Minutes later Tuesday night, the conservative-backed Brad Schimel took the stage at his watch party to acknowledge the loss. Angry yells broke out. One woman began to chant about his opponent: “Cheater.”
Schimel didn’t hesitate. “No,” he responded. “You’ve got to accept the results.” Later, he returned to the stage with his classic rock cover band to jam on his bass.
In any other American era, Schimel’s concession wouldn’t be considered unusual – except maybe the guitar part. But it stands out at a time when the nation’s politics have opened a fissure between those who trust election results and those who don’t.
“It shouldn’t be super laudable,” said Jeff Mandell, general counsel of the Madison-based liberal law firm Law Forward. “But given where we are and given what we’ve seen over the past few years nationwide and in Wisconsin, it is laudable.”
Schimel’s concession of that very same court to a liberal majority, though in line with what generations of candidates have done in the past, was not a given in today’s divisive atmosphere.
Onstage, as his supporters yelled, Schimel shook his head and left no uncertainty he’d lost — a result that would become even clearer later in the night as Crawford’s lead grew to around 10 percentage points.
“The numbers aren’t going to — aren’t going to turn around,” he told the crowd. “They’re too bad, and we’re not going to pull this off.”
By acknowledging his loss quickly, Schimel curtailed the kind of explanation-seeking and digital digging that erupted online after Trump, a Republican, lost the 2020 presidential election, with citizen journalists falsely accusing innocent election workers and voters of fraud.
Schimel also avoided the impulses to which many in his party have defaulted in recent elections across the country, as they’ve dragged their feet to avoid accepting defeat.
Last fall, Wisconsin Republican Eric Hovde spent days sowing doubt in the results after he lost a Senate race to Democrat Tammy Baldwin. He conceded nearly two weeks after Election Day, saying he did not want to “add to political strife through a contentious recount” even as he raised debunked election conspiracies.
In a 2024 state Supreme Court race in North Carolina, two recounts have affirmed Democrat Allison Riggs narrowly won the election, but her Republican opponent, Jefferson Griffin, is still seeking to reverse the outcome by having ballots thrown out.
Trump also has continued to falsely claim he won the 2020 presidential election, even though there was no evidence of widespread fraud and the results were confirmed through multiple recounts, reviews and audits. His close adviser, billionaire Elon Musk, has also spread a flurry of unfounded claims about voter fraud involving noncitizens.
Musk and his affiliated groups sank at least $21 million into the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, and he personally paid three voters $1 million each for signing a petition to boost turnout. He had said the race was central to the “future of America and Western civilization.”
But after the results came in, he said he “expected to lose” and touted the successful passage of a voter ID amendment in Wisconsin’s Constitution. Trump, who had endorsed Schimel, didn’t post about the loss but used his Truth Social platform to celebrate the voter ID win.
An assessment: ‘That’s democracy’
Not all Republicans watching the race were in a magnanimous mood as they processed the results. Peter Bernegger, the head of an election integrity organization who has brought numerous lawsuits against Wisconsin election clerks and offices, raised the specter that an “algorithm” was behind Crawford’s win. InfoWars founder and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones reacted to the results on X, saying, “Election fraud should be investigated.”
But at Schimel’s watch party, several supporters applauded his high road.
“He was all class,” said Russell Jones, a 51-year-old attorney. “That’s how you lose.”
Adam Manka, of the La Crosse County Republican Party, said he worries about how a liberal court could redraw the state’s congressional districts. “But you can’t exactly change it,” Manka said, calling Schimel “very graceful” in his defeat. “This is democracy.”
Crawford, in an interview Wednesday, said Schimel’s phone call was “the way elections should conclude” and said she would have done the same thing if she had lost.
The moment is a good example for future candidates, said Ari Mittleman, executive director of the Wisconsin-based nonprofit Keep Our Republic, which aims to rebuild trust and confidence in elections. He compared elections to a Green Bay Packers football game: “We know who won, we know who lost.” He said he thinks Schimel, a lifelong Wisconsin resident, understands that.
“It’s transparent, and we accept the final score,” Mittleman said. “That’s democracy.”
Schimel and his band, performing for a thinning crowd Tuesday night, took the loss in stride.
“Can you ask them at the bar to get me a Coors Light please?” Schimel said between songs. “Put it on my tab.”
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.This story is published in partnership with The Associated Press.
The Democratic-backed candidate for Wisconsin Supreme Court defeated a challenger endorsed by President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk on Tuesday, cementing a liberal majority for at least three more years.
Susan Crawford, a Dane County judge who led legal fights to protect union power and abortion rights and to oppose voter ID, defeated Republican-backed Brad Schimel in a race that broke records for spending, was on pace to be the highest-turnout Wisconsin Supreme Court election ever and became a proxy fight for the nation’s political battles.
Trump, Musk and other Republicans lined up behind Schimel, a former state attorney general. Democrats including former President Barack Obama and billionaire megadonor George Soros backed Crawford.
The first major election in the country since November was seen as a litmus test of how voters feel about Trump’s first months back in office and the role played by Musk, whose Department of Government Efficiency has torn through federal agencies and laid off thousands of workers. Musk traveled to Wisconsin on Sunday to make a pitch for Schimel and personally hand out $1 million checks to voters.
Crawford embraced the backing of Planned Parenthood and other abortion rights advocates, running ads that highlighted Schimel’s opposition to the procedure. She also attacked Schimel for his ties to Musk and Republicans, referring to Musk as “Elon Schimel” during a debate.
Schimel’s campaign tried to portray Crawford as weak on crime and a puppet of Democrats who, if elected, would push to redraw congressional district boundary lines to hurt Republicans and repeal a GOP-backed state law that took collective bargaining rights away from most public workers.
Crawford’s win keeps the court under a 4-3 liberal majority, as it has been since 2023. A liberal justice is not up for election again until April 2028, ensuring liberals will either maintain or increase their hold on the court until then. The two most conservative justices are up for re-election in 2026 and 2027.
The court likely will be deciding cases on abortion, public sector unions, voting rules and congressional district boundaries. Who controls the court also could factor into how it might rule on any future voting challenge in the perennial presidential battleground state, which raised the stakes of the race for national Republicans and Democrats.
Musk and groups he funded poured more than $21 million into the contest. Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, campaigned for Schimel in the closing weeks and said electing him was essential to protecting the Republican agenda. Trump endorsed Schimel just 11 days before the election.
Schimel, who leaned into his Trump endorsement in the closing days of the race, said he would not be beholden to the president or Musk despite the massive spending on the race by groups that Musk supports.
Crawford benefitted from campaign stops by Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the vice presidential nominee last year, and money from billionaire megadonors including Soros and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker.
The contest was the most expensive court race on record in the U.S., with spending nearing $99 million, according to a tally by the Brennan Center for Justice. That broke the previous record of $51 million for the state’s Supreme Court race in 2023.
All of the spending and attention on the race led to high early voting turnout, with numbers more than 50% higher than the state’s Supreme Court race two years ago.
Crawford was elected to a 10-year term replacing liberal Justice Ann Walsh Bradley, who is retiring after 30 years on the bench.
Wisconsin enshrines voter ID in state constitution
Wisconsin’s photo ID requirement for voting will be elevated from state law to constitutional amendment under a proposal approved by voters.
The Republican-controlled Legislature placed the measure on the ballot and pitched it as a way to bolster election security and protect the law from being overturned in court.
Democratic opponents argued that photo ID requirements are often enforced unfairly, making voting more difficult for people of color, disabled people and poor people.
Wisconsin voters won’t notice any changes when they go to the polls. They will still have to present a valid photo ID just as they have under the state law, which was passed in 2011 and went into effect permanently in 2016 after a series of unsuccessful lawsuits.
Placing the photo ID requirement in the constitution makes it more difficult for a future Legislature controlled by Democrats to change the law. Any constitutional amendment must be approved in two consecutive legislative sessions and by a statewide popular vote.
Voters wait in line and cast their ballots at the Villager Shopping Center during the spring election on April 1, 2025, in Madison, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Republican legislators celebrated the measure’s passage.
“This will help maintain integrity in the electoral process, no matter who controls the Legislature,” Sen. Van Wanggaard, who co-authored the amendment, said in a statement.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who is leading Trump’s efforts to shrink the federal government, also noted the outcome on his social media platform, X, saying: “Yeah!”
Wisconsin is one of nine states where people must present photo ID to vote, and its requirement is the nation’s strictest, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Thirty-six states have laws requiring or requesting that voters show some sort of identification, according to the NCSL.
State schools chief Jill Underly wins reelection over GOP-backed rival
Jill Underly, the Democratic-backed state education chief, defeated her Republican-aligned opponent, Brittany Kinser.
Underly will guide policies affecting K-12 schools as Trump moves to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education. Her second term comes at a time when test scores are still recovering from the pandemic, Wisconsin’s achievement gap between white and Black students remains the worst in the country and more schools are asking voters to raise property taxes to pay for operations.
Jill Underly, Wisconsin superintendent of public instruction, speaks to reporters following the State of Education Address on Sept. 26, 2024, at the Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Wisconsin is the only state where voters elect the top education official but there is no state board of education. That gives the superintendent broad authority to oversee education policy, from disbursing school funding to managing teacher licensing.
Underly, 47, had the support of the teachers union in the general election after failing to secure it in the three-person primary. She also was backed financially by the state Democratic Party.
Underly, who was first elected as state superintendent in 2021, ran as a champion of public schools. Kinser is a supporter of the private school voucher program.
Underly’s education career began in 1999 as a high school social studies teacher in Indiana. She moved to Wisconsin in 2005 and worked for five years at the state education department. She also was principal of Pecatonica Elementary School for a year before becoming district administrator.
Kinser, whose backers included the Wisconsin Republican Party and former Republican Govs. Tommy Thompson and Scott Walker, previously worked for Rocketship schools, part of a national network of public charter institutions. She rose to become its executive director in the Milwaukee region.
In 2022 she left Rocketship for City Forward Collective, a Milwaukee nonprofit that advocates for charter and voucher schools. She also founded a consulting firm where she currently works.
Kinser tried to brand Underly as being a poor manager of the Department of Public Instruction and keyed in on her overhaul of state achievement standards last year.
Underly said that was done to better reflect what students are learning now, but the change was met with bipartisan opposition including from Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, who was previously state superintendent himself. Evers did not make an endorsement in the race.
High turnout leads to ballot shortage in Milwaukee
A voter enters Centennial Hall at the Milwaukee Central Library to vote on Election Day, April 1, 2025, in Milwaukee. (Kayla Wolf / Associated Press)
Unprecedented turnout led to ballot shortages in Wisconsin’s largest city Tuesday as voters cast ballots in “historic” numbers.
The race for control of the court, which became a proxy battle for the nation’s political fights, broke records for spending and was poised to be the highest-turnout Wisconsin Supreme Court election ever.
Early voting was more than 50% ahead of levels seen in the state’s Supreme Court race two years ago, when majority control was also at stake.
Seven polling sites in Milwaukee ran out of ballots, or were nearly out, due to “historic turnout” and more ballots were on their way before polls closed, said Paulina Gutierrez, the executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission.
Clerks all across the state, including in the city’s deep-red suburbs, reported turnout far exceeding 2023 levels.
A state race with nationwide significance
The court can decide election-related laws and settle disputes over future election outcomes.
“Wisconsin’s a big state politically, and the Supreme Court has a lot to do with elections in Wisconsin,” Trump said Monday. “Winning Wisconsin’s a big deal, so therefore the Supreme Court choice … it’s a big race.”
Crawford embraced the backing of Planned Parenthood and other abortion rights advocates, running ads that highlighted Schimel’s opposition to the procedure. She also attacked Schimel for his ties to Musk and Trump, who endorsed Schimel 11 days before the election.
The results of Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice-elect Susan Crawford’s victory over Waukesha County Circuit Court Judge Brad Schimel are shown at the Crawford watch party on April 1, 2025, in Madison, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Brad Schimel hugs supporters after making his concession speech Tuesday, April 1, 2025, in Pewaukee, Wis. (AP Photo/Andy Manis)
Schimel’s campaign tried to portray Crawford as weak on crime and a puppet of Democrats who would push to redraw congressional district boundary lines to hurt Republicans and repeal a GOP-backed state law that took collective bargaining rights away from most public workers.
Voters in Eau Claire seemed to be responding to both messages. Jim Seeger, a 68-year-old retiree, said he voted for Schimel because he’s concerned about redistricting.
Jim Hazelton, a 68-year-old disabled veteran, said he had planned to abstain but voted for Crawford after Musk — whom he described as a “pushy billionaire” — and Trump got involved.
“He’s cutting everything,” Hazelton said of Musk. “People need these things he’s cutting.”
What’s on the court’s agenda?
The court will likely be deciding cases on abortion, public sector unions, voting rules and congressional district boundaries.
Last year the court declined to take up a Democratic-backed challenge to congressional lines, but Schimel and Musk said that if Crawford wins, the court will redraw congressional districts to make them more favorable to Democrats. Currently Republicans control six out of eight seats in an evenly divided state.
Musk was pushing that message on Election Day, both on TV and the social media platform he owns, X, urging people to cast ballots in the final hours of voting.
There were no major voting issues by midday Tuesday, state election officials said. Severe weather prompted the relocation of some polling places in northern Wisconsin, and some polling places in Green Bay briefly lost power but voting continued. In Dane County, home to the state capital, Madison, election officials said polling locations were busy and operating normally.
Record-breaking donations
The contest is the most expensive court race on record in the U.S., with spending nearing $99 million, according to a tally by the Brennan Center for Justice.
Musk contributed $3 million to the campaign, while groups he funded poured in another $18 million. Musk also gave $1 million each to three voters who signed a petition he circulated against “activist” judges.
Elon Musk speaks at a town hall Sunday, March 30, 2025, in Green Bay, Wis. (Jeffrey Phelps / Associated Press)
Schimel leaned into his support from Trump while saying he would not be beholden to the president or Musk. Democrats centered their messaging on the spending by Musk-funded groups.
“Ultimately I think it’s going to help Susan Crawford, because people do not want to see Elon Musk buying election after election after election,” Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler said Monday. “If it works here, he’s going to do it all over the country.”
