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

Shortly after former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman commenced his error-ridden and fruitless investigation into the state’s 2020 election, he raised eyebrows when he derided chief election official Meagan Wolfe’s clothing choices.

“Black dress, white pearls — I’ve seen the act, I’ve seen the show,” he said on a conservative radio program in spring 2022.

Not long after that comment, Wolfe was scheduled to appear at a county clerk conference, and a county clerk bought fake pearl necklaces for everyone in the room, according to Wood County Clerk Trent Miner, a Republican.

“Every one of us, men, women … were wearing those pearl necklaces to show support for her,” he said. “There’s nothing but support from the county clerks for Meagan and the job that she does.”

In contrast with that virtually unanimous support from clerks, he said, most of the criticism she’s received is based on false conspiracy theories or from people who don’t know her or understand her role on the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

Since becoming the commission’s nonpartisan administrator six years ago, Wolfe has faced death threats, repeated efforts to oust her, opposition from President-elect Donald Trump, and more lawsuits than you can count on two hands.

It’s the kind of intense pressure that has caused many election officials to leave their roles in recent years. But in the eyes of other election officials, Wolfe has thrived. Many of her peers say she is a nonpartisan and clear-headed model for navigating the world of election administration at a time when election officials are under ever-increasing scrutiny.

For Wolfe, that pressure was just a din of mostly political noise seeping into the already-complicated work of election administration. Even before the 2020 election, she learned how to cope with a level of stress that has now become the norm.

“I cannot imagine what it would be like to be in a position or an environment where we’re not constantly putting out fires,” Wolfe told Votebeat. “I’ve come to really like and appreciate those challenges. Where a challenge comes up, we have to figure out how to overcome it, how to accomplish this thing that’s never been done before.”

Politics inherent to the job for Wolfe

Wolfe, who has degrees in strategic communications and English writing, came into her administrative job with a long election background. That stands out from the many election chiefs across the country who start their roles with little or no election experience.

When Wolfe was hired at the commission’s predecessor, the Government Accountability Board in 2011, her role was to help implement and train clerks and voters about the state’s new voter ID law. The law, which was the target of litigation, was “very divisive,” Wolfe said.

In her training sessions, she said, “I’d start everything by saying, ‘I’m not here to talk about if this is a good law or this is a bad law. I’m just here to tell you what the law is and what we all need to know to be able to navigate it.’”

Those experiences, along with the continuing political and legal battles she faces, she said, have given her an ability “to separate the noise that’s intended to distract us, intended to sway us from what the important things are that actually deserve our resources and our attention.”

“If you don’t have that experience and perspective,” she said, “then it’s really easy to fall into the trap of, here’s this really loud voice or this really loud claim that’s being made, let’s shift all of our resources and our time and everything over to dealing with that, and then it allows other things to fall by the wayside.”

Wolfe moved into IT and leadership roles before becoming administrator in 2018. Some of her work has been groundbreaking across the country.

For example, Wolfe oversaw the in-house development of the statewide registration system and made Wisconsin among the first states to deploy multi-factor authentication for election officials to access that type of system — a crucial cybersecurity tool.

Wisconsin seems like an “unlikely candidate” to develop those complex systems, Wolfe said, but the state has the most decentralized election system in the nation, which means there are few ready-made programs that it could easily implement.

“We’re used to having to just sort of trailblaze,” she said.

Both of those systems became models for other states, including Rhode Island, whose former election director Rob Rock called Wolfe when the state was trying to develop its own custom-built system.

“I really had no idea how to do this, and so to have someone who kind of helped me out through this process was really instrumental,” said Rock, who is now Rhode Island’s deputy secretary of state. “We certainly wouldn’t have the system we have today if it wasn’t for folks like Meagan and her insight into how they did it in Wisconsin.”

Added Rock, “Meagan is one of the best election administrators in this country. I say that without hesitation at all.”

Wolfe’s accomplishments led to her taking leadership roles in national organizations, such as the Electronic Registration Information Center and National Association of State Election Directors.

Last year, the latter organization gave Wisconsin an award for developing a set of videos outlining how elections work.

Clerks recall Wolfe being there in times of need

A significant portion of Wolfe’s job is to be a conduit between state and local election officials.

She appears at clerk conferences to update local election officials on changing laws and oversees programs to train an ever-evolving cast of full- and part-time county and municipal clerks.

Marathon County Clerk Kim Trueblood, a Republican, said she has come to lean on Wolfe, sometimes for emotional support and other times for advice.

This past election cycle, Trueblood faced a contentious primary from an opponent who, she said, accused her of corruption and targeted her over an outstanding speeding ticket, calling her a fugitive from justice and saying she was unfit to serve.

As the attacks wore on, Trueblood said, Wolfe gave her a call to see how she was doing.

“She was not taking any sides,” Trueblood said. “She wasn’t involving herself politically at all. She was just checking in on a fellow human.”

“That says a lot about a person’s character,” Trueblood added.

Another local election official, Douglas County Clerk Kaci Jo Lundgren, a Democrat, recalled Wolfe being there for her when she was in a pinch.

Ahead of the August election this year, Lundgren mistakenly assigned the wrong Assembly district on every ballot in a small town. After catching the error on election day, Lundgren said, one of her first moves was to call Wolfe for advice.

There wasn’t much the commission could do, Lundgren recalled, but Wolfe offered her templates to communicate the error to the town’s voters. Additionally, Lundgren said Wolfe provided emotional support.

“I felt like one mistake ruined everything for me. And she affirmed that I was here because I’m doing a good job, and I’m upset because I care,” Lundgren said. “She knows what it’s like to deal with difficult situations in elections, and because it was my first time having to deal with something so difficult, it was just nice to have her as a resource.”

One figure in national elections, Carolina Lopez, the executive director of the Partnership for Large Election Jurisdictions, recalled a particularly volatile time in Wisconsin elections around 2022, when courts were flip-flopping on the legality of drop boxes.

During that time, she said, the elections commission sent rapid updates to make local election officials aware of the recent changes.

“That’s probably the biggest thing you could do for … your counties and the people that you partner with – it’s prompt communication, clear communication.”

For all the credit that clerks give Wolfe, the state’s top election official said she has it easy compared to them.

“If we don’t have them and we don’t have people that are resilient and resourceful and compassionate and tough in each of our communities, then this doesn’t work, right?” Wolfe said. “And so my job is really just to support them.”

Wolfe becomes GOP target after 2020 election

After the 2020 election, a multitude of prominent Republicans, including Trump, blamed Wolfe for Trump’s loss in that year’s election. They baselessly alleged fraud and called for investigations and her ouster, blaming her for a slew of decisions by election commissioners that she had no vote on, like bypassing a state law that ordinarily requires sending election officials to conduct elections in nursing homes.

Calls for a new administrator haven’t entirely ceased. But now, over four years after Wolfe became a target, scores of people in the election community — and even many Republican leaders — are ready to move on.

The Legislature’s top Republican, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, was recently asked on WISN 12 if the Assembly would move to impeach Wolfe. Vos, who had authorized Gableman’s investigation, called it unlikely, adding, “I really want 2020 to be in the rearview mirror.”

Trueblood, the Marathon County clerk, said there’s a sense of camaraderie between local election officials and Wolfe, especially after she became targeted in the wake of the 2020 election.

“For a while, she wasn’t going anywhere by herself for fear of her own safety,” Trueblood said. “I don’t care what your political feelings about somebody are, things like that just aren’t okay. And I think we all developed a really close bond with her.”

If that vitriol gets under Wolfe’s skin, she’s not expressing it.

“I’ve always felt really strongly that we cannot allow people threatening us, harassing us, bullying us, whatever you want to call it – we cannot allow that to sway how we behave or, in my position, to stop me from going out and talking to the public about how elections work,” Wolfe said. “Because in some ways I view that as almost giving in to partisan pressure … and I’m just not going to do that.”

Smooth 2024 election sign that Wolfe should continue, former chief says

Despite efforts to move forward, the fight to target and oust Wolfe has continued into 2024, past the November election, which for the most part went off without a hitch.

After 2020, the commission received thousands of calls and emails replete with election conspiracy theories and false claims, she said. Since the 2024 election, she said, conspiracy theory-laden calls and emails number in the single digits.

At least one significant hurdle awaits, though.

As Wolfe’s term expired in the summer of 2023, the election commission deadlocked on her reappointment. She remained in her role as a holdover appointee and, along with the commission, filed a lawsuit against GOP legislative leaders who sought to oust her.

That case is pending before the Wisconsin Supreme Court. In November’s oral arguments, a majority of justices appeared skeptical of the argument against her.

Both of Wolfe’s predecessors expressed support for her to stay in her job.

Mike Haas, who was administrator at the accountability board and later became the commission’s first administrator, said the smooth administration of the 2024 election “is evidence that the right person is in the job and should continue in it.”

Added Haas, “It would be nice in Wisconsin if we could get to a position of people supporting election officials, rather than being focused on creating imaginary conspiracy theories.”

Kevin Kennedy, who was Wisconsin’s chief election official for over 30 years, said both he and Haas were replaceable — and Wolfe is too.

But Kennedy wondered why people would want to replace “someone who’s really good.”

“I think it’s best for Wisconsin if she stays,” he said.

For her part, Wolfe said she has “no immediate plans to leave” if she wins that case and continues to receive the election commissioners’ approval. She has many ongoing projects, but also wants to gauge what next year looks like, she said.

Wolfe also questioned whether she may get in the way of her agency’s functions, like budget negotiations. If there’s ever a time “where me being in this role seems like it’s not productive to the needs of our agency or the state,” she said, then she may reevaluate staying at the commission, “because this isn’t about me. It’s much bigger and more important than me.”

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.

How Meagan Wolfe navigates intense scrutiny to make elections and her peers stronger 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.

Update, Dec. 12, 2024: A federal judge dismissed the Republican Party of Wisconsin lawsuit on Thursday, saying there’s no controversy over the main issue in the case. Both the GOP and the defendants agree they should cast electoral votes for President-elect Donald Trump on Dec. 17, in compliance with a federal law, not the Dec. 16 date dictated under a state law.

Original story: The Republican Party of Wisconsin filed a lawsuit Friday to resolve a discrepancy between state and federal law directing when appointed presidential electors must meet to cast Electoral College votes.

State law requires presidential electors to meet on Dec. 16 this year, but a federal law passed two years ago calls for them to meet on Dec. 17. The state GOP is calling on a U.S. District Court of Western Wisconsin judge to enforce the federal requirement and strike the state one.

“The presidential electors cannot comply with both requirements,” the lawsuit states.

Resolving the current conflict is key to avoiding the state’s electoral votes getting challenged or contested in Congress, the state GOP states.

The lawsuit highlights the Legislature’s failure to pass a bill that would have brought Wisconsin in line with the new federal law. That inaction, the state GOP says, “led to the current conflict between the federal and state statutes.”

The lawsuit is filed against Gov. Tony Evers, Attorney General Josh Kaul and Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe.

The GOP is asking for the federal court to declare the current state law requirement — for the electors to meet on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December, as opposed to the federal law’s requirement to meet on the first Tuesday following the second Wednesday — unconstitutional and unenforceable. Given the tight timeline, it’s seeking a hearing “as soon as the Court’s calendar allows.”

Spokespeople for the Wisconsin Elections Commission and Evers declined to comment for this story. 

Generally, federal law supersedes state law if there’s a conflict between the two, said Bryna Godar, a staff attorney at the University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative. Under the current, conflicting laws, electors this year definitely have to meet on Dec. 17, but it’s less clear what they should do on Dec. 16, she told Votebeat in May.

The new designated day arose as a result of the new federal law, commonly called the Electoral Count Reform Act. Congress designed the law in 2022 to prevent the post-election chaos that then-President Donald Trump and his allies created after the 2020 election, which culminated in efforts to send fake electoral votes to Congress, block certification of legitimate electoral votes and then storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. 

The new federal law sets specific schedules for certifying election results and casting electoral votes. It cleared up ambiguities contained in the previous version of the law, which was enacted in 1887 but never updated until two years ago. 

As of mid-October, 15 states had updated their laws to comply with the Electoral Count Reform Act, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. A Wisconsin proposal to bring the state in line with the new federal law passed the Senate nearly unanimously in February. But it never received a vote in the Assembly. 

“It would have been beneficial if Wisconsin had also done that,” Godar said.

Scott Thompson, a staff attorney at the liberal-leaning legal group Law Forward, said the Legislature knew about this problem for over a year but chose not to resolve it with a simple fix.

“This eleventh hour lawsuit merely confirms that our state Legislature needs to stop peddling election conspiracy theories and start taking the business of election administration seriously,” he said.

Wisconsin Republicans were among those who sent documents to Congress in December 2020 falsely claiming Trump won the state. Trump won the state in 2024. The Wisconsin fake electors were subject to a civil lawsuit, and there’s an ongoing criminal case against their attorneys.

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.

UPDATE: Parties agree on date Trump’s electors are supposed to cast their votes 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.

In the early morning following Election Day in 2020, Claire Woodall, then Milwaukee’s elections chief, mistakenly left behind a USB stick carrying vote totals at the city’s central absentee ballot counting facility. Election conspiracy theorists quickly seized on the mistake, accusing Woodall of rigging the election. 

Their claims were baseless, but the mistake increased scrutiny on the city’s election staff and led Woodall to create a checklist to make sure workers at central count didn’t overlook any critical steps in the future.

This year, despite the checklist, Milwaukee election staff at central count made another procedural mistake — and once again left the door open to conspiracy theorists. 

