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The federal government’s probe into the 2020 election has reached Wisconsin, with several current and former election officials, including multiple people in Milwaukee, confirming they have been interviewed or approached by the FBI.

The exact nature of the investigation remains unclear, though it appears to be at least somewhat centered around the 2020 election. The agency’s election investigations elsewhere in the country have featured subpoenas for ballots and other election records, but legal experts still say it won’t be easy for the federal government to convince a court to give it access to ballots. 

Milwaukee County officials are nonetheless preparing for that possibility, in part because they still retain ballots from the 2020 election, though they declined to discuss those preparations or comment on the record. Those ballots contain identifying information that could, in some cases, allow otherwise unidentifiable absentee ballots to be matched to the voters who cast them. Milwaukee is one of the few jurisdictions in Wisconsin that still has ballots from that election, and the city has long been a target of voter fraud accusations and related attacks from the political right.

Elsewhere in Wisconsin — in communities whose elections have faced less scrutiny and in the vast majority of municipalities where 2020 ballots were destroyed according to the standard retention schedules in state law — election officials are less alarmed and are instead focused on preparing for the midterm elections.

Still, news of the FBI interest has created confusion and some fear on the part of voters and election officials. 

What happened?

So far, the FBI has contacted multiple current and former election officials in Wisconsin. 

The FBI interviewed Wisconsin Elections Commission deputy administrator Robert Kehoe within the last few weeks. The news of the interview was first reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The interview focused on the 2020 election, with agents asking Kehoe to explain how Wisconsin elections operate.

The agency has also attempted to contact Milwaukee County Election Director Michelle Hawley. An agent left a business card at Hawley’s home when she was not there. Milwaukee County Clerk George Christensen criticized the agency for approaching Hawley at her home rather than through the county.

“While we cooperate with all legitimate law enforcement actions, we will defend against any attack on our democracy and will defend the rights of voters of Milwaukee County,” Christensen said in a statement.

Agents also left a card for, called and texted a former Milwaukee election official, who confirmed the contact to Votebeat but requested anonymity because of personal safety concerns. That official declined to say whether they responded to the FBI.

Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson confirmed the FBI has reached out to city employees about the probe.

“The president for whatever reason cannot seem to let it go that he lost an election,” Johnson told a WISN 12 reporter.

Wisconsin Elections Commission spokeswoman Emilee Miklas declined to comment for this story. Other officials declined to speak on the record, and an FBI spokesperson didn’t answer Votebeat questions about the probe.

David Becker, the executive director of the nonpartisan nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research and a former Justice Department voting section attorney, said the federal government’s actions appeared more to be aimed at intimidating election officials than producing actionable criminal cases.

He pointed to FBI Director Kash Patel’s public statements in April suggesting arrests related to the 2020 election were coming, as well as federal officials discussing potential cases on social media before they’re brought before courts.

“If you think you’re going to bring charges and prosecute individuals, you don’t do anything that the federal government has done over the last few months,” he said.

Becker also noted that any potential federal crimes connected to the 2020 election are “well beyond the statute of limitations for any potential federal jurisdiction or crimes,” adding, “This is a problem for any investigation relating to 2020.”

Even so, Becker said election officials’ worries were justified. He said the Election Official Legal Defense Network, which he leads, has received more requests for legal assistance from election officials than ever before “even though all of these efforts indicate that the federal government knows it’s got nothing.”

How do the events in Wisconsin relate to probes elsewhere?

It’s unclear how the FBI interviews in Wisconsin relate to the agency’s scrutiny of the 2020 election in other states. 

In January the FBI raided a Fulton County, Georgia, election office seeking records tied to the 2020 election. About a month later, the agency subpoenaed records related to the audit of the 2020 election in Maricopa County, Arizona, which includes Phoenix.

Separately, the U.S. Justice Department has sought access to 2024 ballots in Wayne County, Michigan, home to Detroit.

Those jurisdictions share several characteristics with Milwaukee County.  All are located in highly competitive swing states won by former President Joe Biden in 2020, and all became central targets of President Donald Trump, who repeatedly challenged the election results despite court rulings, audits and reviews repeatedly reaffirming his loss.

Fulton, Wayne, Maricopa, and Milwaukee County are the largest and most heavily scrutinized election jurisdictions in their respective states. Each has been the subject of persistent conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, many of which remain prevalent on social media, even after extensive investigations found no evidence of widespread fraud. 

“What’s really disconcerting,” said former longtime Wisconsin election chief Kevin Kennedy, “is the fact that there is a clear pattern here to try and continue to stir up issues that were resolved in every single opportunity there was to review them, whether it was a court case, an independent audit or the actual certification and review process that exists.”

What comes next?

The short answer is that nobody really knows.

Officials have been considering the possibility that the federal government may seize the city’s 2020 ballots, which contain personally identifiable information.

Kennedy said recent actions by the Trump administration offer “no reason to think that information that should be protected is going to be protected.”

Kennedy said Wisconsin’s decentralized election system was intentionally designed to distribute authority among local jurisdictions — both to keep election administration accountable at the community level and to limit the amount of sensitive voter information concentrated in any one place.

“You put that at the national level,” he said, “and it only takes one bad actor — and we’ve got evidence there’s more than one of those already in the federal government — to totally disrupt the process when you consolidate that kind of information that’s protected through the various state and local laws and practices.”

Becker said it will be an uphill battle for the federal government to successfully obtain Milwaukee’s ballots. But he said the mere possibility that federal officials could theoretically identify how individual people voted is deeply troubling. 

“That is not the way a democratic society works,” he said. “Now, I don’t think they’re likely going to be able to do that. I think that’s going to be incredibly difficult. It’s not impossible, but the fact that they seem to engender this fear is troubling enough.”

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat’s free national newsletter here.

The FBI is contacting Wisconsin election officials. Here’s what we know. 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.

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The Wisconsin Elections Commission is facing criticism from local officials and a lawsuit filed Wednesday after it ordered Madison not to count 23 absentee ballots that arrived late to the polls in the state’s recent Supreme Court race, a delay city officials say was caused by election administrator error. City officials also say the commission initially offered little guidance but later faulted them for making the wrong decision.

As Madison officials discussed what to do with the late-arriving ballots the day after Election Day, Madison City Attorney Mike Haas reached out to Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe for advice. Wolfe sent the relevant statute the following day and told Madison officials to “decide, within their statutory discretion” whether the 23 ballots should be counted. Madison decided to count them.

Three weeks later, WEC’s commissioners decided Madison made the wrong choice, ordering them to remove the 23 affected ballots from the count. The commissioners didn’t mince words. Chair Ann Jacobs, a Democrat, said Madison committed an “absurd error,” and GOP commissioner Don Millis called it an “epic failure.”

The dispute has exposed a breakdown between state and local election officials with consequences beyond the 23 ballots at issue. Madison officials say they followed guidance from the commission when they chose to count the votes, only to be publicly rebuked and overruled weeks later. Now, a lawsuit argues that not counting the votes would disenfranchise voters whose ballots were delayed by election officials — and local clerks warn the episode could make them less likely to act decisively when problems arise in future elections.

Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell, a Democrat, said the turnaround from the commission was puzzling and could demoralize clerks.

“Why would anybody ask WEC for an opinion about how to handle a situation?” he said. “Here they are attacking clerks for having to make a decision because they couldn’t get advice.”

Wolfe said that the agency was limited in how much advice it can provide for local election officials, but said the commission remains “dedicated to supporting their efforts within the scope of our administrative role.”

Lawsuit alleges removing the 23 votes would be unconstitutional 

The liberal law firm Law Forward’s lawsuit in Dane County Circuit Court alleges that the commission illegally ordered Madison not to count 23 absentee ballots that arrived at the polls after 8 p.m. 

The group says the two voters it’s representing — Margaret and Robert Honig — along with the other voters, would be unconstitutionally disenfranchised “through no fault of their own” and asks the court to strike down the WEC order not to count the ballots. 

The lawsuit references several past rulings in the state as establishing a precedent that voters can’t be deprived of their constitutional voting rights due to election officials’ errors.

This is the second recent Law Forward lawsuit involving Madison’s failure to count ballots due to administrative error. The legal group sued the city for disenfranchising 193 voters in the 2024 presidential election for a separate series of failures. 

It remains unclear why there was such a delay between the ballots’ arrival at the elections office and their delivery to the precincts for counting. State law requires they be “delivered to the polling place no later than 8 p.m.” in order to be tallied. 

Dane County authorized a separate lawsuit on Tuesday, and then filed it Wednesday early evening, as county election officials said they want clarity in the future on whether late-arriving ballots can count if they were only delayed because of election official error.

That same day, Madison complied with WEC’s demand to remove the ballots from the count, but instead of removing the specific ballots at issue, the city selected 20 ballots at random and removed those. Called a “drawdown,” the controversial practice was necessary because poll workers apparently failed to follow Madison Clerk Lydia McComas’ instructions to clearly mark the late-arriving ballots so they could be identified if necessary. Only three were appropriately marked. 

Officials criticize the election commission for lack of direction 

Local election officials say the Wisconsin Elections Commission has become less willing to provide clear guidance in difficult situations — a practice that commissioners and staff say reflects the limits of the agency’s role.

Haas, the Madison city attorney, has firsthand experience on the commission: He preceded Wolfe as the commission’s administrator. Her initial response to the city’s request for advice on how to handle the late-arriving ballots — which provided little direction — was in line with the commission’s tendency in recent years to “intentionally avoid giving definitive responses to specific questions,” Haas wrote in a May 6 letter to the commission obtained by Votebeat.

“This has caused local clerks and their legal counsel to feel frustrated that the WEC is abdicating its responsibility under the Statutes to administer the election laws and provide guidance and advice to local election officials,” he continued.

Haas also questioned why Wolfe’s response and the commissioners’ eventual order were so out of step with one another. The city relied on Wolfe’s initial guidance, Haas said, only to have the commission “contradict its Administrator without even an acknowledgment of her guidance.”

That dynamic, he added, discourages local election officials from being transparent with the agency and damages the commission’s credibility.

He also said that the commissioners were contradicting themselves. In its investigation into the 193 ballots that went missing in Madison until several days after the November 2024 election, the commission concluded that the missing ballots never arrived at the polling places but still could have been counted. 

Haas said it was “difficult to sustain” the commission’s conclusions that “a municipality should count ballots that are discovered in the Clerk’s Office days after the election but not ballots that were delivered minutes after the 8:00 p.m. deadline.”

To McDonell, the Democratic Dane County clerk, the commission’s “real reticence to give advice” is undermining election officials’ trust in the state election agency.

McDonell said that in the past he used to get specific advice from the commission, but now “we get a game of ‘gotcha’ instead.”

In a statement, Wolfe told Votebeat that the commission provides guidance to clerks when the issues are clear. But when state law is ambiguous or unprecedented situations arise, she said, “it’s been our long-established policy to direct clerks to their respective legal counsel for interpretation.”

The Wisconsin Elections Commission has six commissioners, three Democrats and three Republicans. Decisions must be made by a majority of the commission, needing at minimum a 4-2 vote. Although Wolfe — whose role as administrator is nonpartisan — is often referred to as Wisconsin’s top election official, she does not have a vote.

Wolfe added that the commission can exercise its authority to issue determinations on election matters and that it’s her role to adhere to those directives, “even when I don’t always agree with those decisions.”

Jacobs, the commission chair, said the commission provides clerks plenty of help, from designing election manuals and creating administrative rules to adjudicating administrative complaints. 

“We are doing everything we can to provide guidance to clerks on how to do things right,” she said. “We are not their 1-800-GET-HELP number for individual clerks’ every single legal need.”

One of the other reasons the commission can’t provide specific legal advice, Jacobs said, is that the commission acts as a judicial body that could ultimately evaluate whether election officials comply with the law.

