“This is not and should never be a partisan issue,” said Rep. Laurel Lee, a Florida Republican and former secretary of state. “Maintaining accurate voter rolls is fundamental to election security and public trust.”
House Democrats made it clear that they, too, don’t want ineligible voters, such as dead people or noncitizens, on the list. But they questioned why Republicans would want to take any actions that could potentially disenfranchise eligible people, citing recent incidents of state list maintenance actions that led to eligible voters being removed.
“What we do want is every eligible voter gets the chance to vote and their constitutional rights are not infringed upon,” said Rep. Julie Johnson, a Texas Democrat. “And that seems to be a huge distinction.”
It is difficult partly because of the decentralized nature of voting.
The U.S. doesn’t have a national database of eligible voters or citizens. Under federal law, states maintain their own lists. They assign voters the ID number that’s required under the Help America Vote Act, but that number doesn’t have to be connected to any existing federal identification, such as a Social Security number.
To remove voters who were eligible, but aren’t anymore, election officials must have ways to find out when a voter dies, moves to another state, is convicted of a felony, or otherwise becomes ineligible to cast a ballot.
Many election officials get data on address changes from their state’s motor vehicle department and the U.S. Postal Service and get death reports from state and federal agencies. Some states allow or mandate the use of other sources, such as obituaries and responses to jury duty summonses.
But there are potential gaps and time lags in these systems. When people move, for example, they don’t often tell the election office for their old address to remove them from the rolls.
It’s fairly easy for officials to track in-state moves because people carry the same state-assigned voter ID number when they go to register in a new location in the state. But it’s harder for officials to find out when someone moves out of state. That requires coordination between states, or more detailed searches through government records.
Many states are members of the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, a consortium that collects state voter roll data and alerts its members to potentially duplicate registrations across state lines. But two of the largest states, California and New York, are not members. And several Republican states have withdrawn from ERIC in recent years, citing concerns about the program, including about how the organization shares some of its data with researchers.
Statistics like this are often used to back up claims of voter fraud or poor state practices. But there’s a legitimate explanation for this that’s tied to federal and state laws.
In some instances, state laws allow election officials to remove voters from the rolls quickly, such as when they die, or if they respond to a jury duty summons by saying they are not a U.S. citizen.
But when a state finds out a voter may have moved, federal law requires election officials to send a confirmation mailing before removing that person from the rolls. If the voter doesn’t respond, they remain on the roll of registered voters, but are moved to the “inactive” list, and their names must stay there for two federal election cycles before they are removed, unless the state hears from them.
That four-year wait, and a large number of voters on the inactive list, can make the voter roll appear bloated at any given time.
But another reason for the disparity is that population estimates themselves are imprecise, said Chris Fowler, a professor of geography and demography at Penn State University who studies voter rolls and census data.
The U.S. Census Bureau’s American Communities Survey is currently our best measure of population changes from year to year, Fowler said. But the uncertainty in the national population count is about 10 million residents, he said — roughly equal to the population of Michigan.
Some use the disparities between the numbers to cast doubt on the accuracy of elections and raise alarm about voter fraud, such as Elon Musk with his misleading claim that Michigan had “more registered voters than eligible citizens.” His numbers included inactive voters as if they were eligible voters. But before those voters could cast a ballot, they would have to correct their voting record to prove eligibility, most commonly by showing documentation proving they still live in the jurisdiction.
Some of the most cited data available on this comes from more than a decade ago and has helped inspire efforts at improvement since then. But those efforts have run into challenges.
In 2012, a research study by the Pew Center on the States found that more than 2.75 million people were registered to vote in more than one state, and there were more than 1.8 million dead people whose names were still on the voter rolls. These and other findings “underscore the need for states to improve accuracy, cost-effectiveness, and efficiency,” Pew said.
There have been multiple attempts to create systems allowing states to share data to help with voter list maintenance. That’s a difficult task because any such effort must comply with state and federal laws governing data use and privacy. Officials must also cross-check data from various sources, using enough different data points to ensure that the matches are accurate and that a person with the same name as another isn’t mistakenly removed as a duplicate.
One prior program, the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, was ultimately shut down under a court settlement because it did not do enough to protect sensitive voter data. It was also found to be highly inaccurate, often incorrectly identifying registrations as duplicates because of poor matching techniques.
