Boxes of ballots wait to be counted at Milwaukee's central count on Election Day 2024. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)
U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin was declared the winner of Wisconsin’s Senate race by The Associate Press on Wednesday, earning her third term in the chamber. But her opponent, Republican businessman Eric Hovde, remains within the margin allowed under state law to request a recount.
Under state law, candidates who lose by a margin of less than 1% are able to request a recount of both the whole state and individual counties. If the margin is less than 0.25%, the state pays for the costs of the recount — which include staff labor, space, transportation, rentals and supplies — but if it’s more than 0.25% the candidate’s campaign pays for those costs. If the recount changes the result of an election, the counties and state are responsible for the costs.
In 2020, Donald Trump paid $3 million for recounts in Dane and Milwaukee counties.
While official results won’t be ready for weeks, unofficial results show Hovde trails Baldwin by 0.9%.
Wisconsin’s election certification process begins at the local level when boards of canvass in 1,850 communities meet to validate and certify the results of the election. The local boards of canvass, which consist of the municipal clerk and two appointed members from each community, must meet and certify the local election results no later than 9 a.m. on the first Monday after the election.
The certification then moves to the county level, where similarly constructed county boards of canvass meet to validate and certify the results. Results from the county boards of canvass must be transmitted to the Wisconsin Elections Commission within 14 days after a general election. This year that deadline falls on Nov. 19.
At each level, and for the final state certification, the action of the boards of canvass is ministerial, meaning the board has no discretion to not certify a result it doesn’t like. If all the votes were accounted for and legally cast, the board must certify the results.
After the county boards of canvass are complete and the final county sends its results to the state, a candidate within the recount margin can request a recount. Presidential candidates must file their request within one business day after the final county canvass. Other candidates, including Hovde, have three business days. That gives the Hovde campaign until Nov. 22 to request a full or partial recount.
When a recount is called, it is the responsibility of the county to hold it. The recount is a public process and in 2020 the recounts were livestreamed. Representatives from the two parties are involved in the process as election inspectors from each recounted county’s municipalities goes through the ballots again, making sure they were tabulated correctly. Each party is able to challenge individual ballots and each challenge is adjudicated by a bipartisan recount court.
“It’s a very, very public process that has a lot of involvement from the party representatives and the political parties as well,” WEC Administrator Meagan Wolfe said at a Wednesday news conference.
Counties have three days to begin their recount after it is ordered and a recount must be completed by Nov. 30 because the state’s deadline to certify the election results is Dec. 1.
Election officials have expressed confidence in Wisconsin’s election system and its ability to withstand any 2020-style attempts to overturn the results — yet some members of the state’s Republican party, and Donald Trump himself, have continued their work of the past four years to undermine trust in the system.
On Friday, Trump posted on X that if elected he would prosecute people who “cheated” in the election.
“I, together with many Attorneys and Legal Scholars, am watching the Sanctity of the 2024 Presidential Election very closely because I know, better than most, the rampant Cheating and Skullduggery that has taken place by the Democrats in the 2020 Presidential Election,” he wrote. “It was a Disgrace to our Nation! Therefore, the 2024 Election, where Votes have just started being cast, will be under the closest professional scrutiny and, WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again. We cannot let our Country further devolve into a Third World Nation, AND WE WON’T! Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”
After the 2020 election, Wisconsin Republicans formed the plan that became the fake elector scheme. In Wisconsin and six other states where President Joe Biden won, slates of Republicans cast fraudulent Electoral College votes for Trump. Those votes became the basis for Republican members of Congress’ effort to vote to change the results of the election and give the victory to Trump on Jan. 6, 2021.
In the months leading up to the 2024 election, election experts here have pointed to legal developments that should prevent a similar effort this year. The Republicans who took part in Wisconsin’s fake elector scheme have been barred from serving as presidential electors, Congress passed a law making it harder for them to dispute election results and more people are watching than in 2020.
Absentee counting
But some conspiracy theories that abounded after 2020 have persisted. Republicans in Wisconsin claimed that voter fraud had occurred in Milwaukee because thousands of votes from the largely Democratic voting city were “dumped” in the middle of the night, flipping the election to President Joe Biden.
The votes hadn’t been dumped. Instead the city — dealing with a massive increase in absentee voting because of the COVID-19 pandemic — took longer to count those ballots at its central count location.
While most communities in the state count absentee ballots at the same polling place where the voters who cast them would vote in person, 36 communities send their absentee ballots to be counted together at one location.
In response to the conspiracy theories about late night “ballot dumps,” the state Legislature considered a bill that would allow local election officials to begin processing absentee ballots on the Monday before the election. Local clerks would be able to open absentee envelopes and get the ballots ready to be counted, though not actually fed into tabulating machines, ahead of time, which would have allowed the counting on Election Day to move faster.
The bill passed the Assembly, but Republicans in the state Senate killed it.
On Thursday, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) blamed state Rep. Janel Brandtjen (R-Menomonee Falls) for the bill’s failure. Brandtjen has been one of the Legislature’s most outspoken election conspiracy theorists. Some of Wisconsin’s most prominent election deniers had opposed the bill’s passage during public hearings — alleging that if the ballots were processed ahead of time, nefarious actors could figure out exactly how many fraudulent votes were needed to swing the result.
Wisconsin Elections Commission Chair Ann Jacobs expressed her exasperation on social media: “It was based on her conspiracy theory that (somehow) if the 10’s of 1,000’s of envelopes were opened early, someone could figure out the exact # of fake ballots (how? Who knows!) would be filled out & added to the ballot count. Complete nonsense yet here we are!”
Because the bill failed, and because many voters have continued to use the absentee and early voting processes after the pandemic, it’s likely that Milwaukee will again report results long after polls close on Election Day.
Wisconsin’s system
Unlike most other states, Wisconsin’s election system is decentralized. Administration of elections is handled by the 1,850 municipal clerks working across the state. Each clerk is responsible for the election within their community.
At a virtual event hosted on Friday by Keep Our Republic — an organization that has spent four years trying to rebuild trust in the election system by explaining to skeptics exactly how the system works — former Wisconsin Congressman Reid Ribble said that if a person can’t trust politicians that the system is safe and secure, they should trust their local clerk and their friends and neighbors who volunteer as poll workers.
“Elections in Wisconsin are fair and safe and the 1,800 county and municipal clerks that are running those elections, and the thousands and thousands of local volunteers and poll workers, are working very hard to do their jobs in a non-partisan manner,” Ribble said. “I’ve often told friends of mine and other citizens … I get it if you don’t trust politicians. One person you should be able to trust is that — usually a senior citizen — poll worker at your local precinct that’s checking your ID and giving you a ballot and making sure that everything is done correctly. You often see these people at your grocery store. They might sit two or three rows in front of you at church and these are your friends. They’re your neighbors. They’re people that are concerned about defending democracy and seeing it unfold in front of their very eyes.”
Once polls close on Election Day and the votes are tallied, unofficial results get sent to county clerks, who report those preliminary numbers. It’s from those initial reports that media organizations use statistical processes to “call” races, declaring who has won. But the actual winners aren’t officially declared until the results are certified at multiple levels.
This multi-step process gives election experts another layer of assurance that despite continued conspiracy theories, Wisconsin’s system is resistant to meddling.
Each municipality convenes a Board of Canvass, a multi-member body that reviews the community’s election results and makes sure that there aren’t any irregularities — making sure that the number of ballots cast equals the number of people who signed the poll books, for example.
Board of canvass members live in that community, which experts say makes it hard for them to throw a wrench in the process and refuse to certify results, because they’d be declaring that their friends and neighbors’ votes shouldn’t count. This differs from states such as Georgia, where fears have arisen after last-minute process changes that partisan officials placed in this step of the process could throw out results, swaying the election to Trump.