“If you’ve got a court case, a personal injury lawsuit on a car accident, you don’t get to call the judge up and say, ‘Hey, am I doing this right?’” she said. “It cannot be our job to do their jobs for them.”

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Wisconsin Elections Commission faces lawsuit, criticism over order not to count late-arriving Madison ballots 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.

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Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers on Wednesday signed a bill bringing Wisconsin in line with a federal law seeking to prevent the kind of post-election chaos that President Donald Trump and his allies sowed after the 2020 election.

The Democrat also vetoed a Republican-authored bill that would have required the state election commission to hear administrative complaints against itself alleging violations of the federal Help America Vote Act, in line with a U.S. Justice Department demand for the state. That vetoed bill also would have required the state’s Legislative Audit Bureau to conduct audits for potential noncitizen voters.

The bill Evers signed updates Wisconsin’s deadlines for certifying presidential election results and casting electoral votes to match federal timelines set by Congress in 2022, after President Donald Trump claimed to have won the 2020 election and hundreds of individuals stormed the U.S. Capitol to prevent certification of President Joe Biden’s victory.

The mismatch led to a lawsuit in the 2024 presidential election, when the state’s Republican electors were uncertain which day to cast their Electoral College votes because state and federal law set the dates one day apart. The new law resolves that discrepancy.

The measure passed the Senate last session but stalled in the Assembly. With its passage, Wisconsin is among more than 20 states to update their laws to align with the Electoral Count Reform Act.

Vetoed bill would have imposed U.S. DOJ demand

The HAVA bill that Evers vetoed followed a U.S. Justice Department letter sent to the Wisconsin Elections Commission last year. It claimed the WEC was violating the law by declining to hear complaints filed against it.

Under HAVA, a 2002 law that overhauled voter registration and election administration, any state receiving federal election funding must also establish an administrative process for complaints about alleged violations of the law. If a violation is found, the state must provide a remedy; if not, it can dismiss the complaint.

In recent years, however, the WEC has dismissed HAVA complaints related to its own actions, citing a Wisconsin Supreme Court opinion saying it would be “nonsensical” for the agency to adjudicate a complaint against itself.

For example, the commission dismissed a complaint against the agency filed by a Democratic voter seeking to bar Trump from the ballot and has repeatedly dismissed complaints filed by election conspiracy theorist Peter Bernegger that allege various kinds of election mismanagement.

“If a person has a complaint about the legality of the conduct of the commission, that person should file suit in court,” Evers said in his veto message Wednesday.

The vetoed bill also would have required the state to undertake audits of its voter registration list to identify potential noncitizen voters.

Evers said he objected to the “additional burden that could be placed on citizens to provide documentary proof of citizenship after they have already been lawfully registered to vote.”

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat’s free national newsletter here.

New Wisconsin law seeks to prevent certification disaster 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.

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Months before becoming one of the nearly 200 Madison voters in 2024 whose absentee ballots were never counted, Nathan Haimowitz did what he thought he was supposed to do.

As a journalist living in Spain and out of the habit of voting, the 26-year-old former poll worker said he wanted the 2024 presidential election to “be the thing that would spur me to vote more consistently.” To make sure everything was in order, he emailed Madison officials to confirm they had received his absentee ballot application. They told him they had, so he filled out his ballot, sent it in and assumed his vote would be counted.

It wasn’t. 

The mistake that disenfranchised Haimowitz and nearly 200 other voters set off a chain of consequences: The longtime city clerk resigned, state and local officials launched investigations, a lawsuit was filed, and the city began overhauling its voting procedures.

Haimowitz hasn’t cast a ballot since.

“It was definitely a deterrence,” he said. “I didn’t know why my vote hadn’t been counted.”

Early signs suggest the error is already reshaping how many of the disenfranchised voters engage with elections — pushing some away from absentee voting and, in some cases, out of the electorate altogether. Interviews with affected voters also reveal a broader disconnect: Many say they are dissatisfied both with how the city handled the mistake and with the high-profile lawsuit filed in its wake to seek damages for the disenfranchised voters. The city, they say, has not been appropriately responsive, and the lawsuit does not reflect their values. 

Until now, the public conversation has largely reflected the perspectives of the eight voters who joined the lawsuit as named plaintiffs. But others Votebeat spoke with described a different perspective — one that questions whether financial compensation is the right remedy at all.

Mark Ediger, a recently retired chemistry professor at UW-Madison, for example, said he found the lawsuit “pretty bewildering,” adding that as a Madison taxpayer, it would be people like him footing the bill. 

The 193 voters range from dozens of students who are only in Madison for a few years to some of their professors and other longtime city residents. Their responses to the error are just as varied. 

Some, like Haimowitz, stopped voting entirely. Others, like Ediger, say the incident was a one-off mistake that hasn’t impacted their voting behavior. Notably, Ediger is the only voter among the disenfranchised group who has voted absentee in both of the two elections following the error, according to election data obtained by Votebeat.

“The incident has not diminished my trust in elections,” Ediger told Votebeat, adding that he’s satisfied the city has appropriately addressed its cause. “I don’t see how this should change my voting behavior moving forward.”

But other voters said their experience will change how they vote in future elections. “I’m definitely going to prioritize in-person voting,” Joanne Fairbotham, one of the disenfranchised voters, told Votebeat.

“There’s growing evidence that when someone tries to vote and they are prevented from doing so for one reason or another, it makes them less likely to vote in the future, and it can change their behavior,” said Kevin Morris, a senior research fellow and voting policy scholar with the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program. “You can lose a lot of trust very easily, and it can be very difficult to build that trust.”

All of the disenfranchised voters cast absentee ballots in the 2024 presidential election. But, among the 22 who cast ballots in the February 2025 primary for state superintendent of public instruction and city council, nearly all did so in person. Two months later, two-thirds of the 132 who voted in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race did so at the polls, a share similar to how the same group voted in previous April elections. 

Disenfranchised voters question city follow-up 

Shortly after learning that her ballot hadn’t been counted, Fairbotham — a 35-year-old medical coder who lives in Madison — wrote to City Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl, saying the error was “beyond devastating as an American who prides herself in voting in every election.”

“This is how people lose faith in their government that their rights will be protected,” she said in the letter, calling on Witzel-Behl to resign. 

Fairbotham said she never received a response from Witzel-Behl, who has since resigned — or anyone else employed by the city. 

“Not hearing a peep,” she said, is the most frustrating part. Fairbotham’s vote in the 2024 presidential election was the first time she cast an absentee ballot since the peak of the pandemic in 2020. She has only cast in-person votes since and said the incident still makes her angry.

Madison City Attorney Mike Haas disputed the characterization that the city didn’t communicate the seriousness of the error, pointing to a city and state investigation and a public apology from the mayor.

Still, some voters said the city’s outreach fell short after such a significant error. Haimowitz, for example, didn’t hear from the city when most of the voters did — a separate oversight by city officials meant overseas voters did not receive the same notice as those living locally. Until speaking with Votebeat, Haimowitz said, he didn’t know whether the mistake that kept his ballot from being counted was his or the city’s, nor what steps officials had taken to prevent it from happening again.

Election administration experts say direct, proactive communication can be critical in rebuilding trust. After a mistake like the one in Madison, jurisdictions should reach out to affected voters, review what went wrong and clearly explain how it will be prevented in the future, said Jennifer Morrell, CEO of The Elections Group and a former Colorado election administrator.

The city has completed the first two steps, Morrell said, but it did not fully follow through on the third.

After sending an initial notice telling voters they could reach out with questions, the city held no further public hearings, said Haas, a longtime election lawyer and former administrator of the Wisconsin Elections Commission. Few of the disenfranchised voters followed up, he added.

Some disenfranchised voters find lawsuit bewildering

The divide among disenfranchised voters extends to the lawsuit filed in the aftermath of the error.

In March 2025, the liberal group Law Forward filed a claim seeking $34 million from the city and Dane County over the error, later turning it into a lawsuit. In February, a circuit court judge ruled that the city could be held liable for monetary damages.

A small group of affected voters has joined the case, arguing it’s one of the only ways to hold the city accountable for failing to count their ballots.

But others see it differently. “In an era where the reliability of elections is being challenged by some groups in completely spurious ways, it seems to me that this lawsuit just adds to that noise,” Ediger said.

Lawsuits seeking monetary damages for disenfranchisement are now rare, but were more common in the late 1800s and 1900s, when Black voters were intentionally and repeatedly disenfranchised by election workers. Then, the fines forced the government to think twice, said Ediger. But there’s no similar pattern of errors or intentionality here in Madison, he added, which makes him doubt the lawsuit’s purpose. 

Haimowitz said he also opposed the lawsuit, despite how much it has shaken his confidence.

“I’m not sure that the city should pay such a heavy price for this,” Haimowitz said, adding that at a time when some Republicans are peddling “Stop the Steal” narratives and casting doubt on election integrity, especially in battleground states like Wisconsin, the Law Forward letter unnerved him.

“That kind of money could be debilitating to a city elections board that is already under immense scrutiny and pressure to get it all right,” he said.

Law Forward staff attorney Scott Thompson pushed back on comparisons between the case and post-2020 lawsuits filed by Republicans, including one that sought to throw out over 200,000 absentee ballots in Wisconsin.

“That cavalier attitude towards votes that we saw in 2020 is simply unacceptable, and not compatible with democracy,” he said. “And so what do we do with that? Well, I can tell you what we will not do: We will not stand idly by if hundreds of people in a community lose the right to vote because their ballot simply wasn’t counted.”

He said that lawsuits often make people uneasy, but that their perspective may change when a fundamental right is taken away. He declined to directly comment on some of the disenfranchised voters’ issues with the case.

For some disenfranchised voters, financial damages are part of accountability. Precious Ayodabo, a named plaintiff, wrote in a Cap Times column that her disenfranchised absentee vote “is worth enough” to warrant compensation.

“It’s worth enough that I waited for hours in line to cast it. It’s worth enough that politicians spend millions of dollars to receive it. It’s worth enough that people have put their lives on the line and died to protect it,” she wrote.

Thompson declined to make Ayodabo and the other plaintiffs available for interviews. Of the 193 voters, eight are plaintiffs in the case, he said.

Others who support the lawsuit say it’s less about personal payment and more about forcing systemic change. Fairbotham said she’s grateful the case is pushing the city to take the error seriously, particularly after the Wisconsin Elections Commission found the city violated state law.

Thompson said the lawsuit isn’t about making sure the government knows “every single jot and tittle” of absentee voting procedure, but to ensure election officials count every vote, which he defined as “the absolute most basic obligation.”

Still, some election experts warn the case could have unintended consequences. Morrell said the lawsuit could become one of many elements that dissuade election officials from staying in administrative roles.

“If we’re setting an unrealistic expectation that any mistake made by an election administrator opens you up to a lawsuit, that feels like an impossible situation to be in,” she said. “Election administrators take this so seriously and do everything they can to ensure mistakes don’t happen,” she added, “but they do.”

For Haimowitz — a voter who has helped others register to vote and served as a poll worker — the question isn’t just whether the city fixes the problem. It’s whether he can move past having his ballot go uncounted.

“It was something that made me think it’s clearly not that easy to vote,” he said.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat’s free national newsletter here.

Disenfranchised Madison voters sound off on city, lawsuit 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.

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A jury convicted a Wisconsin man of election fraud and identity theft for requesting the ballots of Republican state Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and Democratic Racine Mayor Cory Mason without their consent.

Jurors in Racine County on Tuesday found Harry Wait guilty of two misdemeanor election fraud charges and one felony identity theft charge following a two-day trial. He was acquitted of a second count of identity theft.

