Wisconsin Secretary of State Sarah Godlewski speaks at a press conference defending ballot drop boxes and local election officials on Oct. 30, 2024 in Madison | Wisconsin Examiner photo

As the 2024 campaign air war reaches a furious crescendo over our battleground state, a few groups of public-spirited citizens have been quietly organizing on the ground to shore up the foundations of our democracy.

Take just three events that occurred during the week before Election Day: 

• A bipartisan group of current and former elected officials signed a pledge to respect the results of the election — whatever they may be.
• A separate bipartisan group of Wisconsin political leaders held a press conference to declare their confidence in the security of Wisconsin’s election system and to pledge to fight back against people who cast doubt on the legitimacy of the results — whatever they may be
• Wisconsin Secretary of State Sarah Godlewski and grassroots pro-democracy advocates held an event in downtown Madison to support the use of ballot drop boxes and to defend local election clerks in a season of threats, intimidation and destabilizing conspiracy theories.

All of these public declarations of confidence in the basic voting process we used to take for granted show just how far from normal we’ve drifted.

As Democratic U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan put it in a joint press conference with Republican former U.S. Rep. Reid Ribble, “This is sort of no-brainer stuff.” Yet the two Wisconsin congressmen celebrated the announcement that they got 76 state politicians to sign their pledge to honor the results of the 2024 election.

Notably, however, the list of politicians who agreed to respect what Ribble described as “democracy 101” — that “the American people get to decide who leads them; candidates need to accept the results” — does not include many members of the party of Donald Trump.

Petition signers so far include 64 Democrats, one independent and nine Republicans. Worse, nearly every one of those Republicans has the word “former” next to his or her title. 

Technically state Sen. Rob Cowles is still serving out the remainder of his term. But the legislative session is over and Cowles won’t be back. After announcing his retirement, he made waves this week when he renounced Trump and endorsed Kamala Harris for president. Other GOP officials who pledged to respect the election results include former state Sen. Kathy Bernier, who leads the group Keep Our Republic, which has been fighting election conspiracy theories and trying to rebuild trust in local election clerks, and former state Sen. Luther Olsen, a public school advocate who worked across the aisle back before the current era of intense political polarization.

On the same day Pocan and Ribble made their announcement, a different bipartisan group of Wisconsin leaders, members of the Democracy Defense Project – Wisconsin state board, held a press call to emphasize the protections in place to keep the state’s elections safe and to call out “bad actors” who might try to undermine the results.

Former Democratic Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes and former Republican Attorney General JB Van Hollen joined the call along with former Republican U.S. Rep. Scott Klug and former state Democratic Party Chair Mike Tate.

“I can speak from personal experience, having won and lost very close elections, that the process here in Wisconsin is safe and secure, and that’s exactly why you have this bipartisan group together,” said Barnes, who narrowly lost his challenge to U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson in 2022.

Barnes said false claims undermining confidence in voting and tabulating election results “have been manufactured by sore losers.”

If you lose an election, he added, “you have the option to run again at some point. But what you should not do is question the integrity or try to impugn our election administrators just because the people have said no to you.”

Former AG Van Hollen, a conservative Republican, seconded that emotion. “I’m here to tell you as the former chief law enforcement officer for the state of Wisconsin that our system does work,” he said.

Van Hollen reminded people that he pushed for Wisconsin’s strict voter I.D. law, which Democrats opposed as a voter-suppression measure. “Whether you were for it or against it, the bottom line is that it is in place right now. If people pretended to be somebody else when they came in and voted in the past, they cannot do that any longer,” Van Hollen said.

For voters of every stripe, he added, “Get out and vote. Your vote will count. Our system works and we have to trust in the result of that system.”

Former Republican Congressman Klug underscored that Trump lost Wisconsin in 2020 “and it had nothing to do with election fraud. It just had to do with folks who decided to vote in a different direction.”

He also praised local election workers and volunteers, like those who take his ballot at his Lutheran church, and “who make Wisconsin’s election system one of the best in the country.”

Tate, the former Democratic Party chair, warned that the unusually high volume of early voting and a state law that forbids clerks from counting ballots until polls close on election night will likely mean delays in results coming in. “There are good reasons for that,” he said, “because our good election workers are exercising extreme due diligence.”

In a separate press conference outside City Hall in Madison, members of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign and Secretary of State Godlewski also chimed in to defend Wisconsin’s hard-working election clerks and combat conspiracy theories.

Nick Ramos, the Democracy Campaign’s executive director, connected recent news stories about drop-box arson in other states to the hijacking of a local dropbox by the mayor of Wausau, Wisconsin, who physically removed his town’s ballot drop box and locked it in his office. The mayor was forced to return the box and is now the subject of a criminal investigation. It’s important to hold people accountable who try to interfere with voting, Ramos said, because otherwise “people will try to imitate those types of bad behaviors.”