After the local board certifies the results, in Wisconsin, a similar body at the county level does the same. Then the state elections commission reviews the tallies and the chair of the commission certifies the results. Gov. Tony Evers will then certify whether the Democratic or Republican slate of electors has been chosen.
On Dec. 17 this year, the electors will meet and cast their Electoral College votes for the winner of each state.
Lawsuits
Ahead of the 2020 election, many lawsuits were filed as questions arose over how to conduct a presidential election during a pandemic. After Biden won, Trump and his campaign undertook a flurry of legal efforts in an attempt to overturn the results.
UW-Madison Law School Professor Robert Yablon said at the Keep Our Republic event Friday that 2024 has seen even more litigation than 2020.
“In Wisconsin and around the country, election contests are increasingly being waged, not just in the court of public opinion, but in actual courts,” Yablon said. “The volume of litigation that we have seen in Wisconsin in 2024 is already higher than we saw in 2020, despite the fact that we’re no longer dealing with a pandemic that’s creating an array of controversies and questions about what sort of voting accommodations to be providing.”
The most significant lawsuit ended when the Wisconsin Supreme Court overturned a previous decision that outlawed the use of absentee ballot drop boxes. Drop boxes became very popular with the rise in absentee voting in 2020, but Republicans turned against them as conspiracy theories spread, claiming the boxes are vulnerable to fraud. Hundreds of drop boxes were in place across the state in 2020, but despite being legal again this year, only 78 are being used.
A lawsuit has also changed rules guiding absentee witness signatures. Absentee voters are required to have someone witness their ballot by signing the absentee ballot envelope and providing their address. If the address isn’t included, the ballot can’t be counted.
In the past, local clerks have been given some discretion to add missing information to the address line. If, for example, a married couple filled out their ballots together and a voter’s spouse wrote “ditto,” the clerk could write in the complete address. Or if the clerk knows where the person lives, they could add that information themselves, similarly if the person left off a zip code or city name, the clerk could complete it.
This practice was banned by a 2020 court decision, but subsequent lawsuits have clarified that the ballot must be counted “as long as the certificate contains enough information for the clerk to reasonably be able to identify the place where a witness may be communicated with,” Yablon said.
A number of other lawsuits amount to what Yablon said are efforts to sow distrust in the system, even if they won’t be resolved ahead of the election. Two of these lawsuits involve the state’s voter rolls and when election officials are required to deactivate a voter’s registration.
Some Republicans have become obsessed with the voter registration system in recent years, claiming that election officials are keeping voters active in an effort to allow fraudulent votes.
“To some extent, it seems like these cases are serving to perpetuate and reinforce dubious doubts about legitimacy of the election, and to feed into narratives that the results shouldn’t be trusted,” Yablon said. “They’re trying to implicitly suggest that our voter rolls are bloated, and so there are many people on them who might vote who shouldn’t be voting.”
“The reality is that this is a lawsuit that is not likely to create any action,” he added. “We’re not going to start purging voters days before the election.”
PHOENIX, ARIZONA - AUGUST 23: Former Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gives remarks at the Renaissance Phoenix Downtown Hotel on August 23, 2024 in Phoenix, Arizona.Kennedy announced that he was suspending his presidential campaign and supporting Republican presidential candidate, former U.S. President Donald Trump.(Photo by Rebecca Noble/Getty Images)
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. filed an emergency request Monday seeking to have U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett issue an emergency injunction pending an appeal to the Court that would allow his name to be taken off the presidential ballot in Wisconsin.
Before Kennedy ended his third party presidential run late this summer and endorsed former President Donald Trump, he had filed the paperwork — which included the signatures of thousands of Wisconsin voters who wanted him to run — to get on the ballot. Later, he asked that the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) not include his name on the ticket, but the commission ruled that state law requires anyone who files the paperwork be placed on the ballot.
Kennedy sued to get his name removed in circuit court, lost and then lost appeals at the appellate and state Supreme Courts. Kennedy’s appeals were taking place right before absentee voting was set to begin, with county clerks across the state having already printed and begun mailing ballots with his name on them.
Attorneys for Kennedy pointed to a state statute that allows clerks to cover a candidate’s name with a sticker if that candidate dies before the election takes place and said Kennedy’s name on the ballots could be covered the same way. Election officials across the state warned that the voting machines used to count ballots haven’t been tested with stickers and that those stickers could cause the machines to break — both forcing election staff across the state to use a less accurate hand count of vote totals and local governments to cover the costs of repairing the machines.
In a brief filed during the state court proceedings, Kennedy’s attorneys said “it doesn’t matter” that their proposed solution could wreak havoc on the state’s election systems.
Kennedy’s lawsuits argue that state law discriminates against third party candidates for president by giving them less time between when the required paperwork is due and WEC finalizes the ballot to decide whether or not to run. He’s also argued that keeping him on the ballot violates his First Amendment right to endorse Trump.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled against Kennedy’s efforts in late September. Weeks later, the day before early voting was set to start, he filed his appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. As of Thursday morning, 810,626 absentee ballots with his name on them have already been mailed to voters, 592,902 of those ballots have already been returned and another 191,869 people have cast early votes.
At the same time that he has been working to get off the ballot in some states, including successfully in North Carolina, Kennedy has been suing to get on the ballot in others. A lawsuit to force his name onto the New York ballot was unsuccessful.
“It’s Robert F. Kennedy’s absolute right to endorse Donald Trump for President,” the appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court states. “Over the past months, he’s done that in myriad ways, all over the country and especially in the critical swing state of Wisconsin, where Kennedy has appeared at rallies, spoken on television shows, and provided public endorsements whenever and wherever he could. In Wisconsin, he wants everyone who will listen to him to vote for Trump. That is core political speech and it’s protected under the First Amendment. To ensure that message is conveyed clearly and without confusion, he asked that his name not appear on the Wisconsin ballot. He wanted to be clear: his endorsement was for Trump.”
In the filing to the Supreme Court, Kennedy’s attorneys state that “the costs of administering a remedy would be minimal” even though more than a million ballots with his name on them have already been sent out or even filled out and returned.
In September, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to take action in a similar case involving a third party presidential candidate. In that case, the Court refused Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s effort to get on the ballot in Nevada.
Voting rights activists and others gather at the Midtown Center in Milwaukee on the first day of early voting in July 2022. (Photo | Isiah Holmes)
The first day of in-person early voting in Wisconsin saw 97,436 people cast ballots for the Nov. 5 election. So many people voted on Tuesday that it caused a slowdown of the state election software system, leading to long lines in some places.
The number of ballots cast on the opening day of early voting far surpassed other recent elections. In the 2022 midterm election, which had gubernatorial and U.S. Senate races on the ballot, 33,644 people cast ballots on the first day of early voting. In the 2020 presidential election 79,774 people showed up on the first day of early voting.
Despite Tuesday’s high turnout, the popularity of absentee voting in general still lags behind the 2020 presidential election when the COVID-19 pandemic pushed many voters to vote remotely.
After more than four years of Republicans and Donald Trump attacking the voting system and making accusations that any voting methods other than going to the polls on Election Day are vulnerable to fraud, the GOP nonetheless encouraged Republicans this year to vote early.
Democrats have also been encouraging people to vote early. On Wednesday, the Democratic National Committee announced an ad campaign directed at students on 30 college campuses across the country, including UW-Madison, touting early voting. The city of Madison has six early voting locations across the campuses of UW-Madison, Edgewood College and Madison College.
The traditionally Republican-voting Waukesha County had 11,397 people cast their ballots on Tuesday. Despite its status as a GOP stronghold, the county’s leftward drift has played a major role in Democratic wins in statewide elections in recent years.