Wait leads a group that makes false election claims, including that Wisconsin’s elections are riddled with fraud and that President Donald Trump won the 2020 election. Trump lost Wisconsin in 2020 by about 21,000 votes.

Wait admitted in 2022 that he requested Vos’ and Mason’s ballots to try to prove that the state’s voter registration system is vulnerable to fraud. Wait told The Associated Press at the time that he wasn’t surprised he was charged.

“You got to expect to pay some costs sometimes when you are trying to work for the public good,” he said.

His efforts drew praise from Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson in 2022, who called Wait a “white hat hacker.”

After the verdict, Wait told WTMJ that he “would do it again.”

“I tested the system and the system failed,” he said.

A sentencing date has not been set. Wait’s attorney Joe Bugni did not respond to an email Wednesday asking whether he would appeal.

Wait, 71, faces up to six years in prison on the felony conviction and up to a year in jail on each of the misdemeanor convictions.

His conviction comes after a jury in 2024 found a former Milwaukee election official guilty of misconduct in office after she obtained three military absentee ballots using fake names and Social Security numbers in 2022. Like Wait, Kimberly Zapata argued that she was trying to expose vulnerabilities in the state’s election system.

Zapata was fined $3,000 and sentenced to one year probation.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup. This story is published in partnership with The Associated Press.

Wisconsin man who ordered ballots without consent found guilty of fraud and identity theft 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.

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A conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court justice first elected in 2007 announced Monday that she will not seek a third 10-year term next year, giving liberals another chance to expand their majority as cases affecting redistricting, union rights, school funding and other hot button issues await.

Justice Annette Ziegler, 62, becomes the second conservative justice in as many years to decide against seeking reelection after liberals took majority control of Wisconsin’s highest court in 2023. Liberals held onto their majority last year in a race that broke national spending records and saw billionaire Elon Musk traveling to the state to hand out $1 million checks to conservative voters.

There’s another election on April 7 for the open seat caused by conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley’s decision not to run for reelection. The liberal candidate, Appeals Court Judge Chris Taylor, has outraised her conservative opponent, fellow Appeals Court Judge Maria Lazar, allowing her to spend more on television ads in what so far has been a low-profile race given that the court’s majority is not on the line.

Liberals are seeking to win their fourth Supreme Court race in a row dating back to 2020 and solidify their hold on the court.

Ziegler’s decision to step down means there will be another open race next year. If liberals win this year, their majority would increase to 5-2, and in 2027 they could grow it to 6-1. If the conservative candidate wins this year, the liberal majority would remain 4-3, and next year the best conservatives could do would be to keep it at 4-3.

Ziegler consistently sided with fellow conservatives justices, including in 2020 when the court fell one vote short of overturning President Donald Trump’s election loss that year. Ziegler was in the minority after a conservative swing justice sided with liberals.

Cases expected to come before the court in coming years include challenges to congressional district maps, the future of a state law that effectively ended collective bargaining for most public workers and an effort to increase spending on public schools.

Liberals have struck down a state abortion ban law and ordered new legislative maps since taking control of the court, fueling Democrats’ hopes of capturing a majority this November.

Ziegler, who was chief justice between 2021 and 2025, previously served as a circuit court judge in Washington County for 10 years.

“Now is the right time for me to step away to spend more time with my husband, kids and grandkids,” she said in a statement.

“I am incredibly proud that in all my elections I had support from a broad spectrum of legal, civic, law enforcement and political leaders — both Democrats and Republicans — who believed in my commitment to fairness, ethics and the rule of law,” Ziegler said.

The election to replace Ziegler is April 6, 2027.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup. This story is published in partnership with The Associated Press.

Conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Annette Ziegler won’t seek reelection 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.

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When this legislative session began, Wisconsin Senate leaders made the unusual decision not to create a committee dedicated to election policy for the first time in nearly two decades. That choice has had a measurable consequence: The Senate has taken up far fewer election bills than the Assembly, and several measures that cleared the lower chamber are now stalled with no clear path forward.

Of the 19 election bills that Votebeat has tracked this legislative session, 18 have gotten at least a public committee hearing in the Assembly, compared with nine in the Senate. Fourteen of those bills passed the Assembly, compared with six in the Senate. 

Even in a session when the Senate has generally moved more slowly than the Assembly on many issues — as of Feb. 25, the Assembly had passed 439 bills since the start of the current two-year session, while the Senate passed 276 — the disparity is especially stark on elections.

Both chambers’ election activity is down compared to last session. With a dedicated election committee in the Senate, about 30 election bills received a committee hearing, compared with about 45 in the Assembly. Republicans have controlled both chambers for more than a decade.

“The lack of the dedicated committee has definitely changed things,” said Sen. Mark Spreitzer, a Democratic member of the local government and government operations committees. Without a clear Republican point person on election policy in the Senate, he said, the chamber is allowing the Assembly to drive most of the legislative action.

Some of the bills that have moved through the Assembly but haven’t passed the Senate include proposals to expand early voting hours and to bring the state in line with a 2022 federal law regarding the timing of casting electoral votes and certifying election results in presidential elections, designed to prevent the kind of post-election chaos that President Donald Trump and his allies sowed after the 2020 election. 

Two other bills — one that would require ballots to include plain-language explanations of proposed constitutional amendments and another requiring early in-person voting hours in every municipality — have gotten a public hearing in the Senate but have since stalled.

Clerks have told Votebeat that some of the stalled bills would significantly improve their efficiency  — including an omnibus proposal to create a system tracking voters adjudicated incompetent and also send voters text notifications on the status of their absentee ballots, said Rock County Clerk Lisa Tollefson, a Democrat. That proposal passed through the Assembly in November, but hasn’t been heard in the Senate.

Given the absence of a dedicated Senate election committee, Tollefson added, the Assembly has been doing the heavy lifting. But even with ready-made bills, the Senate does not appear to be eager to pass election legislation.

In every legislative session since 2009, there has been a Senate committee formally tasked with covering election legislation. Committee chairs typically serve as the go-to experts on their panels’ subject areas. They consult with lobbying groups, schedule public hearings and set up committee votes — giving them the power to advance or stall legislation.

But when election bills are scattered across multiple committees, there’s no clear point person in the Senate to guide them through the process.

In the absence of a dedicated election committee in this session, several committee leaders declined to explain whether or when the stalled election bills might move. And some voting groups say it has made it harder to know who to consult with in the chamber to discuss election legislation.

At a WisPolitics event in Madison on Feb. 12, Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu said that the absence of a Senate committee “doesn’t make it hard to pass election bills.” He added that there are “definitely avenues where election bills can run in the Senate,” including the Senate Committee on Government Operations, Labor and Economic Development and the Senate Committee on Transportation and Local Government.

LeMahieu, a Republican, didn’t respond to Votebeat’s request for comment. Sen. Dan Feyen, the chair of the government operations committee, didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. Sen. Cory Tomczyk, who chairs the local government committee, also didn’t respond to a request for comment.

But even some of their fellow Republicans are seeing the effects. For example, Sen. Rachael Cabral-Guevara is the author of two of the bills languishing in the Senate, which would require and fund a certain number of early in-person voting hours in every municipality. Those reforms, she said, are “crucial to restoring confidence in our election process.” 

She said in the Assembly, municipalities and clerks are working on a few details before the bills receive a final Senate vote, though both proposals passed the Assembly in November. The proposal to require the in-person hours got a Senate hearing in late January but has seen no activity since, while the bill to fund it hasn’t gotten a hearing at all. 

There could still be a late flurry of committee activity. On Feb. 27, the Senate government operations committee approved the proposal to bring the state in line with new federal laws regulating presidential elections. But the next presidential race is two years away, and most of the bills that would affect all elections — not just presidential ones — remain stalled. Another bill to require the Wisconsin Elections Commission to hear complaints against itself was scheduled for a March 3 hearing.

With the legislative session entering its final stretch, though, the stalled bills face increasingly long odds. The last general floor session period of the biennium ends on March 19, and the Assembly is effectively finished for the session. That means the Senate only has a few weeks left to consider election bills that already cleared the lower chamber, and if the Senate modifies any of them, the Assembly is unlikely to return to approve the changes. 

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.

This coverage is made possible through Votebeat, a nonpartisan news organization covering local election administration and voting access. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Without a dedicated election committee, Wisconsin Senate lags on election policy 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.

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The city of Madison on Monday appealed a ruling that allows it to be sued for monetary damages for disenfranchising nearly 200 voters in the 2024 election, arguing the decision would unrealistically require “error-free elections” and expose municipalities across the state to liability for mistakes. 

The appeal comes after Dane County Circuit Court Judge David Conway’s Feb. 9 ruling that Madison could face potential financial liability for disenfranchising 193 voters whose absentee ballots were unintentionally left uncounted. Notably, the city did not specifically contest the judge’s rejection in that ruling of its earlier argument that absentee voting is merely a “privilege” under state law — a claim that would have shielded it from damages.

Instead, the appeal centers on who has the authority to enforce election laws and whether voters can sue for negligence. The city argues that such complaints must go first to the Wisconsin Elections Commission and asks higher courts to revisit a landmark 1866 case that allowed damages against election officials who deprive citizens of the right to vote.

“It is not difficult to imagine how the circuit court’s ruling may be perceived as an opportunity by partisan actors to influence the election,” attorneys for the city, former Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl and Deputy Clerk Jim Verbick wrote in the filing. 

A permanent path to sue for damages over accidental election errors without going first through the commission could “chill the willingness of individuals to volunteer to assist with elections, and the willingness of voters to participate in the political process,” they wrote.

Madison asks court to revisit landmark voting case

Much of Madison’s appeal asks the court to revisit a key finding in the landmark 1866 case that secured the extension of the franchise to Black Wisconsinites, Gillespie v. Palmer. In that case, the court held that state law allows plaintiffs to sue election officials for damages if they “negligently deprive citizens of the right to vote.” 

The case arose after Ezekiel Gillespie, a Black man, was turned away from the polls in 1865. While voters had ratified a measure extending the franchise to Black residents 16 years earlier, it went largely unenforced, as state officials still disputed whether the change was valid. Gillespie sued, and courts ultimately ruled in his favor, concluding in 1866 that Black Wisconsinites had been wrongfully disenfranchised for 17 years.

Although Gillespie was intentionally barred from voting, the court’s ruling established negligence — not just intentional misconduct — as a basis for disenfranchised voters to seek damages. The Dane County Circuit Court relied on that broader standard in allowing the Madison lawsuit to proceed. 

Madison officials in their latest appeal argue the lower court misapplied the precedent. In their view, Gillespie was about protecting the right to cast a ballot  — a right that they say isn’t disputed in this case. No election official in Madison denied that the 193 Madison voters had a right to vote, they wrote. Rather, they contend, the voters’ ballots were unintentionally left uncounted after being cast.

If Gillespie is extended under these circumstances, the defendants argue, Wisconsin would be the first state to allow “any voter whose ballot is accidentally uncounted a right to sue for monetary damages,” a premise that they say requires immediate review by higher courts given the impending 2026 midterms.

They also contend the 1866 ruling predates Wisconsin’s modern election system, and relying on “such an archaic interpretation of Constitutional rights in Wisconsin is grossly in error and requires intervention before the case proceeds further.”

Madison’s filing “seeks to erode the protections” guaranteed in Gillespie, said Scott Thompson, staff attorney for Law Forward, which filed the case. “This argument follows the city’s failed attempt to throw out this case by arguing that the right to vote does not protect absentee voters from disenfranchisement. The right to vote has value, and the voters the city of Madison disenfranchised look forward to having their day in court.”

Bryna Godar, a staff attorney at the University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative, clarified that a court wouldn’t need to overturn the historic Black voting rights case entirely to rule that it doesn’t apply in the lawsuit against Madison.