Besides sticking up for beleaguered election officials, the pro-drop-box press conference featured testimony from Martha Siravo, a founder of Madtown Mommas and Disability Advocates. Siravo, who uses a wheelchair, explained that having a drop box makes it much easier for her to vote. 

Godlewski described conversations with other voters around the state — a busy working mom, an elderly woman who has to ask her kids for rides when she needs to go out, and a young man who works the night shift — all of whom were able to vote by dropping their absentee ballots in a secure drop box, but who might not have made it to the polls during regular voting hours. “These stories are real and that’s why drop boxes matter,” Godlewski said. Restoring drop boxes is part of “helping ensure Wisconsin remains a state where every vote matters.”

That’s the spirit we need going into this fraught election, and for whatever comes after.

Mikayla Hughes singing during an early voting gathering at the Midtown Center in Milwaukee. (Photo | Isiah Holmes)

“The cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy,” is a famous maxim from the early 20th century that has been variously attributed to the prominent American social worker and women’s suffrage leader Jane Addams, to the leading American philosopher and psychologist of that era, John Dewey and, most famously, to the iconic former Wisconsin Governor and U.S. Senator Robert M. “Fighting Bob” LaFollette. Regardless of who actually coined that phrase, it was utilized by all three and has proven to be predictive and prescriptive time and again over the years. Now, it may never be more applicable and essential for the survival of our 235-year-old American Experiment in representative self-government than it is today, in 2024.

This year so far in Wisconsin has been an astonishingly positive period for the advancement of democratic engagement and participation after more than a decade of continuous diminishment and destruction of what was once considered the nation’s foremost laboratory of democracy.

Fair maps

In February, after 13 years of enduring one of the most partisan, unfair and unrepresentative political gerrymanders in the nation of our state’s legislative districts, Wisconsinites rejoiced as Gov. Tony Evers signed into law new, much fairer and more competitive state legislative voting maps. The new maps are in effect for 2024 and likely will remain in place until the end of this decade. These maps favor neither Democrats or Republicans. Instead, they much more accurately reflect the very closely divided, 50/50, “blue/red” partisan divide that is Wisconsin, arguably the most “purple” state in the nation.

The return of ballot drop boxes

In July the Wisconsin Supreme Court overturned a misguided and injurious decision made two years ago by the previous court majority that wrongly prohibited the use of secure ballot drop boxes for all Wisconsinites. Disabled and elderly voters and people who live in areas where voting hours are limited used drop boxes to safely and securely return absentee ballots to election clerks in time for them to be counted on Election Day. Eliminating drop boxes was a callous voter suppression measure that was put in place only in Wisconsin and in about a dozen deep red southern and western states. Fortunately, the current Wisconsin Supreme Court majority corrected this travesty of justice and in many (but not all) communities, ballot drop boxes have been restored for the Nov. 5  election and beyond.

Voters reject constitutional amendments

Finally, in August during the partisan primary elections in Wisconsin, voters rose up and decisively defeated two constitutional ballot measures that would have hamstrung the ability of the governor of Wisconsin to distribute federal funds allocated to Wisconsin in times of emergency, such as a natural disaster or pandemic, without the permission of a small group of powerful partisan legislators. When voters were educated about the effect of this last gasp of a gerrymandered partisan legislative majority to seize more power and further upset the critical balance of political power in this state, voters resoundingly voted “No!” Voter turnout in August was higher in this state in a partisan primary election than any other in the past 60 years.

These three momentous and heartening victories for all of the voters of Wisconsin and for democracy signify that if citizens get engaged and informed they will support the expansion of voting rights, people empowerment and the preservation and enhancement of democratic norms and traditions and will defeat attempts to curtail these liberties. The recent developments in Wisconsin also demonstrate that a fully engaged citizenry and very robust voter turnout are as critical to the survival of democracy as oxygen is to the act of breathing and to life itself.

The cure for the ills of democracy in Wisconsin and nationally is voting. When we vote we help to cure the sickness of citizen disengagement that afflicts us as well as the despair, pessimism and cynicism that accompanies that sickness. When we vote we become a healthier and more empowered citizenry. The upcoming election on Nov. 5 is the most important and consequential of any for most of us in our lifetimes. There is no excuse for not actively participating in this election by, at the very least, voting. And each of us can and should do even more to promote voting by expressing its urgency with family members, friends, neighbors, and even strangers if we are able. Vote as if our country and democracy depend on it because in a very real and tangible way, it does.