Dane and Milwaukee counties, the biggest Democratic areas in Wisconsin, saw the most early votes on Tuesday, with 11,862 Dane County residents casting their ballots and 12,282 Milwaukee County voters casting theirs.
In a news release on Tuesday afternoon, the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) said the higher than expected turnout for the first day of early voting used up the capacity of the state’s WisVote system, which some municipal clerks use to print a label that is placed on the outside of in-person absentee certificate envelopes.
“Today’s system lag was purely related to demands on the WisVote system due to high turnout,” the release stated. “This should not prevent any voter’s ability to vote in-person absentee today. WEC staff worked quickly to increase system capacity to ensure that clerks can continue to facilitate in-person absentee voting efficiently.”
WEC Chair Ann Jacobs said that the agency has worked with the state’s Department of Enterprise Technology to boost the capacity of the WisVote system.
“So many of you voted that you overloaded our computer systems! Amazing! We worked with Dept. of Enterprise Technology and have created more server space so all should be running smoothly now,” she wrote. “We apologize for underestimating the incredible enthusiasm you all have for voting. This is unheard of turnout for the first day of in-person absentee voting!! All is well in our WisVote system and you should be able to vote without a problem.”
Early in-person absentee voting is open from now until the Sunday before the election (though some communities end early voting the Saturday before). Hours and locations are set by local municipal clerks. Voters can find how to vote early in their communities at MyVote.WI.Gov
Former President Barack Obama and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz at a rally in Madison on the first day of early voting. (Baylor Spears | Wisconsin Examiner)
Former President Barack Obama, on the first day of early voting in Wisconsin, encouraged people in one of Wisconsin’s major liberal strongholds for Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
Dane County is one of two major liberal hubs in Wisconsin, a critical state that could swing the presidential election. The importance of the area this year has been highlighted by recent visits from Harris herself last month, and from former President Donald Trump, who visited Dane County earlier this month following Wisconsin Republicans’ advice to work to eat into Democratic margins in the state’s fastest growing county.
“If you haven’t voted yet, I won’t be offended if you just walk out right now,” Obama said to an energetic crowd at Alliant Energy Center. “Go vote.”
Gov. Tony Evers, U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan and vice presidential candidate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz also spoke at the rally.
Throughout his speech, which lasted about 40 minutes, Obama made the case that electing Harris and Walz would help improve the lives of Americans, while also criticizing former President Donald Trump.
“We know this election is going to be tight, it’s going to be tight because a lot of Americans are still struggling,” Obama said. Harris, he said, “knows what it’s like to scrap and to work hard — to see her mom worry about the bills, so does Tim. So if you elect them, they will be focused on your problems.”
“Kamala Harris and Tim Walz don’t have concepts of a plan,” Obama said, referencing Trump’s comment during the September debate about his vague ideas for replacing the Affordable Care Act. “They have an actual plan to make your life better.”
Obama said the plan would include cracking down on corporations for price gouging, making it more affordable to build or buy a home, limiting out of pocket health care costs and cutting taxes for middle-class Americans.
Obama highlighted the Trump administration’s decision to not follow the pandemic playbook that his own administration left during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“If somebody tells you it does not make a difference whether you elect someone who’s competent, somebody who cares about you, somebody who listens to experts and listens to ordinary people and knows what their lives are like and what they’re going to do, it makes a difference,” Obama said.
The election is about more than policy, he added, saying that it’s also about “values.” To Trump and his “cronies” freedom means getting away with whatever they want, he said. “We believe true freedom means we get to make decisions about our own life.”
Former President Barack Obama. (Baylor Spears | Wisconsin Examiner)
“Do not boo! Vote,” Obama told the crowd. “They can’t hear you boo. They can hear you vote.”
Walz had a similar theme in criticizing Trump ahead of Obama.
“There’s something, not just nuts, but cruel about a billionaire using people’s livelihood as a political prop,” Walz said about Trump’s recent shift working at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania. “His agenda lets corporations not pay people for overtime and diminishes those very people that he was cosplaying as… That restaurant wasn’t even open. It was a stunt… That five minutes he stood next to the deep fryer I’ll guarantee you that’s the hardest that guy’s ever worked.”
Walz also took some jabs at Elon Musk, a tech billionaire and owner of social media platform ‘X’ (formerly Twitter) who has been campaigning for Trump.
“I’m gonna talk about his running mate — his running mate, Elon Musk,” Walz said. “Elon’s on that stage jumping around, skipping like a dipsh*t.”
Walz accused Musk, who recently offered people $1 million to sign a PAC petition, of trying to buy the election.
Walz ended his speech by saying that they are still the “underdogs” in the campaign.
“We know we’re going to leave it all in the field, Wisconsin. We got same-day voter registration and it’s open today,” Walz said. “We need you door knocking. We need to call.”
The rally’s message resonated with Carey Medina, a 28-year-old from Madison.
“[Walz] just really seems like a relatable guy and like some of those speakers were saying it — what you see is what you get…,” Medina said. “That’s amazing. We need that. We need leaders for the country that are working for the people, not for themselves.”
Medina said that she was planning on trying to go to vote early after the rally, and she learned some information that could help her make the case to undecided voters. One piece of information she said she learned is that elections in Wisconsin are decided by a few votes per voting ward — a point made by Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes Conway who also addressed the crowd. Both the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections were decided by a little over 20,000 votes in Wisconsin, or about three votes per precinct.
Medina said the issues at stake in the election made her want to go canvas this year — this would be her first time. She said one of her top priorities is reproductive rights as well as the separation of church and state.
Reproductive health issues were a focal point at the rally for speakers and attendees alike.
Rallygoers at Alliant Energy Center in Madison. (Baylor Spears | Wisconsin Examiner)
Cindy McCallaster, who moved to Madison earlier this year to be close to her family, said reproductive rights are important to her because of her six grandchildren. Hope Bank of Madison, who attended the rally with McCallaster, said she benefited from Roe v. Wade because she was able to decide not to have children.
Bradley Whitford, the former West Wing actor and Madison native, gave an impassioned speech that highlighted the issue. He spoke about how his dad used to serve as the president of Planned Parenthood in Dane County.
“He was just a dad. Loved his wife and his daughters, and thought they deserved agency over their own bodies and access to the health care they need,” Whitford said. “But now the guy who brags about sexual assault is also bragging about the fact that he overturned Roe v. Wade and stripped those fundamental rights away.”
Whitford named some of the women who have faced devastating consequences under abortion bans. One of the women, Amber Nicole Thurman, died after she took abortion pills, encountered a rare complication and was denied emergency medical care due to Georgia’s abortion ban.
Obama pointed out Trump’s conflicting statements on abortion access, saying he has “tied himself into a pretzel.”
“When [Trump] ran for the first time, he said he’d support punishing women who got abortions. Then a few weeks ago, he says, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be your protector,’” Obama said.
With two weeks to go, rally goers expressed anxiety about the presidential election. Bank of Madison said she is “a little bit terrified, hopeful, but terrified for sure.”
“It seems unthinkable that [Trump] could be elected again, but we were also confident in 2016. There’s a sense of horror and dread,” Bank said.
Voting carrels set up at Madison's Hawthorne Library on Election Day 2022. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)
Early in-person voting for the November election opens Tuesday for Wisconsin voters. Hours and locations for casting an early vote are set locally by municipal clerks. You can check the hours and locations in your area at MyVote.wi.gov.
Officially known as in-person absentee voting, Wisconsin’s early voting allows a voter to request and cast an absentee ballot at a polling location during the two weeks before an election. The in-person absentee process includes checks of a person’s voter registration and identity. Because absentee voting in Wisconsin requires a witness to sign the ballot envelope, a municipal clerk staff member working at the early voting site serves as the witness. The ballots, like absentees sent through the mail or returned to drop boxes, aren’t processed and tabulated until polls open on Election Day.