“You could potentially read that case in a more narrow way, as applying only to intentional deprivation of the right to vote, as opposed to negligence and deprivation,” she said, adding that it’s likely that only a higher court could reinterpret Gillespie in such a way.

Law Forward’s response to Madison’s appeal is due on March 9. Then the Madison-based District 4 Court of Appeals is expected to determine whether the appeal may move forward. 

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.

This coverage is made possible through Votebeat, a nonpartisan news organization covering local election administration and voting access. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Madison appeals ruling allowing lawsuits in 2024 ballot-counting case 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.

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Inside the mostly empty town hall in the town of Wausau on County Road Z last week, a handful of voters cast ballots in wooden booths for a school board race. The biggest question on the minds of local election officials wasn’t who would win — it was who would run elections next year.

After two clerks left within a year, longtime town supervisor Sharon Hunter stepped in because no one else would. Hunter’s term ends in April 2027. Nomination papers for a potential successor are due in January 2027, but local officials still don’t know who comes next.

“Sharon’s not going to do 29 years,” Deputy Clerk Amy Meyer said, referring to the long tenure of the clerk who resigned in late 2024, setting off the cascade of brief replacements. 

Hunter, 72, laughed. “I’d be over 100 years old,” she said. “I don’t think you want me here with my walker.”

Hunter’s decision to step up in a town of 2,200 may seem insignificant. But Wisconsin’s election system — one of the most decentralized in the country — depends on people like her. The state requires each of its 1,850 municipalities to run its own elections. That means hundreds of local clerks are needed to keep the system running. By contrast, Texas, a state with nearly five times Wisconsin’s population, relies on county-level election offices and has about one-sixth as many local election officials. 

That structure leaves Wisconsin unusually dependent on small-town clerks. Between 2020 and 2024, more than 700 municipal clerks here left their posts, the highest turnover by raw numbers in the nation. As rural communities age and fewer residents are willing or able to take on an increasingly complex job, replacing them has become harder — raising questions about how long the state’s hyper-local model can hold.

The system can absorb one vacancy. It strains under dozens. Elections get stitched together, paperwork piles up, and the quiet machinery of local government — licenses, payroll, meeting notices — shifts its weight onto whoever is left. 

Meyer, 55, understands why people don’t want the job — she doesn’t want it either. Like her mother, she has worked elections in town for much of her adult life. She considered becoming clerk, but it wasn’t the right time. She doesn’t want residents coming to her house with ballots or questions, as they once did under the longtime clerk.

“There comes a point in the day where I want to turn my phone off,” Meyer said from the town hall, situated at the center of loosely stitched county roads dotted with ranch homes and small farms, some of them no longer in operation. “I don’t want to hear that your garbage didn’t get picked up, or your neighbor’s dog is barking,” she said. “I just don’t.” 

In a small town, the clerk is often the first call for everything from election deadlines to everyday complaints — and the learning curve is steep. 

“It’s going to take you practically the first year to learn everything,” Meyer said. “Now, we have somebody new in it, and we have spent half the term relearning.” 

Older residents have long filled these roles, but clerks say the job has grown more demanding, with little added support. It is often thankless work for modest pay. In Wausau, the clerk earns about $27,000 a year with no benefits.

Even so, many residents remain committed to keeping elections at the town level. Hunter said preserving local control was her biggest reason for stepping in, though she has not decided whether to seek another term.

“But we do need to have someone coming after me,” she said. “Because I am old.”

In an aging town, succession is unclear

The rural town of Wausau sits just east of the city of Wausau, a community of about 40,000 that began as a logging town in the 1830s and now centers on manufacturing and a burgeoning ginseng farming industry. As the city has grown, the town has increasingly become a bedroom community, as its lower property taxes attract commuters. A handful of farms remain, but the town is less agricultural than it once was. 

Its population is slowly growing — and steadily aging. That’s because retirees also make up a large and growing share of the town’s residents. Its median age has climbed by roughly a decade since 2000 and now hovers around 50 — a decade older than the statewide average. The town still must run elections, issue licenses and post meeting notices. What’s less certain is who will do it. 

Here, as in many communities nationwide, the responsibility will likely fall to older residents. Nationally, nearly 70% of chief election officials are 50 or older, according to the Elections & Voting Information Center. In Wisconsin, that share climbs to almost 80%, with the oldest officials concentrated in the smallest jurisdictions.

One poll worker, knitting pink yarn during a lull between voters, said at 71 she was too old to take on the clerk’s job. She had encouraged a younger neighbor to consider it, she said, but the woman had just given birth.

Wausau’s shift reflects a broader reality in rural Wisconsin: The state built a system that depends on hundreds of small-town clerks and their deputies — a structure rooted in an era when farms were multigenerational, churches were full, and civic roles widely shared. That foundation is thinning. About a quarter of Wisconsin’s farms closed between 2002 and 2022, and churches are aging and shrinking. Volunteer fire departments and other local services report persistent staffing shortages.

There is no sweeping rural exodus. Rural counties are mostly growing, largely because retirees are staying or moving in. Wisconsin’s population is projected to age most rapidly in its rural communities, according to UW-Madison’s Applied Population Lab. 

Originally from nearby Birnamwood, Hunter moved to the town of Wausau in the 1970s and has worked in public service ever since. For four decades, she wrote federal grants and helped low-income youth map out their futures through the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.

Her entry into town government came by accident. Upset over a town decision to pave the ends of some residents’ driveways, but not hers or her neighbors’, she ran for town treasurer. What began as frustration became a career: She spent 10 years as treasurer and two decades as a supervisor.

Her path shifted again after the former town clerk, Cindy Worden, retired after 30 years on the job. Supervisors appointed a replacement, but she left after two weeks because of a terminal cancer diagnosis. The next clerk resigned within months, overwhelmed by balancing the duties with a full-time job and raising a family.

As the town searched for a clerk, Hunter and fellow supervisor Steve Buntin, a retired auto mechanic, filled in. Supervisors listed the job on Facebook and the town website. Potential candidates declined. Some didn’t want the scrutiny of elections, and others resisted the administrative grind. 

At one point, county officials offered to step in to run elections and charge about $1,000 per election. That was Hunter’s turning point, though stepping into the role meant giving up her vote on the town board — a sacrifice she did not take lightly. 

“After you start, you kind of get hooked,” Hunter said. The residents might be “ornery most of the time,” but helping them navigate difficult choices is public service. “It’s in your blood.”

She can return to being a supervisor if someone else steps up as clerk, but, as Buntin put it, “nobody seems to be knocking down the door.”

Last April, the town asked voters to allow clerks to be appointed rather than elected, which would have permitted hiring someone from outside town limits. The referendum failed narrowly. A new state law has since made it easier for small municipalities to switch to appointments, but the town has yet to make the jump.

“You still have to have somebody come forward who wants to be a clerk,” Meyer said. “Just because the state law changed doesn’t make it all that easy.”

Clerks are hard to recruit, and harder to retain

Wausau sits in Marathon County, home to about 130,000 people. To run elections for that population, the county depends on roughly 60 municipal clerks — one in each city, village and town — layered beneath its elected county clerk. In most similarly sized counties elsewhere, such as St. Joseph County, Indiana, or Frederick County, Maryland, a single county office oversees elections for everyone.

There’s little appetite to abandon Wisconsin’s structure. Local clerks argue decentralization limits errors and keeps elections in familiar hands. But filling dozens of posts — and keeping them filled — is no easy task. Of the 13 new municipal clerks who have taken office in Marathon County since the April 2025 election, including Hunter, four resigned within months, County Clerk Kim Trueblood said. Since then, a fifth clerk — in the city of Wausau — has also stepped down.

Trueblood attributes part of the churn to recruitment practices that understate the job. Town and village chairs often approach potential clerks by describing the work as little more than taking meeting minutes.

“Then they get into a job, and it’s the elections, it’s all of the financial reporting, the liquor licenses, everything that they have to do — it’s just overwhelming,” she said. “And people who work a full-time job and have families, I don’t know how they do it.”

The pay rarely offsets the demands. In the town of Wausau, the clerk makes $27,628 per year plus a $1,000 mileage stipend, with no benefits. The job can require 10 to 20 hours a week — and far more around elections — covering everything from meeting notices and licenses to payroll and ballot administration.

Other municipalities in Marathon County pay far less. Kelley Blume, the clerk in the town of Marathon who’s also a deputy clerk for the county, earned just over $10,000 for her town role in 2025. During election seasons, she said, the hours stretch late into the night.

When she was first approached for the job about 10 years ago, she said town officials told her it would only be a couple of hours per week. 

“It’s not a couple hours,” she said. “I feel bad for all of these new clerks that think it’s going to be easy.”

She is considering stepping down. The added responsibilities have grown heavier each year, she said, and she wants to spend more time with her children and grandchildren.

Waiting for the next name on the ballot

Hunter says she stepped in to preserve something she believes is worth protecting: the idea that elections should be run by people who know the roads and the names on the ballot, who know which farm sits beyond the bend and which houses were built last year. To her, local government isn’t an abstraction. It’s a neighbor answering the phone.

“I do feel local government is critical, and I would hate to see that be taken away from the residents,” Hunter said. “It’s important they have a voice, and it starts at their local government.”

She knows the structure is imperfect, but pride in local control runs deep here, even as the pool of residents willing to shoulder the work grows thinner. Ultimately, she said, the town may have to bend. Communities could share clerks or other services, even if that means loosening borders that have long felt fixed.

She’ll decide later this year whether to run again. If she doesn’t, she said, the town may take another vote on hiring clerks outside of town limits. In the meantime, she has no regrets about stepping up — even if nobody in town seems ready to follow her lead.

“It’s my civic duty,” she said.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.

This coverage is made possible through Votebeat, a nonpartisan news organization covering local election administration and voting access. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Who will run the next election in small-town Wisconsin? No one knows 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.

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Polls show roughly 80% of Americans support requiring photo identification to vote.

Pew Research Center (August 2025): 83% of U.S. adults strongly favored or favored “requiring all voters to show government-issued photo identification to vote.” 

Rasmussen Reports (January 2025): Asked if requiring photo ID to vote is “a reasonable measure to protect the integrity of elections,” 77% of likely voters said yes.

Gallup (October 2024): 84% of U.S. adults favored “requiring all voters to provide photo identification at their voting place.” Also, 83% favored “requiring people who are registering to vote for the first time to provide proof of citizenship.”

The House-passed SAVE America Act, supported by President Donald Trump, is awaiting a Senate vote. It would require voter ID and proof of citizenship at the time of registration.

Thirty-six states request or require identification for in-person voting. Wisconsin requires it.

This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

Sources

• Pew Research Center: 2025 Pew Research Center's American Trends Panel
• Rasmussen Reports: Questions – Voter ID – January 26-28, 2025
• Gallup: Americans Endorse Both Early Voting and Voter Verification
• Bipartisan Policy Center: Five Things to Know About the SAVE Act
• NBC News: Trump's election bill tops 50 Senate votes, but Democrats could still block it
• PolitiFact: House passes Trump-supported voter ID law, Senate passage unlikely
• National Conference of State Legislatures: Voter ID Laws
• Wisconsin Watch: Voter ID

Do 80% of Americans support voter ID? 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.

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Organizers are working to introduce a Montana ballot initiative that could prevent corporations from spending on elections.

The constitutional amendment would alter corporate charters and the power given to “artificial persons” in Montana, barring them from political spending. It attempts to bypass the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which said under the First Amendment the government can’t bar corporations and similar groups from spending money independently to influence elections.

The Montana proposal is not yet on the 2026 ballot after the Montana attorney general and the Montana Supreme Court determined the version was legally insufficient under state constitutional rules, but organizers are refiling new versions in the hopes of getting the initiative on the ballot. 