A Wisconsin appellate court denied the state Democratic attorney general's request to stop billionaire Elon Musk from handing over $1 million checks to two voters at a rally planned for Sunday
The payment to a Green Bay man, which Musk announced Wednesday night on his social media platform X, is similar to a lottery that Musk’s political action committee ran last year in Wisconsin and other battleground states before the presidential election in November.
The upcoming election on Tuesday, filling a seat held by a liberal justice who is retiring, will determine whether Wisconsin’s highest court will remain under 4-3 liberal control or flip to a conservative majority. The race has become a proxy battle over the nation’s politics, with Trump and Musk getting behind Brad Schimel, the Republican-backed candidate in the officially nonpartisan contest.
The campaign for the Democratic-supported candidate, Susan Crawford, blasted the $1 million payment from Musk as an attempt to illegally buy influence on the court in a state where Tesla, his electric car company, has a lawsuit pending that could end up before the court.
“It’s corrupt, it’s extreme, and it’s disgraceful to our state and judiciary,” Crawford spokesperson Derrick Honeyman said in a statement.
No legal action against Musk’s payments to voters has been filed in Wisconsin with the Supreme Court election five days away.
Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause in Wisconsin, said the payments were a last-minute attempt to influence the election.
“Whether or not Wisconsinites will believe this is legitimate or not probably won’t be settled until after the election,” he said. “But this is not what a Wisconsin Supreme Court election ought to be decided on. Races for the high court are supposed to be on judicial temperament and impartiality, not huge amounts of money for partisan purposes.”
Musk’s political action committee, America First, announced last week that it was offering $100 to voters who signed a petition in opposition to “activist judges.” He did not say there would be $1 million prizes at that time, but in his post on Wednesday said an additional $1 million award would be made in two days.
It was not clear who determined the winner of the $1 million or how it was done.
Musk’s political action committee used a nearly identical tactic before the White House election last year, offering to pay $1 million a day to voters in Wisconsin and six other battleground states who signed a petition supporting the First and Second Amendments.
It is a felony in Wisconsin to offer, give, lend or promise to lend or give anything of value to induce a voter to cast a ballot or not vote.
The Musk petition says it is open only to registered Wisconsin voters, but those who sign it are not required to show any proof that they actually voted.
The petition says: “Judges should interpret laws as written, not rewrite them to fit their personal or political agendas. By signing below, I’m rejecting the actions of activist judges who impose their own views and demanding a judiciary that respects its role — interpreting, not legislating.”
The petition, while designed to collect data on Wisconsin voters and energize them, also is in line with Trump’s agenda alleging that “activist” judges are illegally working against him. Trump’s administration is embroiled in several lawsuits related to his flurry of executive orders and Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency effort to downsize the federal bureaucracy.
During last year’s presidential race, Philadelphia’s district attorney sued in an attempt to stop the payments under Pennsylvania law. But a judge said prosecutors failed to show the effort was an illegal lottery and allowed it to continue through Election Day.
America PAC and Building for America’s Future, two groups that Musk funds, have spent more than $17 million trying to help elect Schimel, according to a tally by the Brennan Center for Justice. Musk also has given the Wisconsin Republican Party $3 million this year, which it can then give to Schimel or spend on the race.
More than $81 million has been spent on the race so far, obliterating the record for a judicial race in the U.S. of $51 million set in Wisconsin just two years ago, according to Brennan Center tallies.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.This story is published in partnership with The Associated Press.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk and political groups he backs are pouring millions of dollars into the race for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court as the electric vehicle company sues to overturn a state law that prevents it from opening dealerships — a case that eventually could make its way to the high court.
Tesla’s multiple attempts to open its own dealerships in Wisconsin keep running up against a state law that allows only third parties, not auto manufacturers, to operate them. The company filed a lawsuit in January seeking an exemption, just as two Musk-backed political action committees started supporting the Republican-backed candidate, Brad Schimel, over his opponent, Susan Crawford, who is supported by Democrats.
Musk, who is the world’s wealthiest person and is running President Donald Trump’s initiative to slash the size of the federal workforce, has given $3 million to the Wisconsin GOP while groups he supports have funneled more than $17 million into the race. The contributions are part of an extraordinary spending spree in the race, making it by far the most expensive judicial race on record in the United States. Total spending has eclipsed $80 million with days still to go before the final day of voting on April 1.
Schimel’s critics have accused Musk of trying to buy a favorable ruling for Tesla should the dealership case make it to the state Supreme Court. Here are details of the law and Musk’s lawsuit:
Why can’t Tesla set up Wisconsin dealerships?
State statutes generally prohibit vehicle manufacturers from owning or operating dealerships in Wisconsin and give that franchise to third parties. The law was intended to prevent manufacturers from undercutting independent dealerships.
Nearly 20 states have similar prohibitions, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The laws took hold in the 1930s as carmakers started to rely on independent dealerships to sell and service vehicles so they could focus on production. Later, independent dealers wanted to prevent manufacturers from opening their own dealerships and driving them out of business.
Tesla sells its vehicles directly to consumers, who can have their vehicles shipped directly to them or to dealerships in 27 states. Because the company can’t set up its own dealerships in Wisconsin, buyers there must have the cars delivered to them or travel to dealerships in neighboring Minnesota or Illinois to pick them up.
Tesla officials have been working for almost a decade to secure an exemption from the law. In 2017 and 2021, Republican legislators introduced bills that would permit Tesla dealerships, but none of those made it out of the Legislature. They inserted an exemption for Tesla dealerships into the 2019-21 state budget, but Democratic Gov. Tony Evers used his partial veto powers to erase the provision.
The Wisconsin Automobile and Truck Dealers Association has been fighting to preserve the law. Bill Sepic, the association’s president and CEO, told The Associated Press that Tesla should have to follow the law like any other vehicle manufacturer. He said the statutes exist to enable third parties to act as consumer advocates “in making one of the larger purchases of their life.”
What is the company doing now?
Tesla filed a lawsuit in state court in January seeking permission to open four dealerships in Wisconsin.
The company argues that independent dealers wouldn’t meet its standards and says selling vehicles at its own dealerships is in the public interest because unaffiliated dealers’ prices are higher and less transparent.
Its lawsuit says that the state law barring manufacturers from running their own dealerships violates economic liberty rights and that the prohibition exists only to protect independent dealers from competition.
The case is pending in Milwaukee County Circuit Court, though no hearings have been scheduled.
The state Justice Department is defending the law. An agency spokesperson declined to comment.
How did Musk get involved in the state Supreme Court race?
Schimel, the conservative state Supreme Court candidate, is vying with Crawford for an open seat on the high court.
The race is the most significant election nationally since the November presidential contest, providing an early barometer for Republicans and Democrats given the intense interest and outside spending it has generated. It also will determine whether the highest court in the perennial presidential battleground state will flip from liberal to conservative control with major cases involving abortion, union rights and congressional redistricting on the horizon.
Wisconsin Supreme Court candidates Susan Crawford, left, and Brad Schimel wait for the start of their debate March 12, 2025, at the Lubar Center at Marquette University Law School’s Eckstein Hall in Milwaukee. The hourlong debate was the first and only debate between the candidates ahead of the April 1 election. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Eight days after Tesla filed the Wisconsin dealership lawsuit, Musk tweeted: “Very important to vote Republican for the Wisconsin Supreme Court to prevent voting fraud!”
To be clear, there has been no evidence of widespread voting fraud in Wisconsin. Democrat Joe Biden’s victory in the state over then-President Donald Trump in 2020 was affirmed by a recount and an independent audit. Trump, a Republican, won the state last November and offered no objections then to the voting or ballot-counting.
According to a tally from the Brennan Center for Justice, Musk-backed groups America PAC and Building America’s Future have spent more than $17 million to support Schimel with ads and flyers. The money he donated to the state Republican Party has been used to help Schimel, who has been endorsed by Trump.
Are the candidates focused on the Tesla case?
Crawford’s supporters contend the timing of the contributions show Musk is trying to ensure that Schimel wins and creates a conservative majority on the court that ultimately would rule in Tesla’s favor. Crawford said during a debate with Schimel this month that Musk “has basically taken over Brad Schimel’s campaign.”
Sepic, president of the state dealership association, said Wisconsin should elect the candidate who enforces the prohibition but declined to comment when asked if he thought Schimel or Crawford would do that.
Schimel has repeatedly said he would treat any case involving Tesla the same as any other when he considers whether to hear it or recuse himself. Schimel also has insisted that the donations from Musk and his groups do not make him beholden to them.
Crawford has said the same thing about billionaires who have donated to her campaign, including George Soros and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker. Soros has contributed $2 million and Pritzker $1.5 million to the Wisconsin Democratic Party, which has funneled the money to Crawford’s campaign.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.This story is published in partnership with The Associated Press.
The election to fill a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat has become a referendum not only on the new administration, but on Elon Musk, the billionaire who has become one of President Donald Trump ‘s top financial backers and the architect of his efforts to slash the federal workforce.
The April 1 election is the first major test in American politics since Trump secured a second term in November. It will serve as a crucial barometer of enthusiasm in both parties heading into next year’s midterm elections and is happening in a critical battleground state that Trump won by less than a percentage point.
It’s also a test for Musk himself. The Tesla CEO’s nascent political operation, which spent more than $200 million to help Trump win in November, is canvassing and advertising in Wisconsin on behalf of the conservative candidate. A win would cement his status as a conservative kingmaker, while a loss could give license to Republicans distancing themselves from his efforts to stymie government functions and eliminate tens of thousands of jobs.
“This is the first major election held since Donald Trump took office,” said Anthony Chergosky, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. “And I think notably Democrats are concentrating more on Elon Musk than Donald Trump.”
Musk, who is the race’s biggest donor by far, has also inserted himself into the race, holding a get-out-the-vote event on his X platform Saturday.
“It might not seem important, but it’s actually really important. And it could determine the fate of the country,” he said. “This election is going to affect everyone in the United States.”
April 1’s election will determine majority control of a court facing critical issues: abortion rights, collective bargaining and voter access. They include decisions that could have major implications for the 2026 midterms and 2028 presidential election, particularly if they end up hearing challenges to the state’s congressional maps, which could theoretically swing the balance of power in Washington if they are considerably redrawn.
The Supreme Court race is officially nonpartisan, but the campaign has been anything but. Brad Schimel, the Republican-backed candidate, has openly courted Trump’s endorsement, which he received on Friday night, as he campaigns against Dane County Judge Susan Crawford, the Democrat-backed candidate.
The Waukesha County judge and former Republican attorney general attended the president’s inauguration in January and has said that he would be part of a “support system” for Trump. Earlier this month, he attended a “Mega MAGA rally” where he posed for a picture in front of a giant inflatable version of the president, which had a “Vote Brad Schimel Supreme Court” poster plastered on its chest.
He spoke on Musk’s get-out-the-vote call on Saturday. And he joined the president’s eldest son on stage at a get-out-the-vote rally, where Donald Trump Jr. said a Schimel win would protect his father’s agenda and keep up GOP momentum.
“We can’t just show up when Trump’s on the ticket,” he said at a brewery in the Milwaukee suburbs. “You have to engage because it’s not just about now, it’s about that future. This presidency could be put to a halt with this vote.”
Schimel has also resurfaced long-debunked conspiracies about voter fraud that Trump has embraced, urging his supporters to vote early to “make this too big to rig so we don’t have to worry that at 11:30 in Milwaukee, they’re going to find bags of ballots that they forgot to put into the machines.”
Still, he pledged to judge any case that comes before him on its merits — including potential cases involving Trump and Musk.
Republicans have cast the race as a chance for Trump’s loyal supporters to rally around their leader and push back against liberal judges they accuse of working to stymie his agenda.
Mailers from Musk’s America PAC feature photographs of the president. “President Donald Trump needs your vote,” they read. Others warn that “Liberal Susan Crawford will stop President Trump’s agenda.”
America PAC is also offering Wisconsin voters $100 to sign a petition in opposition to “activist judges” — and another $100 for each signer they refer.
Republicans have argued that if even 60% of the voters who cast ballots for Trump in November turn out, Schimel can win, helping to drive momentum for the party heading into next year’s midterms.
“In theory, the opposition party should be energized, but we’re feeling very good about the energy on our side of the aisle,” said Andrew Iverson, Wisconsin GOP executive director.
Andrew Romeo, senior adviser to the Musk-backed group Building America’s Future, which has spent millions on the race, issued a recent memo advising Schimel’s campaign to remind voters that he is “a strong conservative and Trump ally.”
Two groups funded by Musk have so far spent more than $14 million on the race, according to a tally by the liberal Brennan Center for Justice — with plans to spend around $20 million total.
Musk donated another $2 million to the Wisconsin Republican Party on Thursday, the same day the party gave $1.2 million to Schimel’s campaign.
Under Wisconsin law, contributions to candidates are capped, but candidates can accept unlimited cash from state parties, which in turn can accept unlimited cash from donors.
His spending has helped make the race the most expensive judicial election in the nation’s history, with more than $73 million spent so far, according to the Brennan Center, breaking the record set by another Wisconsin Supreme Court race two years ago.
Crawford has also received her own support from billionaires, including philanthropist George Soros and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker.
Democrats want race to be the people vs. Musk
Democrats are hoping to channel their voters’ outrage at the Trump administration by casting the race as an opportunity to stand up to Musk. After nearly a decade of running against the president, they see Musk as a potentially more divisive figure who can motivate their base voters to turn out.
“This race is the first real test point in the country on Elon Musk and his influence on our politics, and voters want an opportunity to push back on that and the influence he is trying to make on Wisconsin and the rest of country,” said Crawford campaign spokesperson Derrick Honeyman.
State Democrats have hosted a series of anti-Musk town halls, including one featuring former vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, and featured Musk heavily in ads.
Crawford has also seized on Musk, going as far as to refer to her opponent as “Elon Schimel” during a recent debate.
“There’s so many people who are desperate for a way to fight back against what Trump and Musk are doing nationally,” said Ben Wikler, the Wisconsin Democratic Party chair, and see the race as an “opportunity to punch back.”
