Wisconsin politics were shaken up this year with the signing of new legislative maps that ended over a decade of extreme and effective Republican gerrymandering.
It was the first time in Wisconsin history a Legislature and a governor of different parties agreed on legislative redistricting, the Legislative Reference Bureau told Wisconsin Watch.
In a good Republican year across the country, Wisconsin Democrats flipped 14 seats in the Legislature — largely because of those new maps. It wasn’t enough to win a majority in the Assembly or the Senate, but the resulting 54-45 and 18-15 splits better reflect Wisconsin’s swing-state status.
Wisconsin’s congressional maps were not redrawn. Republicans kept six of the state’s eight congressional seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.
The state’s current congressional maps were drawn by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and approved by the then-conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2022. The last time a governor of one party and a Legislature of another agreed on congressional maps was in 1991.
Evers’ maps were slightly more favorable to Democrats than the previous decade’s maps, but they didn’t change that much because the court established a “least change” rule when deciding which maps it would approve. That meant they would largely conform to the Republican maps that had been in place since 2011.
In March, the now-liberal high court denied a request to reconsider the state’s congressional maps before this year’s elections without stating a reason. Evers had asked for changes to the congressional maps soon after he signed the new legislative maps into law in February. Those maps were approved by the GOP-controlled Legislature.
Elias Law Group filed a motion in January asking the court to revise the congressional boundaries ahead of the 2024 election. The Democratic law firm argued that new maps were justified after the court abandoned the “least change” approach when deciding on the legislative map challenge last year. In that case, the state Supreme Court said it would no longer favor maps that present minimal changes to existing boundaries.
Democrats argued that Evers’ congressional boundaries drawn in 2022 were decided under the “least change” restrictions later thrown out by the court in the legislative redistricting case.
Republicans pushed back, arguing that newly elected liberal Justice Janet Protasiewicz prejudged the case during her 2023 campaign. They requested she recuse herself from the case. But Protasiewicz said she decided not to vote on the motion to reconsider the congressional maps because she wasn’t on the court when the underlying case was decided.
Republican Party of Wisconsin chair Brian Schimming in a statement called the court’s decision “the demise of Governor Evers’ latest attempt to throw out his own hand-drawn congressional maps.”
Republicans have retained control of six of Wisconsin’s eight House seats, with Democratic Reps. Mark Pocan and Gwen Moore safely controlling the two districts that cover Madison and Milwaukee. In comparison, Democrats held five of the eight seats in 2010 — the year before Republicans redrew the maps.
The 1st and 3rd districts are currently the only competitive congressional districts in Wisconsin, represented by Republican Reps. Bryan Steil and Derrick Van Orden respectively. Steil won his race this month with 54% of the vote, and Van Orden won with 51.4% of the vote.
Conservative Chief Justice Annette Ziegler and Justice Rebecca Bradley in their concurrence wrote the new majority’s “reckless abandonment of settled legal precedent” in the legislative redistricting case “incentivizes litigants to bring politically divisive cases to this court regardless of their legal merit.”
Representatives of Elias Law Group did not respond to Wisconsin Watch when asked if they anticipate another legal challenge to the congressional maps ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
“I remain very interested between now and 2030 in trying to find a way to get the court to … tell us whether partisan gerrymandering violates the Wisconsin Constitution. I believe it does,” Jeff Mandell, founder of the liberal legal group Law Forward, told Wisconsin Watch. “I believe the court will say it does when we present the right case.”
But Mandell said nothing has been drafted, and his group won’t bring a case to the Supreme Court unless it has “got the goods.”
Wisconsin Watch readers have submitted questions to our statehouse team, and we’ll answer them in our series, Ask Wisconsin Watch. Have a question about state government? Ask it here.
As President-elect Donald Trump stocks his Cabinet with some of his most loyal followers, we’ve already checked some of their surprising and dubious claims.
That statement was made at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee by Thomas Homan, former head of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). He is Trump’s pick for border czar and does not require Senate confirmation.
Such removals were highest during Bill Clinton’s second term as president, averaging 1.7 million annually from 1997 through 2000.
Trump’s highest was 600,000 in 2020.
Check out the video version of this fact brief here.
The vice president has supported the rare occurrence of taxpayer-funded gender-affirming surgery for prison inmates and detained undocumented immigrants.
That supports a claim made on Wisconsin radio by former U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican who was Trump’s pick for attorney general. Last week Gaetz withdrew himself from consideration amid reports he had paid women for sex and also had sex with an underage teen. Trump has since announced he plans to nominate former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi to be the nation’s top law enforcement officer instead.
Wisconsin Watch and its partners have also fact-checked claims about (but so far not by) Elon Musk, Trump’s selection to co-lead a government efficiency effort.
We found that Musk was not the founder of Tesla (it was founded by two other entrepreneurs); and that, as of 2022, he was not the richest person in history.
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.
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.
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.
Marquette University’s John Johnson analyzed voting data for Wisconsin’s 2024 U.S. Senate and presidential elections. “Our electorate is increasingly polarized by education,” Johnson writes.
The youngest voters in Wisconsin shifted slightly toward Republicans in both races while other age groups shifted Democratic in the Senate race and Republican in the presidential. The poorest and richest areas in Wisconsin more often vote Democratic, while the middle class areas have leaned Republican.
Wisconsin has one of highest percentages of tipped workers in the US
The Tax Policy Center’s August 2024 analysis showed that about 5% of workers in the state of Wisconsin work “tipped” jobs. The data analysis classifies tipped employees as dining room staff and the majority of people working in personal care or service jobs (nail technicians, hair stylists, etc.). In July 2024, Wisconsin’s state minimum wage for tipped workers was slightly higher than the federal standard of $2.13 per hour.
Chronic absenteeism has improved among students, but remains high
Wisconsin Policy Forum’s October 2024 analysis showed that students of all ages are chronically absent, defined as missing more than 10% of school days in a year under any circumstances.
The issue is most common at the high school level, where nearly one in four students is chronically absent. Chronic absenteeism reached a peak following the pandemic, and while the 2023 rates are lower than the 2022 rates, they have not returned to pre-pandemic norms.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
Wisconsin Republican Eric Hovde conceded defeat on Monday to Democratic incumbent Tammy Baldwin in their U.S. Senate race, saying he did not want to “add to political strife through a contentious recount” even though he raised debunked election conspiracies.
Hovde, who was backed by President-elect Donald Trump, could have requested a recount because his margin of defeat was less than 1 percentage point, at about 29,000 votes. He would have had to pay for it himself.
Baldwin’s campaign referred requests for comment on Hovde’s concession on Monday to her victory speech. In that address, Baldwin pledged to work with Trump when possible but also vowed to fight him to protect the national health care law and abortion rights.
Hovde, in his concession video, repeated claims he made saying there were “many troubling issues” related to absentee ballots in Milwaukee and when they were reported. Republicans, Democrats and nonpartisan election leaders all refuted the claims of impropriety Hovde made.
“Without a detailed review of all the ballots and their legitimacy, which will be difficult to obtain in the courts, a request for a recount would serve no purpose because you will just be recounting the same ballots regardless of their integrity,” Hovde said Monday.
Although there is no evidence of wrongdoing in the election, many Hovde supporters questioned a surge in votes for Baldwin that were reported by Milwaukee around 4:30 a.m. the morning after the election. Those votes put Baldwin over the top.
The votes were the tabulation of absentee ballots from Milwaukee. Those ballots are counted at a central location and reported all at once, often well after midnight on Election Day. Elections officials for years have made clear that those ballots are reported later than usual because of the sheer number that have to be counted and the fact that state law does not allow for processing them before polls open.
Republicans and Democrats alike, along with state and Milwaukee election leaders, warned in the days and weeks leading up to the election that the Milwaukee absentee ballots would be reported late and cause a huge influx of Democratic votes.
Hovde also repeated his complaint about the candidacy of Thomas Leager, who ran as a member of the America First Party. Leager, a far-right candidate who was recruited by Democratic operatives and donors to run as a conservative, finished a distant fourth.
Republicans supported independent presidential candidates Cornel West and Jill Stein in efforts to take votes away from Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tried to get his name removed from the ballot in Wisconsin and other swing states after he backed Trump.
In the Wisconsin Senate race, Leager got about 400 fewer votes than the margin between Baldwin and Hovde. But Hovde claimed on Monday that he would have won the Senate race if Leager had not been on the ballot.
Baldwin declared victory after The Associated Press called the race for her on Nov. 6. She outperformed Harris, who lost Wisconsin by about as many votes as Baldwin defeated Hovde.
The Baldwin win came in the face of Democratic losses nationwide that allowed Republicans to take control of the Senate.
Her win was the narrowest of her three Senate races. Baldwin won in 2012 by almost 6 percentage points and in 2018 by nearly 11 points.
Hovde, a multimillionaire bank owner and real estate developer, first ran for Senate in 2012 but lost in the Republican primary. He poured millions of dollars of his own money into his losing campaign this year.
Hovde on Monday did not rule out another political campaign in the future. Some Republicans have floated him as a potential candidate for governor in 2026.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.This story is published in partnership with The Associated Press.
On Nov. 5, Wisconsin voters approved nearly 78% of the 138 school district referendums across the state.
That’s higher than the 60% passage rate this past spring, but the percentage of K-12 referendums approved statewide has been declining since 2018, according to the Wisconsin Policy Forum.