In Wisconsin, home of the most expensive state Supreme Court races ever, could similar campaign finance laws be put in place? It’s a complicated question, according to legal experts. 

Unlike in Wisconsin, Montana residents can propose changes to the state constitution or statutory law through a citizen petition process. To qualify a constitutional initiative for the ballot, proponents must gather signatures equal to 10% of the state’s electors, including at least 10% of electors in two-fifths of Montana’s legislative districts. Statutory initiatives require signatures equal to 5% of the state’s electors, including at least 5% of electors in one-third of legislative districts.

Similar reforms in Wisconsin would need to come from the Legislature, not from a citizen-led ballot initiative. To place a constitutional amendment on the ballot, lawmakers must approve the same proposal in two consecutive legislative sessions. The amendment would then appear on the statewide ballot, where voters could approve it and make it part of the Wisconsin Constitution by a majority vote. The governor doesn’t have a role in that process.

If Montana’s initiative makes it to the ballot and voters approve it, more litigation is likely to follow, said Derek Clinger, senior counsel at the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School. It’s unclear if the organizer’s argument would survive a constitutional challenge. 

Nevertheless, Montana’s proposed ballot initiative is an interesting conversation starter that could help put “political pressure” on the courts if Montana voters agree to approve a potential amendment, Clinger said. 

“They made a case that doing this would comply with the U.S. Supreme Court precedent and that states have this power to regulate and kind of control what sorts of activities corporations are allowed to participate in,” Clinger said. “It’s an interesting idea what they’re doing in Montana, but I think it would absolutely be litigated, and it’s kind of hard to predict what would happen.”

There are other campaign finance changes Wisconsin politicians could introduce, such as spending limits in judicial elections.

“Judges are supposed to be kind of more above politics compared to legislators and executive officials, and that kind of need to keep judges out of the political fray can justify more campaign finance regulations,” Clinger said. “I think if there was an appetite to impose more regulations on judicial elections in Wisconsin, I think they would have the constitutional ability to do so. But the question is: Is there that appetite?”

Paul Nolette, director of Marquette University’s Les Aspin Center for Government, said it’s a difficult legal environment for supporters of campaign finance reform. 

“Getting laws on the books that make meaningful campaign finance change is just difficult at this particular moment,” Nolette said.

One way to change the system without limiting corporate giving would be more disclosure from so-called “dark money” groups, which can avoid disclosing donors through Super PAC donations. The Arizona Supreme Court allowed legislators to challenge a citizen ballot initiative that called for “dark money” disclosure. More than 70% of voters approved the measure in 2022. 

Legislators also could introduce a more robust public campaign finance system. Wisconsin once had a public financing program for Supreme Court elections as part of the Wisconsin Election Campaign Fund, but it was repealed in 2011. State Sen. Kelda Roys, D-Madison, previously told Wisconsin Watch she was drafting a bill to revive the public financing system and would propose significantly larger grants than the original $100,000 for primary candidates and $300,000 for general election candidates, saying smaller amounts would not meaningfully support competitive campaigns.

“The amount of money in politics, even if it’s just coming from individuals, is still significant enough that it just overwhelms the amount of public money that could be available,” Nolette said.

Apart from the state Legislature, Clinger said the Wisconsin Supreme Court could institute recusal rules, which may discourage partisan campaign donations to justices.

Can Wisconsin do what Montana is attempting to prohibit corporations from donating to campaigns? 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.

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A Dane County judge on Monday rejected the city of Madison’s claim that absentee voting’s characterization in state law as a “privilege” precludes damages against the city for disenfranchising 193 voters and ruled that Madison can face potential financial liability for the error.

In rejecting motions by the city and other defendants to dismiss the case, Dane County Circuit Court Judge David Conway said that a state law describing absentee voting as a privilege does not mean absentee ballots receive less constitutional protection than votes cast in person.

“That right to vote,” Conway wrote, “would be a hollow protection if it did not also include the right to have one’s vote counted.”

Conway also rejected former Madison Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl’s legal argument that there is a meaningful legal difference between intentionally not counting votes and mistakenly failing to count them due to human error. He held that state law allows for people to seek damages against election officials who “negligently deprive citizens of the right to vote.”

“When an election official fails to count a valid absentee ballot, whether by negligence, recklessness, or malice, he or she deprives the absentee voter of that constitutional right,” he wrote. 

The city and Witzel-Behl’s legal argument, made in response to a lawsuit seeking damages on behalf of 193 Madison voters disenfranchised in the 2024 election, drew sharp rebukes from legal experts, Gov. Tony Evers and the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which filed its very first friend-of-the-court brief opposing the rationale. 

Conway dismissed the Madison clerk’s office from the case after arguments that it could not be sued separately from the city, but allowed the case to proceed against the city, Witzel-Behl and Deputy Clerk Jim Verbick. The voters are represented by a liberal election law firm, Law Forward. 

“At the dawn of another election season, the message is clear: The right to vote protects Wisconsinites whether they vote in-person or absentee,” Law Forward staff attorney Scott Thompson told Votebeat. “We are pleased the court agreed with our arguments and that this case will proceed.”

Matt O’Neill, the lawyer representing Witzel-Behl, declined to comment.

Madison spokesperson Dylan Brogan said the city is reviewing the decision and considering its next steps. Brogan stressed that the city “has a long history of promoting and protecting absentee voting and that policy has not changed,” but said monetary damages for unintentional errors would mean money and resources “would be diverted to pay for this human error.”

Madison mayor says ‘nonsensical’ lawsuit could weaken elections

In an interview with Votebeat last week, Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said she didn’t like the state law calling absentee voting a privilege, not a right. But she said that critics should direct their concerns at the Legislature, rather than at the city. 

Rhodes-Conway said the city’s argument “literally repeat(s) what’s in state law.” Legal experts have disputed that characterization, saying the city advanced a novel interpretation of a long-standing statute. Rhodes-Conway said she wasn’t sure those critiques were relevant.

“It shouldn’t be in the law,” she said. “And the state Legislature should take action to correct that and better protect voting in this state.”

The 1985 state law describes absentee voting as a privilege exercised outside the safeguards of the polling place. Another provision requires absentee voters to comply with laws regulating the practice for their votes to count. The law has been cited in lawsuits seeking to restrict absentee voting, but it had never before been used to shield election officials from liability for failing to count valid ballots.

In his Monday ruling, Conway dismissed the city’s interpretation of the law without questioning the statute itself.

“Just because the absentee voting process is a privilege does not mean that those who legally utilize it do not exercise their constitutional right to vote,” he said.

Rhodes-Conway said that, despite using that legal argument in court, the city has consistently promoted absentee voting and will continue to do so.

Rhodes-Conway criticized the lawsuit as a whole, saying that the solution for the city disenfranchising 193 voters in the 2024 presidential election “is not to charge the city of Madison millions of dollars because our clerk’s office made a mistake.” 

“That’s not achieving anything. It’s not making elections better,” she continued. “It’s simply taking money that could be invested in basic services and in election protection and election services, and paying it to the plaintiffs. It’s just nonsensical to me.”

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.

This coverage is made possible through Votebeat, a nonpartisan news organization covering local election administration and voting access. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Court says Madison can be liable for disenfranchising voters 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.

Reading Time: 6 minutes

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

When President Donald Trump pressured state and local officials to intervene in his behalf in the 2020 election, it wasn’t a matter of abstract constitutional theory for the people running elections. It was armed protests outside offices, threats against their families, subpoenas for voter data, and months of uncertainty about whether doing their jobs would land them in legal jeopardy.

Now, Trump says he wants Republicans to “nationalize the voting” and “take over the voting in at least 15 places,” language that evokes the pressure campaigns he and allies mounted during that contentious 2020 period.

Trump’s 2020 effort ultimately stalled when even some Republicans refused to take steps they believed were unlawful. And his call to nationalize voting this week prompted pushback from some GOP members of Congress and other Republican figures.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Trump’s proposal raised constitutional concerns, and he warned that nationalizing elections could make them more susceptible to cybersecurity attacks. Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska was more blunt, saying he has long opposed federal control of elections. “I’ll oppose this now as well,” he wrote on X.

On Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump’s comments referred to his support for federal legislation commonly called the SAVE Act.

Election officials say the lesson of 2020 was not that the system is invulnerable, but that it can be strained in ways that cause lasting damage long before courts step in. While it’s unclear whether Trump’s latest demands — and possible future actions— would lead to the same level of disruption, legal experts say some of the backstops that ultimately stopped him last time are now weaker, leaving election officials to absorb even more pressure.

Memories of 2020 shape the response

Kathy Bernier, a Republican former Wisconsin lawmaker and Chippewa County clerk, was the chair of the state Senate’s election committee following the 2020 election and repeatedly pushed back on Trump’s claims of widespread fraud. As Republicans launched a prolonged review of the results, Bernier criticized the effort publicly, saying Wisconsin’s elections were secure and that “no one should falsely accuse election officials of cheating.”

She faced extensive backlash, including calls for her resignation, and Bernier said the dispute escalated to the point that she carried a gun for protection. She ultimately left the Legislature, a decision that she said wasn’t politically motivated.

A key takeaway from the 2020 election for election officials, Bernier told Votebeat, was the importance of radical transparency — not just following the rules, but showing people, in real time, that the rules are being followed “to a T.”

“When there’s a paper jam,” she said, “announce it.”

Still, she said, officials also learned the limits of that approach. After she tried to boost election confidence across Wisconsin, she came to a blunt conclusion: “There’s nothing you can do with ‘I don’t believe you.’”

In the years that followed, Bernier said, a bigger danger than Trump himself were the “charlatans” who took his words and turned them into a business model, spreading conspiracy theories for profit. The misinformation and disinformation those people spread, Bernier said, continue to resonate among the conspiratorial segments of the GOP.

The impact of their campaigns has been felt acutely by election officials. Many received death threats, and some had to relocate and enhance their security protections. Large cities redesigned their election offices to better protect their workers, and election official turnover increased dramatically, reshaping the profession long after the votes were counted.

Stephen Richer, a Republican who became recorder in Maricopa County, Arizona, shortly after the 2020 election, had similar advice: Follow the law, tell the truth and consult attorneys, national associations and state associations before making key decisions because “the likelihood that they are dealing with your jurisdiction alone is limited.”

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is among the Republicans who prominently resisted Trump’s calls to overturn the 2020 election. He and his wife received death threats and were assigned a protective team by the state. He declined an interview with Votebeat, but in a statement this week, he urged lawmakers to improve state election administration “rather than rehashing the same outdated claims or worse — moving to federalize a core function of state government.”

Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt, another Republican who pushed back on Trump’s baseless allegations of widespread fraud following the 2020 election and faced similar retaliation, told Votebeat that the state’s elections are freer and fairer than ever before and that the Constitution stops Trump from unilaterally nationalizing elections.

The Michigan Department of State, similarly, said this was a settled constitutional matter.

On the other hand, Michigan Republicans have asked the U.S. Justice Department for increased federal involvement in elections in the state, calling for monitors — not atypical in American elections — as well as “oversight,” although GOP leaders didn’t elaborate on what that would mean.

Richer, who lost his reelection bid for recorder in 2024 to another Republican, said Trump’s comments, combined with similar calls for federal involvement, suggest the Republican Party is drifting from its traditional commitment to federalism and local control. He also pointed to increased legislation at the federal level seeking to standardize elections, which has received little pushback from the Republican Party. That’s despite Republicans criticizing an earlier Democratic legislative effort as federal overreach.

“Clearly the federal government is going to do things that it’s never done before,” he said. “The FBI going in and taking materials from an election that happened over five years ago is unprecedented, so maybe we’re destined for additional unprecedented actions.”