Wikler said the party had seen an “explosive surge” in grassroots and small-donor fundraising from across the country tied to Musk’s involvement. Both in Wisconsin and nationally, Democrats are packing town halls and angrily protesting the Trump administration’s firings of thousands of workers and shutdown of agencies. They have also show disillusionment with their party’s own leaders.
“Most voters still don’t know who Crawford and Schimel are, but they have extremely strong feelings about Musk and Trump,” he said.
What’s at stake for Musk
Musk said Saturday that he became involved in the race because it “will decide how the congressional districts are drawn in Wisconsin,” echoing Schimel’s claims that Crawford would push through new congressional maps that could favor Democrats.
Schimel’s campaign has relentlessly attacked Crawford for participating in a call with Democratic donors that was advertised in an email as a “chance to put two more House seats in play for 2026,” a reference to the state’s redistricting fights that have played out for years.
Crawford has said that she didn’t know that that was how the call had been billed when she joined and that nothing of that nature had been discussed while she was on the line.
“In my opinion, that’s the most important thing, which is a big deal given that the congressional majority is so razor-thin,” Musk said. “It could cause the House to switch to Democrat if that redrawing takes place, and then we wouldn’t be able to get through the changes that the American people want.”
Musk has also been giving money to Republican members of Congress who have echoed his calls to impeach federal judges whose decisions he doesn’t like.
He has other interests at play.
Democrats and Crawford have noted that, just days before Musk’s groups started spending on the race, Musk’s electric car company Tesla sued Wisconsin over a rule banning car manufacturers from operating dealerships — forcing buyers to purchase Teslas out of state.
The case could ultimately go before the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
Associated Press writer Scott Bauer contributed to this report.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.This story is published in partnership with The Associated Press.
A group funded by billionaire Elon Musk is offering Wisconsin voters $100 to sign a petition in opposition to “activist judges,” a move that comes two weeks before the state’s Supreme Court election and after the political action committee made a similar proposal last year in battleground states.
Musk’s political action committee America PAC announced the petition in a post on X on Thursday night. It promises $100 for each Wisconsin voter who signs the petition and another $100 for each signer the voter refers.
The campaign for Susan Crawford, the Democratic-backed candidate for Wisconsin Supreme Court, said Musk was trying to buy votes ahead of the April 1 election. The offer was made two days after early voting started in the hotly contested race between Crawford and Brad Schimel, the preferred candidate of Musk and Republicans.
The winner of the election will determine whether the court remains under liberal control or flips to a conservative majority.
Musk’s PAC used a nearly identical tactic ahead of the November presidential election, offering to pay $1 million a day to voters in Wisconsin and six other battleground states who signed a petition supporting the First and Second Amendments.
Philadelphia’s district attorney sued in an attempt to stop the payments under Pennsylvania law. But a judge said that prosecutors failed to show that the effort was an illegal lottery, and it was allowed to continue through Election Day.
America PAC and Building for America’s Future, two groups Musk funds, have spent more than $13 million trying to help elect Schimel, according to a tally by the Brennan Center for Justice. The winner will determine whether conservative or liberal justices control the court, with key battles looming over abortion, public sector unions, voting rules and congressional district boundaries.
Crawford campaign spokesperson Derrick Honeyman accused Musk of “trying to buy a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court to secure a favorable ruling in his company’s lawsuit against the state.”
Just days before Musk’s groups started spending on the Supreme Court race, electric car manufacturer Tesla sued Wisconsin over its decision to not allow it to open dealerships. Musk is the CEO of Tesla and also the head of rocket ship manufacturer SpaceX. Tesla’s case could ultimately come before the Supreme Court.
“Very important to vote Republican for the Wisconsin Supreme Court to prevent voting fraud,” Musk posted on X, just eight days before the lawsuit was filed in January.
Andrew Romeo, a spokesperson for America PAC, referred to the post on X announcing the petition when asked for comment on Friday. A spokesperson for Schimel’s campaign did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
Crawford and her allies have made linking Schimel with Musk a key plank of their campaign. The Wisconsin Democratic Party released a new ad this week accusing Musk of trying to buy the seat for Schimel, a close ally of President Donald Trump.
Schimel earlier this week campaigned with Donald Trump Jr. at an event where the president’s son said electing Schimel was essential for protecting Trump’s agenda. America PAC has also been making that argument in flyers it’s handing out to Wisconsin voters.
Musk’s other group, Building America’s Future, said in a memo Thursday that to defeat Crawford it must “present Schimel as a pro-Trump conservative.”
The new petition says: “Judges should interpret laws as written, not rewrite them to fit their personal or political agendas. By signing below, I’m rejecting the actions of activist judges who impose their own views and demanding a judiciary that respects its role — interpreting, not legislating.”
The petition, while designed to collect data on Wisconsin voters and energize them, is also in line with Trump’s agenda alleging that “activist” judges are illegally working against him. Trump’s administration is embroiled in several lawsuits related to Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency effort to downsize the federal bureaucracy.
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The Republican-backed candidate in Wisconsin’s closely watched state Supreme Court race has resurfaced long-debunked concerns about voting fraud because of the late reporting of ballots in Milwaukee just two weeks before the April 1 election.
Brad Schimel, a former Republican attorney general, spoke of the possibility of “bags of ballots” and fraud in Milwaukee during an interview Tuesday on conservative talk radio. Schimel faces Democratic-backed Susan Crawford in the April 1 election with majority control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court at stake.
Schimel, in an interview on WISN-AM, said his supporters need to “get our votes banked, make this too big to rig so we don’t have to worry that at 11:30 in Milwaukee, they’re going to find bags of ballots that they forgot to put into the machines.”
Schimel said that happened in 2018 and in November “when (U.S. Senate candidate) Eric Hovde was ahead all night, and then all of a sudden, Milwaukee County changed that.”
Republicans and Democrats alike, along with state and Milwaukee election leaders, warned in the run-up to the November election that Milwaukee absentee ballots would be reported late and cause a huge influx of Democratic votes. Milwaukee is the state’s most populated city and is heavily Democratic. Its chief elections official was chosen with bipartisan support.
The reporting of those absentee ballots swung the 2020 presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden, fueling baseless conspiracy theories that the election had been stolen from President Donald Trump.
Milwaukee’s absentee 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 due to the sheer number that have to be counted and because state law does not allow them to be processed until polls open.
A bipartisan bill to allow for processing prior to Election Day died in the Republican-controlled Senate last year. Republicans, who have controlled the Legislature since 2011, routinely complain about slow processing in Milwaukee but have not passed bills to allow for speedier counting.
In 2018, the reporting of more than 47,000 absentee ballots after midnight put Democrat Tony Evers ahead of then-Gov. Scott Walker. Evers went on to win, and Walker criticized the late reporting, saying it blindsided him.
And in November, Hovde said he was “shocked” by the reporting of more than 108,000 ballots in Milwaukee early in the morning after the election in his defeat to Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin.
Schimel said in the radio interview he didn’t know what happened.
“I don’t know if there was fraud there,” Schimel said. “There’s no way for me to know that. All I know is this: We need to turn our votes out. That’s the best insulation we have against any potential fraud, is just get our people to the polls.”
Asked about his concerns during an appearance later Tuesday at the Milwaukee Rotary Club, Schimel said he brought up fraud because voters often ask him how to guarantee election integrity.
“I tell people, by following the rules,” Schimel said. “And then I tell them, ‘Here’s the best way to make sure your vote isn’t stolen: Go use it.’ That’s the answer.”
Yet despite his concerns, Schimel said: “I will always accept the results of the election.”
Crawford’s spokesperson, Derrick Honeyman, said Schimel was “dabbling in conspiracy theories to please his ally, Elon Musk, and it’s unbecoming of a judge and candidate for the state’s high court.”
Groups funded by billionaire Musk have contributed more than $11 million to help Schimel’s campaign. Crawford is backed by several billionaire Democrats, including philanthropist George Soros and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker.
Schimel’s comments drew criticism from the Democracy Defense Project, a bipartisan coalition promoting truth about elections that includes former Republican Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen.
“There is no evidence of fraud in Milwaukee, but the failure of the state to allow early counting on absentee ballots before the close of polls feeds into conspiracy theories,” the group said in a statement.
The court is currently controlled 4-3 by liberals, but one of them is retiring, creating the battle for the majority.
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Some 400 to 600 Asian elephants are believed to remain living in the wild in Cambodia. Researchers said the study's findings underscore the potential of a "national stronghold" for the species.
Abortion rights and the influence of donations from billionaires Elon Musk and George Soros took center stage in a sometimes testy debate Wednesday between candidates for the Wisconsin Supreme Court less than three weeks before the election.
The race pits Republican-backed Waukesha County Circuit Judge Brad Schimel, a former attorney general, against Democratic-backed Dane County Circuit Judge Susan Crawford.
Here are highlights from the debate:
Abortion rights
A challenge to an 1849 state law that bans nearly all abortions is currently pending before the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
Schimel, who is supported by anti-abortion groups, said he believes the 1849 ban “was a validly passed law. I don’t believe it reflects the will of the people of Wisconsin today.”
Schimel said the future of abortion rights should not be up to the Supreme Court, but should instead be decided by voters.
Crawford declined to take a position on the pending abortion case.
But she said she was proud to have supported Planned Parenthood in a pair of abortion-related cases when she was an attorney in private practice. She also spoke against the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade.
“This is a critical issue in this race,” Crawford said. “My opponent has said he believes the 1849 law in Wisconsin is valid law and he’s trying to backpedal from that position now.”
Wisconsin Supreme Court candidates Brad Schimel, right, and Susan Crawford listen to one of the moderators during their debate Wednesday, March 12, 2025, at the Lubar Center at Marquette University Law School’s Eckstein Hall in Milwaukee. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Donations from billionaires Musk and Soros at issue
Crawford said that Musk, a close adviser to Trump, “has basically taken over Brad Schimel’s campaign.”
Groups funded by Musk have spent more than $10 million in support of Schimel on television ads and going door to door canvassing for his candidacy. One of those flyers says that Schimel would defend Trump’s agenda as a member of the court.
“This is unprecedented to see this kind of spending on a race,” Crawford said.
She said it was “no coincidence” that Musk started spending on the race days after his electric car company Tesla sued the state over its decision blocking it from opening dealerships in Wisconsin.
Schimel fired back, “If Elon Musk is trying to get some result in that lawsuit, he may be failing because I enforce the law and I respect the laws passed by the Legislature.”
Schimel said he has no control over outside donations, or the messages they spread.
He was asked, in light of the donations from Musk, if he would rule against Trump.
“If President Trump or anyone defies Wisconsin law and I end up with a case in front of me, I’ll hold them accountable as I would anybody in my courtroom,” Schimel said.
Donald Trump Jr. and political activist Charlie Kirk plan to co-host a town hall on Monday in Wisconsin that’s being billed as a get-out-the-vote effort for Schimel.
Crawford has benefited from donations from prominent national Democrats such as Soros and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker who gave the state Democratic Party $1.5 million, which then donated it to Crawford’s campaign.
Schimel called Soros “a dangerous person to have an endorsement from.”
When asked what the difference was between the Musk and Soros donations, Crawford said, “I have never promised anything and that is the difference.”
Union rights
As an attorney, Crawford sued in an attempt to overturn the state’s law that effectively ended collective bargaining for public workers. That law, known as Act 10, was the centerpiece of former Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s tenure and made Wisconsin the center of the national debate over union rights.
A Dane County judge last year ruled that the bulk of the law was unconstitutional, and an appeal of that ruling is expected to come before the state Supreme Court.
Crawford said she “most likely” would recuse herself from a case challenging Act 10 if it were focused on the same provisions in the lawsuit she brought. But she said the current lawsuit is on different parts of the law.
When Schimel was attorney general, he said he would defend Act 10 and opposed having its restrictions also applied to police and firefighter unions, which were exempt from the law.
Schimel did not say in the debate whether he would recuse himself if a challenge to the law came before the court.
Voter ID
A measure on the April 1 ballot would enshrine Wisconsin’s voter ID law in the state constitution.
Schimel said he will vote for the amendment. Crawford, who sued to overturn the voter ID law, declined to say how she would vote on the amendment.
Congressional redistricting
A challenge to the state’s congressional district boundaries is expected to come before the court.
Crawford appeared at a briefing with donors earlier in the campaign that was billed in an email by organizers as a “chance to put two more House seats in play.”
Crawford said in the debate that she didn’t talk about redistricting during the call and the email sent by the organizers was “not an appropriate way to announce a judicial candidate.”
Schimel said it was hard for him to believe Crawford.
“We have to take my opponent’s word for it what happened on that phone call,” he said.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.This story is published in partnership with The Associated Press.
A Wisconsin appeals court ruled that disabled people are not allowed to receive absentee ballots by email, overturning a lower court's ruling less than three weeks before the April 1 election.
Wisconsin’s version of the Elon Musk-led effort charged with making government run more efficiently struck a more collegial, bipartisan tone in its first meeting Tuesday, taking input from Democrats and hearing testimony from a broad array of government leaders.
Wisconsin is one of several states that have sought to mimic the work of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, run by billionaire Musk at the federal level. Others that have created similar groups include Florida, Oklahoma, Iowa, Missouri, Arizona, Kansas, Louisiana and New Hampshire.
The Wisconsin Assembly’s GOAT committee, which stands for Government Operations, Accountability and Transparency, is much more constrained in its mandate and powers than DOGE, which has broad authority given to it by President Donald Trump.
The Wisconsin committee was created by Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, but three of its nine members are Democrats. There is no counterpart in the state Senate, which means any of its recommendations may face difficulty clearing both houses of the Legislature.
And the committee can’t unilaterally fire state workers or slash government spending. Broad actions like that require action by the full Legislature, which is controlled by Republicans, in addition to Democratic Gov. Tony Evers.
Evers has broken records for vetoing Republican-sponsored bills, making it highly unlikely he would go along with anything significant the GOAT committee may recommend.
Still, as a committee of the Legislature, it was able to solicit testimony Tuesday from numerous agency heads in Evers’ administration at its first meeting Tuesday. University of Wisconsin President Jay Rothman and Bob Atwell, the founder of Nicolet National Bank, also testified.