The 70% approval rate of all school referendums this year was a 10 percentage-point decrease from 2022 and was the lowest passage rate in a midterm or presidential election year in the last decade.
But more and more districts are going to referendum as state aid has fallen far behind inflation over the last 15 years. A total of 241 questions were posed in 2024, the most ever held in a single year, according to the Policy Forum.
Almost half of Wisconsin’s 421 school districts went to referendum this year, asking for a record total of nearly $6 billion from taxpayers — up from a previous record of $3.3 billion in 2022. Voters ultimately approved $4.4 billion in additional taxes.
School districts are increasingly holding operational referendums, asking residents to take on a recurring tax hike just to cover everyday costs like utilities, routine maintenance and staff salaries. Capital referendums are one-time asks for big projects like a new school.
This year, 66% of operational referendums passed statewide, while 76% of capital referendums passed. There were 148 operating referendums held, the most on record, according to the Policy Forum.
The reliance on school referendums comes amid a heavy debate over state-imposed revenue limits and funding for public education.
Revenue limits were created in the early 1990s to keep in check school property tax increases. In 2009, the state Legislature decoupled per-pupil revenue limits from inflation, and districts have had to manage tighter budgets ever since, especially as inflation in recent years has exceeded revenue limit increases.
Wisconsin’s per-pupil K-12 spending increased at a lower rate than every other state in the nation besides Indiana and Idaho between 2002 and 2020, according to the Policy Forum.
School districts across the state are also grappling with declining enrollment, mainly caused by a drop in birth rates.
“Schools are funded based on the number of students we have, so as we have fewer students, our budget shrinks,” Kenosha Unified School District Superintendent Jeffrey Weiss told Wisconsin Watch.
When costs exceed the per-pupil revenue available to the district, state law allows them to go to referendum to ask their voters to authorize their district to exceed their revenue caps at the expense of property taxpayers.
State revenue limits have fallen more than $2,300 behind inflation per student behind inflation even in smaller school districts like Hudson, generating millions in lost revenue.
The 2023-25 state budget included a yearly increase of $325 per student to the state-imposed revenue limits. But that increase still lags behind inflation, Wauwatosa School District Superintendent Demond Means told Wisconsin Watch.
“Are they providing more money to schools? Yes, but they’re still behind. They’ve dug a hole for themselves,” Means said. “They have to come to grips with the fact that they have created an obstacle and a gap that they have to fill.”
Schools are still reeling from a freeze in revenue caps in the 2021-2023 budget, Means said, in which the Legislature provided zero increases to public school funding immediately following the pandemic. Wisconsin ended its 2024 fiscal year with a $4.6 billion budget surplus.
Republican lawmakers tout the $1 billion they added to the budget for public schools last year, emphasizing that education is the largest portion of the state budget. The increase was part of a deal struck between the GOP-controlled Legislature and Democratic Gov. Tony Evers to simultaneously increase funding for private school vouchers.
Democrats argue the state has fallen so far behind, $1 billion isn’t nearly enough.
“Those are just red herrings,” state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jill Underly told Wisconsin Watch. “They’re trying to distract because public education has always been one of the most expensive components of our state budget. It just is. It’s a labor-intensive operation, and labor costs money.”
Underly recently called for a $4 billion increase in public school funding in the Department of Public Instruction’s state budget request. It includes a proposal to tie revenue limits to inflation again.
“The fact that we’ve gone to referendum now three different times in the last six years is a sign that state funding is really becoming a challenge,” Means said. “A community like Wauwatosa does not take going to a referendum lightly.”
The district just passed operational and capital referendums totaling $124.4 million. That translates to a $630 annual tax increase on a $300,000 home, according to district calculations.
While passage rates are typically higher in a presidential or midterm election year due to voter turnout, some referendums still failed. School districts like Hudson, serving many rural, conservative townships, are now faced with a choice: cut programs and staff or push to referendum again in April. Its $5 million operational referendum was voted down on Nov. 5.
The referendum would have increased property taxes annually by $5 on a $500,000 home, according to district calculations.
“These are recurring expenses. This is literally to make ends meet,” Hudson School District Superintendent Nick Ouellette told Wisconsin Watch.
State lawmakers like Rep. Shannon Zimmerman, a Republican who represents the city of Hudson, have suggested that schools need to close and consolidate in light of declining enrollment. Ouellette said it’s not that simple.
The district is receiving less per-pupil funding from the state due to a steady drop in students. But enrollment is not declining at a fast enough rate to immediately close and consolidate schools and classrooms, Ouellette said.
“You lose the revenue, but you don’t lose the expense,” Ouellette said. “You have to allow things to drop enough before you can cut.”
Ouellette said blame is often directed at the school districts with claims that they are mismanaging their budgets or not “living within their means.”
“State lawmakers are well aware that if they continue to not fund schools, it will force local school districts to ask their property tax payers to pay more,” Ouellette said. “So they understand they are raising taxes.”
In Hudson, 54% of the school district’s budget is paid by local taxes, 39% is covered by state aid and 3% comes from federal aid, according to the Policy Forum. A decade ago more than half of the district’s operating revenue came from state aid.
“They’re placing school systems in a very precarious position,” Means said. “Local communities are, in essence, bailing out the Legislature, and that has to stop.”
Forward is a look ahead at the week in Wisconsin government and politics from the Wisconsin Watch statehouse team.
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.
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.
“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.
Wisconsin Republican Eric Hovde admitted Tuesday that he lost the U.S. Senate race to Democratic incumbent Tammy Baldwin, but refused to concede and instead repeated misleading claims about the election while he considers a recount.
Hovde preleased a video saying he wanted to gather more information and assess whether to seek a recount. But in a later interview on 1130-AM radio, Hovde admitted he lost while still stopping short of conceding.
“I will definitely pick myself up and move on and fight for our wonderful country and state, which is why I got into this whole thing,” Hovde said. “It’s the most painful loss I’ve ever experienced.”
Hovde can request a recount because his margin of defeat was less than 1 percentage point, at about 29,000 votes. But he hasn’t said yet whether he will request one, explaining in a video directed at his supporters that he wants to review all of the information and options that are available.
“This is a difficult decision because I want to honor your support and, at the same time, bring closure to this election for our state,” Hovde said in the video posted on the social media platform X.
Hovde pointed to what he claimed were irregularities with the vote results. There is no evidence of any wrongdoing in the election, the results of which are still being reviewed by counties before they submit the canvassed totals to the state by Nov. 19 for certification by Dec. 1.
Democrats, and even some Republicans, immediately called out Hovde for what they said was a perpetuation of lies about the integrity of the election.
“Stop trying to erode trust in our elections (and I say that as someone who supported Hovde),” said Jim Villa, a longtime Republican who previously worked in the Legislature and Milwaukee county executive’s office under Scott Walker before Walker became governor.
“That grift needs to stop!” Villa posted on X.
Baldwin campaign spokesperson Andrew Mamo accused Hovde of “sowing doubt about our very democracy.”
“Leaders on both sides of the aisle should condemn the lies he’s spreading and the pathetic campaign he continues to run,” Mamo said. “Tammy Baldwin has won this race and there is only one thing for Eric Hovde to do: concede.”
John D. Johnson, a Marquette University researcher and data scientist, reacted to Hovde’s video on X by saying, “Reckless disregard for the actual facts here.”
Hovde also raised concerns about precincts in Milwaukee where turnout was higher than the number of registered voters posted on the county’s website. That’s because the original number posted didn’t account for people who registered to vote on Election Day, something that happened in both Republican and Democratic parts of the state in the election.
The bipartisan Milwaukee Election Commission put out a statement refuting Hovde’s “baseless claims.” The commission said it was “fully confident that Mr. Hovde’s accusations lack any merit.”
Andrew Iverson, executive director of the Wisconsin Republican Party, said that “Hovde has the right to request a recount and pursue legal remedies to address whatever concerns he may have regarding the election.”
Although there is no evidence of wrongdoing in the election, many Hovde supporters have questioned a surge in votes for Baldwin that were reported by Milwaukee around 4:30 a.m. the morning after the election. Those votes put Baldwin over the top.
The votes were the tabulation of absentee ballots from Milwaukee. Those ballots are counted at a central location and reported all at once, often well after midnight on Election Day. Elections officials for years have made clear that those ballots are reported later than usual because of the sheer number that have to be counted and the fact that state law does not allow for processing them before polls open.
Republicans and Democrats alike, along with state and Milwaukee election leaders, warned in the days and weeks leading up to the election that the Milwaukee absentee ballots would be reported late and cause a huge influx of Democratic votes.
The reporting of those absentee ballots swung the 2020 presidential election to President Joe Biden, fueling baseless conspiracy theories that the election had been stolen from Donald Trump.
This year, the number of Democratic absentee votes in Milwaukee was not enough to sway the race for Vice President Kamala Harris, but it did put Baldwin over the top.
Hovde said before those ballots arrived that it “appeared” he had won and since last Wednesday, “numerous parties” had reached out to him about alleged inconsistencies.
But on election night, Republican strategists posted on X that Hovde was likely to fall behind Baldwin once the absentee votes from Milwaukee and other Democratic-heavy cities were posted. That is what happened.
To seek a recount, Hovde would have to request one within three days after the last county completed its canvass of the vote. Those are due by Nov. 19, but counties could complete the task sooner.