Somebody — city officials haven’t said who — overlooked the second step outlined on the checklist and failed to lock and seal the hatch covers on the facility’s 13 tabulators before workers began tabulating ballots. For hours, while counting proceeded, the machines’ on-off switches and USB ports were left exposed. 

After election officials discovered the lapse, city officials decided to count 31,000 absentee ballots all over again, a choice that led to delays in reporting results.  

Results from the large and heavily Democratic city ultimately came in at 4 a.m. on Wednesday, only a few hours later than expected, but a time that conspiracy theorists implied was a suspicious hour for vote totals to change. Their posts echoed claims from 2020 that used sensationalized language like “late-night ballot dumps” to describe the reality that in big cities, absentee ballots take time — yes, sometimes late into the night — to collect, deliver, verify and count accurately.

In fact, the results in Milwaukee couldn’t have arrived much sooner. Under state law, election officials can’t start processing the hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots until the morning of Election Day. This year, they got a late start because of delays in getting workers settled, but were still expecting to be done around 2 or 3 a.m. Then it became clear the midday decision to redo the count would add more time to the process. 

But those explanations have done little to curb the false conspiracy theories that have been proliferating on the right, including from losing U.S. Senate candidate Eric Hovde.

Election officials have for years known that the slightest mistakes, or even perceived errors, can trigger false claims. In this instance, the failure to follow a critical security step occurred in the state’s most scrutinized election facility, despite new procedures meant to reduce such errors.

For people with a conspiratorial mindset, such an oversight can’t be explained away as just a mistake, said Mert Bayar, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public. The errors can provide conspiracy theorists a feeling of validation because those errors make a “conspiracy theory more realistic … more believable.”

For those people, he said, election errors are instead perceived as “part of a plot to steal an election.” 

Instead of considering the 2024 Milwaukee mistake a simple oversight, Bayar said, conspiracy theorists may think that the tabulator doors “cannot be left unlocked unless they’re trying something tricky, something stealth.”

Genya Coulter, senior director of stakeholder relations at the Open Source Election Technology Institute, said Milwaukee can still fine-tune its processes and checklists. 

“I don’t think anybody needs to be demonized,” she said, “but I do think that there needs to be some retraining. That would be helpful.”

Milwaukee error initially drew complaints, but not suspicion 

It was an election observer who first noticed the open tabulator doors and alerted election officials. Around 2 p.m., Milwaukee’s current election chief, Paulina Gutiérrez, went from tabulator to tabulator, monitored by Democratic and Republican representatives, to lock all of the doors. Two hours later, she made the call to rerun all ballots through the tabulators.

The tabulators had been in full view of partisan observers and the media, but behind a barrier that only election officials and some designated observers, like representatives for both political parties who accompany election officials during some election processes, can enter. Any tampering would have been evident, Gutiérrez said, and there was no sign of that.

For that reason, some Republicans at central count opposed recounting all the ballots and risking a delay. U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, who went to central count on Election Day to learn more about the error, said he didn’t think anything nefarious happened, though he said the election operation there was “grossly incompetent.”

Coulter said the decision to start the counting over again was “the right call for transparency’s sake.”

Hovde, who lost his Senate race in a state that Donald Trump carried, invoked conspiratorial language to describe what happened. 

“The results from election night were disappointing, particularly in light of the last minute absentee ballots that were dropped in Milwaukee at 4 a.m. flipping the outcome,” he said Monday in his concession speech. “There are many troubling issues around these absentee ballots.”

In an earlier video, Hovde criticized Milwaukee’s election operation and spread false claims about the proportion of votes that his opponent, U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, received from absentee ballots. That led to a skyrocketing number of posts baselessly alleging election fraud in Wisconsin.

One prominent conservative social media account questioned whether the tabulator doors being left open was a case of sabotage. 

In a statement, the Milwaukee Election Commission said it “unequivocally refutes Eric Hovde’s baseless claims regarding the integrity of our election process.”

Why Milwaukee’s results were late

There’s no proof of fraud or malfeasance in Milwaukee or anywhere else in Wisconsin on Election Day. But a few key factors combined to delay Milwaukee’s results until 4 a.m.

First, Milwaukee central count workers started processing and tabulating ballots around 9 a.m., long after the 7 a.m. start time allowed under state law. The delay was a matter of getting dozens of central count workers organized and at the right station in the large facility.

The more high-profile one was the failure to close the tabulators, which prompted the decision to count 31,000 absentee ballots all over again. 

But both of those slowdowns could have been less consequential had Wisconsin election officials been able to process absentee ballots on the Monday before Election Day, as some other states allow. Such a change could have allowed election officials to review absentee ballot envelopes, verify and check in absentee voters but not count votes. An effort to allow election officials to do so stalled in the state Senate this year.

Checklist change could ‘improve transparency’

Milwaukee election officials may have avoided the situation entirely — and could avoid similar situations in the future — by modifying their central count checklist, said Coulter, from the Open Source Election Technology Institute.

Currently, the checklist states that at the start of Election Day, the tabulator doors should be locked and sealed. It’s not clear why that step was skipped. Gutiérrez didn’t respond to questions for comment about who was in charge of the process or whether that person faced disciplinary action. 

But the step likely wouldn’t have been overlooked, Coulter said, if the checklist required the official in charge of locking the tabulators to be accompanied by a representative from each major political party.

“That’s a relatively painless change that … I think it would improve transparency,” Coulter said.

“There needs to be an emphasis on having two people from different political affiliations performing all duties that involve the tabulator,” she said.

Another pre-processing step on the checklist calls for people working at the tabulators to make sure the numbered seals pasted over the tabulator doors are intact. It doesn’t call for checking that the tabulator doors are locked.

To avoid a repeat situation, Coulter said, “they should also check to make sure that the door to the power button is properly locked, and what to do if it isn’t.”

Election officials recognize the scrutiny they face over errors, Coulter said, and they sometimes focus more on avoiding mistakes than running election operations.

“It’s like a racecar driver … If you focus on the wall, you’re going to wind up hitting that wall,” she said. “You have to train your mind to think about the curve and not the wall, but unfortunately, it’s really hard for election officials to do that, especially in high-pressure jurisdictions.”

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.

How Milwaukee’s Election Day mistake left the door open to more misinformation 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.

A lawsuit that could determine whether Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe can keep her job is coming before the state Supreme Court on Monday. The case focuses on the legality of appointees staying on after their terms expire, rather than any matter of her performance as the state’s top election official.

Republicans targeted Wolfe, a nonpartisan appointee, after Donald Trump lost Wisconsin in the 2020 election. Since then, she has endured criticism from Trump supporters for several decisions that the election commission made, as well as for some memos she sent to clerks who run local elections. 

As Wolfe’s term expired in the summer of 2023, the election commission deadlocked on her reappointment. Shortly after, the Republican-controlled state Senate voted to fire her in a move that it later said was only symbolic, but that triggered a protracted fight. 

She and the Wisconsin Elections Commission sued Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu, a Republican, who pushed to oust Wolfe following the expiration of her term. The lawsuit also names Senate President Chris Kapenga and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, both Republicans, as defendants.

Wolfe has now spent the last 16 months as a holdover appointment. During much of that time, it wasn’t clear who would be running the commission during the 2024 presidential election. Wolfe stayed in her role despite the pressure from the right, simultaneously becoming one of the most respected — and scrutinized — election officials nationwide.

One day after the presidential election, Wolfe said that she was “completely committed to seeing through this election,” which has yet to be certified. But she didn’t clarify whether she was seeking to stay in her role beyond the fall.

Lawsuit comes after years of scrutiny, legal battles

The Wisconsin Elections Commission is composed of three Democratic and three Republican commissioners. Wolfe, as the administrator, can issue recommendations to the commissioners on guidance they issue to local election officials, but she has no vote. The commissioners are the ones who decide whether to approve them.

Still, Wolfe has been a scapegoat for election conspiracy theorists seeking to blame somebody for Trump’s loss in the 2020 election.

After the 2020 presidential election, Wolfe was blamed for a slew of decisions by the commissioners, like letting local officials cure mistakes on absentee ballot envelopes and bypassing a state law that ordinarily requires sending election officials to conduct elections in nursing homes. She was also criticized for issuing a memo about using drop boxes in 2020, two years before the high court banned them. (The court reversed that decision this year under a new liberal majority.) 

Some went further, saying baselessly that Wolfe led a wide-ranging conspiracy to commit fraud to rig the 2020 election in Joe Biden’s favor. Late last year, some legislative Republicans tried but failed to impeach Wolfe.

In April, Trump charged that Wolfe “will try to steal another election” if she’s not removed from office. Trump won Wisconsin in the 2024 presidential election.

Commission inaction can ‘undermine trust’

Wolfe’s term expired in July 2023, and the Senate appeared poised to reject her confirmation had she been reappointed. All three Republicans on the commission voted to reappoint Wolfe at the time, which would set her up for a Senate confirmation vote.

But Democratic election commissioners abstained from the vote. They cited a 2022 Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling stating that appointees can stay in their roles past the expiration of their terms, a decision that Democrats had previously opposed.  

That meant Wolfe wasn’t formally reappointed and therefore not subject to another Senate confirmation proceeding. Senate leaders acknowledged that later, but still took a vote to fire her, leading to the current lawsuit. 

A Dane County judge in January sided with the elections commission argument that Wolfe is a lawful holdover. GOP leaders appealed that decision to an appeals court, and the election commission appealed it to the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

“This case is fascinating because the shoes are all on the wrong feet,” said Jeff Mandell, founder of the liberal legal group Law Forward. “And maybe what that shows is that there’s less — maybe on all sides — there’s less of a matter of principle and Constitution than of political convenience.”

Mandell has long pushed back against the false accusations against Wolfe and other election officials in Wisconsin that arose from the 2020 election. Still, he said, “it’s not ideal” for democracy for Wolfe to be in her role past her term.

The debate further demonstrates how both Democrats and Republicans have been relying more on hardball tactics to accomplish their policy goals recently, said Barry Burden, a political science professor at UW-Madison. 

Those tactics escalated as Senate Republicans slow-walked or outright rejected appointments, many of them made by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, to critical roles in state government. 

The various twists in the fight are examples of dysfunction in the appointment processes that can “undermine trust in those processes and in those institutions,” said Bryna Godar, a staff attorney at the University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative.

“Whether or not you think that (Wolfe) should continue in her role, I think it is important 

for appointment processes and confirmation processes to happen in the way that they’re supposed to happen,” Godar said.

Under state law, the election commission administrator serves a four-year term. Election commissioners are supposed to appoint a new administrator if the current position is vacant. 

Until the Senate confirms an appointment, the law says, the commission would be overseen by an interim supervisor selected by a majority of commissioners. If the commission doesn’t appoint somebody within 45 days of the vacancy, a legislative committee can appoint an interim administrator.

Republican legislators are pointing to that law now in their attempt to force commissioners to appoint an administrator, saying the current state of play “would allow a partisan minority of WEC to keep in place a holdover administrator indefinitely,” without a process for Senate confirmation.

But some of the Democrats supporting Wolfe say they’re just following the 2022 Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling.

“When the law has things you can do, you use the law the way it allows you to use it,” said Ann Jacobs, a Democrat on the election commission. 

The high court’s 2022 ruling about holdovers makes clear that Wolfe can be a holdover, Jacobs said, adding, “if the Legislature wants to change the law, they have every ability to do that.”

“The Legislature has hijacked the appointment process for all appointees, not just WEC, where they don’t act on them, so they try to maintain control over appointees by refusing to either confirm or reject them, and I don’t think that’s good government either,” Jacobs said.

Wisconsin Watch reporter Jack Kelly contributed to this report.

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 Supreme Court case could decide fate of state’s top election official 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.

After Democrat Tammy Baldwin won reelection to her U.S. Senate seat in Wisconsin, conspiracy theorists skeptical of the outcome pointed to a misleading results table to claim that there were more ballots cast than registered voters in some wards of Oak Creek, a Milwaukee suburb.

The table on Milwaukee County’s results website appeared to show four Oak Creek wards where more than 100% of registered voters cast ballots, including one with 1,256 registered voters and 1,271 ballots, and another with 1,006 registered voters and 1,019 ballots.

Turnout in Oak Creek “was impressive late at night for Senator Baldwin,” said a social media post from Seth Keshel, a prominent conspiracy theorist who has hundreds of thousands of followers across social media. The post, which was accompanied by an image with data from the county’s table, has already received hundreds of reactions and shares.

But the claim that the numbers show a questionable pattern isn’t true, election officials said, and is easily disprovable. 

The table’s turnout percentages, which were based on numbers on the page showing the county’s unofficial results, were based on the number of registered voters these wards had the day before Election Day. They didn’t take into account the number of people who registered to vote on Election Day, City Clerk Catherine Roeske said. 

Oak Creek hadn’t yet officially tallied the number of same-day registrants, but Roeske estimated that it was about 2,700. 

After Votebeat told Michelle Hawley, Milwaukee County’s election director, about the increasingly viral claim, the county added a note to its results page to clarify that “the number of registered voters displayed are as of the day before the election. In Wisconsin, state law allows voters to register on election day, and as a result, it is possible for a ward to have over 100% participation.”

Turnout in many Milwaukee County municipalities was “super impressive,” Hawley said, surpassing most elections before it.

There’s another flaw in the premise of the social media posts that some kind of malfeasance in Oak Creek helped put Baldwin over the top: Her Republican opponent, Eric Hovde, is the one who carried the city. He got roughly 550 more votes than Baldwin — about 10,700 to 10,150 — according to unofficial results, and topped her total in one of the four wards that were listed with more than 100% turnout.