The deadline to register to vote online or by mail has already passed, but people can still register in-person at their municipal clerk’s office. Wisconsin also has same-day voter registration that allows people to register to vote at the polls on Election Day. Wisconsin requires voters to show a photo ID to register and vote. Acceptable IDs include driver’s licenses, Department of Transportation-issued identification cards, student IDs from Wisconsin universities, passports and military ID cards.
While in-person absentee voting opens this week, voters have already been receiving and returning absentee ballots through the mail for weeks.
As of Friday, the most recent data available from the Wisconsin Elections Commission shows that 593,550 voters have requested absentee ballots and 305,344 of those ballots have already been returned. Those totals are a far cry from the 2020 presidential election when the COVID-19 pandemic pushed many voters to the absentee process. By the Friday before early voting opened in 2020, 1,395,272 absentee ballots had already been requested and 821,300 had been returned.
In the months ahead of Election Day, voting rights advocates and election officials have fretted about the speed of the U.S. Postal Service and its ability to deliver absentee ballots fast enough. For most voters, the legal deadline to request an absentee ballot is Oct. 31, however officials warn that isn’t enough time for the ballot to arrive, be filled out and returned by the close of polls at 8 p.m. on Election Day. Voters worried about mail times can return ballots to drop boxes (in communities that are using them), to their municipal clerk’s office or their designated polling place on Election Day.
Voters at the Wilmar Neighborhood Center on Madison's East side cast their ballots. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)
On the ballot in Wisconsin this fall, voters will decide on a referendum asking to change one word in the state constitution to prevent non-U.S. citizens from voting in any local, state or federal elections. The effort is the Republican Legislature’s fifth attempt to amend the state constitution this year.
Republicans point to a handful of municipalities across the country that have allowed non-citizens to vote in municipal elections like school board races and say the amendment would prevent any Wisconsin communities from doing the same.
“Addressing this issue now will ensure votes are not diluted in the future,” Sen. Julian Bradley (R-Franklin) told Votebeat. “It’s best for the government to address this concern before it becomes a problem.”
Democrats and voting rights advocates say that non-citizen voting isn’t a real problem and that Republicans have shown no proof it is but continue to complain about it as part of their general anti-immigration push in this election. Plus, they say making changes like this by trying to amend the constitution makes an end run around the normal legislative process and Gov. Tony Evers’ potential veto, while making the state vulnerable to future efforts to make it harder for legal voters to cast a ballot.
“First and foremost, we have a system that works, and I think this is a solution in search for problems,” T.R. Edwards, staff attorney at the voting rights focused Law Forward, says. “Secondarily, it shifts the burden to the voter. … But then third, I think it’s yet another vestige of our gerrymandered Legislature and an escape to actually go through the legislative process to do things that have an actual debate about what works for our state.”
Currently the state Constitution says that “every United States citizen age 18 or older” can vote. If approved, the “every” would be changed to “only.”
“Shall section 1 of article III of the constitution, which deals with suffrage, be amended to provide that only a United States citizen age 18 or older who resides in an election district may vote in an election for national, state, or local office or at a statewide or local referendum?” the referendum asks.
Opponents to the referendum say it could lead to discrimination against Hispanic voters, who could be harassed and forced to prove that they belong in their communities. They also worry that changing the constitution could lead to future legislative attempts to require anyone registering to vote to prove they’re a citizen, which they say could disenfranchise legal voters who don’t have access to documents such as a birth certificate.
Edwards points to a recent Brennan Center study that found more than 21 million people across the country, 9% of voting age Americans, don’t have access to documents that would prove their citizenship.
“That number of people, including people like my grandmother when she first moved to the state, [would lose] one of our few things that I think makes us unique as a state, our ability to have same day registration, and we’ll put that in jeopardy,” Edwards says.
Recently, Republicans have moved across the country to warn about large-scale non-citizen voting in ways that would swing elections. Similar to other Republican claims about the election system, there is no proof that is happening. Studies of the voting system across dozens of communities involving millions of votes have found just a handful of cases of non-citizens casting ballots.
Earlier this year, Congress was unable to pass a federal budget over disagreements about a bill that would require citizens to prove their citizenship to register to vote.
State and local officials already have systems in place that determine if someone registering to vote is a citizen. In Wisconsin, people registering to vote must affirm they’re U.S. citizens. Lying about this when filling out the voter registration form is a felony that includes the penalty of deportation.
“We have so many checks and balances in this state, the people that are non-citizens, you think they would actually risk — like if they’re DACA recipients — do you think they would risk their status and get thrown in jail or even be deported just to go cast a ballot?” Nick Ramos, executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, says. “Like, think about how absurd that is.”
A 2017 report from the Brennan Center for Justice analyzed votes cast in 42 jurisdictions accounting for 23.5 million votes. That report found that in the 2016 presidential election, after which President Donald Trump first raised claims of massive numbers of illegal votes, 30 incidents of non-citizens voting were referred to prosecutors — accounting for 0.0001% of the 2016 votes.
The Republican attempts to amend the constitution this year have had mixed results. This spring, two proposed amendments to limit who can work on and provide funding for election administration in the state were approved. But in the August election — after Democrats and advocacy groups in the state waged a public-education campaign to oppose two more amendments — voters denied an attempt to remove powers from the governor allowing him to spend federal emergency dollars.
A Wisconsin resident casts their ballot in the state's primary election at a polling location on April 2, 2024, in Green Bay, Wisconsin. (Scott Olson | Getty Images)
Voting rights advocates across the state are warning of efforts to intimidate voters while right-wing groups have been filing lawsuits attempting to force people off the voter rolls.
With just 20 days until Election Day, more than 573,000 people have already requested absentee ballots and 267,524 of those ballots have been returned. In-person absentee voting will open next Tuesday, with locations and hours set by local election officials.
Wednesday was the deadline for people to register to vote online or by mail — with mail-in registration forms required to be postmarked by Oct. 16. Voters can still register in-person at their municipal clerk’s office or at the polls on Election Day.
On Tuesday, voting rights advocates asked the state and federal Departments of Justice to investigate reports that thousands of voters received text messages that could be seen as voter intimidation. The messages, which seem to have targeted young voters, warn recipients that anyone who votes in Wisconsin when not eligible to do so can be punished with fines up to $10,000 and 3.5 years imprisonment.
In a state with elections as close as Wisconsin, college-aged voters can often play a major role in deciding who wins. College students, even if they’re from another state, are eligible to vote in Wisconsin elections.
“Many students and other young voters are fearful that they will face criminal prosecution if they register and exercise their right to vote — because of a malicious, inaccurate text sent by an anonymous party,” the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin wrote in a letter about the messages.
At a press conference Wednesday, Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) Administrator Meagan Wolfe said that the commission is aware of third party communications that could be seen as intimidating. She said that voters should go to official sources of information to decide if they’re eligible to vote.
“Election officials do continue to receive reports from voters who have received these third party communications, like text messages that they’ve described as intimidating or that contain false information,” she said. “Unfortunately, many voters that receive these kinds of communications during election season, and sometimes they can be misleading, and to avoid being misled by any sort of communication that might come from a third party to a voter, voters should make sure to get their election information from the official source.” (For more information go to Wisconsin’s MyVote website.)
At the press conference, Wolfe also gave an update on the use of absentee ballot drop boxes across the state, which were declared legal by the state Supreme Court earlier this year after a previous court majority had barred their use. Wolfe said local clerks have reported to WEC that this year in Wisconsin at least 78 drop boxes are in use, a steep decline from the more than 500 that were used in the 2020 election and earlier before Republicans turned against them over baseless allegations of fraud.
Drop boxes have remained a major issue in this year’s election, with the Wausau mayor drawing criticism after he removed the city’s drop box without permission from the local election clerk.