Hovde, a multimillionaire bank owner and real estate developer, first ran for Senate in 2012 but lost in the Republican primary. He was backed by Trump this year and poured millions of dollars of his own money into his campaign.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.This story is published in partnership with The Associated Press.
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.
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.
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Democrats flipped 10 Assembly seats and four Senate seats in Tuesday’s election. While they didn’t claim either majority, they have a chance of flipping at least one chamber in 2026.
Republicans performed much better than their historical averages in the newly drawn districts. On average their candidates in competitive races ran 3.6 points ahead, while Democrats ran 2.3 points behind.
One of the signs that the Republican 2011 gerrymander is dead was Democrat Joe Sheehan’s win in a unified Sheboygan Assembly district.
Wisconsin Republicans held on to the state Legislature in Tuesday’s election, but the flipping of 14 Senate and Assembly seats from red to blue provided the clearest evidence yet that the 2011 partisan gerrymander was real and is now dead.
Republicans will maintain majorities in both the Assembly and Senate — though at much slimmer margins than during the most recent legislative session. The math sets up a chance for the Democrats to retake at least one chamber in 2026, especially if Republicans face the usual midterm headwinds that check a new president.
Senate Republicans lost four seats, going from a supermajority that could override Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ vetoes to an 18-15 majority. The four Democratic pickups resulted from new voting maps legislative Republicans and Democratic Gov. Tony Evers agreed to after the newly liberal Wisconsin Supreme Court threw out GOP-gerrymandered districts last year.
The Democratic gains in an election environment favoring Republicans provided further evidence that Wisconsin’s Republican governor and Legislature in 2011 designed maps to allow their party to keep legislative control no matter how much statewide sentiment might change. The party re-upped those maps after the 2020 Census with help from the then-conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court.
The results show that “when people have a real choice at the ballot box, that they’re going to choose the person that best represents their values and the policies they want to see going forward,” Senate Minority Leader Dianne Hesselbein, D-Middleton, told Wisconsin Watch in an interview.
Entering the next election cycle, state Senate Democrats will hold 10 guaranteed seats (they were elected Tuesday) and be favored in six of the 17 seats up for election in 2026. That’s according to an analysis of past voting patterns in state Senate districts that does not yet include 2024 results. By comparison, Republicans will hold just six guaranteed seats while being favored in nine districts up for election in 2026.
That will leave both sides battling for two toss-up districts — currently held by GOP Sens. Van Wanggaard, R-Racine, and Rob Hutton, R-Brookfield — to determine control of the chamber. On Tuesday, Democrats won two of the three Assembly seats in Hutton’s district.
In the state Assembly, where Democrats hoped new maps would help them win a majority, Republicans won 54 seats, according to unofficial returns, while Democrats captured 45 seats. That marks a 10-seat swing from the previous legislative session, when Assembly Republicans were just shy of the votes needed to override a gubernatorial veto.
That’s a remarkable outcome given Republican candidates almost across the board performed better than the historical GOP candidate averages in their districts. By comparison, Democrats performed worse in relation to the historical partisan makeup in 68 of the state’s 99 Assembly districts, according to a Wisconsin Watch analysis of past voting patterns and unofficial results. On average Republican candidates in competitive races ran 3.6 points ahead of the historical GOP average, while Democrats ran 2.3 points behind.
Incumbency also helped. Though Democrats unseated three Assembly incumbents, Republican incumbents outperformed the past voting trend of their new district by an average of 4.27 points, compared with 3.14 points of those who had never held office. Lawmakers with three or more terms under their belts like Reps. Tony Kurtz, Todd Novak, Travis Tranel and Nancy Vandermeer outperformed their district averages by more than 8 points.
Still, Democrats projected optimism that business in the Capitol wouldn’t proceed as usual this year.
“Things are going to change in the Legislature,” Assembly Minority Leader Greta Neubauer, D-Racine, said in a Wednesday statement. “Fair maps have allowed voters to hold legislators accountable, and this will change how policy is written and what bills move through the Legislature.”
Some Republicans on Wednesday downplayed the Democratic gains.
“(Democrats) spent weeks and months talking up trying to take over at least the Assembly and they didn’t, frankly, come close to doing it, including losing some of the key races,” said Republican Party of Wisconsin Chair Brian Schimming. “The truth of the matter is, they had their one moment when they had a huge turnout to take over this year, and they failed in both houses.”
“Majorities matter in the Legislature,” he added.
An election worker counts ballots on Election Day, Nov. 5, 2024, at Milwaukee Central Count at the Baird Center in Milwaukee. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Speaking to reporters at the Capitol, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, declared Republicans would not compromise with Democrats if it meant “expanding welfare, having boys play girls sports and all the craziness that the national Democratic Party stands for,” WisPolitics.com reported.
Republicans will also have a chance to pick up seats in two years, Vos said.
Assembly Democrats lost five races on Tuesday in districts with a Democratic edge, including Novak’s in southwest Wisconsin that carries a 13-point Democratic advantage based on past election results. Republicans won all districts in which they have an edge. Among the 14 toss-up districts, those with less than a 10-point spread based on past election results, Democrats won five and Republicans won nine.
Sheboygan Democrat defeats GOP incumbent in reunited city
In Sheboygan, local Democrats celebrated on Election Night as the majority blue city elected a local Democratic candidate to state office for the first time in over a decade.
Former Sheboygan Area School District superintendent Joe Sheehan defeated freshman Rep. Amy Binsfeld, R-Sheboygan, under new legislative maps that reunited the 26th Assembly District after the 2011 redistricting process blatantly split the city in half, extending to surrounding rural areas to secure two Republican seats. Sheehan, whose campaign slogan was “together again,” led Binsfeld by less than 900 votes, according to unofficial results.
“Some people were choosing not to vote because they just didn’t feel, for a decade, that their vote made any difference,” Sheboygan County Democratic Party co-chair Maeve Quinn said. “It got to the point where nobody wanted to run for the office either.”
But fair maps meant the candidates actually had to get out and earn the vote, Sheboygan Mayor Ryan Sorenson told Wisconsin Watch, saying it strengthened the democratic process in their “light blue city” where the seat wasn’t completely safe.
“We realized the cards were really stacked against us when we had local representation because of the city being cut in half,” Sorenson said. “Sheboygan is the urban center for the county. When you loop us in with small, rural communities that are 45 minutes away, it really dilutes our voice.”
Sheboygan County Democratic Party co-chair Mary Lynne Donohue, who ran for the district in 2020 as a “sacrificial lamb,” told Wisconsin Watch the new maps had been a “rallying cry.” Both Quinn and Donohue noted their office saw far more volunteers, distributed signs and campaign surrogates this cycle than in previous election years, with over 40 door-knocking volunteers stopping in on both Saturday and Sunday before Election Day, they said.
“This place was like a ghost town in 2022,” Donohue said.
UW-Oshkosh student Theodorus Guigley casts a ballot. Students and community members voted at the Culver Family Welcome Center at UW-Oshkosh in Oshkosh, Wis., on Nov. 5, 2024. (Julius Shieh / Wisconsin Watch)
The Chmura-Moore family, consisting of parents Sharon and Dylan and kids Sophia and Elliot, went to the polling site at Oshkosh Public Library in Oshkosh, Wis., on Nov. 5, 2024. Donning raincoats and umbrellas, several dozen voters lined up at the library before 7 a.m. (Julius Shieh / Wisconsin Watch)
The heightened energy is a sign of revival after 13 years of gerrymandering dampened the democratic process in places like Sheboygan all across the state.
Get-out-the-vote volunteers continued to filter into the office on Election Day, including Bryan Cones and Mike Schoen, who came from Chicago to knock on doors in Sheboygan for Democrats up and down the ballot. Cones, originally from Tennessee where Republicans have gerrymandered districts around Nashville, understands how skewed maps make people feel like their vote doesn’t count.
Another volunteer, Patrice Worel-Olson, said she had never before volunteered with the party but did so this year because of the new maps. “We have a chance,” she said.
Donohue was one of the original plaintiffs in a federal redistricting case that challenged the Republican gerrymander of the state Assembly. The U.S. Supreme Court threw out the case on a technical issue. In a more recent legal challenge, a liberal-majority Wisconsin Supreme Court tossed out the state’s Republican-friendly 2020 maps, leading to lawmakers in both parties to approve today’s more balanced maps.
Sheehan’s campaign raised nearly $1.3 million to Binsfeld’s $330,000, with the Democratic Assembly Campaign Committee and the Republican Assembly Campaign Committee investing heavily in each race.
Binsfeld had a falling out with the Sheboygan County GOP earlier this year after she distanced herself from its anti-abortion stance and member concerns about election integrity, according to party chair Russ Otten. The GOP refused to distribute her campaign signs, and Otten predicted she would fall short in the race without local party support.
In stark contrast with Donohue’s ill-fated 2020 campaign, which raised $75,000, Sheehan told Wisconsin Watch he knocked on over 4,000 doors in the district, where voters shared their enthusiasm for his chances.
“That’s incredible that we got a voice, and now we can talk about some of the issues that really affect Sheboygan, which gerrymandering did not allow,” Sheehan said in an interview.