Oak Creek was among the last few municipalities in Wisconsin to report election results, along with neighboring Milwaukee, Green Bay, Oshkosh, and Racine. Conspiracy theorists often use late-arriving results that cause a swing as a pretext to circulate false claims about election fraud.

Before those cities’ numbers came in, early and unofficial results showed Hovde leading Baldwin by about 63,000 votes. Still, at that point, conservatives already recognized that Hovde was unlikely to win, given that the outstanding votes were from cities that mostly lean Democratic. 

The largest chunk of still-unreported votes that would deliver Baldwin a win would come from Milwaukee, which she won by about 143,000 votes. Milwaukee County posted the city’s results at around 4:30 a.m., after a delay caused by a recount of absentee ballots. 

At that time, Oak Creek’s results were still outstanding, even though it had far fewer ballots to count.

Oak Creek’s central counting site processed over 12,700 absentee ballots and was adequately staffed, Roeske said, but as work went late into the night, the city lost many of its poll workers to fatigue. She also cited rules that prevent election officials from pre-processing absentee ballots.

Some “amazing” staff lasted late into the night though, Roeske said. 

Once Oak Creek and the other cities’ results were in, unofficial results showed Baldwin in front by just under 30,000 votes. The Associated Press called the race for Baldwin just before 1 p.m. on Wednesday. Hovde had not conceded as of early afternoon Thursday. Unofficial results showed him within the 1% margin to request a recount.

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, Milwaukee’s Oak Creek suburb didn’t have more ballots than 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.

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.

Milwaukee election officials started counting the city’s absentee ballots all over again Tuesday afternoon after an observer noticed that the panel doors on the city’s 13 tabulators weren’t properly closed.

By the time city officials decided to restart the counting around 4 p.m., over 30,000 absentee ballots had already been fed into the tabulators, Milwaukee spokesperson Caroline Reinwald said. The city had more than 106,000 absentee ballots in total by mid-day Tuesday.

A Republican observer at the city’s central counting facility pointed out that the panel door that covers a tabulator’s on and off switch — and, in at least some cases, slots for inserting USB drives to export election results — was unlocked after workers had been using the tabulators for several hours. Milwaukee Election Commission Executive Director Paulina Gutiérrez then went from tabulator to tabulator, monitored by representatives from the Democratic and Republican parties, to secure each one between 2 and 2:30 p.m. 

City election officials said there was no indication any of the tabulators had been tampered with — and that it would have been clear if somebody had accessed them. The slots are used at the end of the night, when election officials insert USB drives to export election results before driving them to the county to submit the data.

If the off buttons were “tampered with, it would completely turn off,” Gutiérrez told Votebeat. “That would be very evident of tampering, so we just properly locked them and resealed them.”

There were no USB drives in any of the tabulators, she added.

The decision to restart the count, city spokesperson Jeff Fleming said, was “out of an abundance of caution.” 

“We have no reason to believe that there was any compromise to any of the machines,” he said. “But because they were not fully sealed — human error — … we are going to zero them all out again and rerun the ballots that had already been processed.”

Re-tabulating all of the ballots may take up to three hours, Fleming said. City officials initially said the count could go until 2 or 3 a.m. 

Votebeat spoke with multiple Republicans at central count who were aware of the oversight. None said they were concerned about any possibility of tampering.

Before the decision to restart the tabulation process, Republican Party of Milwaukee County Chair Hilario Deleon, who watched Gutiérrez reseal each machine, told Votebeat that he doesn’t think anything nefarious happened.

“I’m not worried about it, although it is a concerning thing when those things are supposed to be locked,” he said.

“Both observers were able to see whether or not there’s flash drives in any of the machines. There’s no flash drives in the machines, there should be no flash drives until the end of the night,” he said, adding that he appreciated Gutiérrez’s transparency.

But Deleon expressed frustration over the decision to restart counting and said local Democrats and city election officials disregarded his view on that matter.

“Let them continue doing their job,” he said. “So many more ballots still have to be counted. Why are we adding more time onto this?”

“It’s just going to be extra work for everyone, and any chance to get these numbers maybe by midnight or 1 a.m., that might have just been pushed back,” he said.

Jefferson Davis, a former Menomonee Falls village president and conservative election activist who has entertained and promoted conspiracy theories, similarly said he wasn’t concerned.

“We had observers at each station as they were taken, and we didn’t see anything that would cause us concern,” he said.

Davis told Votebeat that he welcomed the decision to restart the count as a transparency measure.

Milwaukee election officials typically follow a checklist at central count to ensure that the tabulators are secure, and that thumb drives carrying vote totals end up where they’re supposed to, aren’t tampered with, and remain tracked through a full chain-of-custody process. It appeared one of the earlier steps of closing the panels wasn’t done correctly.

Claire Woodall, formerly the Milwaukee election chief, said there are multiple layers of security to prevent tampering, of which the seal is “the most visible but superficial.”

“Rigorous cross checks exist in the election system, including audit logs that track every action on the tabulator,” she said. “I am confident that this was human error in how the doors (were) closed and seals placed, as no one present at Central Count has presented any concerns of tampering.”

Ann Jacobs, a Democratic commissioner on the Wisconsin Elections Commission, also watched Gutiérrez as she resealed and locked each tabulator.

“Elections are run at the municipal level and at this point, it is up to the Milwaukee Election Commission and the Milwaukee city attorney’s office to decide what their plan is, in light of what’s happened,” she told Votebeat.

National Republicans — long critical of the heavily Democratic city and its elections — decried the mistake. 

“This is an unacceptable example of incompetent election administration in a key swing state: voters deserve better and we are unambiguously calling on Milwaukee’s officials to do their jobs and count ballots quickly and effectively,” Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley and Co-Chair Lara Trump wrote in a media statement.

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

Milwaukee recounts thousands of absentee ballots, delaying results 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.

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’s early voting period finished Sunday, and a couple of things are clear: Voting by absentee ballot, which spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic, remains very popular, and Republicans are coming around to it despite mixed messages from party leaders.

As of Nov. 4, a day out from the election, voters cast and returned over 1.5 million absentee ballots, including nearly 950,000 cast at early voting sites. Ballots are still arriving by mail — the deadline for them to reach clerk’s offices is 8 p.m. on Election Day — but already, the total number of returned absentee ballots exceeds the total from the 2008, 2012 and 2016 presidential elections.

“Clerks were a little surprised by turnout,” Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe said Friday. “Everything still went really smoothly, but I think our local election officials were surprised to see the volume of in-person absentee.” 

The volume was so high, Wolfe said, that the commission bought extra absentee ballot return envelopes in case municipalities ran out. None had run out as of Friday, she said.

Republican areas coming around to absentee voting

Statewide, the total number of returned ballots is about 20% lower than it was at this point in 2020, when COVID-19 pushed voters to rely on mail voting far more than usual. 

As of Monday, no county had received more returned ballots than it had at this point in the 2020 election, but the six counties closest to their 2020 levels — Washington, Adams, Waukesha, Ozaukee, Florence, and Walworth — have Republican majorities.

In Walworth County, a southern county with just over 100,000 residents, county and municipal election staff anticipated an embrace of early voting, but “I don’t think we thought it was going to be the volume that it is,” County Clerk Susi Pike said. “It’s a lot different than any other election, for sure.”

One municipality in Walworth County that typically had early in-person voting only by appointment had open early-voting hours this time around, Pike said.

Voters like the availability of in-person early voting, Pike said, because it provides more flexibility and reduces the likelihood of people not being able to vote if, for example, weather is bad on Election Day.

The state doesn’t track the partisan breakdown of the early voting data, but polling shows a growing Republican embrace of voting before Election Day — at least, some versions of it. 

Among likely voters in Wisconsin who said they would vote early in person, 52% support Donald Trump while 47% support Kamala Harris, a Marquette Law School Poll released Oct. 30 showed. Among those who planned to vote by mail, 70% support Harris, while 30% support Trump.

The percentage of Republicans voting early by mail and in person has increased since the last presidential election.

In 2020, 78% of Republicans planned to vote on Election Day, while 12% planned to cast a ballot early in person and 7% planned to vote by mail, according to the Marquette Law School Poll. In 2024, 70% of Republicans planned to vote on Election Day, with 19% planning to cast a ballot early and 10% by mail. 

That change has come as Republican leaders emphasize early voting, a departure from 2020, when Trump and his allies baselessly alleged widespread fraud related to the casting of absentee ballots.

“We can’t keep walking into Election Day 100,000-200,000 votes down and expect we’re going to make it up in 13 hours between 7 a.m. and 8 p.m.,” Wisconsin Republican Party Chair Brian Schimming said.

Still some Republicans, including Trump, have persisted in casting doubt on some absentee voting methods. Trump has already said this election is rigged, and U.S. Senate candidate Eric Hovde, a Wisconsin Republican, called for monitoring drop boxes to ensure people aren’t “jamming fake ballots.”

In solidly Republican Washington County, voters have already returned about 54,000 ballots, just 2% fewer than at this point four years ago.

Voting by absentee ballot voting was less embraced in some outstate, mostly Republican counties. As of Monday, seven counties had 40% or fewer absentee ballots in this election than in 2020, and all but one voted for Trump that year.

In Clark County, where voters have returned under 2,000 absentee votes compared with nearly 3,500 in 2020, County Clerk Christina Jensen said voters typically wait until Election Day to vote.

Still, Jensen added, the pandemic changed county residents’ voting habits, and she fielded more calls about early voting this year than any year before it.

In Wisconsin’s Democratic strongholds of Dane and Milwaukee counties, voters continued to embrace early voting. Dane County voters had returned over 202,000 ballots, the elections commission stated on Monday, compared with just under 249,000 at this point in 2020. Milwaukee County voters returned about 230,000 this time around, compared with 314,000 at this point in 2020.

Early voting ran smoothly despite persistent printing delays

Even with higher in-person early voting numbers than ever before, early voting ran relatively smoothly. But voters faced long lines and delays across the state for several days, especially during the first week of early voting, because of a printing issue related to the state’s voter registration and election management system.

It remains unclear what caused the printing problem, but it resulted in up to 15-minute wait times to print each label that election officials typically stick on every absentee ballot, usually before voters cast their vote. The election commission encouraged local election officials to hand-write the information usually printed on the label, like a voter’s name and address, which some did.

The issue went away for most of the second week of early voting, but popped again on Friday as election officials across the state tried to print 20,000 labels in an hour, said Ann Jacobs, a Democratic commissioner on the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

Wolfe, the administrator, credited the increase in early voting turnout to “a lot more awareness on all of the options that are available.”

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

Early voting by Republicans helps drive surge in absentee ballot numbers in Wisconsin 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.

With Election Day almost upon us, many Wisconsin voters may feel anxious about facing unexpected obstacles, such as an intimidating poll watcher, or an election official challenging their eligibility.

That’s understandable, given the bitter legal fights and climate of suspicion surrounding recent election cycles.

Here’s a guide to some questions you may have on Election Day, issues you could face and what to do in those situations.

People are intimidating me at a drop box. What should I do?

Since the Wisconsin Supreme Court legalized drop boxes in July, election officials and municipal boards across the state have authorized the use of around 80 drop boxes. But drop boxes have been a target of suspicion from conservatives since 2020, when Donald Trump and his allies began fanning conspiracy theories about them.

Residents of the municipalities with drop boxes can return their ballots to them (check your municipality for more information because some municipalities close their drop boxes before Election Day), and people are also free to observe those ballot boxes. Both groups are subject to a few rules.

Voters can return only their own ballot to a drop box — no one else’s — unless they are assisting a voter who is hospitalized or has a disability, the Wisconsin Elections Commission said. In other words, you can’t return a ballot for your nondisabled spouse, but you can likely do so for an elderly parent who is in the hospital or uses a wheelchair.

Conspiracy theories about drop boxes being used for fraud have inspired calls for citizens to monitor them. They’re allowed to do that, but “not if the watching interferes with voting,” the election commission stated. People who interrupt voting proceedings risk six months in jail, and those who “prevent the free exercise of the franchise” through abduction or fraud risk a felony charge that carries up to a 3½-year prison sentence. 

If somebody impedes your ability to vote at a drop box, you can contact law enforcement. But a person simply watching you put your ballot in the box at a reasonable distance likely isn’t in the wrong.

Somebody challenged my eligibility. Can I still vote?

Like many other states, Wisconsin has a process allowing election officials and eligible voters to challenge a voter’s eligibility. With Republicans drawing attention to the issue of noncitizen voting — which doesn’t really happen much — we may see more voters being challenged this year.

During in-person voting, a poll worker or any Wisconsin voter can challenge somebody’s eligibility to vote based on assumptions or specific knowledge about age, residency, felony status, citizenship, or certain other criteria. State law also allows clerks challenging a voter’s registration form on the basis of citizenship to ask that person to provide proof of citizenship.

But a challenge “based on an individual’s ethnicity, accent, or inability to speak English is unacceptable,” a Wisconsin Elections Commission manual says.

When a challenge happens, the poll worker places the challenger under oath and asks the person to provide the reason and evidence for the challenge. The challenged voter can provide a rebuttal, and the challenger can either withdraw the challenge or stick with it.

If the challenge isn’t withdrawn, the voter takes an oath of eligibility and proceeds to vote, with the election official marking on the ballot that it was challenged.

After the election, the local canvassing board can disqualify the ballot if its members can prove that the person who cast it wasn’t eligible.  

Note that challengers have limits, too. If a challenger appears to be disrupting the voting process frivolously, an election official can issue a warning or summon law enforcement to remove the person.

Do I need to worry about election observers?

Not if they’re obeying the rules. 