Election officials and courts the most significant ‘line of defense’

One of the key reasons that Trump failed in his efforts to delay and then overturn the 2020 election was the “men and women of principle” in his administration, said David Becker, an election lawyer who leads the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation & Research. Becker, a former Justice Department official, said the experience offered an uncomfortable lesson: Those internal guardrails existed because individuals chose to enforce them — and there is less reason to assume they would be there again.

After the 2020 election, Bill Barr, the attorney general at the time, disputed Trump’s claim that there was widespread fraud; the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency similarly disputed the president’s claim that swings in unofficial results during election night meant that there was election fraud; and national security officials reportedly warned Trump that he couldn’t seize voting machines.

“That line of defense is largely gone,” Becker said, because “the primary and perhaps only qualification for being hired by this administration — particularly in those key roles in the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security — is loyalty to this man.”

With fewer internal checks, Becker said, the second and most important line of defense this election cycle is courts and state and local election officials. Courts have already stymied many of the election policies Trump has tried to carry out via executive order, and “election officials are holding firm.” But he cautioned that court challenges take time — time in which “untold damage” can be done to erode public trust and to the officials caught in the middle.

That gap between what Trump can say and what he can actually do is where the risk now lies, said Justin Levitt, an election law professor at Loyola Marymount University who advised President Joe Biden’s administration on democracy and voting rights. Levitt said Trump does not have the legal or operational authority to unilaterally nationalize elections, even if he were inclined to cross legal boundaries.

He contrasted the president’s ability to control elections with ICE’s use of force in Democratic-run cities. In immigration enforcement, Levitt said, Congress has given the executive branch authority that can be exercised aggressively or improperly, even when courts later find those actions unlawful. In those cases, Levitt said, the president has “his finger on a switch” — the practical ability to act first and answer questions later. “No such switch exists” in elections, said Levitt.

But with fewer administration officials pushing back on Trump’s claims compared with his first term, Levitt said election officials can expect Trump’s messaging to get “much, much, much worse this year,” and for those claims to be given more oxygen by the rest of the federal government.

“It’s up to us to choose to believe him or not,” he added. Obedience in advance isn’t required, and treating Trump’s claims as commands would grant him authority he does not have, Levitt said, adding, “We have agency in this.”

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Votebeat staff contributed to this story. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

Election officials draw on sobering 2020 lessons as Trump calls for nationalizing voting 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.

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A misleading claim that Wisconsin has more registered voters than people eligible to vote is gaining traction on social media, including in posts shared this week by President Donald Trump. 

It’s just the latest in a long-running series of claims that misinterpret basic data about voter rolls to create alarm about the risk of voter fraud.

The posts circulating this week cite a video asserting that Wisconsin’s voter rolls contain more than 7 million names — far more than the state’s voting age population — and are overlaid with text reading, “This Is Not a Glitch — This Is Election Fraud Waiting To Happen.”

The video features Peter Bernegger, an entrepreneur who has been convicted of mail fraud and bank fraud. Bernegger has repeatedly promoted false theories about the 2020 election in Wisconsin legislative hearings and repeatedly filed unsuccessful lawsuits against election officials in search of proof for his claims. 

But his claim conflates two datasets in Wisconsin’s voter registration system: the Wisconsin voter list and active registered voters. 

As of July 2025, the state had about 8.3 million names on its list — in line with the number Bernegger cites. But of them, only 3.7 million were active registered voters. The remaining roughly 4.6 million are inactive voters. Inactive records include people who previously registered to vote but later moved out of state, died, lost eligibility because of a felony conviction, or were ruled incompetent to vote by a court. Those individuals haven’t been removed from the voter list, but because of their inactive status, they cannot vote unless they re-register, which requires proof of residency and a photo ID.

Bernegger claims in his video that the list of voters generally grows every day, going down only once every four years, when voters who haven’t cast a ballot in four years are sent postcards asking whether they want to remain registered and then removed from the active list if they don’t respond.

Part of that claim is true: Wisconsin never deletes voter records, so the total database of active and inactive registrations only grows. But the active voter roll, which includes only voters currently eligible to cast a ballot, can shrink. 

By email, Bernegger disputed Votebeat’s characterization of his claims but provided no further proof for them.

The confusion stems from a common misunderstanding about Wisconsin’s voter system, Wisconsin Elections Commission Chair Ann Jacobs, a Democrat, told Votebeat. The pollbooks used to check voters’ eligibility on Election Day contain only active voters, while the broader voter database also retains inactive records. 

The inactive records also detail why a voter was deactivated. Wisconsin state law allows for several reasons for a voter’s registration status to be changed from eligible to ineligible, but there’s no state law calling for the destruction of voter registration records, not even for a voter who has died.

And Jacobs said there’s a good reason for that: Keeping these inactive records indefinitely helps prevent fraud: If somebody tries to register using the identity of a dead voter, for example, clerks can flag that application because the prior record — including the reason it was deactivated — is still on file. 

“It’s actually pro-list-hygiene to have access to that information immediately,” she said.

Interstate databases also play a role in maintaining accurate voter rolls. One such organization, the Electronic Registration Information Center, has helped states including Wisconsin identify hundreds of thousands of voters each year who have moved across state lines and tens of thousands of voters who died. But the system has gaps. Some Republican-led states have left the program, leaving just 25 states and Washington, D.C., participating.

Experts say voter fraud is extremely rare, but Republicans have long argued that dirty voter rolls could enable fraud and reduce confidence. 

Similar misleading claims about voter rolls have circulated in other states, including Michigan, amplified by right-wing figures such as Elon Musk.

Democrats and many election officials typically support regular voter roll maintenance but warn that aggressive cleanup efforts may risk disenfranchising lawful, active voters. 

Wisconsin’s own data shows how infrequently fraud occurs. In its latest report, which covers five elections, the WEC identified just 18 potential instances of fraud. One relates to a voter seeking to vote in two states. Most involved voting after a felony conviction or double-voting by casting an absentee and in-person vote in the same election.

Correction: This story was updated to reflect the number of names on the state’s voter list was 8.3 million.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.

This coverage is made possible through Votebeat, a nonpartisan news organization covering local election administration and voting access. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

No, Mr. President. Wisconsin’s voter roll figures aren’t a sign of ‘fraud waiting to happen’ 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.

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Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers criticized an argument by Madison and its former city clerk that they shouldn’t be held liable for losing 193 absentee ballots because absentee voting is a “privilege,” writing in a court filing that accepting such an argument would “lead to absurd results.”

The argument is key to the city’s defense against a lawsuit that seeks monetary damages on behalf of the 193 Madison residents whose votes in the November 2024 election weren’t counted. It was first presented by the former clerk, Maribeth Witzel-Behl, citing a provision of state law, and then adopted by the city.

If courts accept the argument that absentee voting is a privilege and not a right, the Democratic governor said in a friend-of-the-court brief, election officials would be free to treat absentee ballots in ways that diminish people’s right to vote. For example, he wrote, they would be under no obligation to send voters replacement ballots if ballots they left in a drop box were damaged, and clerks could effectively disqualify ballots from politically disfavored precincts by intentionally not signing their initials on the ballot envelopes.  

Experts say that for a governor to intervene in such a local matter is rare and underscores how seriously Evers views the potential implications. In an earlier communication with the court, the governor said the argument from the city and Witzel-Behl “ignores longstanding state constitutional protections.”

Barry Burden, a political science professor at UW-Madison, said Democrats are likely conflicted by the case, seeking to prevent election administration failures like those in Madison while also resisting arguments that could weaken protections for absentee voting in Wisconsin.

“They’re in a weird place to be criticizing absentee balloting in Madison, one of the most Democratic cities in the state,” he said, adding that he thinks the governor “is speaking for the Democratic Party in getting involved in this case” to convey that it is an “isolated incident” and that the party does not share the position that “absentee voting should be treated any differently in terms of the protections that are given to voters than people who vote in person.’”

In his filing Friday, the governor noted that about 45% of ballots in the 2024 presidential election were absentee.

“The constitutional right to vote,” Evers wrote, “would mean little if close to half of all voters in Wisconsin were deprived of it because they chose to legally cast an absentee ballot.”

Witzel-Behl, former clerk, stands by the ‘privilege’ defense

The lawsuit against Madison officials is a novel type of case in seeking monetary damages over the loss of voting rights. Liberal law firm Law Forward filed the case against the city and the clerk’s office, along with Witzel-Behl and Deputy Clerk Jim Verbick in their personal capacities, alleging that through a series of errors that  led to 193 absentee ballots getting lost in the November 2024 election, election workers disenfranchised the voters and violated their constitutional rights.

As part of their defense, attorneys for Witzel-Behl argued in a court filing that by choosing to vote absentee, the 193 voters “exercised a privilege rather than a constitutional right,” and that she therefore couldn’t be held financially liable for the lost ballots. Madison later joined that argument.

Law Forward rejected the argument in a response filed in late December, calling it a “shocking proposition.”

Attorneys for the city and the former clerk submitted their own briefs last week.

Attorneys for Witzel-Behl reiterated their argument that absentee voting is a privilege and not a constitutional right, adding that “an error in the handling or delivery of an absentee ballot is not the constitutional equivalent of barring the door to the voting booth.”

While absentee ballots should normally be counted, they argued, not counting them because of an unintentional error isn’t a constitutional violation for which they should be financially liable.

Rather than following court precedent, they said, the plaintiffs seek to create a “new, foundationless doctrine allowing monetary damages for the mishandling of an absentee ballot.”

Other defendants zero in on novel monetary claim

In a separate brief, Verbick, the deputy clerk, said he “does not, of course, dispute that Plaintiffs have a right to vote” but rather alleges that there’s no path for the plaintiffs to seek monetary damages for the city’s error.

The city, in another brief, similarly said that no court case cited by Law Forward allows plaintiffs to seek damages for ballots that are unintentionally mishandled. 

Allowing such claims, outside attorneys for the city warned, would push courts into “dangerous, untested waters.” 

“As other courts have cautioned,” they said, “exposing local election officials to financial liability for unintentional disenfranchisement would thrust courts into the minutia of any given election, a role for which courts are unsuited.”

In a separate statement, the city said it believes that all forms of voting, including absentee voting, should be “encouraged, promoted and protected.” But it argued against attaching a dollar amount to a mishandled vote.

Doing so, it said, “would end up regularly costing cities, towns and municipalities hundreds, thousands — or in this case millions — of dollars that could otherwise be spent improving voter access and elections processes.”  

Absentee voting has changed substantially since law’s enactment

The law cited by Witzel-Behl’s attorneys labeling absentee voting a privilege — one that may require more regulation than in-person voting — dates back to 1985. It was enacted after judges in a series of Wisconsin court cases called for more liberal interpretation of absentee voting rules. While it has previously been used to invalidate absentee ballots on which voters did not follow procedure, it has so far not been used in support of a locality failing to properly count votes.

“Absentee voting has changed so radically in the 40 years since the law was written,” Burden said. “It was used by a very small number of voters, it was more difficult to use, there were more witness requirements at the time, and clerks were not really as amenable to absentee voting as they are today.”

Today, absentee voting is an expected and routine part of elections.

“So to treat it as kind of a special class with different rules or rights, maybe in the 1980s that  made more sense,” Burden said. “But now it’s as important as any other kind of voting and so it seems more peculiar, I think, to treat it in some different way.”

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers disputes Madison’s argument that absentee voting is a privilege 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.

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The city of Madison and its former clerk are arguing in court that they can’t be sued for failing to count 193 absentee ballots in the 2024 presidential election, in part because a Wisconsin law calls absentee voting a privilege, not a constitutional right. 

That legal argument raises questions about how much protection absentee voters have against the risk of disenfranchisement — and could reignite a recent debate over whether the law calling absentee voting a privilege is itself unconstitutional.