At the Sheboygan County Democratic Party headquarters on Nov. 5, 2024, local party co-chair Mary Lynne Donohue sits at her computer. Donohue ran for Assembly in 2020 as a “sacrificial lamb” because she lived in a Sheboygan district that had been gerrymandered to prevent Democrats from winning. On Tuesday her party won the new Sheboygan district made possible by new legislative maps. (Hallie Claflin / Wisconsin Watch)
End note: The polls were right
Republicans celebrated the continued legislative majorities alongside Trump’s victory in the state and nationally. Democrats breathed a sigh of relief as Sen. Tammy Baldwin eked out a win to secure a third term.
The results also brought relief to Marquette University Law School poll director Charles Franklin. The final Marquette poll had both races in a statistical tie with Kamala Harris up by a point and Baldwin up by two. Trump in fact won by 0.8 points and Baldwin won by 0.9 points — well within the poll’s margin of error.
“We missed the president by 1.9 points and the Senate by 1.1 points, better than our 2.2 average error,” Franklin told Wisconsin Watch in an email. “SO I get to keep my job.”
Preliminary results show many Wisconsin school districts successfully made the case to voters Tuesday that schools were in need of additional tax support.
Voters in 137 school districts were asked to approve increased funding for schools. A preliminary analysis by the Wisconsin Policy Forum found 107 referendum questions passed, while 30 failed.
Ari Brown, a researcher with the Policy Forum, said the outcome is better than expected, but shows that overtime school district have gotten better at choosing when to put referendums on the ballot and how to word the questions.
“In general, a school district is going to try to avoid going to referendum unless it knows with a pretty high degree of certainty that it has a good chance of succeeding,” Brown said. “That said the passage rate is still lower than in all presidential and midterm election years since 2014.”
State Superintendent Jill Underly said she believes voters realized the value of public education and understood schools need sustainable funding to operate.
“Our state legislature has severely underfunded public schools for well over a decade, and it has led to a record number of districts going to referendum to try and fix severe financial constraints on their own,” Underly said in a statement. “Too many communities were forced to vote Tuesday whether to increase property taxes just so their local schools can pay staff, heat and cool their buildings, and provide a quality education.”
School districts are funded by a mix of taxpayer dollars, state and federal aid.
The 2023-25 state budget included an annual funding increase for public schools of $325 per student to the state-imposed limit on revenues districts can receive in school aids and local property taxes combined.
While this provides some relief, school districts say it didn’t catch them up from a freeze in state revenue caps in the previous two-year budget, or the declining enrollment many public school districts are experiencing.
Wisconsin ended its 2024 fiscal year in June with a $4.6 billion state budget surplus. The state’s “rainy day” fund hit a record-high of $1.9 billion.
“We must reinvest in our public schools and the future of our kids,” Underly said. “The upcoming biennial budget provides yet another opportunity for the legislature to uphold its responsibility to appropriately fund public schools, and to stop forcing Wisconsin communities to make impossible choices.”
Madison Metropolitan School District passes two referendums, deficit remains
Voters in Madison approved two referendums totaling more than $600 million.
The first, for $100 million, will help the school district cover its operating costs. The second, for $507 million, will renovate and replace aging buildings.
In a statement, Superintendent Joe Gothard and school board president Nichelle Nichols said the “yes” votes mean the district will be able to attract quality staff and expand programs including 4K and early literacy, multilingual education and career exploration in middle school.
“We are excited that 10 of our schools will be transformed with the ‘yes’ vote for district facilities,” the statement said.
Still, Gothard said the district is continuing to operate with a structural deficit.
“Our revenues are not keeping up with our costs,” the statement said. “We, along with other public school districts throughout the state, continue to be grossly underfunded by the state. Our team will come together and engage with the community to determine how to move forward and plan for the future.”
Other school districts to pass referendums include Green Bay, Wauwatosa, West Allis, Cudahy, Franklin, Glendale-River Hills, Eau Claire and Superior.
The Green Bay Area Public School District’s $183 million referendum will pay to enhance safety and security at secondary schools and address deferred maintenance projects at several elementary schools.
“I am overwhelmed by the support of our community for the students and staff in the Green Bay Area Public School District,” Interim Superintendent Vicki Bayer said in a statement.
Election Day involves more than quickly marking a ballot and anxiously awaiting election returns.
Filing dispatches from across Wisconsin during Tuesday’s general election, our reporters examined how residents participated in the democratic process. Voters and election workers brought joy, angst and purpose to the polls.
In some cases images told their stories more powerfully than words.
Here is the best of Wisconsin Watch’s photography from Election Day, portraits of what we saw and who we met.
Jonathan Walton, Ward 29 chief Inspector, middle, makes an announcement as the polls open on Election Day on Nov. 5, 2024, at Madison East High School in Madison, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Volunteer poll worker Seth McClure hands a ballot to Lisa Wilber of Madison, right, during Election Day on Nov. 5, 2024, at Madison East High School in Madison, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Elliot Chmura-Moore helps his father, Dylan, submit his ballot. It was the 20th vote submitted on Election Day, Nov. 5, 2024, at the Oshkosh Public Library polling place in Oshkosh, Wis. (Julius Shieh / Wisconsin Watch)
Shane Worden, one of the first 20 voters of the day at the Oshkosh Public Library in Oshkosh, Wis., gives a thumbs up to a poll worker after inserting his ballot into a voting machine. (Julius Shieh / Wisconsin Watch)
Election workers count ballots at Green Bay Central Count in the Green Bay City Hall building on Nov. 5, 2024. (Julius Shieh / Wisconsin Watch)
An observer leans back and watches while election workers count ballots at Green Bay Central Count in the Green Bay City Hall building on Nov. 5, 2024. (Julius Shieh / Wisconsin Watch)
Town of Westfield poll worker Frank Traina assists fellow poll worker and chief election inspector Lacey Baumann as she casts her ballot on Nov. 5, 2024, at Westfield Town Hall in Marquette County, Wis. (Bennet Goldstein / Wisconsin Watch)
UW-Oshkosh students Adam Ketter, left, and Jacob Young spent the day as poll workers. Students and community members voted at the Culver Family Welcome Center at UW-Oshkosh in Oshkosh, Wis., on Nov. 5, 2024. (Julius Shieh / Wisconsin Watch)
A voter heads to the polls on Election Day on Nov. 5, 2024, at Mary Ryan Boys & Girls Club in Milwaukee. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
A ballot is temporarily stuck in the tabulation machine during Election Day on Nov. 5, 2024, at Milwaukee Central Count at the Baird Center in Milwaukee. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)Jefferson Davis, a Republican election observer, left, and Republican Party of Milwaukee County Chairman Hilario Deleon, right, talk to each other after learning that the doors of the tabulation machines were not properly sealed during Election Day on Nov. 5, 2024, at Milwaukee Central Count at the Baird Center in Milwaukee. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)Alvonia Missouri of Milwaukee, joined by her great-grandchildren, Tyriah Smith, 5, left, and Tyron Smith, 7, right, registers to vote during Election Day on Nov. 5, 2024, at Mary Ryan Boys & Girls Club in Milwaukee. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Sharon Brown, a volunteer poll worker, center, helps Iyana Simpson, 21, right, prepare to vote for her first time during Election Day on Nov. 5, 2024, at the Clinton & Bernice Rose Senior Center in Milwaukee. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)Volunteer poll worker Beverly Cooley cheers after helping Jayvonte Wingard, 18, right, vote for his first time on Election Day, Nov. 5, 2024, at the Clinton & Bernice Rose Senior Center in Milwaukee. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)Devin Hildebrand casts a ballot as his daughter Ivy, 2, wears a voting sticker from her mother, Lily, at Green Isle Pavilion in Allouez, Wis., on Nov. 5, 2024. (Julius Shieh / Wisconsin Watch)Voters cast their ballots at Allouez Village Hall in Allouez, Wis., on the evening of Nov. 5, 2024. (Julius Shieh / Wisconsin Watch)Paulina Gutiérrez, executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission, prepares to clear the flash drives used to store the final vote count during Election Day on Nov. 5, 2024, at Milwaukee Central Count at the Baird Center in Milwaukee. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Election workers count ballots on Election Day, Nov. 5, 2024, at Milwaukee Central Count at the Baird Center in Milwaukee. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Election workers count ballots during Election Day on Nov. 5, 2024, at Milwaukee Central Count at the Baird Center in Milwaukee. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
People cheer as 8th Congressional District candidate Tony Wied makes a victory speech at the Legacy Hotel in Green Bay, Wis., on Nov. 5, 2024. (Julius Shieh / Wisconsin Watch)
An attendee of 8th Congressional District candidate Tony Wied’s election night gathering is seen at the Legacy Hotel on Nov. 5, 2024, in Green Bay, Wis. (Julius Shieh / Wisconsin Watch)
Tony Wied celebrates his 8th Congressional District victory at the Legacy Hotel in Green Bay, Wis., on Nov. 5, 2024. (Julius Shieh / Wisconsin Watch)
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
Donald Trump has promised sweeping action in a second administration.
The former president and now president-elect often skipped over details but through more than a year of policy pronouncements and written statements outlined a wide-ranging agenda that blends traditional conservative approaches to taxes, regulation and cultural issues with a more populist bent on trade and a shift in America’s international role.
Trump’s agenda also would scale back federal government efforts on civil rights and expand presidential powers.