Republican Rep. Amanda Nedweski, chair of the committee, said the goal was to address “strong demand from the public” about what is happening with telework, state office use, whether public workers are being held accountable, what cybersecurity is in place and whether there is a cost savings.
Nedweski even cut off fellow Republican and committee vice chair Rep. Shae Sortwell when he began asking questions of a state education department official about spending related to DEI.
“We’re going to stay on topic today,” Nedweski said.
Sortwell sent numerous requests seeking information to the state’s largest cities and all 72 counties related to diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in local governments across the state before the committee met, drawing criticism from Democratic members of the committee. Wisconsin Watch was the first to report on Sortwell’s efforts.
Vos, the Assembly speaker who created the GOAT committee, has said that its goal was to root out waste, fraud and abuse in state government. He attributed Sortwell’s inquiries to information gathering related to that goal.
DOGE claims credit for saving more than $100 billion at the federal level through mass firings, cancellations of contracts and grants, office closures and other cuts that have paralyzed entire agencies. Many of those claimed savings have turned out to be overstated or unproven.
DOGE’s work during the early stages of the Trump administration has drawn nearly two dozen lawsuits. Judges have raised questions in several cases about DOGE’s sweeping cost-cutting efforts, conducted with little public information about its staffing and operations.
Wisconsin election officials voted Friday to force Madison city workers to sit for depositions as they try to learn more about how nearly 200 absentee ballots in November’s election went uncounted.
The uncounted ballots in the state’s capital city didn’t affect any results, but the Wisconsin Elections Commission still launched an investigation in January to determine whether Madison City Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl violated state law or abused her discretion. She didn’t notify the elections commission of the uncounted ballots until December, almost a month and a half after the election and well after the results were certified on Nov. 29.
Commissioners astounded at failure to count ballots
The commission hasn’t made a decision yet on whether Witzel-Behl acted illegally or improperly, but commissioners appeared flabbergasted at the failure to count the ballots as they reviewed the investigation during a meeting Friday. Chair Ann Jacobs was particularly incensed with Witzel-Behl for not launching her own in-depth probe immediately.
“This feels like a complete lack of leadership and a refusal to be where the buck stops,” Jacobs said. “You don’t get to put your head in the sand for weeks. … I am genuinely shocked by this timeline.”
Don Millis said it was a “travesty” that the ballots were never counted. “You’re telling the world that these 193 people didn’t vote in what many thought was the most consequential election of our lifetime,” he said.
What did the commission decide to do?
The commission voted unanimously to authorize Jacobs and Millis to question Madison city employees in depositions — question-and-answer periods usually led by attorneys in which the subject gives sworn testimony. Jacobs said she would confer with Millis about who to question, but Witzel-Behl will likely be one of the subjects.
Madison city attorney Mike Haas, who was in the audience, told The Associated Press outside the meeting that he would not fight the depositions. “The city wants to get to the bottom of this as much as anyone else,” he said.
The commission also voted unanimously to send a message to clerks around the state informing them of the problems in Madison and warning them to scour polling places for any uncounted ballots during the upcoming April 1 election. Jacobs said she plans to call for more substantial changes to state election policy going into the 2026 elections after commissioners learn more about what happened in Madison.
The investigation’s findings so far
The city clerk’s office discovered 67 unprocessed absentee ballots in a courier bag that had been placed in a security cart on Nov. 12, the day election results were canvassed.
Witzel-Behl said she told two employees to notify the elections commission, but neither did. A third employee visited the Dane County Clerk’s Office in person to inform officials there of the discovery. That employee said he didn’t remember what the Dane County clerk said, but he recalled a “general sense” that the county would not want the ballots for the canvass.
The Dane County clerk, Scott McDonell, told the commission that he knew nothing of the uncounted ballots until they were reported in the media.
The clerk’s office discovered another 125 uncounted absentee ballots in a sealed courier bag in a supply tote on Dec. 2. Witzel-Behl said she didn’t inform county canvassers because the canvass was finished and, based on the county’s response to Nov. 12 discovery, she didn’t think the county would be interested.
The elections commission wasn’t notified of either discovery until Dec. 18. Witzel-Behl said the employees she asked to notify the commission waited until reconciliation was completed. Reconciliation is a routine process in which poll workers and elections officials ensure an election’s accuracy, including checking the number of ballots issued at the polls to the number of voters.
Holes in protocols
The investigators noted that Madison polling places’ absentee ballot logs didn’t list the number of courier bags for each ward, which would have told election inspectors how many bags to account for while processing ballots.
City election officials also had no procedures for confirming the number of absentee ballots received with the number counted. Witzel-Behl said that information was emailed to election inspectors the weekend before the election, but no documents provided the total number of ballots received.
If Witzel-Behl had looked through everything to check for courier bags and absentee ballot envelopes before the election was certified, the missing ballots could have been counted, investigators said.
Witzel-Behl also couldn’t explain why she didn’t contact the county or the state elections commission herself, investigators said.
Voters prep for lawsuit
Four Madison voters whose ballots weren’t counted filed claims Thursday for $175,000 each from the city and Dane County, the first step toward initiating a lawsuit.
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Four Wisconsin voters whose ballots were not counted in the November presidential election initiated a class-action lawsuit Thursday seeking $175,000 in damages each.
The voters were among 193 in Madison whose ballots were misplaced by the city clerk and not discovered until weeks after the election. Not counting the ballots didn’t affect the result of any races.
The Wisconsin Elections Commission investigated but did not determine whether Madison Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl failed to comply with state law or abused her discretion.
She didn’t notify the elections commission of the problem until December, almost a month and a half after the election and after the results were certified on Nov. 29.
The goal is to reinforce and strengthen the right to vote in Wisconsin, said attorney Jeff Mandell, who is general counsel of Law Forward, which filed claims against the city of Madison and Dane County on Thursday.
“When people’s votes are not counted, when the right to vote is violated, our democracy is diminished,” Mandell said during a news conference announcing the action.
The four affected voters are seeking $175,000 each from the city of Madison and Dane County. That is above the $50,000 maximum that can be sought in class-action lawsuits against municipalities.
The lawsuit will argue that the cap is unconstitutional, the notice of claim said.
The number of affected voters who could join the lawsuit might grow, Mandell said. All of the voters whose ballots were not counted are named in the notice made public Thursday.
Madison takes election integrity seriously, the city’s spokesperson, Dylan Brogan, said in reaction. He noted that the clerk’s office apologized for the error both publicly and to each affected voter.
The clerk’s office has also taken steps to ensure the such a mistake won’t happen again and looked forward to additional guidance from the state elections commission, Brogan said. He declined to comment specifically on the lawsuit.
The state elections commission is scheduled to discuss its investigation into the uncounted ballots on Friday.
According to a summary of its findings, the clerk didn’t explain what exactly happened at the polling places, how the uncounted ballots went unnoticed all day on Election Day or how they were misplaced.
She also hasn’t said whether she spoke to the chief inspectors in the affected wards to find out what happened, making it difficult to develop guidelines to help election clerks throughout the state avoid similar issues, investigators said.
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A seventh inmate has died at Wisconsin’s oldest prison, less than a year after the then-warden and multiple members of his staff were charged with misconduct and felony inmate abuse.
The state Department of Corrections offender website notes that 23-year-old Damien Evans died Tuesday at the Waupun Correctional Institution. The site does not offer any details. A Corrections spokesperson didn’t immediately return a message Wednesday. Dodge County Sheriff Dale Schmidt said in an email to The Associated Press that his agency is investigating Evans’ death but he had no information to share.
Online court records indicate Evans was sentenced in 2019 to seven years in prison for armed robbery and an additional two years to be served concurrently for bail jumping. Both cases were filed in Racine County.
Evans is the seventh Waupun inmate to have died in custody since June 2023. One killed himself, one died of a fentanyl overdose, one died of a stroke, and one died of dehydration and malnutrition. Another inmate, 66-year-old Jay Adkins, died in May. A sixth prisoner, 57-year-old Christopher McDonald, died in August.
The Dodge County Sheriff’s Office has said McDonald’s death appears to have been a suicide. He was sentenced to 999 years after pleading no contest to being a party to first-degree intentional homicide in 1992. Schmidt didn’t immediately respond to follow-up emails Wednesday afternoon seeking updates on the investigations into Adkins’ and McDonald’s deaths.
Prosecutors last year charged warden Randall Hepp with misconduct and eight members of his staff with felony inmate abuse in connection with the deaths of two of the prisoners, Cameron Williams and Donald Maier. Three of the eight staff members also were charged with misconduct. Hepp subsequently retired.
According to criminal complaints, Williams died of a stroke in October 2023. His body went undiscovered for at least 12 hours.
Maier died of dehydration and malnutrition. He had severe mental health problems but either refused or wasn’t given his medication in the eight days leading up to his February 2024 death.
Federal investigators also have been looking into an alleged smuggling ring involving Waupun prison employees. Gov. Tony Evers office has said the probe has resulted in the suspension of nearly a dozen employees. A former prison worker pleaded guilty in September to smuggling cellphones, tobacco and drugs into the facility in exchange for money.
Waupun inmates have filed a class-action lawsuit alleging mistreatment and a lack of health care.
The maximum-security prison was built in the 1850s. Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike have been calling for years to close it. Concerns about local job losses and the cost of building a replacement prison have stymied progress.
Evers, a Democrat, last month proposed a multitiered, $500 million plan for the state’s prisons that includes converting Waupun to a medium-security center focused on job training for inmates.
This story has been updated to correct that Evans is the seventh inmate to die at Waupun Correctional Institution since June 2023, instead of the sixth inmate, and to correct that one inmate killed himself, not two.
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An audit of the November election won by President Donald Trump in swing-state Wisconsin found that not a single vote was counted incorrectly, altered or missed by tabulating machines.
The audit also found no evidence that any voting machine or software had been hacked or otherwise tampered with. The Wisconsin Elections Commission released the audit’s findings last week and is scheduled to discuss them Friday.
Trump defeated former Vice President Kamala Harris in Wisconsin by just over 29,000 votes.
In 2020, when Trump lost to Joe Biden by just under 21,000 votes, Trump and his supporters alleged there was widespread fraud in Wisconsin. But two partial recounts, a nonpartisan audit, a conservative law firm’s review and multiple state and federal lawsuits did not support the claims.
Trump and his allies have not made similar accusations about wrongdoing in the 2024 election that he won.
Meagan Wolfe, Wisconsin’s top elections official, said in a memo that the audit shows the public how effectively elections are run and also works to “dispel any misinformation or disinformation about the security of electronic voting systems.”
The post-election audit is required under state law and has been done after each general election since 2006. Local elections officials in 336 randomly selected municipalities across the state hand-counted 327,230 ballots as part of the 2024 audit. That is nearly 10% of all Wisconsin ballots cast in the 2024 election and the largest post-election audit ever undertaken in the state.
The only errors found during the audit were made by people, not the vote-counting machines. And only five human errors were detected, resulting in an error rate of just 0.0000009%, according to the report.
“My hope is that this reassures persons on all sides of the political aisle that voting tabulators are doing their jobs accurately,” Ann Jacobs, chair of the elections commission, said in a post last week on the social media platform X. “We all lament when our candidate loses, but in WI, it wasn’t because someone hacked the machines. The other guy just got more votes.”
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Wisconsin Democratic Gov. Tony Evers on Tuesday decried what he called “irresponsible decisions in Washington” and “needless chaos,” saying his new two-year spending proposal was designed to prepare for drastic cuts from the federal government.
Evers released his budget as he considers seeking a third term in the battleground state that President Donald Trump narrowly won in November.
Evers’ budget is more of a wish list than a roadmap of what will actually become law. Republicans who control the Legislature promised to kill most of his proposals, as they have done on his three previous budgets, before passing it later this year.
“With so much happening in Washington that’s reckless and partisan, in Wisconsin we must continue our work to be reasonable and pragmatic,” Evers told the Legislature and other guests.
He urged lawmakers to leave $500 million available to respond to situations caused by federal decisions.
Here are highlights of Evers’ $119 billion two-year budget, which would increase spending by more than 20%:
Pushing back against Trump on tariffs, higher education
Evers said that Trump’s tariffs — or import taxes — could spark trade wars with Wisconsin’s largest exporters and hurt the state’s $116 billion agriculture industry.
“I’m really concerned President Trump’s 25% tariff tax will not only hurt our farmers, ag industries and our economy but that it will cause prices to go up on everything from gas to groceries,” Evers said.
Evers’ plan calls for creating a new agriculture economist position in state government to help farmers navigate market disruptions caused by tariffs. He’s also calling for increasing funding to help farmers find and increase markets for their products.
Tariffs are just one issue where Evers has fought back against the Trump agenda.
Evers also previously called for a bipartisan solution to immigration, while criticizing Trump’s move to deport people in the country illegally.
And Evers proposed the highest increase in Universities of Wisconsin funding in state history, citing concerns about federal cuts.
“Politicians in Washington don’t know a darn thing about what’s going on at campuses across Wisconsin,” Evers said. “They don’t know how important our UW System has been to our state’s success or how important it is for our future.”
Evers taps into the Republican priority of cutting taxes
Evers has clashed with Republicans over tax cuts in the past, gutting a $3.5 billion tax cut in the last budget, while approving a $2 billion tax cut in 2021. In his new budget, Evers called for cutting a variety of income, sales and property taxes by nearly $2 billion, while increasing the income tax on millionaires by $1.3 billion.
Republicans will almost certainly kill any tax increase. They have said they want to use the state’s entire $4 billion surplus on cutting taxes.
The Evers plan includes eliminating the income tax on tips and doing away with the sales tax on over-the-counter medications. He also proposed reducing income taxes for the middle class and creating a new incentive for local governments not to increase property taxes.
Republican Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu discounted Evers’ tax cuts as “gimmicky,” called the budget “irresponsible” and said the GOP will deliver an alternative broad tax cut proposal soon.
Fighting water pollution caused by ‘forever chemicals’
Evers and Republicans have long been at odds over how to battle PFAS pollution, even as numerous Wisconsin communities struggle with contamination from the so-called forever chemicals and are forced to drink only bottled water.
Evers is calling for spending $145 million to fight the pollution through additional testing to find the pollution and researching ways to combat it.