The 78 boxes means that less than 50 communities across the state are using the boxes because Madison and Milwaukee have a total of 14 drop boxes available across the two cities.
“The decision to have drop boxes or not, as our state Supreme Court said, is a decision that rests with the municipal clerk, and just like any decisions they make for their community, they have to weigh the considerations or the needs of their local community, and so I won’t undercut any of those decisions that have been made by our municipal clerks, because they’re making a decision for their community and the best needs of their community,” Wolfe said.
As Republicans have continued to attack the voting system in Wisconsin and across the country, two lawsuits have been filed seeking to make last-minute changes to the voter registration system.
One of the lawsuits, filed by Daniel Eastman, an attorney involved in former President Donald Trump’s legal fight to overturn the results of the 2020 election, alleges that more than 140,000 voters on the voter registration list are ineligible because cross-checks with U.S. Postal Service data shows they don’t live at the address where they’re registered to vote. The lawsuit states that more than 50,000 of those registrations are in Milwaukee.
Election officials use the USPS data to keep voter rolls updated but the data has a high error rate and is generally confirmed through other sources.
The lawsuit asks the Milwaukee Elections Commission to mail postcards to all the voters found in the data to confirm if they’ve moved and asks WEC to instruct all the other clerks in the state to do the same.
The second lawsuit alleges that there’s a “legitimate concern” the state and local election officials are activating inactive voter registrations and asks a Marinette County judge to order WEC not to activate any voter registrations
Courts are generally unlikely to make rulings affecting voting so close to an election. Clerks use a variety of sources of information, including data from a national coalition of states tracking when people move to or die in other states, to keep voter rolls up to date.
U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden tours Gilbertson's Dairy in Dunn County. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)
In the race for Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District, both Republican incumbent Rep. Derrick Van Orden and his Democratic challenger Rebecca Cooke pulled up to campaign events last week in pickup trucks as they’ve each sought to claim status as true “political outsiders” who can bring a different perspective to Washington D.C.
Van Orden, a former Navy SEAL, had never held an elected office before he ran for the seat and lost in 2020 to former Democratic Rep. Ron Kind, who had held the position for 26 years. After Kind retired in 2022, Van Orden ran again and won, defeatingstate Sen. Brad Pfaff (D-Onalaska). Running for re-election for the first time, Van Orden tells voters he’s focused on making policies “where the rubber meets the road.”
Cooke, a nonprofit leader, business owner and waitress, points to her upbringing on an Eau Claire County dairy farm and has criticized both parties, depicting herself as a moderate in the purple district — which has been won twice by former President Donald Trump.
Both candidates say they represent the working class voters of western Wisconsin’s Driftless Region. Each has accused the other of being a political insider.
Van Orden and Republicans have highlighted Cooke’s previous work as a Democratic political fundraiser while Cooke, at an event last week, said that since being elected, Van Orden has “gone Washington.”
Since Van Orden won in 2022, Wisconsin Democrats have been haunted by the national party’s abandonment of Pfaff’s campaign. Late in the cycle, the national party and its allied groups pulled spending in the district and moved it elsewhere. Van Orden won the race by 3.8 percentage points.
This year, the outside money has continued to flow towards Cooke’s campaign. House Majority PAC, the Democrats’ largest outside funder of congressional campaigns, has more than $4 million in advertising reserved in the district while both candidates have individually raised more than $4 million, keeping Cooke’s campaign closer to her opponent’s in available cash than Pfaff had two years ago.
William Garcia, chair of the 3rd District and La Crosse County Democratic Parties says that national Democrats “learned their lesson” after Pfaff’s loss.
“Look what you did, you took money out of the 3rd and gave it to places that lost by more,” Garcia said, describing conversations he had with national Democrats after 2022.
Garcia says with Cooke on the ticket and the renewed national support, he’s confident in Cooke’s ability to return the seat to Democrats.
“We’re doing great,” he says. “Rebecca Cooke is good at connecting with people, talking with the press and engaging in the issues. We’re going to keep moving that needle.”
But with just a few weeks left in the campaign, election forecasters believe that needle still points toward Van Orden. Public polling on the race has been limited, but most have shown Van Orden with a lead. Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, designates the district as leaning Republican.
Throughout the campaign, Democrats have criticized Van Orden for contributing to Congress’ inability to pass an updated farm bill. Since taking office, Van Orden has celebrated his appointment to the House agriculture committee, but despite a farm bill passing out of the committee with his vote, it has not passed the full House.
The 3rd District is home to much of the state’s cranberry industry and a large number of dairy farms. The area, like other parts of Wisconsin and around the country, has seen a growth in the number of large factory farms. But factory farms haven’t become as dominant as in eastern Wisconsin, with some small and mid-size farms holding on.
“For this congressional district it’s the biggest disappointment,” Garcia says. “He made a big deal of being on the agriculture committee but one of the great failures of this Congress is the inability to pass a farm bill.”
Van Orden blames the Democratic controlled Senate for the impasse, saying the House is waiting on them to introduce their version of the bill.
Last Thursday, Van Orden and a small group of supporters toured the 550-cow Gilbertson’s Dairy Farm in Dunn County as he received the endorsement of the Wisconsin Farm Bureau.
At the event, Van Orden said “I’m not gambling with your farm,” when discussing the importance of getting a farm bill passed. He talked about making sure the policies set at the U.S. Department of Agriculture are kept up to date with modern farming practices.
“Government has to operate at the speed of farming,” he said. “Farming should not be beholden to government policies that are decades behind.”
Throughout the race, he’s discussed goals to reduce government regulations on farms and let farmers do their work.
“We have to understand that farmers are shepherds of the land, they’re the greatest conservationists around,” he said. “Because if you destroy the land, you can’t farm and you’re out of business. So what I want to do is make sure that USDA is keeping up with what farmers need. We absolutely want to maintain this beautiful land, but when you have onerous amounts of regulations, the farmers can’t afford to farm anymore, which means we can’t afford to feed everyone. So the federal government needs to get out of the way of their private businesses, including the agricultural industry, and let them do their job.”
Democratic candidate for the 3rd Congressional District Rebecca Cooke speaks after receiving the endorsement of National Security Leaders of America. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)
At an event nearly 100 miles south in La Crosse, Cooke — speaking to a small group of supporters — mocked property Van Orden owns as a “hobby farm” and later told reporters that the version of the farm bill he voted for in committee “doesn’t support small and mid-sized farmers.”
During the campaign, Van Orden has focused heavily on immigration policy, complaining about unauthorized crossings of migrants at the country’s southern border and highlighting crimes committed by undocumented immigrants in the district. Democratic voters at the Cooke event worried about the effect that Republican immigration proposals, saying Trump’s plan to deport millions of immigrants could devastate a number of local industries, including agriculture.
On the road between the two events, the city of Arcadia is home to Ashley Furniture, the largest furniture manufacturer in the world, which is heavily dependent on Hispanic immigrant workers. More than 63% of the city’s population is Hispanic, according to census data, and 44% of the community speaks Spanish. In western Wisconsin, an estimated 70% of the workforce on local dairy farms is made up of immigrants, mostly from Mexico and Central America.
At her La Crosse event, Cooke appeared at the local Korean War Memorial where she received the endorsement of National Security Leaders of America, a group of retired members of the military and former staff at the Departments of Defense, State and Veterans Affairs.
After losing his first campaign to Kind in 2020, Van Orden attended the rally in Washington D.C. that culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The veterans’ group highlighted Jan. 6 saying Van Orden’s presence near the Capitol that day should disqualify him from office. Cooke said she was “humbled” by the endorsement, which also gave her campaign an avenue to contrast Van Orden’s military record without criticizing his service.