A look at what Trump has proposed:
Immigration
“Build the wall!” from his 2016 campaign has become creating “the largest mass deportation program in history.” Trump has called for using the National Guard and empowering domestic police forces in the effort. Still, Trump has been scant on details of what the program would look like and how he would ensure that it targeted only people in the U.S. illegally. He’s pitched “ideological screening” for would-be entrants, ending birth-right citizenship (which almost certainly would require a constitutional change), and said he’d reinstitute first-term policies such as “Remain in Mexico,” limiting migrants on public health grounds and severely limiting or banning entrants from certain majority-Muslim nations. Altogether, the approach would not just crack down on illegal migration, but curtail immigration overall.
Abortion
Trump played down abortion as a second-term priority, even as he took credit for the Supreme Court ending a woman’s federal right to terminate a pregnancy and returning abortion regulation to state governments. At Trump’s insistence, the GOP platform, for the first time in decades, did not call for a national ban on abortion. Trump maintains that overturning Roe v. Wade is enough on the federal level.
Still, Trump has not said explicitly that he would veto national abortion restrictions if they reached his desk. And in an example of how the conservative movement might proceed with or without Trump, anti-abortion activists note that the GOP platform still asserts that a fetus should have due process protections under the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. That constitutional argument is a roadmap for conservatives to seek a national abortion ban through federal courts.
Taxes
Trump’s tax policies broadly tilt toward corporations and wealthier Americans. That’s mostly due to his promise to extend his 2017 tax overhaul, with a few notable changes that include lowering the corporate income tax rate to 15% from the current 21%. That also involves rolling back Democratic President Joe Biden’s income tax hikes on the wealthiest Americans and scrapping Inflation Reduction Act levies that finance energy measures intended to combat climate change.
Those policies notwithstanding, Trump has put more emphasis on new proposals aimed at working- and middle class Americans: exempting earned tips, Social Security wages and overtime wages from income taxes. It’s noteworthy, however, that his proposal on tips, depending on how Congress might write it, could give a back-door tax break to top wage earners by allowing them to reclassify some of their pay as tip income — a prospect that at its most extreme could see hedge-fund managers or top-flight attorneys taking advantage of a policy that Trump frames as being designed for restaurant servers, bartenders and other service workers.
Tariffs and trade
Trump’s posture on international trade is to distrust world markets as harmful to American interests. He proposes tariffs of 10% to 20% on foreign goods — and in some speeches has mentioned even higher percentages. He promises to reinstitute an August 2020 executive order requiring that the Food and Drug Administration buy “essential” medications only from U.S. companies. He pledges to block purchases of “any vital infrastructure” in the U.S. by Chinese buyers.
DEI, LGBTQ and civil rights
Trump has called for rolling back societal emphasis on diversity and for legal protections for LGBTQ citizens. Trump has called for ending diversity, equity and inclusion programs in government institutions, using federal funding as leverage.
On transgender rights, Trump promises generally to end “boys in girls’ sports,” a practice he insists, without evidence, is widespread. But his policies go well beyond standard applause lines from his rally speeches. Among other ideas, Trump would roll back the Biden administration’s policy of extending Title IX civil rights protections to transgender students, and he would ask Congress to require that only two genders can be recognized at birth.
Regulation, federal bureaucracy and presidential power
The president-elect seeks to reduce the role of federal bureaucrats and regulations across economic sectors. Trump frames all regulatory cuts as an economic magic wand. He pledges precipitous drops in U.S. households’ utility bills by removing obstacles to fossil fuel production, including opening all federal lands for exploration — even though U.S. energy production is already at record highs. Trump promises to unleash housing construction by cutting regulations — though most construction rules come from state and local government. He also says he would end “frivolous litigation from the environmental extremists.”
The approach would in many ways strengthen executive branch influence. That power would come more directly from the White House.
He would make it easier to fire federal workers by classifying thousands of them as being outside civil service protections. That could weaken the government’s power to enforce statutes and rules by reducing the number of employees engaging in the work and, potentially, impose a chilling effect on those who remain.
Trump also claims that presidents have exclusive power to control federal spending even after Congress has appropriated money. Trump argues that lawmakers’ budget actions “set a ceiling” on spending but not a floor — meaning the president’s constitutional duty to “faithfully execute the laws” includes discretion on whether to spend the money. This interpretation could set up a court battle with Congress.
As a candidate, he also suggested that the Federal Reserve, an independent entity that sets interest rates, should be subject to more presidential power. Though he has not offered details, any such move would represent a momentous change to how the U.S. economic and monetary systems work.
Education
The federal Department of Education would be targeted for elimination in a second Trump administration. That does not mean that Trump wants Washington out of classrooms. He still proposes, among other maneuvers, using federal funding as leverage to pressure K-12 school systems to abolish tenure and adopt merit pay for teachers and to scrap diversity programs at all levels of education. He calls for pulling federal funding “for any school or program pushing Critical Race Theory, gender ideology, or other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children.”
In higher education, Trump proposes taking over accreditation processes for colleges, a move he describes as his “secret weapon” against the “Marxist Maniacs and lunatics” he says control higher education. Trump takes aim at higher education endowments, saying he will collect “billions and billions of dollars” from schools via “taxing, fining and suing excessively large private university endowments” at schools that do not comply with his edicts. That almost certainly would end up in protracted legal fights.
As in other policy areas, Trump isn’t actually proposing limiting federal power in higher education but strengthening it. He calls for redirecting the confiscated endowment money into an online “American Academy” offering college credentials to all Americans without a tuition charges. “It will be strictly non-political, and there will be no wokeness or jihadism allowed—none of that’s going to be allowed,” Trump said on Nov. 1, 2023.
Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid
Trump insists he would protect Social Security and Medicare, popular programs geared toward older Americans and among the biggest pieces of the federal spending pie each year. There are questions about how his proposal not to tax tip and overtime wages might affect Social Security and Medicare. If such plans eventually involved only income taxes, the entitlement programs would not be affected. But exempting those wages from payroll taxes would reduce the funding stream for Social Security and Medicare outlays. Trump has talked little about Medicaid but his first administration, in general, defaulted to approving state requests for waivers of various federal rules and it broadly endorsed state-level work requirements for recipients.
Affordable Care Act and Health Care
As he has since 2015, Trump calls for repealing the Affordable Care Act and its subsidized health insurance marketplaces. But he still has not proposed a replacement: In a September debate, he insisted he had the “concepts of a plan.” In the latter stages of the campaign, Trump played up his alliance with former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime critic of vaccines and of pesticides used in U.S. agriculture. Trump repeatedly told rally crowds that he would put Kennedy in charge of “making America healthy again.”
Climate and energy
Trump, who claims falsely that climate change is a “hoax,” blasts Biden-era spending on cleaner energy designed to reduce U.S. reliance on fossil fuels. He proposes an energy policy – and transportation infrastructure spending – anchored to fossil fuels: roads, bridges and combustion-engine vehicles. “Drill, baby, drill!” was a regular chant at Trump rallies. Trump says he does not oppose electric vehicles but promises to end all Biden incentives to encourage EV market development. Trump also pledges to roll back Biden-era fuel efficiency standards.
Workers’ rights
Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance framed their ticket as favoring America’s workers. But Trump could make it harder for workers to unionize. In discussing auto workers, Trump focused almost exclusively on Biden’s push toward electric vehicles. When he mentioned unions, it was often to lump “the union bosses and CEOs” together as complicit in “this disastrous electric car scheme.” In an Oct. 23, 2023, statement, Trump said of United Auto Workers, “I’m telling you, you shouldn’t pay those dues.”
National defense and America’s role in the world
Trump’s rhetoric and policy approach in world affairs is more isolationist diplomatically, non-interventionist militarily and protectionist economically than the U.S. has been since World War II. But the details are more complicated. He pledges expansion of the military, promises to protect Pentagon spending from austerity efforts and proposes a new missile defense shield — an old idea from the Reagan era during the Cold War. Trump insists he can end Russia’s war in Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas war, without explaining how. Trump summarizes his approach through another Reagan phrase: “peace through strength.” But he remains critical of NATO and top U.S. military brass. “I don’t consider them leaders,” Trump said of Pentagon officials that Americans “see on television.” He repeatedly praised authoritarians like Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.This story is published in partnership with The Associated Press.
An impassive portrait of George Washington watched Tuesday’s Election Day proceedings from his perch above the entrance of Westfield Town Hall.
Washington’s expression offered no hint that the Marquette County, Wisconsin, town was recovering from political tumult: fierce divisions on a three-member board that culminated in September when voters ousted their town chair in a recall election.
Westfield’s election inspector and chief election inspector soon resigned, along with its treasurer and a town supervisor. The same evening the board approved those resignations, the town clerk, that meeting’s notetaker, handed in her notice.
None of the resignees nor the former board chair, Sharon Galonski, responded to requests for comment for this story.
Several news outlets, including the Associated Press, reported the events, prompting questions about how the resignations might affect Westfield’s preparation for the general election.
But interim Town Clerk Courtney Trimble said the media blew the situation out of proportion. Volunteers immediately stepped forward following the poll workers’ resignations. Trimble said she had a list of 12 who offered their names.
“I’m confident in their ability,” she said Tuesday. “These elections always feel — I don’t want to say ‘pressure’ — there’s more training that you put in.”
‘Hopefully, tomorrow the commercials will stop!’
Westfield’s polling place occupies its white clapboard-clad town hall, surrounded by cornfields and conifers. The converted one-room schoolhouse dates to the mid-1800s, and chalkboards line its interior walls. Scotch-Irish settlers, attracted by the area’s fertile soil and nearby springs, founded the community.