PFAS, short for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are man-made chemicals that don’t easily break down in nature. The chemicals have been linked to health problems including low birth weight, cancer and liver disease and have been shown to make vaccines less effective.
Republicans unlikely to go along with Democratic plan
Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said most of Evers’ plan was “dead on arrival” and said the GOP would start from scratch. Republicans have repeatedly rejected his calls to expand Medicaid and legalize recreational marijuana. They are also unlikely to increase funding for K-12 schools and the Universities of Wisconsin budget as much as Evers wants.
Evers also proposed making Wisconsin the first state in the country to audit insurance companies over denying health care claims.
However, Republicans did not summarily reject another major Evers proposal to close the 127-year-old prison in Green Bay as part of a massive overhaul of the state’s correctional system.
Associated Press writer Todd Richmond contributed to this report.
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.
Wisconsin’s Democratic-backed incumbent state schools leader will face a Republican-supported challenger after both advanced in Tuesday’s three-person primary.
The winner in the April 1 general election will guide education policy in the battleground state during President Donald Trump’s second term.
Jill Underly, currently serving her first term as state superintendent, and Brittany Kinser, an advocate of the state’s private school voucher program and public charter schools, both advanced in Tuesday’s primary. Jeff Wright, a rural school superintendent, was eliminated.
Jill Underly
Underly was first elected to head the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction in 2021 with the support of Democrats and teachers unions. She has tried to position herself as the champion for public schools.
She said her win shows that voters “love their public schools.”
“They are also committed to making sure their public schools stay viable and every kid has these opportunities to be successful,” Underly said.
She was endorsed by the Wisconsin Democratic Party, which also has given her campaign $106,000 this month, and a host of Democratic officeholders.
Brittany Kinser
But the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the statewide teachers union, did not endorse a candidate in the primary. The political action committee for the union had recommended Wright be endorsed.
Wright, a two-time Democratic candidate for state Assembly, tried to cut into Underly’s base of support. He won the endorsements of the Association of Wisconsin School Administrators and the Middleton-Cross Plains teachers union.
Kinser, an education consultant, invited Wright’s backers who were unhappy with Underly’s leadership to back her.
“I’m welcoming Jeff and his supporters to come and join our campaign so we can restore high standards for all children in Wisconsin,” Kinser said.
Wright is going to “take some time to think” before he endorses anyone, his spokesperson Tyler Smith said.
Kinser is backed by Republicans, including the state party, which has given her campaign $200,000 so far.
Underly accused Kinser of being “focused on expanding vouchers, and these policies put our public schools in a dangerous race to the bottom.”
Kinser countered that her campaign is focused on bolstering achievement for all students, no matter what type of school they attend.
Wisconsin is the only state where voters elect the top education official but there is no state board of education. That gives the person who runs the Department of Public Instruction broad authority to oversee education policy, which includes dispersing money to schools and managing teacher licensing.
Whoever wins will have to manage Wisconsin’s relationship with the Trump administration as it seeks to eliminate the federal Department of Education, which supports roughly 14% of public school budgets nationwide with an annual budget of $79 billion.
CLARIFICATION: The Associated Press updated this story to make clear that Kinser is an advocate for the state’s private school voucher program and public charter schools.
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.
The reasons for the beachings are unclear. Reasons could include disorientation caused by loud noises, illness, old age, injury, fleeing predators and severe weather.
(Image credit: Department of Natural Resources and Environment Tasmania)
A divided Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that a Republican Party official lacked the standing to bring a lawsuit challenging the use of a mobile voting van in 2022.
The lawsuit sought to ban the use of mobile voting vans in any future election in the presidential battleground state. The court did not address the legality of mobile voting sites in its ruling, meaning mobile voting vans could be used in future elections.
A single van has been used only once — in Racine in a primary election in 2022. It allowed voters to cast absentee ballots in the two weeks leading up to the election. Racine, the Democratic National Committee and others argue that nothing in state law prohibits the use of voting vans. City officials said that in light of the state Supreme Court ruling, they plan to use the van again during the state’s elections in April, calling it an important tool for ensuring all voters can cast their ballots.
The court did not rule on the merits of the case. Instead, it ruled 4-3 to dismiss the case, with four liberal justices in the majority and three conservative justices dissenting.
The Supreme Court ruled that the Racine County voter who brought the lawsuit, the county’s Republican Party chairman, Ken Brown, was not “aggrieved” under state law and therefore was not permitted to sue.
Brown filed a complaint the day after the August 2022 primary with the Wisconsin Elections Commission, arguing that the van violated state law. He argued that it was only sent to Democratic-leaning areas in the city in an illegal move to bolster turnout.
Racine city Clerk Tara McMenamin disputed those accusations, saying it shows a misunderstanding of the city’s voting wards, which traditionally skew Democratic.
The elections commission dismissed the complaint four days before the 2022 election, saying there was no probable cause shown to believe the law had been broken. Brown sued.
Justice Rebecca Bradley, who wrote the dissent in Tuesday’s ruling, said the ruling means that the elections commission’s decision will be left unreviewed by courts “and the People are left, once again, without a decision on fundamental issues of election law enacted to protect their sacred right to vote.”
Bradley said the ruling will make it more difficult for any voter who believes election law has been violated to bring lawsuits.
“The majority, once again, refashions the law to its own liking as it shuts the doors of the courthouse to voters,” Bradley wrote.
The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, a conservative law firm, represented Brown. The firm’s deputy counsel, Lucas Vebber, said in a statement that the ruling prevents Wisconsin residents from holding government officials accountable.
Wisconsin’s Democratic attorney general, Josh Kaul, praised the ruling, saying the decision means that “in-person absentee voting will remain widely available and won’t be unnecessarily restricted.”
Republicans in this case argued that it violates state law to operate mobile voting sites, that their repeated use would increase the chances of voter fraud, and that the one in Racine was used to bolster Democratic turnout.
Wisconsin law prohibits locating any early voting site in a place that gives an advantage to any political party. There are other limitations on early voting sites, including a requirement that they be “as near as practicable” to the clerk’s office.
For the 2022 election, McMenamin, the Racine clerk, and the city had a goal of making voting as accessible to as many voters as possible.
Racine purchased its van with grant money from the Center for Tech and Civic Life, a nonprofit funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife. Republicans have been critical of the grants, calling the money “Zuckerbucks” that they say was used to tilt turnout in Democratic areas.
The van was used only to facilitate early in-person voting during the two weeks prior to that 2022 election, McMenamin said. It traveled for two weeks across the city, allowing voters to cast in-person absentee ballots in 21 locations.
A Racine County Circuit Court judge sided with Republicans, ruling that state election laws do not allow for the use of mobile voting sites.
The elections commission argued on appeal that Brown did not have standing to seek an appeal in court of the commission’s decision. The law allows for anyone who is “aggrieved” by a commission order to seek judicial review, but the state Supreme Court said Brown failed to show how he suffered because of the commission’s decision.
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.
The Milwaukee public school district struggles with a “culture resistant to change” that has undermined its ability to function properly, disproportionately harming its most vulnerable students, an audit ordered by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and released on Thursday found.
Evers, who served as Wisconsin’s superintendent of schools before becoming governor, ordered the independent audit last year after it became known the district failed to submit financial reports to the state leading to the resignation of the district’s superintendent and the withholding of funding by state officials.
The audit found that the Milwaukee Public Schools district, which is the state’s largest, with more than 66,000 students, must make sweeping, high-level changes to be more transparent with parents and taxpayers.
“MPS must make systemic changes to ensure that students — particularly the most vulnerable — are at the center of every decision,” the audit by MGT of America Consulting said. “Ultimately, this work is in service of students, whose future success hinges on a district capable of delivering equitable, high-quality education.”
Auditors identified “critical issues stemming from leadership and staff turnover, fragmented planning, outdated systems, and unproductive reporting protocols, which have led to siloed operations and inefficient practices.”
Evers, in a statement, urged the district to quickly accept the audit’s 29 recommendations.
“This audit is a critical next step for getting MPS back on track and, ultimately, improving outcomes for our kids,” Evers said.
The school district said in a statement that the audit will serve as a guide for improvement.
“While acknowledging the need for focused support, the report makes clear that we have an opportunity to build on this momentum, strengthening our schools and communities while creating a more unified path forward,” the district said.
The audit was released two days after Milwaukee Public Schools announced it was hiring former Boston Public Schools Superintendent Brenda Cassellius as its new superintendent. The audit also comes amid a race for the state superintendent of schools, in which school and student performance is a top issue.
Evers made $5.5 million in public funds available for a pair of audits. The first one cost $2.5 million, and Evers said the remaining $3 million will be used to help the district implement the audit’s recommendations. He is proposing that an additional $5 million be spent to address future audit results, including one pending related to instruction.
The money would only be awarded if the state is satisfied that the district is making progress, Evers said.
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A liberal Wisconsin Supreme Court justice on Wednesday rejected a Republican request that she not hear a pending case that seeks to restore collective bargaining rights that tens of thousands of teachers, nurses and other state workers lost in 2011.
Her decision came at the same time the court, without comment, declined to hear the case as unions requested before it first goes through a lower appeals court.
Justice Janet Protasiewicz decided against recusing herself after Republican legislative leaders filed a motion saying she should not hear the case because she voiced opinions about the law during her 2023 campaign.
Her decision is a win for liberals who have fought for more than a decade to overturn the law known as Act 10, which effectively ended collective bargaining for most public unions.
Conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn withdrew from the case on Jan. 30. Hagedorn helped write the law when he was serving as then-Gov. Scott Walker’s chief legal counsel.
The court’s decision not to immediately hear the case means it is almost certain not to consider it until after the April 1 election. That election will determine whether liberals maintain their majority on the court. Even if the conservative wins, due to Hagedorn’s recusal, the court would be split 3-3 between liberal and conservative justices when considering the case.
Christina Brey, a spokesperson for the unions that brought the lawsuit, said they were disappointed in the delay but they remained confident.
Wisconsin’s anti-union law has been challenged for years
Seven unions representing teachers and other public workers in Wisconsin filed the lawsuit seeking to overturn the anti-union 2011 law, known as Act 10. The law had withstood numerous legal challenges before a Dane County circuit court judge in December found the bulk of it to be unconstitutional, setting up the appeal to the state Supreme Court.
The Act 10 law effectively ended collective bargaining for most public unions by allowing them to bargain solely over base wage increases no greater than inflation. It also disallowed the automatic withdrawal of union dues, required annual recertification votes for unions and forced public workers to pay more for health insurance and retirement benefits.
Dane County Circuit Judge Jacob Frost in December ruled that the law violates equal protection guarantees in the Wisconsin Constitution by dividing public employees into “general” and “public safety” employees. Under the ruling, all public sector workers who lost their collective bargaining power would have it restored to what was in place before 2011.
The judge put the ruling on hold pending the appeal.
The union law divided Wisconsin and the country
The law’s introduction in 2011 spurred massive protests that stretched on for weeks. It made Wisconsin the center of a national fight over union rights, catapulted Walker onto the national stage, sparked an unsuccessful recall campaign and laid the groundwork for Walker’s failed 2016 presidential bid.
The law’s adoption led to a dramatic decrease in union membership across the state. The nonpartisan Wisconsin Policy Forum said in a 2022 analysis that since 2000, Wisconsin had the largest decline in the proportion of its workforce that is unionized.
In 2015, the GOP-controlled Wisconsin Legislature approved a right-to-work law that limited the power of private-sector unions.
If the lawsuit is successful, all public sector workers who lost their collective bargaining power will have it restored. They would be treated the same as the police, firefighter and other public safety unions that remain exempt.
Divisions remain over the effectiveness of the law
Supporters of the law have said it gave local governments more control over workers and the powers they needed to cut costs. Repealing the law, which allowed schools and local governments to raise money through higher employee contributions for benefits, would bankrupt those entities, backers of Act 10 have argued.
Democratic opponents argue that the law has hurt schools and other government agencies by taking away the ability of employees to collectively bargain for their pay and working conditions.
Republicans wanted Protasiewicz not to hear the case
Protasiewicz is the court’s newest member and ran in 2023 as an opponent of the union law. Her victory gave liberals the majority on the court for the first time in 15 years. That majority is on the line again in the April 1 Supreme Court election to fill the seat of a retiring liberal justice.
Protasiewicz said during her campaign that she believes Act 10 is unconstitutional. She also told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that she would consider recusing herself from any case challenging the law. Protasiewicz participated in protests against it and signed the petition to recall Walker.
In her response to the Legislature’s request that she not hear the case, Protasiewicz said she could hear the case fairly.
“I am confident that I can, in fact and appearance, act in an impartial manner in this case,” she said.
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.
A Wisconsin couple is suing Walgreens and a pharmacy benefits management company, alleging that their son died because he couldn’t afford a sudden $500 spike in his asthma medication.
Shanon and William Schmidtknecht of Poynette filed their lawsuit in federal court in Milwaukee on Jan. 21, a year to the day that their son Cole died at age 22.
According to the lawsuit, Cole Schmidtknecht suffered from asthma all his life. He managed it with daily inhaler doses of the medication Advair Diskus and its generic equivalents.
He stopped at a Walgreens pharmacy in Appleton on Jan. 10, 2024, to refill his prescription and was told the cost had jumped from $66 to $539 out-of-pocket. Unable to afford the new cost, he left the pharmacy without the medication. He tried to manage his condition with his rescue inhaler but suffered a fatal asthma attack days later, according to the lawsuit.
The Schmidtknechts allege that pharmacy benefits management company OptumRX violated Wisconsin law by raising the cost of the medication without a valid medical reason and failing to provide 30 days’ advance notice of drug price increases.
Pharmacy benefits managers act as intermediaries between health insurance companies, prescription drug companies and pharmacies. Optum Rx services prescription claims for more than 66 million people across the United States, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit alleges that the Walgreens pharmacy staffers failed to offer Cole any workarounds to obtain his usual medication. They told him there were no cheaper alternatives or generic medications available, they didn’t contact OptumRx to request an exception on Cole’s behalf, and they didn’t ask Cole’s doctor to request an exception for him, his parents contend.
The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages.