“[Van Orden] has done an incredible amount since launching his first campaign for this seat,” she said. “Unfortunately, none of it has been to benefit his constituents and our community. It has been in service of his own ego and his own political advancement.”
Pfaff’s campaign in 2022 focused heavily on attacking Van Orden for perceived character flaws. In addition to his attendance at the Trump rally on Jan. 6, Pfaff pointed to an incident in which Van Orden tried to bring a loaded gun onto an airplane and a time he yelled at a teenage library employee in Prairie du Chien over a LGBTQ book display for Pride month. After he was elected, Van Orden made headlines for yelling at teenage Senate pages for taking pictures in the Capitol rotunda.
While Cooke mentioned some of those outbursts, she kept the focus on policy.
“We have so much to do here in this district when it comes to service,” she said. “Our communities still need access to better health care, health care that they can afford, and so many of our families really are struggling to make ends meet. Whether that’s filling up at the gas tank or getting to the grocery store and being able to pay for their rent all in the same month, and to have a little bit of money left over.”
“We also know that we deserve leaders that build up our democracy,” she continued. “As these folks mentioned, I’m running against someone who is an election denier. He participated in the Stop the Steal rally. He is shaking the very pillars of our democracy.”
But Van Orden, asked about his attendance at the Trump rally on Jan. 6, said he condemned the attack on the Capitol and criticized a reporter for asking about it, saying, “next time do your homework before you ask me that question.”
Despite all the negative headlines that have surrounded Van Orden before and since he took office, he summarized the choice in his re-election race as a simple calculation: Are voters better off now than when President Joe Biden won office four years ago? Although Republicans have held a majority in the House since 2022.
“Are you better off now than you were three and a half years ago or four years ago? The answer is no,” he said. “We’re closer to World War III than we have been in my lifetime because of weak strategic leadership by the Biden administration. So everybody just ask yourself, are you better off now than you were four years ago? And if they’re honest, they’re going to say no. That means you need a change in leadership.”
CLINTON, IOWA - JANUARY 06: Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaks to guests during a rally at Clinton Middle School on January 06, 2024 in Clinton, Iowa. Iowa Republicans will be the first to select their party's nomination for the 2024 presidential race when they go to caucus on January 15, 2024. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Former President Donald Trump visited Waunakee Tuesday afternoon, making his first ever stop in the Democratic stronghold of Dane County.
The stop marks a change in strategy for Republicans in Wisconsin, who have regularly written off the fastest growing county in the state because of its reliably Democratic voting residents. Some Republicans, including former Gov. Tommy Thompson, have pushed for the party’s candidates to make more stops in the area because despite having no chance of winning the county, it is still home to the third most Republicans in the state.
In 2020, when Trump narrowly lost to President Joe Biden, he won 22.9% of the Dane County vote.
Trump’s visit was the first time a GOP presidential nominee visited Dane County since Bob Dole did in 1996.
“I think he’s got to come and really tell the people ‘I want your vote, I’m here in Dane County because I’m going to compete for your votes all over the state of Wisconsin,’” Thompson told reporters Tuesday.
The Trump campaign also made a stop at a museum in Milwaukee, the state’s largest city and also a Democratic stronghold, for an event meant to focus on a pro-school choice message.
Hundreds of Trump supporters attended the rally at Dane Steel on Tuesday where Trump was supposed to deliver remarks on agriculture and the economy. Instead, as he often does at rallies, his speech took a number of detours, including a large section on foreign policy in which he discussed a large-scale missile attack by Iran on Israel Tuesday morning. Trump said that if he was not re-elected, there was a risk of “World War III.”
“Ever since Iran has been exporting terror all over the world, it has just been unraveling,” Trump said. “The whole Middle East has been unraveling and, of course, the whole world has been unraveling since we left office.”
After the event, Democrats criticized Trump’s remarks for not addressing the needs of Wisconsin voters.
“Today was yet another speech from Donald Trump where he told stories about himself and aired his personal grievances, went on weird and irrelevant tangents, and spread lies to distract and divide instead talking about real solutions to issues facing Wisconsin families,” Mike Browne, deputy director of liberal advocacy group A Better Wisconsin Together, said in a statement.
Republican Party of Dane County Chair Brandon Maly told the Cap Times that to win statewide, Republicans need to hit at least 23% of the Dane County vote.
“Everybody needs to turn out, everybody needs to invest,” Maly said. “So yes, more investment is happening here than before. Because, simply put, if we want the math to add up, we have to do better in Dane County as Republicans.”
Sign for the Wisconsin Elections Comission. (Wisconsin Examiner photo)
The Wisconsin Election Commission (WEC) on Tuesday delayed taking action on two complaints against municipal clerks for not following state and federal laws guiding the return of absentee ballots.
A complaint against the city of Greenfield alleges that the local clerk created separate deadlines for disabled voters’ lawfully designated assistants to return absentee ballots. State law gives absentee voters until polls close at 8 p.m. on Election Day to bring their ballot to their designated polling place and drop it off.
In Greenfield, a man returning his wife’s ballot because of her disability was turned away and sent to the clerk’s office because of a local policy that states someone returning another voter’s ballot must take it there.
A separate complaint was filed against the city of Brookfield alleging that the city refused to accept any absentee ballots at polling places and instead required them to be returned to the clerk’s office with enough time for the clerk to bring the ballot to the correct polling place to be counted. The man who brought the complaint alleges that when he arrived at the polling place around 5 p.m. he was told he must bring his ballot to the clerk’s office but that no one would be there to receive it because city staff was in a meeting.
With less than 50 days until the election, Brookfield has drawn other criticisms over its absentee voting policies after the city council voted not to allow the use of absentee ballot drop boxes to collect ballots. A group of voting rights focused organizations held a press conference in the city Tuesday to protest that decision.
At the WEC meeting Tuesday afternoon, which at times grew heated, Republican commissioners questioned if it was possible to create a system that perfectly accommodates voters with disabilities returning their ballots while allowing clerks to affirm that people who have permission to assist a disabled voter are returning another person’s ballot.
“We cannot make this world perfectly equitable for all,” Commissioner Don Millis said.
Republican Commissioner Robert Spindell drew repeated pushback from the Democrats on the commission for arguing that whatever the body decides, it has to make sure it doesn’t encourage “ballot harvesting” — a practice that is prohibited by state law involving organizations gathering and returning large amounts of absentee ballots — which Republicans regularly warn against without much evidence that is widespread. .
The Democrats on the commission also said that the state has had the same interpretation of the absentee ballot statutes since long before WEC was created in 2015 — that voters can return their ballots until polls close at 8 p.m. on Election Day. Commission Chair Ann Jacobs pointed out that the Uniform Voting Instructions, approved by the commission last year and made mandatory for clerks to follow, reaffirm that longstanding interpretation of statute.
“I’m sort of floored that, coincidentally, in a political year, there’s attacks on absentee voting,” Jacobs said. “Suddenly, we’re changing our minds on the rules. I’m just flabbergasted by that. We made those instructions mandatory, and it tells every absentee voter in this state that they can take their absentee ballot to the poll site.”
The Republicans on the commission signaled they’d be unwilling to vote to accept the complaints against the two cities while the Democrats said they didn’t want to take a vote that would upend the interpretation of the uniform voting instructions so close to the election, with hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots already sent to voters with those instructions included on the envelope.
“I am extremely against even the consideration of us undoing our uniform instructions prior to Nov. 4, when we have — what is it? — as of this morning, 450,000 ballots out with our uniform instructions,” Jacobs said.
The commission ultimately voted to delay the consideration of the complaints until after the election.
Voters at the Wilmar Neighborhood Center on Madison's East side cast their ballots. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)
Four years ago, in late September of 2020, the concerns that then-President Donald Trump would not accept the results of the election if he lost began to become more concrete. The COVID-19 pandemic had caused a massive boost in the use of absentee voting and Trump had warned his supporters not to use the voting method.