Here, voters trend conservative. During the 2020 election, they handily handed then-incumbent President Donald Trump 333 votes — nearly two-thirds of ballots cast.
Election greeter Chris Vander Velde stood at the hall’s entrance Tuesday, directing voters to wait in the foyer. They shuffled to the registration table, where poll workers Frank Traina and Susan Porfilio sat. Those caught in the day’s periodic downpours squeaked on the hall’s wooden floors.
Such orderly proceedings were unlike the tempest 2024 presidential cycle, marked by the unexpected withdrawal of President Joe Biden, two assassination attempts against Trump and the rapid ascent of Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee.
“Hopefully, tomorrow the commercials will stop!” said one voter who arrived mid-morning in a white and black plaid shirt and sparkly flip-flops.
She and Vander Velde laughed.
Behind her librarian glasses, Porfilio instructed electors to sign the register before continuing to the four voting booths arranged along the room’s perimeter.
The morning hustle? Distinctly ordinary.
Voters visited Westfield Town Hall in Marquette County, Wis., to cast ballots on Election Day, Nov. 5, 2024. (Bennet Goldstein / Wisconsin Watch)
One voter forgot her photo identification but returned later with the card in tow. A smiling man’s registration incorrectly appended the suffix “Sr.” to his name.
“I have no idea why,” he told Porfilio.
Traina checked IDs and reminded people the ballot was double-sided with the school referendum on the back
“Thank you for working the polls,” a voter in a maroon windbreaker told him.
“There’s nowhere else I’d rather be,” Traina said. With every flick of his arm, his “In God we trust” tattoo peeked out from under his Harley-Davidson T-shirt.
Residents of all ages flocked to the polls.
“No ID?” Traina jokingly asked a curly-haired kid, waiting, as their family signed in.
The child mumbled, hands in pockets.
Later, a young woman in a red raincoat and glasses stepped before Porfilio.
“Have you ever voted here before?” Susan asked.
“No, it’s my first time voting in general,” the woman said.
By 10:30 a.m., over half the town’s electorate had cast ballots, including absentee and early voters.
Porfilio chatted with a man in a Lake Michigan shirt. She checked his voter number.
“And I’ll give you your license back,” Porfilio said.
“You heard my house burnt down, right?” he said.
“No!” she said. “When was that? Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Yeah,” he muttered.
‘Take our township back!’
Across the room, Chief Election Inspector Lacey Baumann supervised the Dominion ballot drop box, the last stop on the voters’ town hall circuit.
Baumann awoke at 3:30 a.m. to milk her 53 goats so she could be at the town hall by 6 a.m., an hour before the polls opened. What started as a COVID-19 pandemic pastime became a side hustle, where she and her family make soaps, lotions, laundry detergent, bath salts and lip balm.
“I just want to confirm that there are two initials on the backside box of your ballot,” she told a woman in sweatpants. “You’re gonna put it in the machine where the arrows are. When you hear the second ‘ding,’ you’ll be good to go.”
Lacey’s twin sister, Lindsay Baumann, won Westfield’s recall election in September. Her campaign pledged to “take our township back!” and she bested Galonski by 32 votes.
Lacey Baumann, chief election inspector for the town of Westfield, casts her own ballot the morning of Nov. 5, 2024, at Westfield Town Hall in Marquette County, Wis. (Bennet Goldstein / Wisconsin Watch)
From the first meeting in 2023 when its members were sworn in, turmoil marked Westfield’s town board. Members sparred during meetings. Discussion routinely veered into accusations of malfeasance.
The recall petition charged Galonski with a litany of offenses, including initiating the termination of the volunteer fire department without considering citizen input and consulting the town board, spending taxpayer dollars in excess and denying a board supervisor access to town property.
At an August board meeting, Galonski defended her actions and rejected one attendee’s call to resign to spare the town the cost of a recall election.
“I haven’t done anything wrong — not a thing. Everything has been done according to the law and by vote of the board,” Galonski said. “The majority of the board has taken action on many of the things that you want to do a recall on.”
‘It’s our right. It’s our privilege’
Voters continued to stream into Westfield’s town hall for the rest of the day. The town reached another turnout milestone.
“That’s what it’s all about,” Vander Velde said. “It’s our right. It’s our privilege. It’s our responsibility.”
Vander Velde, who moved to Westfield more than three decades ago, enjoys chatting with fellow residents on Election Day, but another reason she enjoys working the polls is the chance to learn the rules and regulations. She calls herself a “law and order person.”
“Government is really of the people,” Vander Velde said. “The people in this township are really good, close people, and you expect your government to respond that way.”
As anxious Americans awaited news of the presidency’s fate, Baumann, the town’s newly elected chair, said she felt the political slugfest in her community was over.
“It seems like there’s a lot more happier people,” she said. “We’re getting somewhere.”
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
An odd standoff brewed Tuesday afternoon at a polling place in Kenosha’s Lincoln Park neighborhood: Two groups of election observers began scrutinizing each other.
Tanya Mclean, executive director of Leaders of Kenosha, stood outside the Oribiletti Center with two volunteers who joined her effort to protect against voter intimidation at the polls. Minutes after they arrived, a woman wearing an election observer sticker walked up to monitor the volunteers. She photographed them and occasionally typed in her phone.
Soon, two police officers arrived to monitor both groups. As if to settle the dispute, an officer took out a tape measure and walked 100 feet from the door. Wisconsin law bars “electioneering,” or attempts to influence elections within 100 feet of a polling place door. The rules extend to nonpartisan observers, who additionally can’t talk about the contests on the ballot, handle election documents, make calls, or interact with voters unless requested.
But if anyone thought Mclean and her colleagues were doing so, she couldn’t understand why. Dressed in yellow sweatshirts that read “Election Defenders,” the women had done little more than stand near the door and keep an eye on their surroundings.
In the end, the volunteers moved 10 feet further from the door, ending the standoff without incident.
While joy and enthusiasm for the democratic process permeated many Wisconsin polling places on Election Day, the brief episode in Kenosha exemplified how suspicion and unspoken tension played out elsewhere, said Mclean, whose four-woman group pushes for racial justice and progressive social issues.
A chief inspector asked Mclean to leave a separate polling place earlier in the day, accusing her of electioneering with little explanation, she said. And just minutes before police arrived in Lincoln Park, a man approached her group to ask if they were working as election officials — or simply out to create “visual antics.” When they said they were there to observe, he left, ripping a Kamala Harris/Tim Walz yard sign from a nearby lawn, carrying it away.
“It’s been interesting, and not in a good way,” Mclean said. “It’s not the voters who have been the problem. It’s people tasked with observing elections who assume we’re here for nefarious reasons. They just assume we’re here to disrupt.”
Mclean doesn’t remember this kind of suspicion during the 2020 election, which unfolded months after Kenosha police shot Jacob Blake, sparking a protest that left two dead and another wounded. While Mclean said the city has since taken steps to move past the protests, some tensions still linger.
“A lot of issues that needed to be addressed during that time and that fed into those feelings of uprising are still there,” she said. “In some ways, I feel like we’re in the same place.”
Several volunteers from Chicago joined Mclean Tuesday in helping drive voters to the polls and look out for voter intimidation.
“By comparison, Illinois is a safe state,” said Ivy Czekanski, who drove to Kenosha to volunteer. “We don’t see the same kind of intimidation there as we do in Wisconsin.”
She added, “I was also here in Kenosha in 2020, and this is the first time I’ve seen people so whipped up about voter intimidation. They’re observing us, and we’re observing them, and it becomes this dueling effort to watch each other.”
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
Former President Donald Trump declared victory in the 2024 presidential election early Wednesday morning. Hours later the Associated Press affirmed the win after results showed Trump narrowly won Wisconsin by about 33,000 votes or 1 point.
Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin won another term as well, though by her narrowest margin yet. The Associated Press called the race at 12:42 p.m. Wednesday. Baldwin’s Republican challenger Eric Hovde trailed by less than a percentage point, falling short of Trump’s total by more than 50,000 votes. It’s the latest case of split-ticket voters having clout in Wisconsin after Democratic Gov. Tony Evers won re-election in 2022 while Sen. Ron Johnson won a third term by a narrower margin.
Democrats broke a Republican supermajority in the state Senate, flipping enough seats to set up a possible takeover of the chamber in 2026. They also narrowed the Republican majority in the Assembly, electing a representative from Sheboygan for the first time since Republicans gerrymandered the state’s legislative districts in 2011. But several Republican incumbents won new districts that favored Democrats.
Trump spoke to a crowd at Mar-a-Lago in West Palm Beach, Florida, after the Associated Press projected Trump would win Pennsylvania, a critical state considered a must-win for Vice President Kamala Harris.
“America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” Trump said.
The Associated Press described Trump’s victory as an extraordinary comeback for a former president who refused to accept defeat four years ago, sparked a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, was convicted of felony charges and survived two assassination attempts.
The victory validates his bare-knuckle approach to politics. He attacked his Democratic rival, Kamala Harris, in deeply personal – often misogynistic and racist – terms as he pushed an apocalyptic picture of a country overrun by violent migrants. The coarse rhetoric, paired with an image of hypermasculinity, resonated with angry voters – particularly men – in a deeply polarized nation.
As president, he’s vowed to pursue an agenda centered on dramatically reshaping the federal government and pursuing retribution against his perceived enemies.