After Pew’s study, the nonprofit provided funding to help launch ERIC, to try to screen out duplicate voter registrations across state lines. Since then, ERIC has helped states identify hundreds of thousands of voters each year who have moved across state lines, and tens of thousands of voters who died. But in part because some Republican states have left the program, only half of states now participate, leaving a lot of gaps.
Some states use more data sources and perform checks more frequently than others. In the latest federal survey of election officials, for example, about 30% of states said they do not use National Change of Address reports from the U.S. Postal Service or data from motor vehicle agencies to identify potentially ineligible voters.
Generally speaking, removing voters who have moved prevents them from wrongly voting in their old voting jurisdiction, and removing a voter who has died prevents another person from fraudulently casting a ballot in their name.
That said, prosecutions for double voting and voting for others are rare, and Votebeat could not find any studies showing that states that do a better job of cleaning voter rolls have less voter fraud.
The Heritage Foundation’s database of voter fraud across all states since 1982 includes 174 convictions for duplicate voting, 99 cases of noncitizen voting, and two cases of someone voting under a dead person’s name.
But Churchwell, of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, said the number of prosecutions does not properly measure how much fraud occurs. Rather, he said, it indicates the state’s propensity to prosecute. “I doubt you’ll find research showing where a state is simultaneously terrible at list maintenance yet zealous with prosecutions,” he said.
Yes, but states that have looked have not found them in large numbers.
Audits in multiple states have found small numbers of noncitizens on the rolls, few of whom had actually cast ballots, and there are no known instances of noncitizens voting in large enough numbers to influence the outcome of an election.
The threat of noncitizen voting has become a prominent talking point for Republicans, driving their efforts to pass proof-of-citizenship requirements for voters. But even in Republican-led states, officials who have recently tried to find noncitizens on the rolls have reported only small numbers.
In an audit last year, for example, the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office found 20 noncitizens out of 8.2 million registered voters. Nine of them had voted in prior elections, the office found. In Ohio, only one of the 641 cases of noncitizen voting that Secretary of State Frank LaRose referred for prosecution resulted in a voter fraud charge.
In Texas, which has more than 18.6 million registered voters, the Secretary of State’s Office identified 581 noncitizens from 2021 to August of 2024. The state referred 33 potential noncitizens who voted in the 2024 election to the attorney general for investigation. The state also is investigating potential cases from the 2020 and 2022 election cycles.
In Michigan, where activists are working to get a proof-of-citizenship requirement enacted, a review this year by Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s office found 15 noncitizens who voted in the November 2024 election.
In Arizona, which requires proof of citizenship to vote in state and local elections, Jesse Richman, a political science professor at Old Dominion University, identified at least 2,331 registered voters who he believes are highly likely to be noncitizens. He studied the state’s voter rolls as an expert defense witness for a case challenging the state’s proof of citizenship laws. Richman said those people could have become naturalized citizens since last updating their license, but the ID they used when registering to vote or updating their registration was a noncitizen ID.
On Aug. 28, the U.S. Justice Department announced the indictment of a Canadian citizen charged with registering to vote and voting in federal elections in North Carolina in 2022 and 2024.
Yes, there are voters who have died but whose names are still on the rolls.
But claims about the number of such voters often turn out to be inaccurate.
In 2012, for example, South Carolina’s State Election Commission reviewed 207 cases that the South Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles had referred to as potential cases of ballots being cast in the names of dead voters. Of those, the commission was able to conclude that 197 did not involve dead voters — instead, they were either clerical errors or identified through bad matches. There wasn’t enough information on the remaining 10 cases to make any determination.
States that are members of ERIC receive reports about voters who may have died while out of state, and the service has identified about 644,000 voters who died over the last 13 years and whose names needed to be removed from the list. But some state laws may limit how states use that information.
Pennsylvania, for example, is an ERIC member, but state law allows officials to remove the names of dead voters only if they learn of it through the state’s health agency or an obituary. Election officials in the state, including Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt, have advocated for that to change.
Yes. In Texas, some of the people removed from the rolls last year were eligible citizens who did not respond to a mailed notice seeking more information about their status, an investigation by Votebeat, The Texas Tribune and ProPublica found.