Then, in the days after the election when the result remained in doubt, conspiracy theories began to spread around the country. In Wisconsin, Trump supporters complained of a “ballot dump” in Milwaukee that flipped the result for Joe Biden (actually the surge in absentee ballots had just made it slower for election workers at the city’s central count location to tally the votes).
“There’s been a travesty at the ballot box,” one voter told the Wisconsin Examiner on Nov. 6, a day before Biden was declared the winner. “We’re seeing unbelievable numbers of ballot harvesting, voter fraud, election fraud and nothing’s being done to correct the situation in cities like Detroit, Philadelphia and Atlanta.”
That same weekend, a Wisconsin attorney and the Trump campaign began to shape a plan. That plan — created as Trump’s final legal avenues to overturn the election results ran out — would soon become the fake elector scheme, in which Republicans in Wisconsin and six other states where Biden had won cast false slates of electors for Trump. The plot underpinned the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, urged on by Trump, as Congress attempted to certify that Biden had in fact won the election. Trump’s supporters used the fake elector scheme to argue that the certification should be stopped so that the fraudulent electoral votes could be counted.
In the months after the election, multiple reviews, audits and investigations were launched, searching for the voter fraud that Trump and his supporters baselessly claimed had stolen the election from him. By June, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos had tasked state Rep. Janel Brandtjen (R-Menomonee Falls) and former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman with running their own investigations into the election. Gableman and Brandtjen ultimately joined calls for the election results to be decertified and drew massive amounts of criticism.
Gableman’s review ran for more than a year, racking up legal fees and keeping public records hidden, without finding any evidence of fraud. Brandtjen, who was at the time the chair of the Assembly’s elections committee, repeatedly invited conspiracy theorists to testify, giving a platform to debunked claims of wrongdoing.
After Gableman’s review ended, state Rep. Tim Ramthun ran a Republican primary campaign for governor entirely on a platform of election conspiracy theorism. Election deniers in Wisconsin state government along with local activists Peter Bernegger of New London (previously convicted of fraud) and Harry Wait, of Union Grove (charged with felonies after illegally requesting absentee ballots), as well as former Menomonee Falls Village President Jefferson Davis became the core of the state Republican Party’s election denying wing — with allies in the Legislature and a sizable number of voters on their side.
But despite the hold that election conspiracy theories have on a subset of Wisconsin Republicans, elections experts say the state is prepared for 2024 and unlikely to see a repeat of the 2020 effort to overturn results.
“It’ll be a case of crying wolf again,” Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause Wisconsin, says. “All of this was done in 2020 to no effect, with no evidence.”
Laws and rules have been changed or clarified; election officials and others have spent countless hours repeatedly sharing factual information about how the voting system works; the two attorneys central to planning the false elector scheme have been charged by the state Department of Justice with felonies, Wisconsin’s fake electors have agreed as part of a settlement deal that they tried to falsify the results of the election and that they will not serve as Trump electors in the future, and Trump no longer has the element of surprise.
Mandell says he thinks the small fringe of election deniers in Wisconsin will make baseless accusations while Heck says he’s looking out for efforts to discourage people from voting and staying vigilant against disruptive observers at polling places and central count locations where absentee ballots are tallied. But generally, the two say they’re confident clerks, election officials and legal observers are prepared.
“There’s no doubt that there continue to be things thrown at the wall, but I think we’re in a much better place than we were four years ago or even before that,” Jeff Mandell, general counsel at the voting rights-focused nonprofit firm Law Forward, says. “When I think about threats to this election, there are, of course, things, both in Wisconsin and around the country, that we continue to hear. And we are thinking through and preparing for those things, but I regard those as really low likelihood problems. And so while we’re doing everything we can to be ready, in case one of them does rear its head in Wisconsin, I’m pretty skeptical that one will.”
Leading up to the election, Republican politicians continue to make false claims about the system. Last week, U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany and a number of county sheriffs held a press conference to attack the use of absentee ballot drop boxes and warn of attempts by non-citizens to vote. Republicans in Congress have tied the passage of a federal spending bill to the SAVE Act, which outlaws voting by noncitizens in federal elections, something that is already a felony carrying penalties of imprisonment and deportation and which data shows happens incredibly rarely.
“This just doesn’t happen,” Mandell says. “It is already illegal under state law. It is already illegal under federal law. The consequences are tremendous. And so I would actually say that I think some of this carping about this fictitious idea of non-citizen voting is just evidence of how much election denialism has been marginalized because there’s almost nothing left for them to talk about.”
Earlier this year, the Wisconsin Supreme Court overturned a previous decision, once again allowing the use of drop boxes for returning absentee ballots. A number of election clerks in Republican parts of the state have decided not to use the method because of unsubstantiated warnings that they are vulnerable to fraud and “ballot harvesting,” the alleged practice of political groups rounding up and returning hundreds of absentee ballots at once.
The national Republican party has promised to send more than 100,000 volunteers to serve as election observers. During the last election, a number of Wisconsin’s most prominent election deniers had the police called on them for disrupting voting during the Democratic primary in an August special election for state Senate. They promised to be back in November.
In the small town of Thornapple in Rusk County, the U.S. Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against local officials for repeatedly refusing to use electronic voting machines and instead hand counting ballots. The lawsuit argues the town must use machines that allow voters with disabilities to vote. Election conspiracy theorists have regularly called for the hand counting of ballots over concerns that electronic machines — which aren’t connected to the internet — are susceptible to hacking. Election officials say that hand counting adds the threat of human error and voting machines are much more accurate.
In other states, voting rights advocates have warned that Republican members of election boards and other agencies central to the certification of election results may step in and refuse to certify the election if Trump loses. Mandell says that Wisconsin’s decentralized voting system helps defend against that threat.
Each municipality has a board of canvass responsible for certifying the local election results, which then get sent to the county boards of canvass and then on to the state. Mandell says that the role played by local officials Wisconsin means someone denying the certification would be tossing out the votes of their friends and neighbors. That’s an important safeguard, he says.
“You’re talking about folks not saying ‘I am skeptical of elections,’ or ‘I don’t like election machines,’ or some other nonsense,” he says. “You’re talking about people saying ‘I want to throw out my friends’ and neighbors’ votes. I don’t want my spouse’s vote to count or my family’s votes to count.’ And I think people are understandably and correctly reticent to say such a thing.”
PHOENIX, ARIZONA - AUGUST 23: Former Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gives remarks at the Renaissance Phoenix Downtown Hotel on August 23, 2024 in Phoenix, Arizona.Kennedy announced that he was suspending his presidential campaign and supporting Republican presidential candidate, former U.S. President Donald Trump.(Photo by Rebecca Noble/Getty Images)
The Wisconsin Elections Commission on Thursday asked the state Supreme Court to take up Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s lawsuit seeking to force his name off the presidential ballot in the state, bypassing the Court of Appeals.
Kennedy has been trying for weeks to get his name off the ballot after filing nomination papers to get his name on the ticket but then later dropping out of the race and endorsing former President Donald Trump. More than 8,000 Wisconsin voters signed nomination papers to put Kennedy on the ballot. WEC ruled that state law requires a candidate who files the proper paperwork to get on the ballot to remain on the ballot unless they die.
Kennedy has been trying to get off the ballot in a number of states, succeeding in a few. His effort comes as polling has shown that his support largely draws votes away from Trump.
Earlier this week, a Dane County judge dismissed a lawsuit from Kennedy against the WEC decision and on Wednesday the state’s District 2 Court of Appeals, controlled by a conservative majority, took up the case.
In its request for the Supreme Court to take up the case, WEC said that Kennedy is seeking “extraordinary” relief and the case should move to the state’s highest court because it is “highly time sensitive and hugely consequential for the people of Wisconsin.”