Anybody who’s not a candidate up for election is allowed to observe elections being conducted at a polling place, central count facility and other voting sites. Observers have no designated duties. They’re simply people who want to watch election proceedings, some to ensure compliance with election rules and others to understand how the voting process works.

Election observers are typically a welcome presence for election officials. But some observers can be unruly, and others may not be familiar with the rules of observing an election. The Wisconsin Elections Commission provides a primer on what they can and can’t do. Here are some of the key parts of it.

Election observers can’t electioneer, talk about the contests on the ballot, handle election documents, make calls, or interact with voters unless requested. At a polling place and clerk’s office, observers can’t use video and still cameras. At a central count location, however, video and still cameras are allowed as long as they’re not disruptive and don’t show any completed ballots.

If you see potential wrongdoing, or if an observer is intimidating you at your polling site, you can report the activity to an election official at the site.

I’m not registered to vote yet. Can I still vote?

Wisconsin allows for same-day voter registration on Election Day, but not the Saturday, Sunday or Monday before. For those seeking to register on Election Day, you need to bring to your polling site proof of residence along with a photo ID to vote. Proof of residence documents must contain the voter’s name and current address. A state ID or driver’s license with your current address could serve as both your proof of residence and voting ID, as long as it has a photo.

What if I don’t have a document required to vote?

In Wisconsin, people seeking to vote must bring a photo ID. People seeking to register must bring proof of residence and provide the number on a state-issued ID or the last four digits of their Social Security number, information that allows election officials to check registants’ eligibility.

Without that documentation, you can cast provisional ballots in two instances: 

The first is if you have a valid state-issued ID but were unable or unwilling to list the ID number when you registered. The second is if you are a registered voter but unable or unwilling to provide identification.

In either situation, you would be handed a provisional ballot, which election officials can count only if you provide the necessary documentation to poll workers by 8 p.m. on Election Day, or to their municipal clerk by 4 p.m. on the Friday following the election.

How can I make sure my absentee ballot gets counted?

A key step is to fill everything out in the presence of an adult witness. That witness can be at a distance as you complete your ballot, so you have privacy for your selections, but witnesses’ presence and the information they add to the ballot return envelope will matter. 

On that envelope — once it’s sealed with the ballot inside — voters should include their complete name as it’s listed in the voter records and address. There’s also a blank to indicate which ward or aldermanic district you live in, which you can find by entering your voter information at myvote.wi.gov/Whats-On-My-Ballot.

Then, witnesses should provide their name, address and signature on the envelope. Witnesses must be U.S. citizens and at least 18 years old, and they can’t be a candidate on the ballot unless it’s the sitting municipal clerk.

A Wisconsin court ruling now allows for some leniency in the witness address section — an incomplete address is OK as long as an election official can discern where a voter lives — but the surest way to make the ballot count is for you and the witness to provide as much detail as possible.

How late can I mail my absentee ballot?

It’s probably too late already. Although some election officials may have arranged with their local post office to speed up ballot deliveries, the U.S. Postal Service and the Wisconsin Elections Commission suggested that voters mail their ballots back no later than Oct. 29. Many municipalities in Wisconsin route their mail through a different state or Milwaukee, adding to delivery times.

At this point, it’s best to return your absentee ballot to a drop box, if there’s an open one in your town, or in person to an election official. Check your local election website or call your clerk to find out whether drop boxes are available, and where it’s best to return a ballot.

How do I know whether my absentee ballot got counted or arrived on time?

Voters can go to myvote.wi.gov/Track-My-Ballot to see how their ballot moves through different stages of the absentee ballot process. Type your information there to see whether an election official received your absentee request, sent your ballot and received your completed ballot. An orange box indicates an issue with your absentee ballot that you should call your clerk about.

It can take up to seven days after sending it in for your ballot to be marked as received. If it’s been more than that, give your clerk a call.

How do I find my polling place?

On Election Day in Wisconsin, you can cast a ballot only at the one polling site that serves your ward. If you show up at the wrong site, poll workers may be able to help you find the right one. But they’re not able to issue you provisional ballots; you’ll have to cast a ballot at your designated polling site.

You can find your polling site at myvote.wi.gov/Find-My-Polling-Place.

When will we know the election results?

Wisconsin doesn’t have a centralized system to report election results. Rather, municipalities send unofficial results to their counties, and the state’s 72 counties are required to post those results to their website. That said, you don’t need to go county by county to find who’s winning statewide. National and local media will be compiling those results and posting them to their websites.

The big question is when the count will be complete. Madison typically sends its completed results to the Dane County clerk around 10 p.m., City Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl said. 

In Milwaukee — whose results the overall statewide outcomes will depend on — it’s likely going to take a little longer. Absentee ballots are processed and counted at a single location, and since state law prevents any pre-processing or counting until 7 a.m. on Election Day, city officials will have an estimated 80,000 absentee ballots to count beginning in the early morning. 

That’s less than half as many as in the 2020 election, when the city had 169,000 ballots and finished counting at 3 a.m. on Wednesday.

Still, for this election “the estimate is sometime after midnight,” city spokesperson Melissa Howard said. 

That time accounts for the counting and a relatively new, transparency-focused process to have city officials witness an election official exporting results from the central count tabulators and then transport those results to the county, Howard said.

Because smaller municipalities typically tabulate results quicker, and Republican voters tend to be clustered in small, rural areas, it may appear from early returns that Republicans are winning handily in the state.

But that’s simply a matter of which ballots, and how many of them, have been counted. The numbers should be expected to change significantly as results come in from larger municipalities that take longer to count their ballots and have more Democratic voters. There may not be a clear picture of who wins Wisconsin until the morning after Election Day, or later.

Remember, too, that these election results are still unofficial. Results can change through the canvassing process and recounts. But the unofficial results should give you a pretty clear indication of which candidates won which race.

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.

A Wisconsin voter’s guide to dealing with Election Day pitfalls and problems 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.

Melissa Kono had just finished a training session with a new Republican poll worker in 2014 when she asked the poll worker if she had any questions.

“Her question was, ‘What do I do when all the Mexicans come in to vote?’” recalled Kono, then the town clerk in Burnside, in western Wisconsin’s Trempealeau County. “And I was speechless because I was like, that just doesn’t happen. There’s all this other stuff you should be asking questions about because it’s new to you … I was just flabbergasted by that comment.”

Since then, as she trains poll workers and clerks across the state, Kono said she has seen the worry over noncitizen voting grow. At this point, she said, the baseless concern that noncitizens will vote en masse in the Nov. 5 presidential contest is the election conspiracy theory she hears about most from GOP poll workers and voters. The suspicion plays into growing doubts about the integrity of elections and century-old stereotypes of immigrants as criminals.

In hindsight, Kono said, “I should have seen this coming because it’s only bubbled up even more.”

For years, Wisconsin conservatives have been hammering the talking point that noncitizens may be able to cast ballots en masse in the state and across the nation. That’s despite federal law banning noncitizens from voting in presidential elections and the fact that there’s no evidence of noncitizens voting in federal contests in any meaningful numbers.

The messaging has percolated from conservative think tanks to politicians and voters across the state. In Wisconsin, Republicans passed legislation linked to the issue, including a proposed constitutional amendment coming before voters in November. A top Republican lawmaker has also sought to find data on how many noncitizens have state-issued IDs that they could potentially use to vote.

Now, weeks away from Nov. 5, clerks are hearing the same concern from some of their voters and poll workers. And suddenly, the talking point of noncitizens voting in the 2024 election appears to be about as prominent as the repeatedly discredited 2020 election conspiracy theory that corrupt voting officials and hacked voting machines enabled Democrats to steal the election.

Lawmakers have raised concern over the fact that the Wisconsin Elections Commission and local clerks don’t have a specific system to keep noncitizens from voting. Election officials don’t have a database they’re required to use that shows a list of noncitizens with state-accepted IDs, for example, though one clerk in southeast Wisconsin says she has found a state system that has helped her catch noncitizens who registered to vote.

Noncitizens and immigrant advocates say no such system is needed. It’s already a felony under federal law for noncitizens to try to vote, and the risks of doing so — including jail time and deportation — are enough to dissuade them from casting a ballot. 

Talking point emerges ahead of 2024 election

The conservative messaging about noncitizen voting, which emerged more than a century ago, serves a few purposes for contestants in the current election cycle, said UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden. First, it focuses attention on immigration, which is a signature issue for Republicans and their presidential nominee, Donald Trump. Second, it acts as a cover to explain why Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 and 2020. 

And third, “it sets the stage for this fall’s elections,” Burden said. “That if things don’t go as the Republicans would like, there has been a premise laid out already that noncitizens are part of the problem and are committing fraud and might be responsible for an election that’s not trustworthy.”

Indeed, the Trump campaign appears to be laying the rhetorical groundwork already for legal challenges based on the premise that noncitizen voting will swing results.

“Democrats are pushing for non-citizens to vote and influence the future of our country,” Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in a statement, referencing proposals in some cities allowing noncitizens to vote in local elections and adding that Democrats “aren’t even trying to hide their election interference schemes.”

That line of thinking has already inspired legislation and lawsuits in Wisconsin.

Over the past couple of years, as some cities around the country allowed noncitizens to vote in local elections, Wisconsin Republicans pushed for a proposed constitutional amendment that would state “only” U.S. citizens can vote in local, state and federal elections. That’s the proposal on the November ballot.

Republicans in 2023 also passed legislation requiring that state IDs issued to noncitizens be marked as not valid for voting purposes. Lawmakers considered the bill after the clerk in Mequon, in southeastern Ozaukee County, said she had four experiences in 18 months with noncitizens either voting or trying to vote. But Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, vetoed the legislation, saying the bill could cause noncitizens to be treated unfairly and perpetuate false claims about elections.

This August, a Wisconsin voter filed a lawsuit alleging the Wisconsin Elections Commission and Department of Transportation weren’t sharing data that would help election officials block noncitizens from voting.

Rep. Scott Krug, a Republican who chairs the Assembly Elections Committee, said it would be his “mission” to build a better system to prevent noncitizens from voting.

In the meantime, despite a lack of evidence, right-wing claims about noncitizens voting en masse increased.

“There is a non-negligible amount of voter participation by non-citizens in federal elections, which is not only a serious threat to the integrity of our elections and the democratic process they represent, but also has the potential to reduce Americans’ trust and confidence in election results,” stated an Oct. 7 letter that congressional Republicans, including Wisconsin’s U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson and U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, sent to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland.

In June, Trump posted on social media, “Non citizen Illegal Migrants are getting the right to vote, being pushed by crooked Democrat Politicians who are not being stopped by an equally dishonest Justice Department.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson told Politico recently, “If you have enough non-citizens participating in some of these swing areas, you can change the outcome of the election in the majority.”

No required verification system, but one clerk said she checks every voter

Kono, the former Burnside clerk, said some of the election workers she has trained recently have asked her how to verify voters’ citizenship. She tells them that when voters register, they must certify under the penalty of perjury that they’re U.S. citizens.

“Some of them are not satisfied with that,” Kono said, “because it’s like, ‘Well, how do you verify it?’”

As it stands, Wisconsin has no required process to verify whether every person who seeks to vote is a citizen. And the Department of Transportation doesn’t currently have a system providing voters’ current citizenship status to election clerks.

Mequon City Clerk Caroline Fochs said that for several years she’s been using a different system to verify citizenship and has used it to discover noncitizens who registered to vote or cast ballots — leading in a few instances to prosecution.

When people register in Mequon to vote, Fochs said, she checks their information against a Wisconsin Department of Transportation system providing access to driver records. The Public Abstract Request System doesn’t connect to the voter rolls, but Fochs said it does indicate whether people with licenses were U.S. citizens when they applied.

She had used that system for about 15 years to check the information voters provided when they registered. In 2021, after people didn’t mark that they’re citizens on voter forms, she also began using the system to check for citizenship status.

When somebody is marked as something besides a U.S. citizen, Fochs said, she sends the person’s information to an agent at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to check whether that person has since become a citizen. Fochs estimates that about 20% of people not marked as U.S. citizens in the system are confirmed by DHS to be noncitizens. She refers those cases to local law enforcement, she said. 

Fochs takes the extra confirmation step, she said, because the state’s current system, where people swear under penalty of perjury that they’re citizens, doesn’t require any verification after the fact.

“If nobody’s looking, nobody’s ever going to be prosecuted, right?” she said on Friday. “They could check the box and sign their name, but if nobody has the ability to then take the next step and check it, you could do it all day long. The penalties don’t matter. So we need to check it to make sure that people are being honest.”

Several other clerks told Votebeat they had never heard of the lookup tool, or if they had, that they weren’t using it to check for voters’ citizenship status.

One clerk who discussed the system with Fochs, Oconomowoc City Clerk Diane Coenen, expressed concern over the potential for noncitizens to vote and face penalties, but said she won’t be using the lookup tool because the city lacks staffing to look up every voter in the growing community, and she doesn’t want to use it only in certain cases.

Transportation Department says records aren’t current

Department of Transportation spokesperson John DesRivieres declined to comment. 

But the agency acknowledged in a recent legal filing that its citizenship data isn’t a reliable tool to check for people’s current citizenship status.

Responding to the lawsuit claiming that the department should share citizenship data with the election commission, the agency said it doesn’t have current citizenship information, but rather just “outdated information about the status of applicants for driver licenses and state ID cards at the time of application.”

“Every year, thousands of lawful permanent residents in Wisconsin become naturalized citizens, and these individuals generally have no reason to update their citizenship status with DOT,” the filing states.

The often inaccurate data is why Fochs double-checks with someone from the federal Department of Homeland Security, she said.