That law, which appears to be uncommon outside of Wisconsin, has been cited repeatedly in recent years in attempts to impose more requirements and restrictions on absentee voting, and, at times, disqualify absentee ballots on which the voters have made errors. It does not appear to have been invoked to absolve election officials for errors in handling correctly cast ballots.

Nonetheless, the law has become central to the defense presented by Madison and its former clerk, Maribeth Witzel-Behl, in a novel lawsuit seeking monetary damages on behalf of the voters whose ballots went missing. 

The suit, filed by the law firm Law Forward, names the city and the clerk’s office as defendants, along with Witzel-Behl and Deputy Clerk Jim Verbick in their personal capacities, and cites a series of errors after the 2024 election that led to the ballots not being counted in alleging that they violated voters’ constitutional rights. 

In defending against that claim, attorneys for Witzel-Behl argued in a court filing that by choosing to vote absentee, the 193 disenfranchised voters “exercised a privilege rather than a constitutional right.”

Witzel-Behl’s filing argues that the 193 disenfranchised voters did, in fact, exercise their right to vote, but chose to vote absentee and therefore place the ballots into an administrative system that “can result in errors.”

“The fact that Plaintiffs’ ballots were not counted is unfortunate,” the filing states. “But it is the result of human error, not malice. And that human error was not a violation of the Plaintiffs’ constitutional right to vote.” 

Matthew W. O’Neill, an attorney representing Witzel-Behl, declined to comment.

The city’s attorneys have now adopted the same argument, filings show. 

Asked about the city’s legal defense, current Madison clerk Lydia McComas didn’t address the argument directly but told Votebeat that the city is committed to counting all eligible votes “regardless of how they are cast.”

Phil Keisling, a former Oregon secretary of state, said he wasn’t aware of other states with similar laws. He said he found the city’s argument wrong and offensive. 

“The right to vote, if there is a state constitutional right to vote, should have nothing to do with the form that a voter chooses,” he said.

Law passed to clarify absentee voting requirements

The law that Madison cites in its legal defense was enacted in 1985, long before absentee voting became widespread. The stricter language about the regulation of absentee voting came after judges in a series of Wisconsin court cases called for more liberal interpretation of those regulations.

The law states that while voting is a constitutional right, “voting by absentee ballot is a privilege exercised wholly outside the traditional safeguards of the polling place.” A subsequent provision states that absentee ballots that do not follow required procedures “may not be counted.”

The law appears similar to a 1969 U.S. Supreme Court decision that drew a distinction between the right to vote and the right to receive absentee ballots. That decision has since been interpreted — and misinterpreted — in a “number of ways by a number of people wanting to trim back mail voting,” said Justin Levitt, an election law professor at Loyola Marymount University.

After the Wisconsin law was enacted, the state election board clarified the Legislature’s position that failing to comply with procedures for absentee ballot applications and voting would result in ballots not being counted. The board did not suggest the law could be used to excuse municipalities that improperly discard legally cast ballots.

Absentee voting has long been available in Wisconsin but surged in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic and has been extensively litigated since then.

The law calling absentee voting a privilege was central to a lawsuit that resulted in a 2022 statewide ban on ballot drop boxes; another lawsuit to prohibit voters from being able to spoil ballots and vote with a new one; and President Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election outcome in Wisconsin.

A later lawsuit led to the reinstatement of drop boxes in 2024. In that case, plaintiffs argued that the law “unconstitutionally degrades the voting rights of all absentee voters by increasing the risk of disenfranchisement.” The court, then led by liberal justices, declined to overturn the statute but disagreed with an earlier interpretation that absentee voting requires heightened skepticism.

Experts say Madison’s defense misinterprets the law

Rick Hasen, a professor at UCLA Law School and expert on election law, said he didn’t think the law itself was problematic, adding that states have various laws controlling absentee voting. The U.S. Constitution, he noted, doesn’t require any state to offer absentee voting.

But “once the state gives someone the opportunity to vote by mail,” he said, “then they can’t — as a matter of federal constitutional law — deprive that person of their vote because they chose a method that the state didn’t have to offer.”

The city and Witzel-Behl’s use of the law in this instance “seems to be wrong,” Hasen said.

Attorneys for Law Forward in a court filing called Witzel-Behl’s argument a “shocking proposition.”

“There is no right to vote if our votes are not counted,” Law Forward staff attorney Scott Thompson told Votebeat. “And this is the only case I’m aware of where a municipal government has argued otherwise.” 

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.

This coverage is made possible through Votebeat, a nonpartisan news organization covering local election administration and voting access. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Madison’s defense in missing ballot case: Absentee voting is a ‘privilege,’ not a right 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.

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The U.S. Postal Service adopted a rule effective Dec. 24 clarifying that some mail is not postmarked when it is first received – at a post office, for example – but rather on a later date, during processing.

The rule doesn’t change practices, but instead is “intended to improve public understanding of postmarks and their relationship to the date of mailing.”

Postmarking can affect whether local officials accept election ballots.

Fourteen states, including Illinois, accept a mailed ballot if it is received after Election Day, as long as it is postmarked on or before Election Day.

Thirty-six states, including Wisconsin, require absentee ballots, including those cast by mail, to be received by the local election office by Election Day. They aren’t affected by the rule change.

Manual postmarks can be requested at post offices.

The postal service has been reducing operations, increasing postmarking delays, the Brookings think tank reported.

This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

Sources

• Federal Register: Postmarks and Postal Possession
• National Conference of State Legislatures: Receipt and Postmark Deadlines for Absentee/Mail Ballots
• Brookings: When a postmark no longer tracks mailing
• Wisconsin Elections Commission: Vote Absentee By Mail
• Washington Post: Thousands of mail-in ballots could be discounted under new post office policy
• San Francisco Chronicle: USPS quietly changes how postmarks work — and it could affect mail-in ballots

Does the US Postal Service always postmark an election ballot on the day it is mailed? 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.

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For nearly two weeks following Election Day in 2024, former U.S. Senate candidate Eric Hovde, a Republican, refused to concede, blasting “last-minute absentee ballots that were dropped in Milwaukee at 4 a.m., flipping the outcome.”

But, just as when Donald Trump blamed Milwaukee for his 2020 loss, Hovde’s accusations and insinuations about the city’s election practices coincided with a surge of conspiratorial posts about the city. Popular social media users speculated about “sabotage” and “fraudulently high” turnout.

Hovde earlier this year told Votebeat that he believes there are issues at Milwaukee’s facility for counting absentee ballots, but he added that he doesn’t blame his loss on that. He didn’t respond to a request for comment in December for this article.

In Wisconsin’s polarized political landscape, Milwaukee has become a flashpoint for election suspicion, much like Philadelphia and Detroit — diverse, Democratic urban centers that draw outsized criticism. The scrutiny reflects the state’s deep rural-urban divide and a handful of election errors in Milwaukee that conspiracy theorists have seized on, leaving the city’s voters and officials under constant political pressure.

That treatment, Milwaukee historian John Gurda says, reflects “the general pattern where you have big cities governed by Democrats” automatically perceived by the right “as centers of depravity (and) insane, radical leftists.”

Charlie Sykes — a longtime conservative commentator no longer aligned with much of GOP politics — said there’s “nothing tremendously mysterious” about Republicans singling out Milwaukee: As long as election conspiracy theories dominate the right, the heavily Democratic city will remain a target.

Milwaukee voters and election officials under constant watch

Milwaukee’s emergence as a target in voter fraud narratives accelerated in 2010, when dozens of billboards in the city’s predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods showed three people, including two Black people, behind bars with the warning: “VOTER FRAUD is a FELONY — 3 YRS & $10,000 FINE.” 

Community groups condemned them as racist and misleading, especially for people who had regained their voting rights after felony convictions. Similar billboards returned in 2012, swapping the jail bars for a gavel. All of the advertisements were funded by the Einhorn Family Foundation, associated with GOP donor Stephen Einhorn, who didn’t respond to Votebeat’s email requesting comment.

Criticism of Milwaukee extends well beyond its elections. As Wisconsin’s largest city, it is often cast as an outlier in a largely rural state, making it easier for some to believe the worst about its institutions — including its elections.

“One of the undercurrents of Wisconsin political history is … rural parts versus urban parts,” said University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee political scientist and former Democratic legislator Mordecai Lee. As the state’s biggest city by far, “it becomes the punching bag for outstate legislators” on almost any issue.

“People stay at home and watch the evening news and they think if you come to Milwaukee, you’re going to get shot … or you’re going to get run over by a reckless driver,” said Claire Woodall, who ran the city’s elections from 2020 to 2024.

Election officials acknowledge Milwaukee has made avoidable mistakes in high-stakes elections but describe them as quickly remedied and the kinds of errors any large city can experience when processing tens of thousands of ballots. What sets Milwaukee apart is the scrutiny: Whether it was a briefly forgotten USB stick in 2020 or tabulator doors left open in 2024, each lapse is treated as something more ominous.

Other Wisconsin municipalities have made more consequential errors without attracting comparable attention: In 2011, Waukesha County failed to report votes from Brookfield when tallying a statewide court race — a major oversight that put the wrong candidate in the lead in early unofficial results. In 2024, Summit, a town in Douglas County, disqualified all votes in an Assembly race after officials discovered ballots were printed with the wrong contest listed. 

“I don’t believe that there is anywhere in the state that is under a microscope the way the city of Milwaukee is,” said Neil Albrecht, a former executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission. 

Black Milwaukeeans say racism behind scrutiny on elections

Milwaukee grew quickly in the 19th century, built by waves of European immigrants who powered its factories and breweries and helped turn it into one of the Midwest’s major industrial cities. A small Black community, searching for employment and fleeing the Jim Crow South, took root early and grew substantially in the mid-20th century.

As industry declined, white residents fled for the suburbs, many of which had racist housing policies that excluded Blacks. That left behind a city marked by segregated schools, shrinking job prospects and sharp economic divides. The split was so stark that the Menomonee River Valley became a shorthand boundary: Black residents to the north, white residents to the south — a divide Milwaukee never fully overcame.

The result is one of the most segregated cities in the country, a place that looks and feels profoundly different from the overwhelmingly white, rural communities that surround it. That contrast has long made Milwaukee an easy target in statewide politics, and it continues to feed some people’s suspicions that something about the city — including its elections — is fundamentally untrustworthy.

The Rev. Greg Lewis, executive director of Wisconsin’s Souls to the Polls, said the reputation is rooted in racism and belied by reality. He said he has a hard enough time getting minorities to vote at all, “let alone vote twice.” 

Albrecht agreed.

“If a Souls to the Polls bus would pull up to (a polling site), a bus full of Black people, some Republican observer would mutter, ‘Oh, these are the people being brought up from Chicago,’” he said. “As if we don’t have African Americans in Milwaukee.” 

After former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes — a Black Milwaukeean and a Democrat — lost his 2022 U.S. Senate bid to unseat U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, Bob Spindell, a Republican member of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, emailed constituents saying Republicans “can be especially proud” of Milwaukee casting 37,000 fewer votes than in 2018, “with the major reduction happening in the overwhelming Black and Hispanic areas.”

The message sparked backlash, though Spindell rejected accusations of racism. Asked about it this year, Spindell told Votebeat he meant to praise GOP outreach to Black voters.

Milwaukee organizer Angela Lang said she finds the shifting narratives about Black turnout revealing. “Are we voting (illegally)?” she said. “Or are you all happy that we’re not voting?”

History of real and perceived errors increases pressure on city

The scrutiny directed at Milwaukee falls on voters and the city employees who run its elections. 

Milwaukee’s most serious stumble came in 2004, when a last-minute overhaul of the election office contributed to unprocessed voter registrations, delayed absentee counts and discrepancies in the final tally. Multiple investigations found widespread administrative problems but no fraud. 