And that’s the concern that voting rights advocates have about states that take aggressive steps to clean their lists, especially close to an election. Two of the most recent cases were in Alabama and Virginia, just before the November 2024 election.
Alabama inactivated the registrations of 2,074 eligible voters whom it had flagged as noncitizens based on whether they had been issued federal immigration ID numbers. And Virginia also removed eligible voters from its rolls as it attempted to purge noncitizens based on information from its motor vehicle department, CNN and NPR found.
This is why federal law has safeguards on when states can remove potentially ineligible voters, such as the rule that election officials cannot conduct systematic voter removals within 90 days of an election, Nott with Campaign Legal Center said.
“The more aggressive your list maintenance laws are,” she said, “the more likely you are probably going to be purging people who are eligible to vote.”
Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen at jfifield@votebeat.org.
Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.
Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for Votebeat‘s newsletters here.
A guide to understanding the debate over keeping voter rolls ‘clean’ is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
This story is from Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powers stalling climate action. Sign up for Floodlight’s newsletter here.
In south-central Wisconsin, near-record warmth in January and two record-breaking summer heat waves have cross-country skiers nervous they won’t be getting much snow this winter — again.
And it’s not just skiers in Wisconsin who are worried. New research shows heat waves are prompting a growing number of Americans to make the connection between hotter weather and climate change.
Ski seasons in the United States have shrunk by an average of 5.5 to 7.1 days between 2000 and 2019 compared to the 1960s and ’70s, according to a 2024 study by researchers from Canada and Austria. And in the coming 25 years, ski seasons could be even shorter — by between two weeks and three months — depending on how much the world reduces its greenhouse gas emissions, the researchers said.
Tamara Bryant, executive director of a cross-country ski club in Madison, Wisconsin, has seen this dynamic firsthand — both in her professional and personal lives.
“I remember the winters where my son could build snow forts in the front yard, year after year, and we’re just not getting the same (amount of snow),” she said. “Having a white Christmas is not something we can totally rely on.”
Madison’s chain of lakes also aren’t freezing like they used to, creating hazards for people who fish on the ice.
Hilary Dugan, associate professor in the Center for Limnology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says back in the 1800s, lakes would remain frozen approximately 130 days a year, but now, on average, it’s maybe 75 days a year.
“That’s something that people around here notice because winter is a big part of life,” Dugan said. “Traditionally, winter would start in December (and) it would end probably like April. That meant that you could consistently go out and ice fish, cross-country ski, you know, winter recreation.
“We’re talking months of change — not just a couple of days.”
More than 1,700 miles away in Phoenix, dangerous heat has prompted officials to close the city’s extensive system of mountain trails. But that hasn’t stopped some from hiking in 100-degree-plus weather, leading to emergency rescues and the death of a 10-year-old last year.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found 2024 was the hottest year in its 130-year climate record. NOAA reported the average annual temperature across the contiguous United States in 2024 was 55.5 degrees — or 3.5 degrees above the 20th-century average — heat that it said fueled a near-record number of tornadoes.
Hotter summers and warmer winters are not only disrupting outdoor activities. The record-breaking heat has also been driving national concern about climate change — more so even than dramatic events such as wildfires and hurricanes, according to new research.
Yale’s latest Climate Opinion Maps found that 65% of U.S. adults somewhat or strongly agree that global warming is affecting weather patterns, while 72% of adults nationally think global warming is real.
Its recent study showed that people’s interest in learning more about climate change consistently spikes during weather events like heat waves. And the public’s interest in climate change increases in specific areas experiencing extreme weather events, researchers found.
“Certain weather events — like heat waves — seem to produce consistent jumps in climate change interest across all regions simultaneously,” the researchers wrote, “while others — like wildfires — show more geographic variation.”
The study involved research through Yale’s partnership with Google. The team analyzed online search trends across the country, finding that searches on climate change followed “consistent and predictable patterns.”
Heat waves in 2023 sparked consistent interest in climate change, the study found, while Hurricanes Helene and Milton in 2024 garnered an increase in searches only in the places affected by those storms. Similarly, interest in climate change increased during bouts of wildfires in the United States and Canada, but only in the areas most directly affected by the smoke, the study found.
The authors suggest the findings can be used by officials to help people prepare for extreme weather. And, the authors note, “this timing could help the public better understand the need to transition to renewable energy sources, reduce fossil fuels, update risk assessments, increase planning, and strengthen building codes.”