“The conduct of both OptumRx and Walgreens was deplorable,” one of the family’s attorneys, Michael Trunk, said in a statement. “The evidence in this case will show that both OptumRx and Walgreens put profits first, and are directly responsible for Cole’s death.”
OptumRx spokespeople didn’t immediately reply to Wednesday messages seeking comment. In a statement last April extending sympathy to the family, the company said that a review of Cole’s claims showed that on the day he visited the pharmacy, he did buy a different asthma medication, generic Albuterol, for a $5 co-pay on Jan. 10 — a medication that it says he also obtained in October 2023. His case was handled “consistent with industry practice and the patient’s insurance plan design,” the company said.
Trunk, though, said Wednesday that the $5 generic prescription Cole filled was for his rescue inhaler, not the Advair Diskus inhaler that he took daily. He said Cole was not able to fill his Advair Diskus prescription because it had suddenly become too expensive.
Walgreens officials didn’t immediately respond to a Wednesday email seeking comment on the lawsuit.
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.
A new television attack ad in Wisconsin’s hotly contested Supreme Court race features a doctored image of the liberal candidate, a move that her campaign claims could be a violation of a recently enacted state law.
The image in question is of Susan Crawford, a Dane County circuit court judge. It appeared in a new TV ad paid for by the campaign of her opponent Brad Schimel, a Waukesha County circuit court judge.
The winner of the high-stakes race on April 1 will determine whether the Wisconsin Supreme Court remains under a liberal majority or flips to conservative control.
The Schimel campaign ad begins and ends with a black-and-white image of Crawford with her lips closed together. A nearly identical color image from her 2018 run for Dane County Circuit Court shows Crawford with a wide smile on her face.
Crawford’s campaign accused Schimel of manipulating the image, potentially in violation of a state law enacted last year. The law, passed with bipartisan support in the Legislature and signed by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, requires disclosure if political ads use audio or video content created by generative artificial intelligence. Failure to disclose the use of AI as required can result in a $1,000 fine.
“Schimel will try to manipulate images and the facts because he’s desperate to hide his own record of failure,” Crawford spokesperson Derrick Honeyman said in a statement.
Schimel’s campaign spokesperson Jacob Fischer said the image was “edited” but not created by AI.
Peter Loge, the director of the Project on Ethics in Political Communication at George Washington University, said images should never be changed to give a false impression.
“That said, as these things go, it’s not that egregious,” Loge said of the Schimel ad.
He pointed to numerous other examples of images being doctored for use in political ads, including one in 2015 by a political action committee supporting Wisconsin Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson. The image showed then-President Barack Obama smiling and shaking hands with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. In 2020, U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar, a Republican from Arizona, posted the fake image again on social media.
Obama and Rouhani never met. The image was fake.
A doctored image was also used last year in a television ad in the Indiana governor’s race.
“A good rule of thumb is to take everything with a grain of salt,” Loge said. “Just because you see it on television or on the internet doesn’t mean it’s true.”
The Schimel ad attacks Crawford over the release of a convicted rapist in 2001 because the state’s office of criminal appeals missed the deadline to appeal to the state Supreme Court. Crawford headed the division at the time, but the error miscalculating the appeal deadline was made by another attorney in the office and by two secretaries, according to a report by the attorney general.
“Crawford didn’t bother filing the appeal in time, letting the rapist walk free,” the Schimel ad claims.
After that error was discovered, Crawford ordered a review of every pending appeal’s deadline and personally calculated the deadline for petitions for review to the state Supreme Court. Republican officeholders at the time who investigated what happened, including then-state Rep. Scott Walker, said the error was an isolated incident.
Schimel served one term as attorney general between 2015 and 2019 when Walker was governor. Walker appointed Schimel as a judge the day after Schimel lost reelection in 2018.
Elon Musk is rapidly consolidating control over large swaths of the federal government with President Donald Trump ’s blessing, sidelining career officials, gaining access to sensitive databases and dismantling a leading source of humanitarian assistance.
The speed and scope of his work has been nothing short of stunning. In a little more than two weeks since Trump took office, the world’s richest man has created an alternative power structure inside the federal government for the purpose of cutting spending and pushing out employees. None of this is happening with congressional approval, inviting a constitutional clash over the limits of presidential authority.
Trump says Musk is doing his bidding
Musk has been named as a special government employee, which subjects him to less stringent rules on ethics and financial disclosures than other workers. Trump has given Musk office space in the White House complex where he oversees a team of people at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. The team has been dispersed throughout federal agencies to gather information and deliver edicts. Some of them were spotted on Monday at the Department of Education, which Trump has vowed to abolish.
Republicans defend Musk as simply carrying out Trump’s slash-and-burn campaign promises. Trump made no secret of his desire to put Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur behind the electric automaker Tesla and the rocket company SpaceX, in charge of retooling the federal government.
“Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday.
The Republican president also played downs concerns about Musk’s conflict of interests as he flexes his power over the bureaucracy even though his businesses face regulatory scrutiny and have federal contracts.
“Where we think there’s a conflict or there’s a problem, we won’t let him go near it, but he has some very good ideas,” Trump said.
Musk persists in spite of Democrats’ outrage
Democrats, for their part, accused Musk of leading a coup from within the government by amassing unaccountable and illegal power.
The early days of the Trump administration are “looking more like a coup in a transition,” says U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wisconsin. She is shown speaking to reporters at a University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Pharmacy tour on Feb. 3, 2025. (Phoebe Petrovic / Wisconsin Watch)
“We will do everything in our power in the Senate and the House to stop this outrage,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland said. “And in the meantime, since we don’t have many Republican colleagues who want to help us, we are doing everything we can with our colleagues through the courts to make sure that we uphold the rule of law.”
Speaking to reporters in Madison, Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wisconsin, said the early days of Trump’s new administration are “looking more like a coup than a transition.”
She called on Republicans to join Democrats in pushing back through an “all-hands-on-deck” approach.
The apex of Musk’s work so far came on Monday at the Washington headquarters for the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, where yellow police tape blocked access to the lobby and hundreds of employees were locked out of computer systems. Musk said Trump had agreed to let him shutter the agency.
“It’s not an apple with a worm in it, what we have is just a ball of worms,” Musk said of the world’s largest provider of humanitarian, development and security assistance. “You’ve got to basically get rid of the whole thing. It’s beyond repair.”
Federal workers are in unchartered territory
Musk has also turned his attention to the General Services Administration, or GSA, which manages federal government buildings. An email sent last week from the Washington headquarters instructed regional managers to begin terminating leases on roughly 7,500 federal offices nationwide.
The initiative is being led by Nicole Hollander, according to an agency employee who requested anonymity to discuss internal matters. Hollander describes herself on LinkedIn as an employee at X, Musk’s social media platform.
“This has gone beyond the pale. This is out of control. This is not a normal situation,” said Keya Chatterjee, executive director of Free DC, a local advocacy organization. She participated in a protest on Monday outside the Office of Personnel Management, which is one of the lesser-known federal agencies key to Musk’s agenda.
Musk’s work has unnerved federal employees who are being nudged toward the exits. On Sunday night, concerns swept through the workforce that they could be locked out of internal human resources system, denying them access to their own personnel files that showed pay history, length of service and qualifications. Supervisors in some agencies encouraged employees to download their records, called an SF-50, to personal computers so that they could prove their employment history in the event of disputes.
Musk’s penchant for dabbling
Musk has been tinkering with things his entire life, learning to code as a child in South Africa and becoming rich with the online payment company PayPal. He bought the social media platform Twitter a little more than two years ago, renamed it X and slashed its workforce while turning it into his personal political megaphone.
Now Musk is popping open the hood on the federal government like it’s one of his cars or rockets.
“The Silicon Valley playbook to disrupt the status quo — by disregarding and disobeying rules that you don’t like — is in full effect here,” said Rob Lalka, an expert on entrepreneurship and innovation in business at Tulane University.
One of the most significant steps was gaining access to the U.S. Treasury payment system, which is responsible for 1 billion payments per year totaling $5 trillion. It includes sensitive information involving bank accounts and Social Security payments.
“No one outside of the staff doing the work ever asked to have access to the payment files,” said Richard Gregg, who spent four decades working for Treasury and oversaw the payment system as fiscal assistant secretary.
It’s unclear what Musk wants to do with the payment system. He’s claimed that he could trim $1 trillion from the federal deficit “just by addressing waste, fraud and abuse.”
“That’s the biggest data hack ever in the world,” Baldwin said. “I am outraged about it.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent must revoke Musk’s access to the payment system.
“We must halt this unlawful and dangerous power grab,” he said on Capitol Hill.
A group representing retirees and union workers sued Bessent and the Treasury Department on Monday to get them to stop sharing personal and financial information with DOGE.
Trump rewards Musk’s fealty
Musk’s role is partially a reward for his work on behalf of Trump during the campaign. He spent roughly $250 million supporting Trump through America PAC, which included door-to-door canvassing and digital advertising.
Although the PAC has not announced its next plans, Musk has suggested that he could endorse primary challenges to Republican lawmakers who defy Trump’s agenda.
“The more I’ve gotten to know President Trump, the more I like him,” Musk said in a conversation streamed live on X. “Frankly, I love the guy. He’s great.”
Musk also described his work overhauling the federal government in existential terms, making it clear that he would push as hard and as far as he could.
“If it’s not possible now, it will never be possible. This is our shot,” he said. “This is the best hand of cards we’re ever going to have. If we don’t take advantage of this best hand of cards, it’s never going to happen.”
Phoebe Petrovic of Wisconsin Watch contributed reporting.
A conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court justice said Thursday he will not participate in a pending case that will determine whether tens of thousands of public sector workers regain collective bargaining rights that were taken away by a 2011 law.
Justice Brian Hagedorn drafted the law, known as Act 10, when he was chief legal counsel for then-Gov. Scott Walker. His decision to recuse himself from the case leaves the court with four liberal justices and two conservatives.
The Republican-controlled Legislature earlier this week asked that liberal Justice Janet Protasiewicz not hear the case because before she joined the court she called the law unconstitutional, signed a petition to recall Walker during the fight over the law and marched on the Capitol in protest in 2011.
Hagedorn, in a brief two-page order, said the law commands that he not hear the case. Democratic lawmakers on Tuesday had called on him to step aside.
“The issues raised involve matters for which I provided legal counsel in both the initial crafting and later defense of Act 10, including in a case raising nearly identical claims under the federal constitution,” Hagedorn wrote.
Protasiewicz has not responded to the call that she step aside. Even if she did, the court would still have a 3-2 liberal majority.
She did not participate Thursday in an incremental ruling related to the case.
A Dane County circuit judge last month overturned the bulk of the law, saying it violates equal protection guarantees in the Wisconsin Constitution by dividing public employees into “general” and “public safety” employees. Under the ruling, all public sector workers who lost their collective bargaining power would have it restored to what was in place before 2011.
The judge put the ruling on hold pending the appeal. School worker unions that brought the lawsuit have asked the Supreme Court to take it directly, skipping the appeals court. The Wisconsin Supreme Court has not yet decided whether to take the case.
Now, Hagedorn will not participate in that decision or any others related to the lawsuit.
Supporters of the law have said it provided local governments more control over workers and the powers they needed to cut costs. Repealing the law, which allowed schools and local governments to raise money through higher employee contributions for benefits, would bankrupt those entities, backers of Act 10 have argued.
Democratic opponents argue that the law has hurt schools and other government agencies by taking away the ability of employees to collectively bargain for their pay and working conditions.
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.
The study found that some local communities near tiger habitats have also benefited from the increase in tigers because of the foot traffic and revenues brought in by ecotourism.
The recognition acknowledges the mountain's theft from the Māori after New Zealand was colonized. It fulfills an agreement from the country's government to Indigenous people.
The liberal candidate for the Wisconsin Supreme Court participated in a briefing with Democratic donors billed as a “chance to put two more House seats in play,” a move that Republicans say shows that she is committed to redrawing congressional districts to benefit Democrats.
The event is just one of many partisan gatherings the candidates in the nonpartisan-in-name-only race have attended. Both candidates are also accepting large donations from partisans, including the Democratic and Republican parties, as both sides fight for control of the court in the battleground state.
Waukesha County Judge Brad Schimel, a former Republican attorney general, faces liberal Dane County Circuit Judge Susan Crawford in the April 1 election. The race will determine whether liberals maintain their 4-3 majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court or it flips to conservative control.
The 2023 Wisconsin Supreme Court race, which was also for ideological control of the court, was the most expensive judicial race in U.S. history. This year’s race is shaping up to be even more expensive and has already garnered national attention from multibillionaire Elon Musk, a Donald Trump loyalist.
The possibility of redrawing Wisconsin’s congressional district boundaries is just one of several major issues the court could tackle, in addition to abortion rights, election laws and union rights. The liberal-controlled court in December 2023 ordered new legislative maps, which Democrats credited with them gaining seats in November.
Now Democrats are hoping the court will redraw congressional lines. The state Supreme Court in March declined to take up a congressional redistricting case brought by Democrats.
The Wisconsin Republican Party on Wednesday accused Crawford of “selling two of Wisconsin’s seats” in Congress because of her participation in an event with Democratic donors organized by the liberal group Focus for Democracy. The email invitation to the Jan. 13 event billed it as a “chance to put two more House seats in play for 2026.”
The New York Times first reported on the event, saying it was organized by California billionaire and Democratic megadonor Reid Hoffman. Wisconsin Democratic Party Chairman Ben Wikler, who is running for the Democratic National Committee chair, appeared at the event with Crawford.
“In an appeal to entice out-of-state billionaires, Susan Crawford said the quiet part out loud: she is begging to be bought and paid for,” Wisconsin Republican Party Chairman Brian Schimming said in a statement Wednesday.
Schimel’s campaign said Crawford sees the Supreme Court seat “as a political weapon used to undermine the Wisconsin people and deliver favors to out-of-state, liberal elites.”
“Susan Crawford has proven she will do anything in her pursuit of power, even offer congressional seats for support of her campaign,” the Schimel statement said.
Crawford’s campaign spokesperson Derrick Honeyman said in a statement that Crawford is running to be a “fair, impartial, and common sense justice.”