The results cap a historically tumultuous and competitive election season that included two assassination attempts targeting Trump and a shift to a new Democratic nominee just a month before the party’s convention. Trump will inherit a range of challenges when he assumes office on Jan. 20, including heightened political polarization and global crises that are testing America’s influence abroad.
His win against Harris, the first woman of color to lead a major party ticket, marks the second time he has defeated a female rival in a general election. Harris, the current vice president, rose to the top of the ticket after President Joe Biden exited the race amid alarm about his advanced age. Despite an initial surge of energy around her campaign, she struggled during a compressed timeline to convince disillusioned voters that she represented a break from an unpopular administration.
Harris’ campaign manager announced earlier in the night that Harris would address her supporters Wednesday.
The Associated Press called Wisconsin’s 10 Electoral College votes for Trump at 4:34 a.m. Wednesday. A tabulator problem forced election workers in Milwaukee to restart their count of absentee ballots earlier in the day Tuesday.
Here’s when other high-profile statewide races here in Wisconsin were called by the Associated Press:
2022 U.S. Senate race: Wednesday, Nov. 9, 11:46 a.m.
Check out the Wisconsin Watch voter guide for results from the Associated Press for each individual race in Wisconsin.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Republicans poised to hold 6-2 House edge
Republicans were poised to win all six seats they currently control in Wisconsin’s House delegation.
As of Wednesday morning the Associated Press had called winners in every race but the 3rd Congressional District, where Republican Rep. Derrick Van Orden had an 11,000-vote lead over Democratic challenger Rebecca Cooke with 99% of votes reported.
Incumbent Democrats Mark Pocan and Gwen Moore and Republicans Bryan Steil, Scott Fitzgerald, Glenn Grothman and Tom Tiffany won their races.
Tony Wied celebrates his 8th Congressional District victory at the Legacy Hotel in Green Bay, Wis., on Nov. 5, 2024. (Julius Shieh / Wisconsin Watch)
Thanking his family, friends and Trump, newcomer Republican Tony Wied gave a victory speech to a crowd of supporters at The Legacy Hotel in Green Bay, Wisconsin. He defeated Democratic candidate Kristin Lyerly by nearly 15 points.
Wied’s campaign victory in Wisconsin’s largely red 8th Congressional District came as no surprise. Previous Rep. Michael Gallagher, also a Republican, won the district by comfortable margins during each election cycle between 2016 and 2022.
Wied credited much of his success to an endorsement from Trump, saying that Trump’s “support for me (during) this campaign was second to none.”
Even before Green Bay precincts reported any significant results, local Republican candidates felt confident about the election.
Patrick Buckley, candidate for the 89th Assembly District, said he thought efforts to reach voters and canvass would end up paying off.
“We did a wonderful job, and hopefully voters will see that,” Buckley said. “I think for Republicans, it should be a good night.”
Buckley, a first-time Assembly candidate, lost to Democrat Ryan Spaude, also a first-time Assembly candidate, in the Green Bay district.
Attendees at Cooke’s watch party followed the tug-of-war over Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District for hours Tuesday night.
The campaign projected incoming results at the front of the event in downtown Eau Claire. Mild cheers broke out a few times as Cooke took a slight lead, but by 10 p.m. enthusiasm for result updates dampened.
Cooke didn’t give a victory or concession speech during Tuesday’s event which ended long before the outcome was finalized. But Cooke told WPR and Wisconsin Watch that if things didn’t go in her favor she’d tell her supporters “that we ran a hell of a race.”
“We really left no stone unturned,” Cooke said. “We’ve really pulled people off the sidelines. People who don’t always see themselves reflected in the political process and I’m really proud of the work that we’ve done in that way.”
– Julius Shieh, Addie Costello
Citizenship voting amendment passes
Wisconsin voters approved a constitutional amendment that prohibits foreign nationals from voting in the state.
Republicans across the country have been pushing voters to adopt constitutional amendments that explicitly prohibit non-U.S. citizens from voting. The move was spurred by the District of Columbia and municipalities in California, Maryland and Vermont allowing non-citizens to vote in local elections.
The Wisconsin Constitution states that every U.S. citizen who is at least 18 can vote. The amendment revises that language to read that only U.S. citizens can vote in federal, state and local elections held in Wisconsin.
The amendment was on the ballot in seven other states besides Wisconsin this cycle, according to Ballotpedia. North Dakota, Alabama, Florida, Colorado, Ohio and Louisiana have already adopted it.
Democrats contend the measures could create hurdles for legal voters and lead people to believe that the problem of noncitizens voting is bigger than it really is. Data from states indicates that voting by noncitizens is rare, although Republican officials in Alabama, Georgia, Ohio and Texas have highlighted voter registration reviews that turned up potential noncitizens.
– Todd Richmond, The Associated Press
Republicans return smaller Assembly majority as incumbents win new districts
Despite less friendly voting maps and considerable spending from Democrats, Republicans won a majority in the Wisconsin Assembly, extending 13 years of GOP control of the Legislature’s lower chamber by two more years.
Republican success on Tuesday was fueled in part by incumbents. Rep. Todd Novak, R-Dodgeville, defeated Democratic challenger Elizabeth Grabe in a district that a Wisconsin Watch analysis of previous voting patterns suggested was almost 56% Democratic, according to unofficial results. Rep. Pat Snyder, R-Schofield, breezed past Democratic challenger Yee Leng Xiong in a district that a Wisconsin Watch analysis rated as just 2% more Republican than Democratic.
The election results were a gut punch for Democrats, who were eager to win back a majority in the Assembly for the first time in more than a decade after the liberal-controlled Wisconsin Supreme Court threw out Republican-gerrymandered voting maps last year.
In the months leading up to the election, Democrats were confident they could win back the majority. Assembly Minority Leader Greta Neubauer, D-Racine, told reporters during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that her party would win a 52-seat Assembly majority in the fall. They missed the mark on Tuesday.
Trevor Ford, a spokesperson for the Republican Assembly Campaign Committee, offered a simple assessment of returns early on Wednesday: “Wisconsin Assembly Republicans will hold the majority.”
The exact size of the majority was unclear as of early Wednesday morning.
There were a few bright spots for Democrats, who seemed poised to return to Madison in January with bolstered ranks. In the 26th Assembly District, Joe Sheehan unseated Republican Rep. Amy Binsfeld in a district that reunited the city of Sheboygan into one Assembly district.
A spokesperson for the Assembly Democratic Campaign Committee didn’t return a request for comment early Wednesday.
– Jack Kelly
Nov. 6, 12:30 a.m.
Democrats break GOP supermajority in state Senate
Democrats broke Republicans’ two-thirds supermajority in the state Senate on Tuesday, according to unofficial results, reining in overwhelming GOP control in the chamber that threatened the veto authority of Democratic Gov. Tony Evers.
The exact number of seats each party will control come January remained unclear as of early Wednesday morning, though Republicans had secured the 17 seats needed for a majority while Democrats flipped at least two seats and were leading the vote totals in two others, dropping Republicans below their current 22-seat supermajority.
One flip came in the 14th Senate District, a Democratic-leaning toss-up district that stretches from the Madison area north and west to encompass Portage, Wisconsin Dells, Baraboo, Reedsburg and Richland Center. Democrat Sarah Keyeski defeated incumbent Sen. Joan Ballweg by 2 points, according to unofficial returns.
Another came in the 30th Senate District, where redistricting had caused incumbent Republican Sen. Eric Wimberger to move into the 2nd Senate District, where he will replace retiring moderate Republican Sen. Rob Cowles. Democrat Jamie Wall, a business consultant and third-time Democratic candidate, defeated Republican Allouez village president Jim Rafter, in the 30th.
“Senate Democrats have broken the Republican’s manufactured supermajority, and I remain optimistic for our candidates who are still awaiting final vote tallies,” Senate Minority Leader Dianne Hesselbein, D-Middleton, told Wisconsin Watch in a statement.
Results in the 8th and 18th showed Democrats poised to further chip away at the GOP majority, but the races were too close to call as of early Wednesday morning. Those gains could help Democrats secure a majority in 2026, when the other 17 recently redrawn Senate seats are up for four-year terms.
A spokesperson for the Committee to Elect a Republican Senate did not immediately respond to a request for comment early Wednesday.
– Jack Kelly
Nov. 6, 12:30 a.m.
Sheboygan incumbent loses Assembly seat without local GOP support in newly drawn toss-up district
A freshman Republican Assembly member’s fight to hold her Sheboygan seat was complicated after she lost the support of the Sheboygan County GOP earlier this year. The infighting could be a sign of the changing face of the Republican Party in Wisconsin.
Freshman Rep. Amy Binsfeld, R-Sheboygan, views the local party as extremist and distanced herself from it in January due to its anti-abortion stance and member concerns about election integrity, according to local party chair Russ Otten.
“I find that incredible in a person who’s running as a Republican in a very tight race,” Otten told Wisconsin Watch.
Text messages posted by the county GOP in September show Binsfeld asked the party to distribute her campaign signs, but they refused to do so after she declined to meet with the party’s leaders, Otten said.
“I feel you should probably confirm that choice with all Republican voters in the 26th District being you are willing to give up a seat to the Democrats in November,” Binsfeld wrote in the exchange. “I’m asking for signs to be available to Republican voters.”
Binsfeld did not immediately reply to Wisconsin Watch’s request for comment.