Fochs said she was confident she wasn’t crossing any legal red lines because she checks the records of everybody registering to vote — not just in specific instances.

But Kono said she wasn’t so sure. “I would be worried about doing something that we haven’t been told or advised to do,” she said.

An ID form asks for proof of citizenship

In Wisconsin, noncitizens with legal status, such as green card holders or lawful temporary visitors, can get Wisconsin driver’s licenses and state-issued IDs just as U.S. citizens do. 

There are currently about 135,000 non-expired IDs and driver’s licenses issued to people who were noncitizens at the time of their application, the Department of Transportation’s legal filing says. But sharing their records with the Wisconsin Elections Commission would be illegal under federal privacy laws, the filing says.

There is a separate, free ID for voting that state residents can apply for. Typically, those applying for that card need to provide proof of citizenship. However, people without proof can still request one of those IDs by filling out a separate form that asks them for their identifying information. Lying on that form is punishable by a six-month jail sentence and $1,000 fine. 

And as Kono said, people registering to vote are asked whether they’re citizens, and the form instructs them not to fill it out unless they are. Lying on that form constitutes a felony offense, with penalties of up to 3½ years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

Few noncitizens appear willing to risk that penalty.

A Brennan Center for Justice analysis found that election officials overseeing 23.5 million votes across 42 jurisdictions in the 2016 general election referred about 30 incidents of potential noncitizen voting for further investigation or prosecution. A Heritage Foundation analysis of election fraud cases nationwide found two dozen prosecuted cases of noncitizens voting in the last 20 years.

Why immigrants are a more vulnerable target

After his loss in 2020, Trump and his allies helped promote claims that corrupt election officials and voting machine companies rigged the election in Democrats’ favor. They were sued over that messaging, leading to hundreds of millions of dollars in legal settlements. 

Meanwhile, of the dozens of lawsuits Trump filed after his 2020 loss, none succeeded in overturning election results in the swing states he lost. 

This election, Trump and his allies have turned their attention from voting machine companies to noncitizens, a group that’s less organized and perhaps less likely to sue for false claims. 

Burden, from UW-Madison, said suspicion of noncitizen voting could be what drives post-election lawsuits if Trump loses.

“There are millions of noncitizens living in the U.S.,” Burden said. “There’s some living in every swing state, more than 100,000 in Wisconsin. And that might be the focus of at least litigation or outrage after the election.”

But Burden said noncitizens are unlikely to vote in any significant numbers given the penalties they would face.

“It’s a lot of risk involved for a very little benefit, to be casting one vote in an election where there might be 3 million votes cast for president in the state,” he said.

Christine Neumann-Ortiz, the executive director of the immigrant rights group Voces de la Frontera Action, said that whether they are in the country illegally or legally, with visas or lawful permanent resident status, immigrants typically know they can’t vote, and she organizes voter education sessions to make sure noncitizens know they can’t cast a ballot. 

“The stakes are so high, they don’t want to vote,” she said. “They don’t want to end up with felony charges or jail time. It would affect their ability in the future to adjust their status, and obviously people don’t want that.”

The few instances of noncitizens getting charged after voting are generally a result of confusion about who’s eligible to vote, she said.

Neumann-Ortiz said the voters likely to bear the brunt of the accusations or suspicion are lawful voters.

“My concern is that all of this anti-immigrant rhetoric is really a way to gin up the MAGA base so that they show up at different polling sites and racially profile voters and try to intimidate or harass people from voting,” she said. “This is absolutely intended to disenfranchise eligible voters through the challenge process.”

In Wisconsin, election officials and voters can challenge somebody’s eligibility to vote based on assumptions about their age, residency, felony status, and citizenship, among other things. But a challenge “based on an individual’s ethnicity, accent, or inability to speak English is unacceptable,” an election commission manual states.

It’s highly unlikely that enough noncitizens would vote to swing the outcome, Burden said, but it could lead Republicans to say — as Trump baselessly did in 2019 about alleged noncitizens on the voter roll in Texas — that the few people they caught are just the “tip of the iceberg.”

While conservatives’ messaging could lead to increased ballot challenges, Neumann-Ortiz said it could have an unintended consequence.

“It’s offensive. It’s racist,” she said. “It’s not true, and it certainly does motivate people who are eligible to vote, whether naturalized U.S. citizens or U.S. citizens who are children of immigrants. It certainly does motivate them to turn out to vote and challenge that kind of hate mongering and disinformation.”

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.

Noncitizen voting rarely happens. But Wisconsin voters are hearing a lot about it. 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.

Months after the Wisconsin Supreme Court legalized them, ballot drop boxes remain a source of deep division among public officials in communities across the battleground state. 

While city officials in Madison and Milwaukee embraced them early for the August primary, several communities in Waukesha and Milwaukee counties have opted out of using drop boxes for November’s election, to some voters’ dismay. Some clerks in Dodge County decided not to use drop boxes after the county sheriff warned against them, saying he struggled with “the appearance of the potential for fraud even if no fraud occurs.” 

Then, this past week, the issue boiled over in Wausau, after Mayor Doug Diny unilaterally decided to remove the city’s drop box, reportedly ignoring warnings from the city attorney. The city clerk has referred the matter to law enforcement.

The disputes point to lingering distrust of drop boxes as a ballot return option after the liberal-controlled Wisconsin Supreme Court legalized them this year. The court’s decision overturned a ban issued by the court in 2022 when it had a conservative majority. But it left some unresolved questions over who at the local level can make the decision to authorize — or ban — drop box use.

Now, across the state, some local officials are fighting to ban drop boxes in their communities in the name of guarding against fraud, while others are lobbying to keep them as a way to make voting more convenient.

With a few weeks left before the election, at least 70 Wisconsin municipalities are using drop boxes, said Sam Liebert, Wisconsin director of the group All Voting Is Local. Meanwhile, at least 63 municipalities have banned or explicitly opted out of them.

One of them is Brookfield, the western suburb of Milwaukee. Residents there requested access to drop boxes, saying it would eliminate a barrier for voters with disabilities and older adults who can’t always go to the city hall to drop off their absentee ballot, TMJ4 reported. But officials voted to opt out after the city clerk and city attorney said that drop boxes would require extra work to set up and monitor and that they were unnecessary in a post-pandemic election.

In many conservative areas, the opposition that led officials to forgo or ban drop boxes came as a result of unsubstantiated claims that they could be used to perpetrate large-scale ballot fraud. 

Liebert said the bans would make it harder to vote. “I understand maybe it’s politically expedient or politically savvy to buy into the big lie and the mis- and disinformation that’s around drop boxes,” he said, “but also, at the same time, you’re going to have more voter participation if you have this option.”

In the 2020 election, liberal communities were likelier than conservative communities to have drop boxes as a ballot return option, according to a study by the conservative group Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty. On average, the study found, municipalities with drop boxes had 48 more voters participating than municipalities without them.

Drop box use gets pushback from city officials

When the high court legalized drop boxes in July, the majority said clerks had discretion under the law to use them. But across the state, mayors and municipal boards have asserted their power to restrict access to drop boxes, sometimes without clerks’ approval.

In Wausau, for example, Diny, the newly elected mayor, moved the city’s drop box on Sept. 22 from outside City Hall to inside his office, telling City Council President Lisa Rasmussen that it would remain there “until certain issues that the clerk is aware of are addressed.”

Rasmussen objected. “It is inappropriate for you to attempt to influence the clerk’s decision about the box and equally wrong for you to take it from its posted site following her decision,” she told Diny in an email obtained by Votebeat. “The action you took may have serious legal ramifications. I would imagine that if a citizen did the same thing, they’d already be answering to the police.”

Diny, who was backed by Republicans in the nonpartisan mayoral race, later said he moved the drop box because he feared somebody would steal it, since it hadn’t at that point been secured to the ground, WSAU reported.

On Sept. 25, City Clerk Kaitlyn Bernarde said she was referring the matter to the local district attorney, citing a law requiring clerks to submit reports of suspected election fraud and irregularities. In response, Diny said that Bernarde was “out of her lane” and that the City Council should have the final say on drop boxes.

Days later, after Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and voting rights groups condemned Diny’s actions, the drop box was back — this time, secured to the ground — and the Portage County Sheriff’s Department was investigating the incident, the Wausau Pilot & Review reported.

On Wednesday, four Wausau residents asked a federal prosecutor for an investigation, alleging in a letter that Diny “may have broken federal law by using his official position to interfere with citizens’ right to vote.”

One of those residents, Jay Coldwell, told Votebeat that “it was just shocking to see that our elected mayor would interfere with the election process.”

“If it’s that today, what is it tomorrow, and how many other cities will this happen in?” he said.

Bernarde and Diny didn’t respond to requests for comment. 

One reason for such power struggles is that clerks’ roles can vary across the state, with different ordinances in different municipalities, said Rick Esenberg, founder of the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, a conservative law firm that filed the lawsuit leading to the first drop box ban.

“In general, I’d think a municipal board, as the legislative body, could ban drop boxes or specify the conditions under which they are used,” he said. “It seems anomalous to think that a clerk would have unrestrainable authority and I don’t read (the Wisconsin Supreme Court opinion that legalized drop boxes) to say that they do.”

“A harder question,” Esenberg added, “is whether a clerk can unilaterally decide to use drop boxes. There is an argument for that, although perhaps not.”

Clerks have a lot of authority to run elections, but they, like most civic actors, have checks and balances, said Scott Thompson, staff counsel for Law Forward, a group seeking more inclusive voting policies.

But after the state Supreme Court’s ruling this year, the boundaries of power among mayors, municipal boards and clerks are a “pretty complicated legal question,” Thompson said.

“Big picture, I think municipalities are clearly working through this, as local governments always work through various issues,” he said.

Baseless claims from 2020 echo into 2024

Opponents of drop boxes, including Diny, argue that there are plenty of other ways to return a ballot.

Many of them have also relied on the talking point that drop boxes enable the harvesting of fake ballots — like filling out and returning multiple ballots under fake names. Those claims were popularized by the film “2000 Mules,” a film about purported drop box misuse in the 2020 election that has been roundly debunked.

Such claims have led to litigation and laws targeting banning drop boxes across the country. And they’ve been repeated in Wisconsin by Republicans including U.S. Senate candidate Eric Hovde, who called for 24/7 drop box monitoring in Madison to ensure nobody is “jamming fake ballots.”

But those claims about the dangers of drop boxes are baseless. Election officials have safeguards in place to protect against the possibility of widespread fraud through drop boxes. 

Wisconsin clerks process absentee ballots from drop boxes just as they do any other absentee vote, including those sent through the mail or dropped off in person. With narrow exceptions for military voters, election officials send absentee ballots only to Wisconsin residents who have requested one and are confirmed to have registered to vote with a valid ID.

Before opening the ballot envelopes deposited in a drop box, election officials verify that they have witness and voter signatures and a witness address. Then they open the envelope, verify that the person casting the ballot was qualified to vote and hadn’t already voted in the election, and record the voter on the poll books as having returned an absentee ballot. Only then would they tabulate the vote.

Proponents say the benefits of drop boxes are clear.

In rural Wisconsin, Thompson from Law Forward said, they can be especially helpful to residents who aren’t frequently in town. And they provide an extra option for people worried about mail delays, Liebert noted.

They’re also helpful to voters with disabilities, who are likelier than other people to vote absentee and who Thompson said are “always caught in the middle” of anti-democratic attempts to restrict ballot access. 

“You put drop boxes in the community, it makes it that much more likely that you can exercise the franchise,” Thompson said.

Access to drop boxes varies across municipalities that use them

Among municipalities using drop boxes, their visibility and availability vary, which can create confusion for voters.

In Madison, voters have access to 14 drop box sites, open day and night until the Monday before the election. That’s about one drop box for every 20,000 people. Milwaukee also has over a dozen drop boxes. In Eau Claire, with about 70,000 people, there’s just one drop box, also open 24 hours a day. 

There’s also a single drop box in Marshfield, a city of about 20,000 people in central Wisconsin, but it’s only available after the City Hall closes.

That policy ensures that night-shift workers who live in the city can return their ballot after hours and that people returning their ballots during the day can have a clerk or staff member double-check that their ballot envelope is correctly filled out, Marshfield City Clerk Jessica Schiferl said.

Schiferl said she came up with that policy after the city attorney and administrator said the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling gave clerks the final say over drop box use. She then alerted the mayor about the drop box plans.

Officials in Madison and Milwaukee have heavily promoted their drop boxes, but other municipalities don’t promote their use anywhere, Liebert said, “because they don’t want to stir up the bee’s nest of election deniers or bad faith actors who would be upset if they knew that their clerk or city hall was actively promoting a drop box.”

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 legalized ballot drop boxes, but some local officials are fighting them 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.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court rejected Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s request to have his name removed as an independent presidential candidate from the November ballot or covered with stickers, a relief for local clerks.

The court on Friday unanimously upheld a decision by the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission to keep Kennedy — who dropped out on Aug. 23 and endorsed former President Donald Trump — on the ballot despite his request to drop out. The commission cited a law saying qualified nominees can only get off the ballot if they die.

“It’s good to have that done so we could focus more on the election,” Waukesha County Clerk Meg Wartman, a Republican, said about the case. She said around 40,000 ballots had already gone out in the county, and some had already been returned. 

Kennedy had sought to remove his name in several battleground states to avoid splitting votes and inadvertently helping Democratic candidate Kamala Harris. His lawyers had argued that the commission’s decision amounted to a First Amendment violation by “diminishing Kennedy’s message or putting forth a message he doesn’t agree with.”