Climate Central’s analysis of heat streaks between 1970 and 2024 found that their frequency has at least doubled in nearly 200 cities across the Southwest, Northeast, Ohio River Valley and southeastern parts of the country — and those heat waves were attributed to greenhouse gas emissions.
The data, released in July by the nonprofit group of scientists and climate researchers, also found heat waves are the leading cause of weather-related deaths in the United States. In 2023, the group reported that 2,325 people in the United States died from extreme heat — a record high.
This heat, Phoenix Fire Department Capt. Rob McDade said, “It’s very dangerous.” In July 2024, a 10-year-old boy died from heat-related injuries while hiking South Mountain Park and Preserve with his family.
In 2021, Phoenix adopted a safety program to restrict access on parts of the city’s 200-plus miles of trails during extreme heat — especially on rugged stretches where it’s more difficult for the fire department to rescue hikers.
“We have more people hiking than ever, and we are seeing rescues that have to happen that definitely are related to the heat,” said Jarod Rogers, deputy director of the city’s Parks and Recreation Department.
Last year, between May 1 and Oct. 13, the city had 45 days of trail closures due to extreme heat. Since adopting the safety program, there have been fewer rescues — from 57 in 2021 down to 35 in 2024.
“The proof is in the pudding,” McDade said. “Setting up these restrictions is dramatically cutting back those extreme (heat) day mountain rescues.”
Rising temperatures are causing a different kind of risk in northern regions. Last winter, Dugan said she repeatedly heard about people being rescued after falling through melting lake ice.
“It felt higher than normal,” she said. “People are willing to go out on the thinnest ice to go get some fish. It’s definitely a passion for people here.”
Skiers are also feeling the burn from a warmer climate. Bryant, executive director for the MadNorSki Club (Madison Nordic Ski), said there has been little snow in recent years, shortening the cross-country skiing season.
Annual snowfall in Madison has decreased over the past three winters from 70 accumulated inches in 2022 to 43 inches in 2023 and 22 inches in 2024.
Bryant said popular ski races have had to cancel because of the lack of snowfall. Some event organizers have resorted to using artificially made snow.
In 2017, organizers of the American Birkebeiner race (“Birkie”), which draws more than 10,000 nordic skiers to northern Wisconsin each year, canceled its cross-country ski races due to lack of snow.
In 2024, another low-snow year, Birkie organizers used snowmaking machines to create a 10-kilometer ski loop instead of the normally linear 50- or 53-kilometer course.
“In the photos, you would see this little white ribbon of snow on the trail, and it was brown everywhere else,” Bryant said, calling the recent lack of snow in Wisconsin “freaky.”
Birkie spokesman Shawn Connelly said the American Birkebeiner Ski Foundation has kept its ski events running thanks to donor funding to purchase the snow-making equipment. “As long as we have the cold, we’ll have the snow,” Connelly vowed, “and we’ll continue to host North America’s largest annual cross-country ski race.”
While the Yale study shows Americans are increasingly concerned about climate change, President Donald Trump’s administration is moving in the opposite direction.
In July, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency proposed rescinding the 2009 Endangerment Finding, which scientifically characterized planet-warming greenhouse gases as a danger to human health and the environment. The ruling was used as the foundation for the federal government’s regulation of emissions from vehicles and power plants for the last 16 years.
The proposal comes after the Trump administration gutted many of the initiatives of former President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act that aimed to reduce the country’s climate impact over the next two decades.
Environmental advocates have accused the Trump administration of “burying its head in sand” when it comes to the climate crisis.
“Americans are already suffering from stronger hurricanes, more severe heat waves and floods, and more frequent fires,” Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, said in a prepared statement. “(Americans) are watching these climate disasters get worse (and) the danger to their lives and health intensify.”
Floodlight is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powers stalling climate action.
From ski trails in Wisconsin to hiking paths in Phoenix, extreme heat is reshaping recreation — and our attitudes is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
An unnamed tech company is proposing a $1.7 billion data center in the western Wisconsin city of Menomonie — and concerned citizens are raising the alarm.
The post $1.6B data center proposed in Menomonie draws strong response from concerned citizens appeared first on WPR.
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