“It was hard coming in at that low point,” said Albrecht, who joined the commission the following year, saying it gave Milwaukee the reputation as an “election fraud capital.”

In 2008, the city created a centralized absentee ballot count facility to reduce errors at polling places and improve consistency. The change worked as intended, but it also meant Milwaukee’s absentee results — representing tens of thousands of votes — were often reported after midnight, sometimes shifting statewide margins.

That timing is largely a product of state law: Wisconsin is one of the few states that prohibit clerks from processing absentee ballots before Election Day. For years, Milwaukee officials have asked lawmakers to change the rule. Instead, opponents argue the city can’t be trusted with extra processing time — even as they criticize the late-night results all but unavoidable under the current rule.

That dynamic was on full display in 2018, when former Gov. Scott Walker, trailing in his reelection bid, said he was blindsided by Milwaukee’s 47,000 late-arriving absentee ballots and accused the city of incompetence.

Proposals to allow administrators more time to process ballots — and therefore report results sooner — have repeatedly stalled in the Legislature. The most recent passed the Assembly last session but never received a Senate vote, with some Republicans openly questioning why they should give Milwaukee more time when they don’t trust the city to handle the ballots with the time it already has. 

“The late-arriving results of absentee ballots processed in the city of Milwaukee benefits all attempts to discredit the city,” Albrecht said. 

Without the change, to keep up with other Wisconsin municipalities, Milwaukee must process tens of thousands of absentee ballots in a single day, a herculean task. “The effect of not passing it means this issue can be kept alive,” said Lee, the UW-Milwaukee political scientist.

Some Republicans acknowledge that dynamic outright. Rep. Scott Krug, a GOP lawmaker praised for his pragmatic approach to election policy, has long supported a policy fix. This session, it doesn’t appear to be going anywhere. 

Krug said a small but influential faction on the right has built a kind of social network around election conspiracy theories, many focused on Milwaukee. Because the tight counting window is part of the fuel that keeps that group going, he said, “a fix is a problem for them.”

2020 marked the shift to ‘complete insanity’

Albrecht said that while Milwaukee had long operated under an unusual level of suspicion, the scrutiny that followed 2020 represented a shift he described as “complete insanity.”

That year, in the early hours after Election Day, Milwaukee released its absentee totals, but then-election chief Woodall realized she’d left a USB drive in one tabulator. Woodall called her deputy clerk about it, and the deputy had a police officer take the USB drive to the county building. The mistake didn’t affect results — the audit trail matched — but it was enough to ignite right-wing talk radio and fuel yet more conspiratorial claims about the city’s late-night reporting.

The scrutiny only intensified. A joking email exchange between Woodall and an elections consultant, taken out of context, was perceived by some as proof of fraud after Gateway Pundit and a now-defunct conservative state politics site published it. Threats followed, serious enough that police and the FBI stepped in. Woodall pushed for increased security at the city’s election office, saying that “there was no question” staff safety was at risk.

A similar dynamic played out again in 2024, when workers discovered that doors on absentee tabulators hadn’t been fully closed. With no evidence of tampering but anticipating backlash, officials zeroed out the machines and recounted every ballot. The fix didn’t stop Republicans, including Johnson, from suggesting something “very suspicious” could be happening behind the scenes. Johnson did not respond to a request for comment. 

Meanwhile, errors in other Wisconsin communities, sometimes far more consequential, rarely draw similar attention. Take Waukesha County’s error in 2011 — a mistake that swung thousands of votes and affected which candidate was in the lead. “But it didn’t stick,” said UW-Madison’s Barry Burden, a political science professor. “People don’t talk about Waukesha as a place with rigged or problematic elections.”

In recent years there was only one substantiated allegation of serious election official wrongdoing: In November 2022, Milwaukee deputy clerk Kimberly Zapata was charged with misconduct in office and fraud for obtaining fake absentee ballots. 

A month prior, she had ordered three military absentee ballots using fake names and sent the ballots to a Republican lawmaker, an effort she reportedly described as an attempt to expose flaws in the election system. Zapata said those events stemmed from a “complete emotional breakdown.” She was sentenced to one year of probation for election fraud.

“We didn’t hear as much from the right” about those charges, Woodall said. 

More recently, the GOP has raised concerns about privacy screens — a curtain hung last November to block a staging area and, earlier this year, a room with frosted windows. Republicans seized on each, claiming the city was hiding something.

Paulina Gutiérrez, the city’s election director, told Votebeat the ballots temporarily kept behind the curtain “aren’t manipulated. They’re scanned and sent directly onto the floor,” where observers are free to watch the envelopes be opened and the ballots be counted.

But the accusations took off anyway. Even Johnson, the U.S. senator, suggested the city was “making sure NO ONE trusts their election counts.”

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Here’s why Milwaukee elections are always viewed with suspicion 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.

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Update:

A Wisconsin judge ruled Monday there is enough evidence to proceed to trial in a felony forgery case against an attorney and an aide to President Donald Trump for their role in the 2020 fake elector scheme.

Dane County Circuit Judge John Hyland ruled that there was probable cause to proceed with the 11 felony forgery charges against Jim Troupis, who was Trump’s campaign attorney in Wisconsin, and Mike Roman, Trump’s director of Election Day operations in 2020.

The preliminary hearing of a third person charged, former Trump attorney Ken Chesebro, was postponed amid questions about what statements the man made to prosecutors that could be admitted in court.

— Scott Bauer, The Associated Press

Original story:

Five years after the 2020 presidential election, state-led cases against individuals involved in “fake elector” plans to overturn that year’s election results in favor of President Donald Trump have hit roadblocks.

Just this fall, a judge in Michigan dismissed the state’s case against 15 people accused of falsely acting as electors to certify the presidential election for Trump in 2020. A Georgia prosecutor, who took over that state’s case in November after the district attorney was removed, dropped the charges against Trump and other people who were accused of 2020 election interference in the state. 

But unlike Michigan and Georgia, Wisconsin’s criminal case has not faced such legal stumbles so far. A preliminary hearing in the criminal case against former Trump campaign attorneys Kenneth Chesebro and Jim Troupis and former campaign aide Michael Roman was held Monday morning in Dane County Circuit Court. 

Legal experts said Wisconsin’s case at this point differs from those in Michigan and Georgia in key ways. There have been no major scandals so far, no changes have been made to people overseeing the case, and Wisconsin’s prosecution has a narrower focus than those in other states, said Lori Ringhand, a constitutional and election law professor at the University of Georgia School of Law. 

“The prosecution isn’t of the electors,” Ringhand said. “It’s of the actual people, the very high-level Trump campaign people, attorneys who are accused of facilitating the entire scheme.” 

Democratic Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul in June 2024 charged Chesebro, Troupis and Roman with 11 felony forgery counts each for generating documents that falsely claimed Trump won Wisconsin in 2020. The three men allegedly originated the fake electors plan in Wisconsin that spread to other swing states across the country with close vote margins between Trump and former President Joe Biden. 

Wisconsin’s focus on Chesebro, Troupis and Roman could be a stronger case than if the state focused on the slate of false electors, Ringhand said. That’s because it’s hard to prove intent in the cases targeting just electors. 

In the Michigan case, the Associated Press reported the judge in September said that the state failed to prove the electors had intended to commit fraud. A majority of the Wisconsin false electors said they did not believe their signatures certifying a Trump election in the state would be sent to Washington, D.C., according to an amended criminal complaint filed in December 2024. 

“Against the electors themselves, I think it was going to be difficult to prove that they were intending to do something false or fraudulent, as opposed to just creating backup slates,” Ringhand said. “That evidence may look different with these people who are the very high-level organizers of the kind of nationwide effort to create these slates in order to perpetuate this narrative or create challenges or confusion on the House floor.” 

The case in Georgia, which included Trump as a defendant, was marred by scandal as Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis was ultimately disqualified after news surfaced that she had a romantic relationship with a member of her prosecution team. That slowed the legal process, Ringhand said, and the new prosecutor saw challenges in the time delays and potentially prosecuting a sitting president. 

While Wisconsin’s case hasn’t faced these obstacles, some could surface in the future, said Jeff Mandell, general counsel and co-founder of Law Forward. The organization filed a civil case against the state’s false electors, which was settled in 2023. 

Mandell pointed out that it’s already taken the state a year and a half to just reach a preliminary hearing. The defendants this year have sought multiple times to dismiss the charges. Troupis, a former Dane County judge, last week requested all Dane County judges be prohibited from overseeing the case “to avoid the appearance of bias or impropriety.” Additionally, the Associated Press reported Friday that Wisconsin U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson asked the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate allegations from Troupis that the judge overseeing his case is guilty of misconduct.

More efforts to delay and “throw sand in the gears” could show up as the Wisconsin case advances, Mandell said.

“It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if one of the things the defendants have in mind is trying to make sure they don’t go to trial until after the 2026 election,” Mandell said. “Maybe they think there’s going to be a new attorney general who will drop the charge.”

Kaul is seeking reelection as attorney general next year. Fond du Lac County District Attorney Eric Toney, a Republican who ran against Kaul in 2022, announced in October his plan to challenge Kaul again in 2026. 

Trump in November pardoned those involved in efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, including the three from Wisconsin still facing prosecution, but that action only protects those people from federal prosecutions.

Wisconsin prosecution of 2020 fake elector scheme moves ahead as other state efforts falter 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.

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The Wisconsin Elections Commission on Thursday declined to send the state’s unredacted voter rolls to the federal government, joining more than a dozen states pushing back against disclosing sensitive voter information.

The commission’s move comes as the U.S. Department of Justice has asked all 50 states for their voter files — massive lists containing significant personal information on every voter in the country — claiming they are central to its mission of enforcing election law. 

“The U.S. DOJ is simply asking the commission to do something that the commission is explicitly forbidden by Wisconsin law to do,” said Don Millis, a Republican appointee on the Wisconsin Elections Commission. “There’s a clear consensus that personally identifiable information is to be protected.”

While pieces of these lists are public, election officials typically redact voters’ Social Security numbers, driver’s license information and dates of birth before issuing them in response to records requests. The DOJ, in many cases, has asked for information not traditionally made public. That was also the case in Wisconsin: The DOJ requested voters’ partial Social Security numbers, license numbers and dates of birth. 

The Wisconsin Elections Commission — which is made up of three Democrats and three Republicans — ultimately voted in closed session to send the DOJ a letter declining the request for unredacted voter information. Republican commissioner Bob Spindell appeared to be the only member in favor of cooperating with the federal government and said Wisconsin will likely face a lawsuit as a result of the commission’s choice. 

The letter, signed by every commissioner except Spindell, says state law “explicitly prohibits” sending the unredacted voter list.

Officials in both Democratic and Republican states have pushed back on disclosing their voter rolls in response to these requests. On a podcast with conservative talk radio host Joe Pags, Assistant U.S. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said these states were refusing to cooperate because they were embarrassed that their voter rolls were not sufficiently cleared of inactive or unlawful registrants. 

Rather, many states, like Colorado, have said the federal government isn’t entitled to unredacted voter information that could put voters at risk. The DOJ, they say, has not provided sufficient explanation for how the data will be used.

In early December, after receiving a memorandum of understanding similar to the one sent to Wisconsin, Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold told the DOJ to “take a hike,” adding that she “will not help Donald Trump undermine our elections.” The DOJ sued Griswold just over a week later.

All 50 states were asked to turn over their voting rolls, Dhillon said on the podcast: Four states have voluntarily cooperated, 12 are in negotiations, and 14 have been sued by the DOJ over their refusal.

Wisconsin election officials have repeatedly said that federal officials can obtain the publicly available, and therefore redacted, voter roll the same way anybody else can: by purchasing it online for $12,500.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Wisconsin Elections Commission refuses to send Justice Department unredacted voter list 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.