But the justices said Kennedy didn’t make a persuasive case. In a concurring opinion, two conservative justices said Kennedy’s position was weakened by urgent election and court deadlines.

Election officials told Votebeat and said in court filings that either of Kennedy’s original requests — printing new ballots without his name or covering up his name with stickers on the ballots — would be time-consuming and expensive. 

Clerks additionally said that putting stickers over his name on ballots could cause tabulators to malfunction on Election Day. A prominent voting machine company, Election Systems & Software, said that it wouldn’t cover such malfunctions under its warranties, and its machines aren’t tested to work with stickered ballots.

In Dane County, reprinting nearly 500,000 ballots would have cost $150,000 and taken about two weeks, Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell, a Democrat, said in a court filing.

“There was no way we were going to be able to reprint ballots in time to mail to overseas voters,” McDonell told Votebeat. “I am grateful the Supreme Court acted in accordance with the law and the practicalities of running a presidential election.”

In Milwaukee County, where the county office put in an order to print 610,000 absentee ballots, reprinting those ballots would have cost $82,000 — an amount that wasn’t budgeted, the county’s elections director, Michelle Hawley, said in court filings.

But for all the concern among election officials, the ruling wasn’t so surprising, said Wartman, the Waukesha County clerk.

“I don’t think we thought it had a lot of merit,” Wartman said of the case, adding that multiple local candidates have tried to get off the ballot in the past to no avail.

“Even though this was certainly a bigger name and a bigger stage, so to speak, the legal precedent to have him removed from the ballot wasn’t there,” she said.

The court decision marks a likely end to Kennedy’s fight to get off the ballot in Wisconsin, at least in state courts. A federal appeal could still follow, but those appeals haven’t succeeded elsewhere.

In Michigan, Kennedy took his case to a federal court after the Michigan Supreme Court rejected his request to get off the ballot. That federal court also rejected his request, as did a federal appeals court. In New York state, which leans Democratic — and which his father represented as a U.S. senator — Kennedy sued to get his name on the ballot, an effort the U.S. Supreme Court struck down.

The North Carolina Supreme Court, on the other hand, ordered counties to issue new ballots without Kennedy’s name after he filed a similar lawsuit.

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 clerks relieved after high court keeps RFK Jr. on ballot 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.

A proposal on November’s ballot to ban voting by noncitizens across Wisconsin would have little practical effect on who can vote under existing laws. But it would shut the door on an option that some advocates of wider voting access want to retain: letting municipalities open their local elections to noncitizens or younger voters.

Current laws already bar anyone who is not a U.S. citizen from voting in elections for federal or statewide Wisconsin offices. But supporters of the proposed constitutional amendment have pointed to municipalities in other states that let noncitizens vote in races for city council or school board, for instance. They say the amendment is key to making sure that such a thing doesn’t take hold in Wisconsin.

They also say heading off noncitizen voting at the local level would free local clerks from having to prepare separate ballots for those voters without the federal and state races, which could complicate election administration and lead to more errors.

The proposed amendment is part of a movement by Republicans nationwide to raise concerns about large-scale illegal voting by noncitizens in state and federal elections, even though experts say that’s not happening. 

Similar measures are coming before voters in North Carolina, Iowa and several other states this November.

The measure is also the latest example of Republicans who control the Legislature using constitutional amendments to enact election-related policies and bypass Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat. Unlike normal bills, constitutional amendments can’t be vetoed by the governor.

“Practically speaking, it doesn’t seem like there’s going to really be an impact, other than to cut off the possibility that a locality would allow for noncitizens to vote,” said Bree Grossi Wilde, executive director of the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School.

Experts say there are no Wisconsin municipalities that currently extend voting rights to noncitizens or people younger than 18.

Opponents of the amendment say it could be the first step toward future legislation requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote, a move that could disenfranchise some voters. Some also object to the state potentially blocking municipal experiments in extending the franchise to 17-year-olds and noncitizens who want to have a say in their community.

The current constitutional language on voting says that “every” U.S. citizen 18 or older has a right to vote. Under the proposed amendment, it would instead say that “only” a U.S. citizen 18 or older can vote in national, state and local elections — language that opponents say is less inclusive. 

Bans on noncitizen voting have been proliferating around the country since 2020, when false claims of widespread noncitizen voter fraud spread across conservative circles and to the highest levels of the Republican Party. Former President Donald Trump, the GOP presidential nominee, urged House Republicans recently to force a shutdown of the federal government if Congress can’t pass legislation that would require all Americans to provide proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections.

The broad category of noncitizens can include immigrants who are in the country illegally, people on work visas, as well as legal permanent residents, some of whom have lived in the U.S. for decades. Some are brand new to the communities they live in while others raised their children and owned businesses in them.

Noncitizen voting in federal elections is already illegal, and rare, because of robust systems at the state and local levels to check the eligibility of potential voters and the high risks for anyone who tries: Noncitizens who attempt to vote illegally — including legal permanent residents — can face felony charges, loss of residency status and deportation.

A Brennan Center for Justice analysis found that election officials overseeing 23.5 million votes across 42 jurisdictions in the 2016 general election referred about 30 incidents of potential noncitizen voting for further investigation or prosecution. A Heritage Foundation analysis of election fraud cases found two dozen prosecuted cases of noncitizens voting in the last 20 years.

But some areas do allow noncitizen voting in local elections. Washington, D.C., for example, allows it, and over 500 registered to vote in a recent district council election, The Washington Post reported. In San Francisco, some noncitizens can vote in school board elections. Some cities in Vermont and Maryland also offer noncitizens the chance to vote in local elections.

In Wisconsin, some Democrats have voiced support for letting local governments allow noncitizen voting. 

Christine Neumann-Ortiz, the executive director of the immigrant rights group Voces de la Frontera Action, also supports extending the franchise to noncitizens in some local elections, saying, “it makes our democracy stronger, the more people are involved.”

Supporters of the amendment argue that every ballot cast by a noncitizen’s ballot serves to cancel out a citizen’s.

Such measures “dilute the rights of United States citizens by extending the scope of qualified electors to non-citizens and discouraging the naturalization process,” Jim Steineke, a Republican former lawmaker and Assembly majority leader, said in a public comment about the proposal. 

“Addressing this issue now will ensure votes are not diluted in the future,” he said.

Sen. Julian Bradley, R-Franklin, who was the lead Senate author on the measure for its latest passage, said, “It’s best for the government to address this concern before it becomes a problem.”

Bradley disagreed with the premise voiced by some amendment opponents that some noncitizens should be able to vote in local elections because they’re tax-paying residents of their communities. Spending money in a place doesn’t entitle people to voting in that place if they’re not citizens, he said.

For 60 years after its founding, Wisconsin did allow noncitizens with a stated intention of becoming citizens to vote. In 1908, during one of the peaks of immigration into the U.S., voters approved an amendment rescinding voting rights for that demographic. That amendment didn’t explicitly ban municipalities from allowing noncitizen voting in local elections, as the current proposal would. 

So far, neither opponents nor supporters of the amendment have engaged in major mail or ad campaigns to publicize the issue. Without the public attention, many political observers predict the measure will pass, as constitutional amendment ballot questions typically do.

“I think it’s very important that more be done,” Neumann-Ortiz said. “In the absence of more public education, voters are going to vote against their own interests.”

During its two passages through the Legislature, just one group, Wisconsin Family Action, registered in favor of it.

“Wisconsin Family Action, along with the vast majority of people, believe that voting should only be eligible for U.S. citizens,” Daniel Degner, the group’s interim president, said in a statement, referencing a 2021 poll.

Groups fear citizenship proof requirement to vote

Amid a broader debate over whether noncitizens should have any right to vote, opponents of the amendment are calling attention to how it could affect current voters. 

The League of Women Voters of Wisconsin and Neumann-Ortiz said the measure could be laying the groundwork for a future proposal requiring proof of citizenship at the polls. Such a measure at a national level could disenfranchise up to 10% of U.S. citizens, who don’t have readily available documents proving their citizenship, a Brennan Center analysis states.

In Wisconsin, people registering to vote are required to attest, under oath, that they are U.S. citizens and that they’ll be 18 by the time of the next election. They’re not required to show or send in proof of citizenship, but lying on the registration form is a felony. Wisconsin state agencies have additional checks designed to keep noncitizens from getting state-issued IDs to vote.

State law allows clerks challenging a voter’s registration form to ask that person to provide proof of naturalization, Wilde added, but it doesn’t require them to seek proof.

Proponents of the amendment dismissed the idea that the proposed constitutional amendment is a precursor to a stricter law on citizenship proof. And it’s not clear the amendment would be required for such a law to pass. 

Nothing precludes the Legislature from enacting a citizenship proof requirement even now, before the amendment is passed, said Rick Esenberg, founder of the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty.

“It is up to the (Legislature) whether and to what extent it wishes to require proof,” he said. “And it will continue to be up to them once this is passed.”

Bradley, the Senate author, said he believes that Wisconsin residents should have to prove their U.S. citizenship to vote, but that the amendment has nothing to do with that.

“We will address the next question in the next Legislature,” he said.

Federal law does not require documented proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections. So any new requirement would set up a conflict like the one that has played out in Arizona for over 10 years.

Arizona passed a law that requires documented proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote, but the U.S. Supreme Court blocked Arizona’s citizenship proof requirement from taking hold in federal elections. That means Arizona keeps a separate set of rolls for voters who haven’t provided such proof and who can cast ballots only in federal contests — for president and Congress. 

A Votebeat analysis found that federal-only voters are disproportionately young adults living on or near college campuses — many of them likely college students from out of state who don’t have documents proving their citizenship readily available.

Would the new language weaken voter protections?

Some groups promoting voting access have raised another concern — that the new constitutional provision, if Wisconsin voters approve it, would weaken voter protections. They point to the language of the proposed amendment, which would say “only” U.S. citizens can vote, compared with what they see as more inclusive language in the current constitution stating that “every” citizen can vote.

“From there, there could be further limitations to the right to vote, and if there’s any legal challenges on those limitations, we won’t be able to go back to the constitution and say, ‘Well, the constitution guarantees that every citizen can vote.’ So it will not have the protection that it currently has,” said Eileen Newcomer, voter education manager of the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin.

Dan Lenz, staff counsel at Law Forward, a group that seeks more inclusive voting policies, said there are other constitutional provisions that protect voting rights in Wisconsin. But he said the potential change to this one “makes it exclusive. And, however you look at it, that is something less than what we have now.”

Lenz said constitutional amendments are an improper vehicle for passing election policy because subsequent legislatures can’t quickly fix unintended consequences since the policy is enshrined in the constitution, not just state law.

“Instead, they have to restart the amendment process,” Lenz said, “and that takes a minimum of a number of years.”

Esenberg, from the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, said he was skeptical that the amendment’s passage would authorize another voting restriction that couldn’t be enacted now.

“Given the history of the amendment (which is clearly aimed at noncitizen voting), it’s hard to imagine what limitation that is not possible today would sneak in,” he said. “This (viewpoint) seems like an effort to make the issue something other than noncitizen voting.”

It’s possible that the provision could be challenged in court in the future, with the Wisconsin Supreme Court getting the final word on whether the change from “every” to “only” is legally substantive, Wilde said.

Constitutional amendment proposals have to pass the Legislature in two successive sessions before going to voters for a final say. Republicans say the amendment process helps them protect and advance conservative policies that they fear the Wisconsin Supreme Court, currently with a liberal majority, or a future Legislature with a Democratic majority could otherwise reverse.

They’ve also used it to pass policies that Evers would almost certainly veto.

In April, voters approved two GOP-written constitutional amendments banning private grants for elections and restricting outside assistance for election officials during the conduct of elections. In August, voters rejected two GOP amendments that would have given the governor less control over federal funds.

Some voting rights advocates have criticized Republicans for backing constitutional changes to enact narrow policy changes.

“That’s not the way to do business. It’s not the way to legislate and make policy,” Newcomer said. “The constitution is a sacred document that protects our rights, and like any change that’s going to be made to the constitution, we need to take it really, really seriously.”

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.

With ballot question, Wisconsin voters will decide limits on noncitizen 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.

Just days before Wisconsin clerks are supposed to begin sending voters absentee ballots, two court cases involving Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s bid to get off the November presidential ballot may require election officials to make new ballots from scratch — and delay sending them out.

A lawsuit in Dane County circuit court and a pending appeal in a conservative court based in Waukesha County have yet to be resolved. An oral ruling in the Dane County case is scheduled for Sept. 16, three days before clerks are required under state law to send out their first batch of absentee ballots. But the appeals court may take it up before then.

Similar cases have played out in other swing states, where Kennedy has tried to get off the ballot after endorsing former President Donald Trump.

The North Carolina Supreme Court ruled in favor of Kennedy, ordering election officials to take him off the ballot after counties had already printed nearly 3 million ballots with Kennedy’s name listed. The Michigan Supreme Court ruled to keep Kennedy on the ballot, but he has since filed a federal lawsuit to get off it. 

Regardless of how the courts rule, the issue could fuel a legislative debate over whether to change a state law that appears to make it virtually impossible for candidates to get off the ballot once they file nomination papers and qualify to appear on it.

Waukesha County Clerk Meg Wartman, a Republican, said on Friday that she has already ordered the printing of ballots and is proceeding as normal at this point, expecting to get ballots to municipal clerks by Wednesday’s deadline. But if a court orders new ballots without Kennedy’s name, she said, it would take her a couple of weeks to program, test and check the new ballots before sending them to municipal clerks. That would go far beyond the current Sept. 19 deadline.