“She has not publicly or privately commented on congressional redistricting at any time and was on this call briefly to share her background and why she’s running,” Honeyman said.
Honeyman pointed to partisan events that Schimel has attended, including an inaugural gala for Trump in Washington, D.C. Schimel also traveled the state talking with county Republican parties and other conservative groups. Schimel has said he expects conservative outside groups to spend between $10 million and $15 million on the race.
The Wisconsin Democratic Party has given $1 million to Crawford’s campaign. Democrats also spent millions last year trying to flip two of the state’s congressional districts but were unsuccessful.
Democrats have long targeted the 1st Congressional District in southeast Wisconsin held by Republican Rep. Bryan Steil and western Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District held by Republican Rep. Derrick Van Orden.
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.
The Republican-controlled Wisconsin Legislature on Tuesday asked that a liberal state Supreme Court justice step aside in a pending case that seeks to overturn a 2011 law that effectively ended collective bargaining for most state workers.
If Justice Janet Protasiewicz agrees not to hear the case, the court would be deadlocked 3-3 between liberals and conservatives. The lawsuit has massive implications for union rights in the battleground state.
A Dane County Circuit Court judge last month overturned the bulk of the law, saying it violates equal protection guarantees in the Wisconsin Constitution by dividing public employees into “general” and “public safety” employees. Under the ruling, all public sector workers who lost their collective bargaining power would have it restored to what was in place before 2011.
The judge put the ruling on hold pending the appeal. School workers unions that brought the lawsuit have asked the Supreme Court to take it directly, skipping the appeals court. The Wisconsin Supreme Court, controlled 4-3 by liberals, has not yet decided whether to take the case.
Republicans enacted the law in the face of massive protests 14 years ago that made Wisconsin the center of the national fight over union rights. The debate also catapulted then-Gov. Scott Walker onto the national stage, sparked an unsuccessful recall campaign and laid the groundwork for his failed 2016 presidential bid. The law’s adoption led to a dramatic decrease in union membership across the state.
Protasiewicz is the court’s newest member and ran in 2023 as an opponent of the union law, known as Act 10. Her victory gave liberals the majority on the court for the first time in 15 years. That majority is on the line again in the April 1 Supreme Court election to fill the seat of a retiring liberal justice.
Protasiewicz said during the campaign that she believes Act 10 is unconstitutional. She also told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that she would consider recusing herself from any case challenging the law. Protasiewicz participated in protests against it and signed the petition to recall Walker.
The Legislature’s top Republicans, Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, said Tuesday that it would be “right and ethical” for her to step aside. The motion seeking her recusal references comments she made during the campaign about coming from a union background, her belief that the law was unconstitutional and her opposition to Walker.
“Recusal is warranted because of the appearance that she has prejudged the merits of this case,” Republicans argued in the motion.
Protasiewicz declined to comment when asked via email if she would recuse herself. The decision on whether to do so is entirely hers.
Jacob Karabell, attorney for the unions seeking to overturn the law, called the recusal request “meritless” and an attempt to delay a final ruling.
Protasiewicz is not the only justice on the court with a potential conflict.
Conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn was Walker’s chief legal counsel and had a role in drafting Act 10. During his successful run for the court in 2019, Hagedorn would not promise to recuse himself if a case challenging Act 10 came before the court.
No motion has been filed with the court asking Hagedorn to step aside, but Democratic legislative leaders on Tuesday said he should. Hagedorn did not respond to an email seeking comment.
If both Protasiewicz and Hagedorn recused themselves, liberals would have a 3-2 advantage.
Supporters of the law have said it provided local governments more control over workers and the powers they needed to cut costs. Repealing the law, which allowed schools and local governments to raise money through higher employee contributions for benefits, would bankrupt those entities, backers of Act 10 have argued.
Democratic opponents argue that the law has hurt schools and other government agencies by taking away the ability of employees to collectively bargain for their pay and working conditions.
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Wisconsin Democratic Gov. Tony Evers used his seventh State of the State speech Wednesday to urge the GOP-controlled Legislature to enact a wide range of proposals Republicans have rejected in the past, including numerous gun control measures just a month after there was a school shooting not far from the state Capitol.
Republicans were quick to dismiss his proposals, much as they have the past six years.
Here’s what to know about the speech from Evers, a Democrat who may run for a third term next year in the battleground state:
Bipartisan approach to immigration and health care
Evers, without mentioning President Donald Trump by name, said “there is a lot of angst about what may happen in the days, months and years ahead.”
“I have always been willing to work with anyone who is willing to do the right thing for the people of Wisconsin,” Evers said. “And that has not changed. But I will not compromise on our Wisconsin values of treating people with kindness, dignity, empathy, and respect.”
Evers called for bipartisan efforts to address immigration.
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said Republicans would next week introduce a bill that requires cooperation with federal law enforcement officials who are working to deport people who have committed a crime and are in the country illegally.
“He didn’t pay attention to what happened in this state in the election in November,” Assembly Majority Leader Tyler August said of Evers. “President Trump won Wisconsin, and one of the cornerstones of his campaign was about illegal immigration. … He’s clearly pushing back against the president.”
Wisconsin is one of the “blue wall” states that Trump won in 2016 but lost in 2020. Trump carried Wisconsin in 2024 on his way back to the White House.
Gun control is renewed priority despite Republican opposition
Evers called for a series of gun control measures five weeks after a school shooting just 6 miles from the Capitol left a teacher and a 14-year-old student dead. The 15-year-old shooter shot and killed herself.
Evers called for universal background checks for gun purchases and restoring a 48-hour waiting period for gun purchases, a law that Republicans repealed in 2015.
He also called for banning the purchase of “ghost guns” and closing a loophole that allows for domestic abusers to own firearms.
Evers also called for incentives and new requirements to safely secure firearms and a “red flag” law that would allow judges to take guns away from people determined to be a risk to themselves or others.
Republican legislative leaders said that all of the gun control measures would be rejected.
The governor last week created a state office for violence prevention, which Republicans vowed not to fund after federal funding runs out in two years.
Evers, a former teacher and state superintendent of schools, also called for spending $300 million to provide comprehensive mental health services in schools statewide. That would be 10 times the amount the Legislature approved for school mental health services in the last budget.
Republicans vow to reject proposals, push for cutting taxes instead
Republican leaders immediately rejected the bulk of what Evers called for, saying they instead would be pushing for a tax cut of nearly $1,000 for every taxpayer in the state.
Evers’ speech “was chock full of liberal wishes, empty promises and a whole lot of things that are not going to happen in Wisconsin,” Vos said.
Declaring 2025 as “The Year of the Kid,” Evers called on Republicans to approve $500 million to lower the cost of child care. The bulk of that would go toward funding the Child Care Counts program for the next two years. Without more funding, the program — which was created during the COVID-19 pandemic — is slated to end in June.
Republicans said they would not support that additional funding.
Evers also called for creating new programs designed to set price ceilings for prescription drugs and improve oversight of drug companies, removing the state sales tax on over-the-counter medications and capping the copay on insulin at $35.
In an emotional moment, Evers welcomed the widow and parents of former state Rep. Jonathan Brostoff, who died by suicide in November. Evers, his voice cracking with emotion, talked about Brostoff’s death when introducing a new program that would allow people to temporarily and voluntarily register to prevent themselves from purchasing a firearm.
Vos said that invoking Brostoff was a “cheap political stunt” and “kind of sad.”
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The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Friday rejected an attempt by a conservative activist to obtain guardianship records in an effort to find ineligible voters, but the case could return.
The court did not rule on the merits of the case, instead saying in its 5-2 decision that a lower appeals court did not follow proper procedure when it issued a ruling saying the records should be released.
Here’s what to know:
Conservative activist brought the case
The case tested the line between protecting personal privacy rights and ensuring that ineligible people can’t vote.
Former travel agent Ron Heuer and a group he leads, the Wisconsin Voter Alliance, allege that the number of ineligible voters doesn’t match the count on Wisconsin’s voter registration list. Heuer asked the state Supreme Court to rule that counties must release records filed when a judge determines that someone isn’t competent to vote so that those names can be compared to the voter registration list.
Justices lean on technicality to reject the case
The justices said the District II appeals court, based in Waukesha, was wrong to overturn a Walworth County Circuit Court ruling denying access to the records. In a nearly identical lawsuit, the District IV appeals court, based in Madison, had denied access to the records saying they were not subject to disclosure under the state public records law.
Justice Janet Protasiewicz, writing for the majority, said that the District II appeals court could have sent the case to the Supreme Court, explaining why the other appeals court ruling was incorrect.
If it follows the proper procedure for doing that, the case could end up right back before the Supreme Court again. In the meantime, the Supreme Court sent the case back to the appeals court for further action.
All four liberal justices were joined by conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn in the majority. He said the different branches of the appeals court must be unified in their actions.
Chief Justice Annette Ziegler and Justice Rebecca Bradley, both conservatives, dissented, saying the court “leaves unresolved issues of great importance to voters, election officials, and people from whom courts have removed the right to vote due to incompetency.”
Sam Hall, the attorney for Walworth County, praised the ruling.
“We all agree that election integrity is fundamental and our citizens must have confidence in our elective process, while also respecting the dignity of those individuals subject to guardianship orders,” he said.
A court has the power to remove the right to vote from a person under a guardianship order if the person is determined to be unable to understand “the objective of the election process.”
The attorney for Heuer did not immediately return an email seeking comment.
Case was one of several targeting 2020 election
The case was an attempt by those who questioned the outcome of the 2020 presidential race to cast doubt on the integrity of elections in the presidential swing state. Heuer and the WVA filed lawsuits in 13 Wisconsin counties in 2022 seeking guardianship records.
The District II appeals court in 2023 overturned a circuit court ruling dismissing the case and found that the records are public. It ordered Walworth County to release them with birthdates and case numbers redacted.
Heuer and the WVA have pushed conspiracy theories about the 2020 election in a failed attempt to overturn President Joe Biden’s win in Wisconsin. Heuer was hired as an investigator in the discredited 2020 election probe led by former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman that found no evidence of fraud or abuse that would have changed the election results.
The WVA also filed two unsuccessful lawsuits that sought to overturn Biden’s win in Wisconsin.
There are no pending lawsuits challenging the results of the 2024 election or calls to investigate the outcome.
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.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court heard arguments Thursday over whether a Republican-controlled legislative committee’s rejection of a state agency rule that would ban the practice of “conversion therapy” for LGBTQ+ people was unconstitutional.
The challenge comes amid the national battle over LGBTQ+ rights. It is also part of a broader effort by the Democratic governor, who has vetoed Republican bills targeting transgender high school athletes, to rein in the power of the GOP-controlled Legislature.
Here are things to know about the case:
What is ‘conversion therapy’?
So-called “conversion therapy” is the scientifically discredited practice of using therapy to “convert” LGBTQ+ people to heterosexuality or traditional gender expectations.
The practice has been banned in 20 states and in more than a dozen communities across Wisconsin. Since April 2024, the Wisconsin professional licensing board for therapists, counselors and social workers has labeled “conversion therapy” as unprofessional conduct.
Advocates seeking to ban the practice want to forbid mental health professionals in the state from counseling clients with the goal of changing their sexual orientation or gender identity.
Fair Wisconsin, the only statewide LGBTQ+ civil rights and political advocacy organization, has heard about “conversion therapy” happening across the state, said the group’s executive director, Abigail Swetz.
However, accurate data about how often it is happening is hard to come by, she said. There would be some data if the ban is enacted and the state is able to take action against licensed practitioners, but that wouldn’t include attempts at “conversion therapy” made by religious institutions, Swetz said.
What is happening in Wisconsin?
The provision barring “conversion therapy” in Wisconsin has been blocked twice by the Legislature’s powerful Joint Committee for the Review of Administrative Rules — a Republican-controlled panel in charge of approving state agency regulations.
The case before the liberal-controlled Wisconsin Supreme Court will determine whether the ban survives. The court will also determine if that legislative committee has been overreaching its authority in blocking a variety of other state regulations during Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ administration.
The lawsuit brought by Evers targets two votes by the joint committee. One deals with the Department of Safety and Professional Services’ “conversion therapy” ban. The other vote blocked an update to the state’s commercial building standards.
Republicans who supported suspending the “conversion therapy” ban have insisted the issue isn’t the policy itself, but whether the licensing board had the authority to take the action it did.
Evers has been trying since 2020 to get the ban enacted, but the Legislature has stopped it from going into effect.
Justices question how far legislative power goes
Liberal Justice Jill Karofsky focused on the “conversion therapy” rule, calling the practice “beyond horrific.”
“There are real lives that are at risk here,” she said. “This is hurting people.”
Other justices focused on whether the Legislature or the governor has the power to issue administrative rules.
The Legislature’s attorney Misha Tseytlin said decades of precedent are on his side, including a 1992 Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling upholding the Legislature’s right to suspend state agency rules. Overturning that ruling would be deeply disruptive, he argued.
Evers, in arguing that the ruling should be overturned, said in court filings that by blocking the rule, the legislative committee is taking over powers that the state constitution assigns to the governor. The 1992 ruling conflicts with the constitution and has “proved unworkable,” Evers said.
Conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley said the state constitution clearly gives the power to the Legislature.
“Nowhere do I see that the people ever consented to be governed by an administrative state instead of their representatives in the Legislature,” she said.
The issue goes beyond ‘conversion therapy’
The “conversion therapy” ban is one of several rules that have been blocked by the legislative committee. Others pertain to environmental regulations, vaccine requirements and public health protections.
Evers argues in the lawsuit that the panel has effectively been exercising an unconstitutional “legislative veto.”
The court sided with Evers in one issue brought in the lawsuit, ruling 6-1 in July that another legislative committee was illegally preventing the state Department of Natural Resources from spending money on a land stewardship program.
The issue related to state regulations was broken out and heard Thursday.
The court, controlled 4-3 by liberal justices, will issue a written ruling in the coming months.
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.
Wisconsin’s photo ID requirement for voting would be elevated from a state law to a constitutional amendment under a proposal approved Tuesday in the Republican-controlled Assembly with no support from Democrats.
The proposed constitutional amendment will appear on the April 1 ballot for voter consideration. It would need to be approved by voters before the constitution would be amended. Even if voters reject it, the voter ID requirement that has been in state law since 2011 will remain in place.