If Kennedy’s effort is successful, the remedy is now complicated because local election clerks have already put hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots into the mail. An effort to print new ballots would be hugely expensive to county clerks across the state. Kennedy’s attorneys have suggested placing white stickers over his name on the ballots — a remedy that is available under state law if a candidate dies.
WEC added that the Supreme Court should accept the case and issue a final resolution, avoiding a temporary decision at the appeals court that will still end up at the Supreme Court level.
“This Court should provide final resolution of this case and avoid an interim appellate court decision that disrupts or casts doubt on that process, or causes clerks to commence an all-hands-on-deck stickering effort,” WEC’s petition states.
When it accepted the case, the appeals court asked a number of questions about the viability of the stickers, including if electronic machines would be able to handle their use. The appeals court had asked for Kennedy’s attorneys to file briefs in the case by Thursday with responses from WEC by Friday.
In its petition to the Supreme Court, WEC calls the proposal of the stickers a “logistical nightmare.”
“Kennedy appears to recognize that it is too late to reprint the ballots, which already are on their way to municipal clerks and absentee voters, including overseas and military voters,” the petition states. “He proposes that all can be solved by requiring local clerks to create and affix stickers to every Wisconsin ballot, but that solution would ignore state law; force clerks to spend tens of thousands of hours creating and affixing stickers; and, as the circuit court put it, create a ‘logistical nightmare’ that could threaten the accuracy of the election results and confidence in the election.”
As part of its request to bypass the appellate court, WEC Technology Director Robert Kehoe stated that more than 340,000 absentee ballots have been sent to voters in the mail. He also said that he is “unaware of any clerk ever placing stickers on ballots in the administration of an election,” adding that the stickers could cause problems with votes being counted.
“The voting tabulation machines tested and certified for use in this state by the Commission are calibrated to read even a light mark so that no vote goes uncounted, and a sticker in the target area of an oval or error could register a double vote,” Kehoe stated. “Even a shadow or wrinkle (for instance, caused by how the sticker is applied) on an optical scan ballot can cause the voting tabulation machine to register a vote.”
Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. takes the stage at the Des Moines Register soapbox Aug. 12, 2023. On Friday, Feb. 9, 2024, national Democrats alleged Kennedy has illegally coordinated with a super PAC to gather signatures for his bid. (Photo by Jay Waagmeester/Iowa Capital Dispatch)
Wisconsin’s District 2 Court of Appeals has agreed to hear former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s lawsuit asking that his name be removed from the ballot in Wisconsin.
The court, held by a conservative majority, ruled on Wednesday that it will hear the case, in which Kennedy is attempting to get off the ballot despite having filed nomination papers in which more than 8,000 voters signed petitions stating they want him on the ticket.
The Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) previously ruled that state law requires that candidates who have filed nomination papers and have qualified must be included on the ballot unless they die before Election Day. A Dane County judge ruled earlier this week against Kennedy’s effort.
The appeal comes as absentee voting kicks off in Wisconsin, throwing a potential wrench in the start of the voting process. As of Wednesday, local election clerks are required to begin mailing absentee ballots to voters who already have requests on file. Many clerks have gotten a head start, with WEC data showing more than 295,000 ballots have already been put in the mail.
County clerks were also required this week to deliver printed ballots to municipal clerks, adding a potential massive cost to local governments if Kennedy’s name were to be removed and ballots need to be reprinted. At a Dane County court hearing this week, Kennedy’s attorneys suggested using white stickers to cover Kennedy’s name on ballots — an option available to election officials if a candidate dies.
In its ruling accepting the case, the appeals court included a number of questions about the stickers it would like the parties in the lawsuit to answer in their briefs. The questions include if it matters that ballots with stickers on them have not been tested with voting equipment; if a candidate for a statewide office such as attorney general died and stickers were used, would those stickers need to be put on ballots statewide; and if election clerks have the discretion not to use the stickers if a candidate dies after ballots have been printed.
The appeals court ruling orders that all briefs in the case be filed by Friday afternoon.
A Dane County judge has rejected a request from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., shown here campaigning for president in Iowa in August 2023, to have his name removed from Wisconsin's presidential ballot in November. (Jay Waagmeester | Iowa Capital Dispatch)
A Dane County judge on Monday rejected a request from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to have his name removed from the presidential ballot in Wisconsin this November.
An attorney for Kennedy said immediately after the decision that he plans to appeal. A separate case on the issue had already been separately filed with the more conservative District 2 Court of Appeals, which covers the suburban counties around Milwaukee.
Dane County Judge Stephen Ehlke ruled that state law does not allow a candidate to withdraw from the presidential race once they file nomination papers. Ehlke said Kennedy was asking him to make an exception to the law for only him.
“However, courts are required to apply the law as written, not as some party wishes it were written,” Ehlke said.
Kennedy dropped out of the race in August, after he’d filed to get his name on the ballot in Wisconsin. After ending his campaign, Kennedy endorsed former President Donald Trump. Polls show that Kennedy’s candidacy likely pulled supporters from Trump.
Last week in a similar case, the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled that Kennedy’s name must be removed from the state’s ballots, causing a delay of up to two weeks.
The Wisconsin Elections Commission previously ruled that Kennedy’s name must appear on the ballot, finding that if a candidate successfully files nomination papers to appear on the ballot, the only event that can cause the candidate’s removal is death.
In Wisconsin, a ruling to take Kennedy’s name off the ballot would cause delays and added expenses to county clerks responsible for printing ballots. Ballots with his name on them have already been printed across the state because county clerks must get them in the hands of municipal clerks by Wednesday. The first absentee ballots for requests that clerks already have on file must be sent this week.
If a candidate dies after ballots have been printed, the candidate’s name may be covered by a white sticker on the ballot. Kennedy’s attorneys pushed for his name to be similarly covered with stickers.
Assistant Attorney General Stephen Kilpatrick said that the labor required to cover Kennedy’s name on ballots and the unknown effect the stickers would have on vote tabulating machines made that an impossible request that would also force clerks to miss state and federal deadlines.
PHOENIX, ARIZONA - AUGUST 23: Former Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gives remarks at the Renaissance Phoenix Downtown Hotel on August 23, 2024 in Phoenix, Arizona.Kennedy announced that he was suspending his presidential campaign and supporting Republican presidential candidate, former U.S. President Donald Trump.(Photo by Rebecca Noble/Getty Images)
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has asked Wisconsin’s District 2 Court of Appeals to remove his name from the state’s presidential ballot, saying he’s “running against the clock.”
The request comes after a Dane County Circuit Court judge, working in a different appellate district, rejected Kennedy’s request to issue an injunction last week before the Wisconsin Elections Commission had a chance to respond. The judge, Stephen Ehlke, instead set a scheduling conference that happened on Wednesday.
Kennedy’s legal maneuvers come after he ended his presidential campaign last month and endorsed former President Donald Trump. Polls show Kennedy’s presence on the ballot largely pulls support from Trump.
Kennedy had asked the WEC to remove his name from the ballot, a request the body denied earlier this month. His campaign had filed nomination papers with the state on Aug. 6 and state law does not include a mechanism to take back that filing.
His attorneys argued to the more conservative friendly 2nd District that the briefing schedule in the Dane County case would take too long and by the time a decision is reached, ballots will already be printed and sent out.
County clerks across the state have already begun printing ballots, with the first absentee ballots required to be put in the mail Sept. 19. In 2020, the state Supreme Court denied an attempt by the Green Party to have its candidates put on the ballot because the lawsuit was filed after ballots had been printed.
Kennedy’s attorneys argued the appeals court should take up the case so the WEC can’t run out the clock.
“Its victory will not be one of principle and precedent but procrastination,” Kennedy’s attorneys argued.
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