Then, Wartman said, municipal clerks would have to send voters the new ballots. If the ruling comes after local clerks send out a first batch of ballots on Thursday, municipal clerks may have to send those voters new, corrected ballots later on.

“That adds to voter confusion, time, energy — just things we have to work with at the polling place,” she said. “For us that work in elections, we’re able to adjust and work as needed, but to send the voters two ballots is difficult.” 

Some county clerks have already delivered ballots to their municipal clerks, Wartman said. She said she’s waiting until the Wednesday deadline just in case.

New ballots wouldn’t just amount to more time but also more money, Wartman said. Redoing the process could cost up to $50,000, Wartman said, and more for municipalities to send out each ballot.

“We’ve learned that in elections, everything’s doable. It’s just how expensive it is, the stress that it causes and, again, confusion for the voters,” she said.

Clerks typically finalize ballots well before they go out to voters. 

A Dane County election official said the lawsuit was filed after the county already sent finalized ballots to the printer. La Crosse County Clerk Ginny Dankmeyer, a Democrat, said on Sept. 4 that many other clerks around the state had finalized their ballots as well, “and printers are already printing.”

Dankmeyer said she waited a few days after the election commission finalized presidential candidates before she finalized ballots and sent them to be printed, just in case a lawsuit came up.

“I actually waited until Friday to send my ballots out, just because I figured that would be the three days if someone would file a lawsuit, that they would do it right away,” she said. “And then someone waited until … a week later to file a lawsuit.”

If the lawsuit is successful, Dankmeyer said, “there’s a lot involved. There’s a cost involved. There’s time involved. There’s confusion. If these ballots get back and get mailed out before a decision is made, then a new ballot has to be mailed.”

Legislative change may follow ballot access debate

Kennedy said on Aug. 23 that he was dropping out of the race and endorsing Trump. He filed to withdraw his candidacy ahead of an election meeting on Aug. 27 to give ballot access to presidential candidates. Five of the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission’s six commissioners — three Democrats and two Republicans — approved putting him on the ballot despite his request to withdraw from it. One commissioner, Republican Bob Spindell, voted to remove him from the ballot.

The commissioners voting to keep Kennedy on the ballot cited a law stating that candidates who file nomination papers and qualify to be listed on the ballot can’t decline nomination and must appear on the ballot unless they die.

The law troubled some of the commissioners, like Republican Don Millis, who said it would make sense to allow candidates to withdraw from the ballot up to the point that the commission sets the ballot. Still, Millis voted to keep Kennedy on the ballot. 

Rep. Scott Krug, a Republican who chairs the Assembly Elections Committee, said he objects to the law that the Wisconsin Elections Commission cited in keeping Kennedy on the ballot. He’s considering a proposal to change that law next legislative session.

“I have a hard time seeing why we want to force somebody to be on the ballot, even if they are seen by one side as trying to play shenanigans or whatever some have said that he’s trying to do,” Krug said. “It’s still somebody’s freedom to associate however they want to. And I just don’t see it being a good choice for good policy and long-term good governance saying, ‘Hey, you’ve got to do it. We know you don’t want to but you have to.’”

Krug’s proposal, which he has yet to solidify and circulate, would allow independent candidates to withdraw from the ballot anytime before the governing board overseeing ballot access finalizes its list of candidates.

“If you’re in the process of being approved for ballot access as an individual candidate who went through nomination papers, why not let you off? What are we hurting by letting you go?” Krug said.

The criticism against such a law, Krug said, is that it would incentivize coalition-building — allowing independent candidates to drop off the ballot at the last minute, in exchange for something, to give other candidates a boost.

But Krug said European politics have long operated through coalition-building. 

It’s unclear how much support the proposal could receive in the Legislature. Lawmakers are expecting Republicans’ near-supermajority to shrink substantially after the November election, with some Democratic legislative leaders even predicting they’ll flip the Assembly to a Democratic majority.

Candidates who no longer wanted to appear on the ballot used to have an easier off-ramp. 

A state law on the books until the late 1970s allowed a candidate to “decline the nomination by delivering to his filing official a written, signed and acknowledged declination,” according to the Legislative Reference Bureau.

The drafting file for the legislation that repealed that law didn’t offer insight into why lawmakers wanted to change it, the bureau stated.

Kennedy says rights are violated by keeping him on ballot

Kennedy’s lawsuit alleges that as an independent, he is being treated differently from major party candidates in a way that violates the First Amendment and a constitutional clause guaranteeing equal protection.

The complaint points to a state law allowing major party candidates to submit their presidential and vice presidential candidates up until the first Tuesday of September, while independent candidates have to file nomination papers by the first Tuesday in August.

Those different standards give major parties more time to vet candidates and decide their best course of action, Kennedy’s lawyers state. 

The lawsuit further alleges that candidates don’t qualify to appear on the ballot until the Wisconsin Elections Commission approves them. Until that date, the lawsuit states, the commission should have allowed him to withdraw from the ballot.

“In First Amendment parlance: it has compelled him to not just speak, but to associate with a cause he doesn’t want to be part of,” the lawsuit states.

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.

Should candidates be allowed to just drop out? RFK Jr. lawsuit spurs debate about changing state law is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

This 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.

Everything had been going just fine on the morning of election day in Summit, Wisconsin, when a voter walked up to an election official and asked why Chanz Green wasn’t on the ballot as a state Assembly candidate. 

A few checks, a couple calls, and then panic set in: It was an election official’s worst nightmare. 

The Douglas County clerk, who’s relatively new to leading the office, assigned the wrong Assembly race to the small northern Wisconsin town. Summit’s town clerk, who’s also somewhat new, didn’t catch it. Neither did the candidates. Only a voter did, on the last day of a 47-day voting period. 

The error didn’t alter the outcome of the election. The Assembly primary race that Summit voters were supposed to have had on their ballot was decided by a margin larger than the number of registered voters in the town.

But it did deprive the 188 people who cast a ballot the opportunity to vote in the correct Assembly race. Election officials take seriously any error in which a voter is disenfranchised, no matter the effect on the outcome. In many ways the goal of every aspect of their work — and their ability to earn voters’ trust — is based on avoiding this very situation.

And three months ahead of the November election, it raised alarms across the state. Some Wisconsin residents said it shook their trust in elections. The losing candidate in the Assembly primary race called for a new election — and for the resignation of Douglas County Clerk Kaci Jo Lundgren.

Speaking to Votebeat, Lundgren, a Democrat, took full blame for the error but also highlighted an issue that she said almost certainly factored into it: inexperienced election officials.

“I should have had additional review done on the ballots by more people,” Lundgren said. “I have new staff. I have new clerks. So unfortunately, it was missed.”

The error — along with its causes and aftermath — provides a view into the challenges of election administration in Wisconsin today. County and municipal clerks, hundreds of whom are new to the job at any given point, not only have to learn how to administer elections but must also adjust their operations quickly as rapid-fire litigation changes the rules sometimes just months or weeks before an election.

Just this year, clerks and their municipal boards have had to decide whether and how to implement drop boxes amid new guidelines and rhetoric that could foster increased third-party monitoring. They’re adjusting now to a recent ruling requiring clerks to implement technology to send markable electronic ballots to voters with disabilities in November. They’ve also had to adjust to two new constitutional amendments passed in April that limit clerks’ ability to receive outside money and assistance.

They’re doing all this in an environment of increased scrutiny and sometimes unbounded conspiracy theories. Beyond the demand for her to resign, Lundgren’s significant mistake led to calls to get rid of voting machines and the Wisconsin Elections Commission — neither of which factored heavily into the error — and an allegation that county clerks are “ushers of the communist stolen elections.”

Such rhetoric has gotten “so constant,” said Paul Gronke, a political science professor at Reed College who studies election administration. It has led some clerks to avoid discussing their work with community members, he said, or to leave the field entirely, often for lower-profile government jobs. Changing election laws add additional pressure, Gronke said.

“We have heard that a lot, that things are changing so quickly it’s just hard to keep up,” Gronke said. “That’s going to make errors more frequent.”

New maps compound difficulty for inexperienced officials

County clerks have also had to adjust to new legislative boundaries after a lawsuit earlier this year led to new maps in the middle of what’s usually a 10-year redistricting cycle. That’s the change that led to the election day mistake in Summit, and potentially to another ballot error in Racine County that was caught early enough to fix.

To Lundgren, the Douglas County clerk, the error was a lapse that the new staff and clerks in the county also didn’t catch. Neither did Dan Corbin, the town clerk in Summit, who didn’t return several calls to Votebeat. 

After a voter caught it on election day, Lundgren called the Wisconsin Elections Commission, seeking its direction to try to resolve the issue. There was no clear fix. The problem appeared unprecedented, Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe said, and there didn’t seem to be any Wisconsin court decision or law outlining specific next steps. 

Initially, the prospect of a do-over election was on the table. That was an option Scott Harbridge, the losing candidate in the Assembly race mistakenly left off the Summit ballot, supported. 

But on Aug. 20, the Douglas County board of canvassers certified the election. The county disqualified the votes that Summit voters cast for the Assembly race mistakenly put on their ballots. 

Trent Miner, the clerk in Wood County in central Wisconsin, said an error like the one in Douglas County could have occurred anywhere, even with a more experienced clerk, especially because of new legislative district lines.

“You live in mortal fear that you’re going to miss something,” said Miner, a Republican. “This is Kaci’s first presidential election — certainly not the first election she’s administered — but this is probably the first one since those new districts went into effect.”

A similar mistake happened elsewhere, too, ahead of the Aug. 13 election.

In the village of Caledonia in Racine County, absentee voters assigned to a polling place that serves two Assembly districts initially received ballots with the wrong Assembly race on them. 

County Clerk Wendy Christensen had put in wrong information when she was preparing ballots, and nobody caught it until after the ballots first went out.

“I have a slightly bigger team here than some of the counties up north, so we have even more sets of eyes on things,” said Christensen, a Republican. “We proof in teams of two, and then we give it to two other people and (do) multiple rounds of it. But even with more people and more sets of eyes, again, it can be missed.”

A voter caught the mistake about 10 days after the first round of ballots went out, giving election officials enough time to issue corrected ballots to absentee voters, Caledonia Village Clerk Jennifer Olsen said. All in-person voters got the correct ballots, she said.

Christensen said late rule changes, like the new maps, leave less time to look over things.

“Just when you sort of think you got it figured out, sometimes the rules change, or the maps change, or something else changes,” Christensen said.

Pressure on clerks increasing as November election approaches

On social media, some Wisconsin residents said mistakes like Lundgren’s perpetuate distrust in elections. One person said “county clerks are a big part of the problem,” adding, “F ‘em.”

“There’s a lot of people that don’t have faith that our elections are fair,” Harbridge told Votebeat on election day. “And, you know, I don’t want this just to be another thing that puts that dagger in our elections because we need to have everybody confident that our elections are fair.”

Harbridge said he had little confidence in Wolfe, the elections commission administrator. He also criticized outside vendors preparing ballots and said he supports eliminating voting machines in favor of hand-counted paper ballots. He later posted on social media that clerks should print their ballots locally, something many county clerks aren’t equipped to do. 

“The rhetoric isn’t productive,” Miner said. “Kaci made a mistake. She owned up to it. She admitted as soon as she found out. Kaci’s a great clerk. She is, and I know that because she’s taking this incredibly hard.”

For her part, Lundgren, who had spent 10 years working in the county clerk’s office before taking it over, was forthright with voters and the press. She took blame for the mistake, alerted the candidates once she found out about it, and said she’d examine how the error occurred to make sure it never happens again. County clerks and local officials contacted her with words of support and ideas for preventing similar issues in the future.

Still, she made a crucial mistake that amounted to a town not having the right race on the ballot.

What’s the best way to address that error?

For Angie Sapik, a Republican state representative and Douglas County Board member, there is no clear answer except avoiding the same mistake in the future.

“It was just an honest error on her part,” she said. “It doesn’t take away from the severity of the error because I think it is an enormous, enormous problem. But it is just a mistake, and I think it’s a mistake that is probably easy to make with how many changes there have been. She’s a great lady. She works really hard.”

For Harbridge, the solution is Lundgren’s resignation. But Gronke said such a step would be counterproductive.

“The immediate assumption that the best solution here is to get rid of the person because that person was new and not as experienced as they should be, and then you bring another new and inexperienced person, is certainly not the best way to do it,” he said. “The way to do it is to figure out what kind of protections can be put in place to ensure that this doesn’t happen in the future.”

The Wisconsin Elections Commission was slated to consider sending clerks a document on procedures to proofread ballots, which would go out to clerks if commissioners sign off on it at an upcoming meeting, agency spokesperson Joel DeSpain said.

Lundgren said she’s determined to stay in her job despite the criticism following her error. 

“I love what I do,” she said. “I love serving the public. I love my community and the people that I’m with. The political side of things can be difficult because of the heated nature that politics is in right now, and that’s what is difficult for me, but I know that I’m in the right spot for my community and to serve them.”

About Harbridge’s call for her to resign, she said, “If he is concerned about one error, getting a brand new clerk in this position, especially before a presidential election, that would be a huge disservice to Douglas County residents.” 

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

Wisconsin ballot error highlights pressures on election officials ahead of November is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

This 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.

They opened to fanfare and closed on or just before Election Day, having fulfilled their purpose. Absentee ballot drop boxes were back in Wisconsin for the first time in over two years, and everything seemed to go just fine.

For last Tuesday’s primary, voters in many Wisconsin municipalities had their first opportunity in several elections to return their ballots to a drop box. That could have been at one of the 14 drop boxes in Madison, one of the 13 locations in Milwaukee, the red drop box outside of Racine’s City Hall or one of the other drop boxes located in places from Onalaska to Rhinelander. 