Republicans, citing Wisconsin polls that showed broad support for voter ID requirements, hailed the measure as a way to bolster election security and protect the law from being overturned in court.
But Democrats said photo ID requirements are often enforced unfairly, making it more difficult for people of color, people with disabilities and poor people to vote. Democrats argued that lawmakers should focus instead on other issues such as gun control, clean water, affordable housing, and expanding access to child care.
If voters agree to place the photo ID requirement in the constitution, it would make it more difficult for a future Legislature controlled by Democrats to change a law they’ve long opposed. Any constitutional amendment must be approved in two consecutive legislative sessions and by a statewide vote of the people.
Wisconsin is one of nine states where voters must present a photo ID to cast a ballot, and its requirement is the strictest in the country, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Thirty-six states have laws requiring or requesting that voters show some sort of identification at the polls, according to NCSL.
Other states have taken similar steps in recent years to put voter ID requirements in their constitutions, with mixed success. Voters approved it in Mississippi in 2011 and North Carolina voters in 2018, while Minnesota voters rejected it in 2012.
The Republican-controlled Wisconsin Legislature first passed the state’s voter ID law in 2011. It took effect briefly in 2012, but courts that year put it on hold until 2016 after state and federal courts allowed it to take effect.
The Legislature last session approved the voter ID constitutional amendment for the first time. The measure was the first proposal considered by the Legislature this year. The state Senate passed it last week along a party line vote, with all Republicans in support and Democrats against.
The Assembly on Tuesday gave it the final approval needed, also on a party line vote, sending it to the ballot for voter consideration.
It will be the sixth ballot measure the Legislature has placed on the ballot over the past year. Amending the constitution puts questions before voters and avoids potential vetoes by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers.
Evers this month proposed giving citizens the ability to put measures on the ballot through a referendum process. Evers on Tuesday renewed that call, which Republicans oppose.
“If Republican lawmakers are going to continue ignoring the will of the people and legislating by constitutional amendment, then they should give the people of Wisconsin the power to pass the policies they want to see at the ballot box,” Evers said in a statement.
Lawmakers moved quickly because of a Jan. 21 deadline to get the issue on the April 1 ballot.
Control of the state Supreme Court also hangs in the balance in that April election. The race for an open seat will determine whether liberals maintain control for at least the next three years. The Democratic-backed candidate, Dane County Circuit Judge Susan Crawford, was the lead attorney in a 2011 lawsuit challenging the voter ID law.
There are no pending legal challenges to voter ID.
Even if the amendment is approved, lawmakers could still decide what types of photo IDs are acceptable. Voters without a photo ID could still cast a provisional ballot, as they can now. The ballot is counted if the voter returns later with a photo ID.
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.
Republicans who control the Wisconsin Legislature are moving quickly to place a measure on the April ballot to enshrine the state’s already strict voter ID requirement into the state constitution.
The move would make it more difficult for Democrats to soften the 14-year-old law or overturn the requirement in court. Other states have taken similar steps in recent years to put voter ID requirements in the constitution. Voters approved it in Mississippi in 2011 and North Carolina voters in 2018, while Minnesota voters rejected it in 2012.
The voter ID constitutional amendment is the first proposal being considered by the Wisconsin Legislature this year. The session began Monday, there was a public hearing Tuesday, and the Senate was approved it Wednesday. The Assembly was expected to give final approval next week.
Democrats on Tuesday accused Republicans of rushing to enshrine a requirement that they argue makes it more difficult to vote.
“I’m irritated,” Democratic Sen. LaTonya Johnson said at the hearing Tuesday, held less than 24 hours after lawmakers were sworn into office. “There are definitely more important issues than this.”
Johnson noted that the proposal was coming three weeks after a school shooting about 6 miles from the state Capitol but was taking precedence over gun control measures. A student shot and killed a fellow student and teacher before killing herself.
Constitutional amendments must pass the Legislature in two consecutive sessions and then be approved by voters before taking effect. The Legislature passed the voter ID proposal last session and must approve it again by Jan. 21 to get it on the April ballot for voter approval.
Control of the state Supreme Court also hangs in the balance in that April election. The race for an open seat will determine whether liberals maintain control for at least the next three years. The Democratic-backed candidate, Dane County Circuit Judge Susan Crawford, was the lead attorney in a 2011 lawsuit challenging the voter ID law.
Republican Sen. Van Wanggaard, lead sponsor of the measure, said Tuesday that he was “not willing to risk” the law being struck down by the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
There are no pending legal challenges to voter ID, even though the state Supreme Court has sided with Democrats in other major cases, including throwing out Republican-drawn legislative maps and overturning a ban on absentee ballot drop boxes.
“We can be sure that a new lawsuit challenging its constitutionality is coming,” Wanggaard said.
Enshrining the requirement in the constitution would make it more difficult for a future Legislature controlled by Democrats to change than a state law.
Democrats who have long opposed voter ID also picked up seats in the Legislature in November under newly enacted maps more friendly to them and are hoping to regain majority control of at least the state Senate in two years.
The possibility of Democrats regaining majority control has led Republicans to enact a number of constitutional amendments to protect laws they have passed.
Republicans put five constitutional amendments before voters last year, the most in a single year since 1982, and four more could be on the ballot in the next two years.
Democratic Gov. Tony Evers has proposed giving voters the ability to place constitutional amendments and other proposals on the ballot, going around the Legislature. Republican leaders signaled that would be rejected.
Polls have shown wide public support for a voter ID law, despite opposition from Democrats and advocates who say it makes it harder for people to vote, especially older people and those without an ID.
Even if the amendment is approved, lawmakers could still decide what types of photo IDs are acceptable. Voters without a photo ID could still cast a provisional ballot, as they can now. The ballot is counted if the voter returns later with a photo ID.
Wisconsin enacted its law in 2011, one of the first actions Republicans took after they gained majority control from Democrats after the 2010 election.
Wisconsin is one of nine states where voters must present a photo ID to cast a ballot, the strictest requirement in the country, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. A total of 36 states have laws requiring or requesting that voters show some sort of identification at the polls, according to NCSL.
Wisconsin’s voter ID law has been challenged in whole or in part numerous times since it was enacted, but the requirement has survived.
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.
Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers’ plan to let voters repeal and create state laws without legislative involvement met opposition on Monday from Republican leaders of the Legislature, who signaled that the idea is likely to be rejected for a second time.
Evers’ plan comes the same day the Legislature kicked off its two-year session. Republicans remain in control, but their majority is at its narrowest since they took over in 2011.
That means the dynamic between the Legislature and Evers, entering his seventh year as governor, will largely remain as it has been. Republicans must approve anything Evers wants to get done.
Still, the Democratic Evers is reviving a plan to weaken the powers of the Legislature that Republicans already previously rejected.
Evers said on Friday that the state budget he plans to unveil next month will include a mandate that legislators take up a constitutional amendment allowing voters to petition for ballot proposals to repeal state statutes and create new ones. Evers made a similar proposal in 2022 for voters to repeal the state’s 1849 abortion ban, but Republicans killed the plan.
Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos rejected the idea.
“It appears that Tony Evers’ single agenda item for the next session to is take power away from the elected members of the Legislature,” Vos told The Associated Press. “If that’s his focus, it’s going to make it awfully hard to find consensus.”
Republican Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu said in a statement that Evers should focus on cutting taxes and scaling back the size of government.
Republicans hold a 54-45 advantage in the Assembly and an 18-15 majority in the Senate in the two-year session that started Monday.
There are six new state senators, all Democrats. Nearly a third of the Assembly — 31 lawmakers — are newly elected. Of them, 23 are Democrats. Those new lawmakers make up the majority of the 45-member Democratic caucus.
Lawmakers have said they are hopeful the slimmer GOP majorities will lead to more compromise, but on this issue they don’t appear to be willing to go along with what Evers wants.
Wisconsin is one of 24 states that do not provide a way for people to reject or enact statutes outside of the legislative process, according to Ballotpedia.
Evers said Republicans have been ignoring the will of the people by refusing to legalize marijuana, repeal the abortion ban, implement gun control measures and increase funding for public schools. Instead, he said, the GOP has been enacting policy through constitutional amendments, denying voters a voice.
“Republican lawmakers are going to continue to try to legislate by constitutional amendment,” Evers said. “Then they should give Wisconsinites the same opportunity that 26 other states have.”
Constitutional amendments must pass two consecutive legislative sessions and a statewide referendum to take effect. The governor plays no role in the process.
Republicans have asked voters to approve seven amendments since 2010, according to data from the University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative. Voters ratified three in 2024 alone, including two in April to restrict use of private money in election administration and one in November that prohibits foreign nationals from voting. Republicans could put another amendment to voters in April’s elections that would cement voter identification requirements.
Gun control advocates planned to be in the Capitol on Monday shortly before the session kicks off to press lawmakers to take action following a shooting by a 15-year-old student on Dec. 16 at a Madison private school that left a teacher and student dead and two other students severely injured. The shooter killed herself.
Evers called a special session in 2019 in an attempt to pass gun control measures, including requiring universal background checks, but Republicans took no action.
Evers also called a special legislative session in September 2022 to approve a constitutional amendment similar to his latest proposal. He promoted it as a way to repeal the abortion ban and ensure abortion remained legal in Wisconsin after the U.S. Supreme Court reversed its landmark Roe v. Wade decision.
Republicans convened and ending the special session in less than 30 seconds.
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.
President Joe Biden is moving to ban new offshore oil and gas drilling in most U.S. coastal waters, an effort to block possible action by the incoming Trump administration to expand offshore drilling.
When the Wisconsin Legislature returns to work in January, Republicans will still be in charge but will have the narrowest majorities since taking control in 2011. That’s giving Democrats, including Gov. Tony Evers, optimism that both sides will be able to work together better than they have since Evers took office six years ago.
Both sides are eyeing the state’s massive budget surplus, which sits at more than $4 billion. What to do with that money will drive debate over the next two-year budget, which will be written in 2025, while questions hang in the air about whether Evers plans to run for a third term in 2026 and how the state will interact with President-elect Donald Trump’s administration.
Here is a look at some of the biggest pending issues:
New dynamic in the Legislature
Democrats gained seats in the November election because of redrawn maps ordered by the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The Republican majority now sits at 54-45 in the Assembly and 18-15 in the Senate. Democrats have 10 more seats in the Assembly than last session and four more in the Senate and are hopeful about gaining the majority after the 2026 election.
“We have already seen a shift in the Capitol due to the new maps,” Assembly Democratic Minority Leader Greta Neubauer told The Associated Press.
She and other Democrats predict it will lead to more pressure from rank-and-file Republicans in competitive districts to move to the middle and compromise with Democrats.
“Everybody understands, at least at this point, that we need to work together, pull together,” Republican Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu told the AP. “And it’s important to get some things done.”
Pushing back against Trump
Democrats say they have been talking with Evers and Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul about how Wisconsin can push back against the incoming Trump administration’s plans for mass deportations. But Democrats say they are also looking at other ways the state can fight Trump’s policies on issues like abortion and LGBTQ+ rights.
“We’re worried about a lot of the things that former and future President Trump might do, especially when it comes to deportation and immigration,” Senate Democratic Minority Leader Dianne Hesselbein said.
Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said he would support Trump’s efforts to deport people who are in the country illegally and commit crimes.
Republicans prioritize cutting taxes. Democrats are open
Republicans passed a $3.5 billion tax cut that Evers gutted to just $175 million with his veto in the last budget. With another large surplus, Republicans say they want to try again.
“People struggling to pay their bills,” LeMahieu said. “We heard that in our local races. And so we want to help help help families out there. We have the money to do it. And that’s going to be our number one priority.”
Both he and Vos said they would like a tax cut of around $2 billion.
Democrats say that they aren’t opposed to cutting taxes, but that they want it to be targeted to helping the middle and lower classes and families.
“We are not interested in tax cuts that primarily benefit rich Wisconsinites or corporations,” Neubauer said. “But we are certainly open to tax cuts that help those who are struggling to make ends meet.”
K-12 education funding
The state superintendent of schools, Jill Underly, proposed spending more than $4 billion on K-12 schools in her budget proposal, which is subject to legislative approval. That’s almost certainly not going to happen, both Republicans and Democrats said.
“We’re not going to spend $4 billion on education, I can guarantee you that right now,” LeMahieu said.
While Democrats say they are prioritizing education funding, “I don’t think we’re going to be able to match that,” Hesselbein said of the $4 billion request.
Universities of Wisconsin
Leaders of the cash-strapped Universities of Wisconsin have asked for $855 million in additional funding in the next budget, nearly an 11% increase. System President Jay Rothman says schools need the money to stave off tuition increases, cover raises, subsidize tuition, and keep two-year branch campuses open in the face of declining enrollment and flat state aid.
Evers has promised to include the request in his budget, but Republican leaders said they would not approve that much, and Democrats also said it was a goal that was unlikely to be met.
LeMahieu and Vos both said UW would not get what it wants.
“We’re going to need to see some substantial change in how they’re doing their programing,” LeMahieu said. “We can’t just keep spending more and more on a system that’s educating less and less people.”
Marijuana, health care and other priorities
Vos said he intends to create a state-level task force to improve government efficiency, similar to what Trump created at the national level dubbed DOGE. He also supports passing a bill that would allow for the processing of absentee ballots the day before Election Day, a measure that’s had bipartisan support in the past but failed to pass.
Democrats say they will continue to push for ways to expand and reduce costs for child care, health care for new mothers and prescription drugs. Both Republicans and Democrats say they want to do more to create affordable housing. The future of the state’s land stewardship program also hangs in in the balance after the state Supreme Court said Republicans were illegally blocking funding of projects.
Democrats also say they hope to revive efforts to legalize medical marijuana, an effort that was backed by some Republicans but that failed to pass last session.
LeMahieu predicted the slimmer Republican majorities will make it more difficult for any marijuana bill to pass because some lawmakers “are dead set against it.”
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.
Granholm's statement came as the Energy Department released a long-awaited study that found U.S. LNG shipments drive up domestic wholesale prices and frequently displace renewable energy sources.
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