“She does not like the fact that our county party has become a patriot-driven party,” Otten said. “She is a cohort of Robin Vos in Madison, and we see Robin Vos as part of the problem.”
Binsfeld lost to Democratic newcomer Joe Sheehan, who decided to run earlier this year after new legislative maps reunited the city of Sheboygan, which was split in half to secure two Republican seats under Wisconsin’s previously gerrymandered maps. The district is now a toss-up, with a slight Democratic lean.
– Hallie Claflin
Update: Nov. 6, 1 a.m.
Stephanie Rushing, Milwaukee Election Commission election services coordinator, sorts through rejected absentee ballots on Election Day, Nov. 5, 2024, at Milwaukee Central Count at the Baird Center in Milwaukee. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Milwaukee setback stands out in otherwise smooth Wisconsin election
Polls closed across Wisconsin after an Election Day marked most notably by a human error in Milwaukee that prompted city election officials to count 31,000 absentee ballots all over again, potentially delaying the state’s results for hours.
In Milwaukee, election chief Paulina Gutiérrez projected that the city’s counting of absentee ballots would go well into Wednesday morning, partially a result of her decision Tuesday afternoon to make election workers count 31,000 absentee ballots all over again because some staff didn’t lock tabulator doors in the early morning.
For security reasons, those panel doors — which cover the on/off switch and sometimes a slot for USB drives — are to be locked during counting, though other security measures ensured there was no chance of tampering.
The decision to restart the count, city spokesperson Jeff Fleming said, was “out of an abundance of caution.”
Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe said the commission didn’t weigh in on the city’s decision to rerun the batch of ballots, but she praised the city’s transparency throughout the process.
After Gutiérrez made that decision, the city put out an all-call to every Milwaukee employee to help election officials count the ballots that had already been tabulated. Between 30 and 50 city staff from health, fire and other departments came to help, city spokesperson Caroline Reinwald said.
Paulina Gutiérrez, executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission, prepares to clear the flash drives used to store the final vote count during Election Day on Nov. 5, 2024, at Milwaukee Central Count at the Baird Center in Milwaukee. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
“Things are moving really smoothly right now and quickly, so hopefully this isn’t actually that much of a delay,” she said.
But Republican leaders criticized the oversight that led to the second count. U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin called Milwaukee’s central count “grotesquely disorganized.” State GOP Chair Brian Schimming said about election officials, “You had one job,” adding that the election operation had gone “ridiculously wrong.”
Johnson said his concerns about Milwaukee election officials’ oversight could be alleviated if they present him video logs of the central counting site as well as records from the initial and second count of the 31,000 absentee ballots, including how they’re split by party. There are video streams of central count, but vote totals weren’t exported in the manner that Johnson was seeking, though each vote has a paper trail, city officials stated.
Election Day in Milwaukee was also marked by a lawsuit filed by the Republican National Committee, alleging that GOP election observers were being restricted at city election sites. The GOP walked back its claims at a Tuesday hearing, conceding there weren’t any issues.
Outside of Milwaukee, election officials faced few issues.
In Thornapple, a northern Wisconsin town that faced a Justice Department lawsuit over its decision not to use accessible voting machines in the past, election officials did have a voting machine in use, said Erin Webster, a local resident who was an election observer on Tuesday.
The state had a surge of early in-person voting, but election officials said that Tuesday was still very busy. Melissa Kono, who has been a clerk in the small northern Wisconsin town of Burnside since 2013, said it was the most intense election she had ever administered in terms of turnout.
— Alexander Shur, Votebeat
11 p.m.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
Milwaukee ballot tabulation machines are not connected to the internet.
“Tabulation machines are not connected to Wi-Fi and the idle speculation suggesting they are vulnerable is simply incorrect,” Mayor Cavalier Johnson posted on Election Day, Nov. 5, 2024.
For years, the city has used flash drives — thumb-size data-storing devices — to transmit results.
Flash drives are cleared and reformatted before being put in sealed envelopes; the process is witnessed, and both a Democrat and a Republican are among the observers who certify the process. After all ballots are processed, voting results from the tabulation machines are exported to the flash drives. Witnesses also sign a document certifying the exports.
On Election Day afternoon, election officials restarted the absentee ballot count after an observer noticed panel doors on Milwaukee’s 13 tabulators weren’t properly closed.
City election officials said there was no indication any of the tabulators had been tampered with.
This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.
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.
A ballot is temporarily stuck in the tabulation machine during Election Day on Nov. 5, 2024, at Milwaukee Central Count at the Baird Center in Milwaukee. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
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.
Ray Mendoza doesn’t care who you vote for. He just wants you to vote.
To Mendoza, 54, the right to vote is too precious to squander. That’s how the Milwaukee man feels after surrendering that right for the roughly 20 years he spent in a federal penitentiary and on probation.
“I encourage everybody, if you’re a convicted felon and you’re not on probation or parole, get out and vote. Use your voice,” Mendoza last week told a reporter outside Milwaukee’s Frank P. Zeidler Municipal Building, where he voted for the third time in his life — casting an in-person absentee ballot.
Video by Trisha Young / Wisconsin Watch
Each state sets its own process around removing and restoring voting rights following a felony conviction. Maine and Vermont are the only states that allow people to vote while still in prison. People in Florida can’t vote until completing their sentence and paying all fines and fees — a requirement some critics have likened to poll taxes that barred African Americans from voting during the Jim Crow era.
Wisconsin automatically restores voting rights after someone is “off paper,” meaning they have completed their prison sentence and time on probation or extended supervision. In a state of roughly 6 million people, that puts voting off limits for the roughly 23,000 in state prisons and more than 45,000 serving probation or extended supervision for felony convictions.
Those figures represent just a fraction of people living with felony convictions on their criminal record.
Mendoza regained his right to vote in 2019 after completing his prison bid and probation. But even now, voting stirs an anxiety he can’t fully shake. He feels at times as if restoration is a ruse to send him back to prison for unwittingly violating some rule.
“I’m waiting for somebody to come up and say, ‘You’re under arrest for fraudulent voting,’” he said of the back-of-mind feeling. “But I know I’m registered. I know I’m legit.”
Nevertheless, he votes, and he urges all eligible voters to do the same, telling them: “If you don’t vote, you don’t have any right to complain.”
Still, he recalls meeting community members who plan to sit out on Election Day, believing their vote counts for little. Mendoza’s experience helps him see things differently.
He asks: “If your vote wasn’t important, why is that the first thing they take when they take your freedom?”
Mendoza now hopes his work and perspective will shape a more peaceful Milwaukee, where he lived before going to prison for participating in a violent crime that included charges of attempted murder and kidnapping.
Mendoza, a Marine Corps veteran, began turning his life around even before going to prison. Just before his 1997 conviction, Mendoza publicly denounced the life of gang violence he previously embraced. When a Milwaukee police officer shot a man named James Rey Guerrero who was allegedly fleeing police, Mendoza worked with community leaders and police to calm tensions and organize a nonviolent prayer vigil.
At his sentencing hearing, family members and community leaders pleaded with the judge to show leniency, citing his work in the community, court transcripts show.
“There were a lot of threats against Milwaukee police by gang members who were upset with what had transpired, and Ray was very instrumental in helping to kind of calm that and allow that prayer vigil in March to go on,” an employee of Milwaukee’s Social Development Commission told the judge.
But redemption would have to wait. Mendoza was sentenced to 20 years in a federal penitentiary.
Ray Mendoza, 54, fills out an in-person absentee ballot at the Frank P. Zeidler Municipal Building in Milwaukee on Oct. 30, 2024. He voted for the third time in his life after regaining his voting rights in 2019 following nearly 20 years in prison and on probation. (Trisha Young / Wisconsin Watch)
His path to rehabilitation wasn’t a straight line. He said he spent his first 13 years in and out of solitary confinement, contemplating how to return to selling drugs without getting caught.
“All the way up until year 14 of my sentence, my mind said, ‘Well, I’m gonna come home and I’m gonna make a phone call and I’m gonna get a truckload of drugs and up here so I can get back to work,’” he said.
But returning to old habits, he eventually realized, would return him to prison.
“One day I was sitting in the hole, and I just say, ‘You know, if I want to go home and stay home, I gotta change the way I think. I gotta change the way I live my life, and I gotta change the way I view everybody else and everything else around me,’” Mendoza said. “I refuse to go back to prison.”
He’s kept the promise he made to himself. After his release, Mendoza went to work as a violence interrupter, sharing his experiences and helping to head off gunfire. More recently, he began work as a restorative justice coach at The Northwest Opportunities Vocational Academy, designed for students determined to be at risk of not graduating.
“According to (Milwaukee Public Schools), these (students) are the worst of the worst of the school system. Those are the ones that I love the most. Those are my favorites,” Mendoza said.
He sees a version of himself in every young person he works with. For them, his message is simple: They don’t have to go through the pain and heartache he endured. They can do things differently.
On this Election Day, the nation, including Wisconsin, faces partisan divisions so deep that some have vowed to move to another country if their preferred presidential candidate loses.
But where many see hopelessness, Mendoza sees something different.
“I don’t think things are hopeless right now. I’ve seen hopeless,” he said.
“I see opportunity. Even with all the negativity that’s going on in our city, I still see opportunity, not for me, not for people my age, not for people in the work that I do, but for the young people.”
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.
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