Many municipalities that used to have drop boxes didn’t reopen them for this election for various reasons, from a rusted drop box lock to a lack of time — the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s July 5 decision unbanning them came less than six weeks before the primary. Many of those cities plan to have drop boxes available in November, though.

In the places that offered them for the primary, including Wisconsin’s two biggest cities, clerks reported no significant problems and a fair amount of drop box use, given that the option opened up well after absentee voting was already underway. 

“The transition to utilizing drop boxes has been going pretty smoothly thus far, and we hope that that’ll continue in November,” said Paulina Gutiérrez, executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission.

Voters said drop boxes provided them with an extra path to return their ballots as they juggled challenging work schedules and other obstacles to voting.

Madison resident Quocan Vo works nights, which he said makes it inconvenient to vote in person during the day. He contemplated taking his absentee ballot to a polling place, but said that “defeats the purpose of absentee voting.”

Instead, he took his ballot to a drop box Monday just outside the Willy Street Co-op, becoming one of hundreds of Madisonians to use a drop box this election.

Madison’s drop boxes opened on Aug. 5, eight days before election day and on what City Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl calls “Mail-it-back Monday” — the last day by which she said a ballot should be mailed to avoid delays. 

The ballots that arrived in drop boxes since that date, Witzel-Behl told Votebeat, “are absentees that maybe otherwise would have been put in the mail and arrived after election day, so wouldn’t have been able to be counted.”

Drop boxes also had a steady stream of activity in Milwaukee, Gutiérrez said. The most heavily used drop boxes were those near the busiest early voting sites, she said.

Milwaukee resident Matt Dresen initially sent his ballot in by mail. But it was returned to him on Monday because the envelope lacked a witness address. After fixing the error, he put the ballot in a Bay View drop box on Tuesday, recognizing that his ballot would arrive too late if he tried mailing it again.

Plenty of internal processes to keep drop boxes safe

Some voters have lingering and unfounded suspicions about drop boxes: that they’re not secure, or that they promote so-called ballot harvesting. The doubts have been voiced even by some politicians, like Republican U.S. Senate candidate Eric Hovde, who on Tuesday questioned why Wisconsinites need drop boxes and falsely said they didn’t exist in Wisconsin until the pandemic.

More than half the states in the country expressly allow drop boxes or have jurisdictions that offer them. 

In Madison, poll workers followed a meticulous process to make sure absentee ballots deposited at drop boxes were safe. 

After 5 p.m. on Monday, when drop boxes closed for the election, poll workers assigned to teams of two loaded ballots from each of the city’s 14 drop boxes into tamper-evident bags, each with unique seal numbers. During the process, they filled out chain-of-custody forms with their names, the time they arrived at the drop box, and the serial number on each bag. They also closed and locked both slots on the drop boxes.

The poll workers then took the secure bags on a short trip to the city clerk’s office, where election workers counted the ballots and confirmed on the chain-of-custody sheet that they accepted the drop box delivery, writing the time they received the ballot bags and noting their serial numbers.

On a few occasions, when they pulled out the ballots, election officials found absentee ballots for different cities, and they arranged to have those ballots delivered to the correct place. They then sorted the Madison ballots by the 108 polling sites and loaded them again into tamper-evident bags with unique seal numbers. Then, on Election Day, poll workers dropped those ballots off at the correct polling sites, filling out another chain-of-custody form to document their activity. In Madison, absentee ballots are counted at the polling site where the voter would have otherwise cast an in-person ballot.

Election officials in other areas of the state have different processes to keep drop boxes and the ballots deposited in them secure. But across the board, it appeared the absentee ballots deposited in drop boxes passed through fewer hands — and likely fewer cities — than mailed ballots. And they almost certainly took less time to get to clerks’ offices. Election officials have been concerned with mail delivery as they’ve faced lost ballots and mail delays.

Preparing for drop boxes and additional guidance

Rolling out drop boxes required last-minute work from the election officials who decided to offer them in this primary election. 

The state high court lifted the ban on them after absentee voting already started on June 27. The Wisconsin Elections Commission issued guidance outlining proper procedures for drop box use about one week after that. Among the guidelines was that voters should return only their own ballot to a drop box unless they’re helping somebody who has a disability or is hospitalized — a new guideline the agency didn’t issue last time drop boxes were in use.

There was talk before the election of outside observers monitoring drop boxes in Madison and other parts of the state to watch for signs of possible or perceived wrongdoing. There was little of that, though November may be a different story. 

In Milwaukee, city officials hosted a couple press conferences to highlight drop box use and met with staff from voter-focused organizations to get the message out about proper drop box use, like how voters in most cases can return only their own ballot to a drop box, Gutiérrez said.

Gutiérrez also prepared election workers and staff at libraries, where most of the city’s drop boxes are located, for the possibility of third-party drop box observers. 

“We don’t mind observers. They can come and watch,” she said. “We just don’t want them to interfere with the voting process, and we don’t want voters to feel intimidated.”

By Monday afternoon, Gutiérrez said, there were no signs of outside groups interfering with the voting process at drop boxes or any drop box observers that did anything notable.

Milwaukee election officials aren’t obligated to ask any questions to people returning ballots to a drop box, said Gutiérrez, in reference to an additional state election commission guideline. 

Even somebody dropping off four or five ballots could be doing so properly because the other ballots could belong to residents of residential care facilities, Gutiérrez said. 

“It’s not our discretion to figure it out,” she said. “Of course, if someone gets a complaint, we will investigate as well as we can.” 

In Madison, Witzel-Behl typically sends voters a supplemental letter outlining where and how voters can return absentee ballots. But she finalized and began sending out the document before the high court legalized drop boxes.

Still, city officials have tried to alert the public about the new ballot return option. Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway held a news conference standing beside a drop box on the day they opened.

“We are absolutely committed to making sure that every eligible voter has a safe and secure way to cast their ballot, and drop boxes are, I think, a really key part of that,” she said.

Appearing alongside her were staff members of voter advocacy groups, including All Voting Is Local and Disability Rights Wisconsin, who tried to get the message out about drop boxes since the July ruling. 

Drop boxes provide a safe and accessible voting option for people whose disabilities make it difficult or impossible to vote in person, said Anna Anderson, Disability Rights Wisconsin’s voting rights coordinator. 

Some Wisconsin voters didn’t yet have access to drop boxes

Madison and Milwaukee each had over a dozen drop boxes in use, while some other cities had just one or none at all.

Wausau officials opted not to open their drop box, partially because of a rusted drop box lock. 

Green Bay City Clerk Celestine Jeffreys told Votebeat the city didn’t have enough time to reinstall its drop boxes after the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling. She hopes to install them in time for the general election, she said.

Beloit City Clerk Marcy Granger said she didn’t use drop boxes in this election because the decision came after she already sent out absentee ballots with an instruction sheet approved by the Wisconsin Elections Commission. The sheet didn’t mention drop boxes as a ballot return option. 

Drop box policies also varied among the municipalities using them. 

For example, Madison’s drop boxes closed Monday at 5 p.m., while Milwaukee’s stayed open until 6 p.m. on Tuesday.

In Madison, the earlier closure is a function of the way the city sorts absentee ballots and sends them out to polling places for counting. 

In Milwaukee, as in other cities with central absentee ballot counting facilities, the process is simpler. Ballots from drop boxes are taken to the city’s single central counting location and counted there along with other absentee ballots. The 6 p.m. deadline ensures that election officials have enough time to collect and count them, Gutiérrez said.

November’s election will be different. Voter turnout will be far greater, drop boxes will be more widely available, and many more ballots will end up in them. And there may well be third-party election observers watching drop box activity, and reporting their suspicions if they see a voter dropping off multiple ballots.

But for the primary, as a trial for the return of a popular voting option during a relatively low-turnout election, it appears drop boxes passed the test.

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

Ballot drop boxes prove popular in return to some Wisconsin cities during primary 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.

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.

It’s primary election day in Wisconsin, and early voting has provided a test run for newly legalized absentee ballot drop boxes.

Wisconsinites’ votes today will determine whether the Legislature can take control of how the governor uses federal funds, who will be their legislative and congressional candidates and, in the few counties with contested clerks’ races, who will manage elections after this year.

Don’t expect a big turnout. Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe said turnout percentages for elections like these typically run in the mid-teens to upper 20s.

That means clerks will likely have fewer ballots to count and some extra time to make sure their processes are running smoothly ahead of November, when they can expect more eyes on them and potential legal challenges. It’s also a time for clerks to make sure their drop boxes are in order (or, in Wausau, to dust off those rusty drop box locks just one more time). 

Here’s what’s new and noteworthy for this election day and what to watch for.

The popularity of drop boxes

When drop boxes were last used heavily for a critical statewide election, in 2020, Wisconsin was in the middle of a pandemic, in-person voting options were more limited, and there was less political and legal pushback against the ballot return option. These factors made drop boxes immensely popular.

Now, all polling locations are open again, and drop boxes are more politicized, seemingly scarcer and, depending where you are, not as much in demand.

That said, drop boxes are still a voting option that many Wisconsinites like and are thrilled to see available again. Depending on where you live, your municipality may have as many as a dozen drop boxes, or none at all. I’ll be watching out for how many voters use drop boxes and vote absentee in general compared with in-person voting. 

I’ll also be watching out for third-party efforts to monitor drop boxes, though we’re not likely to see intense activity until November. As I reported in July, new Wisconsin Elections Commission guidance says voters who use drop boxes must return only their own ballots, unless they’re helping somebody who has a disability or is hospitalized. That means a person returning a spouse’s ballot could be considered as having cast a ballot improperly. 

Election conspiracy theorists and a Republican U.S. Senate candidate are already publicizing plans to look for suspicious drop box activity: Are voters returning more than one ballot? Are suspicious people opening drop boxes in the wee hours? As election experts have told me, just the perception of wrongdoing could be enough for a drop box monitor to go public with accusations and create suspicion. I’m curious whether we’ll see such an incident in this election.

Lastly, with drop boxes, I’ll be looking out for how municipalities use them differently. 

In Madison, for example, drop boxes closed at 5 p.m. on Monday; voters who have a ballot to drop off must take them to their polling place. In Milwaukee, however, the boxes are open until 6 p.m. on Tuesday. Are the early closing times, like Madison’s, confusing voters who try to return ballots to them on Tuesday? Will Milwaukee be able to gather absentee ballots from drop boxes quickly enough to avoid additional vote-counting delays?

Some legal changes appear imminent but not for this election. For example, a Dane County judge is requiring municipal clerks to provide electronic voting options for people with disabilities. But the order requiring those accommodations is for the November election, not August. A judge recently denied a motion by Republican lawmakers to stay that ruling as they appeal it.

County clerks face off (or, in most cases, don’t)

Wisconsin’s county clerks are up for election this year, and in the vast majority of cases, voters are just going to see just one name on the August and November election ballots. Only about 10% of Wisconsin’s 72 counties will have competitive county-clerk primaries or general elections.

Although municipal clerks are charged with running elections at the local level, county clerks still have significant election responsibilities. They’re tasked with uploading election night results, providing ballots and other election supplies to municipal clerks on time, training other election officials, and conducting recounts.

In most counties, you’ll have the same county clerk at the beginning of the next term. In some, the incumbent may get replaced by a deputy county clerk or a municipal clerk.

There’s one high-stakes race, in Washington County, where Clerk Ashley Reichert, a Republican, is facing a challenge from the right by Sue True, who is advocating radical changes in the way Wisconsinites vote. 

“The way to restore our Constitutional Republic is simple,” True said in a blog post. “Pray, Remove the Machines, Vote in Person, Hand Count Paper Ballots.”

Aside from the fact that Wisconsin law requires voting machines in municipalities with 7,500 or more people, multiple reports have outlined how error-prone hand-counting ballots is.

Reichert appears to be favored to win — she has received endorsements from the county executive, legislators, and other local officials — but can True pull off an upset, or show that even a substantial minority of Washington County voters supports the election practices she endorses?

Election conspiracy theorists seek legislative seats

Over the last few years, Republicans in control of the Legislature have largely pushed the chambers’ most fervent election conspiracy theorists to the sidelines. Now, two of them are looking to return to or stay in the Legislature against center-right candidates.

Rep. Janel Brandtjen, formerly the head of the Assembly Elections Committee, was not only relieved of her chairing duties but also kicked out of private Republican meetings as GOP leaders say they lost trust in her. 

Former Rep. Tim Ramthun, a Republican who unsuccessfully ran for governor in 2022, was shushed and ignored on the Assembly floor as he tried to decertify the 2020 election.

Brandtjen and Ramthun will be facing off against longtime Republican legislators on Tuesday. Do they stand a chance? 

Brandtjen just might. Although she has lost the respect of many of her colleagues, she has former President Donald Trump’s support. Her opponent is Sen. Dan Knodl, currently Republican chair of the Senate Elections Committee. Voters backed Knodl over Brandtjen in a Senate primary in 2023. 

This time, the district’s smaller. Do voters in Washington and Waukesha County prefer the candidate who has rallied behind Trump’s stop-the-steal rhetoric? Or do they prefer the center-right candidate in Knodl?

Ramthun, endorsed by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, also represents the GOP wing that’s focused on election conspiracy theories. Ramthun faces an unlikely bid against Sen. Dan Feyen, who’s backed by Republican legislative leaders and Wisconsin U.S. representatives. 

It’ll be something of a surprise if Ramthun or Brandtjen wins. If they lose, it’ll be another sign that so-called election integrity is a losing message for Republicans. 

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

It’s primary day. Vote on constitutional amendments, partisan legislative races 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.