Denise Jess walked into a Madison polling place on Saturday to vote early in person and encountered a familiar barrier: an absentee ballot envelope with a blank space for writing in her name, birthdate and address.

Jess, who is blind, chuckled along with her wife, who accompanied her to the polls. Who was going to do all that writing?

A poll worker quickly offered help, reminding Jess that she had the right to assistance. Jess, who is executive director of the Wisconsin Council of the Blind & Visually Impaired, knew she had those rights. But the moment still bothered her.

“It’s just a bummer,” she said, comparing voting with other tasks she performs independently, like identifying birds by ear, paying bills online, posting on social media, and grocery shopping. Voting is a constitutional right in Wisconsin and yet, she said, it remains far less accessible. 

Other industries have prioritized accessibility because it benefits their bottom line, she said, but voting systems were not originally designed with accessibility in mind.

“We’re making strides,” she said, “but it’s still always, always about retrofitting and trying to catch up.”

Jess’s experience illustrates a persistent tension in election policy: how to ensure both ballot security and accessibility for all voters. Electronic absentee voting is particularly nettlesome. Disability rights advocates have pushed for this option as a way for people with vision or other disabilities to vote independently, and in private, from home. But cybersecurity experts warn that current technology cannot guarantee that ballots returned electronically will be safe from hacking or manipulation.

Over a dozen other states provide fully electronic absentee voting for people with disabilities. In those states, voters with disabilities can receive a ballot electronically, mark it using a screen reader and return it electronically — similar to signing and returning a document electronically. Wisconsin isn’t one of them. Here, voters with disabilities must cast their votes on a paper ballot, or on an accessible voting machine at a polling place that prints out a paper ballot. 

That means that voters who are visually impaired or unable to write must often rely on others to complete their ballots — undermining ballot secrecy, which is also constitutionally protected. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when many disabled voters were reluctant to visit the polls in person, Wisconsin’s rules presented an even bigger barrier. 

Last year, four voters with disabilities, along with Disability Rights Wisconsin and the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin, filed a lawsuit seeking access to electronic absentee voting. A lower court initially granted some voters that option, but an appeals court paused and eventually reversed that order. The case is now before the Dane County Circuit Court. 

Beyond the roughly dozen states that offer fully electronic voting, a few others, including Vermont, Michigan, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, allow voters with disabilities to fill out ballots electronically, but they have to print out the ballots and return them by mail, drop box, or in person. Verified Voting, a nonpartisan election technology group, promotes this option as a step forward for states wary of fully electronic voting.

That wouldn’t solve the issue for everyone, though. Jess pointed out that many blind voters don’t own printers, meaning they’d still face accessibility hurdles.

Security concerns haven’t been resolved

At a time of heightened concern over election security and integrity, some technology experts say fully electronic voting is still not ready to be used widely.

Between August 2021 and September 2022, the University of California, Berkeley, hosted a working group of election, technology and cybersecurity experts to discuss the feasibility of creating standards to enable safe and secure electronic marking and return technologies. The group found that widespread adoption of electronic return would require technologies that don’t currently exist or haven’t been tested. 

A 2024 report by several federal agencies, including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Election Assistance Commission, found that sending digital copies of ballots to voters is safe and that filling them out electronically is somewhat safe, but that returning them electronically adds significant security risks.

“Sheer force of will doesn’t suffice to solve this problem,” said Mark Lindeman, the policy and strategy director at Verified Voting. “There needs to be extensive technical innovations that we can’t just dial up.”

Lindeman said threats from electronic ballot return include the possibility that somebody hacks into the system and changes votes. One potential safeguard — having voters verify that their selections were received and counted correctly — remains unproven at scale, the UC-Berkeley working group said. 

“That’s the fundamental technical tragedy at this stage of the game,” Lindeman said. “Paper ballots are obviously inconvenient for many voters. They pose real obstacles to voting, but we haven’t found a technical alternative to paper ballots that solves all the problems.”

Denise Jess chooses ‘path of least pain’

In Wisconsin, Jess chooses among three imperfect voting options.

She can vote on Election Day in her polling place, whose layout she has memorized, though it can get too busy for her comfort. She can vote using an accessible machine but still has to hand-sign the poll book, something she typically does with the assistance of a poll worker and a signature guide, a small plastic card with a rectangular cutout that frames the area where she has to sign. 

Alternatively, she can vote absentee in person during the early voting period, but then she has to receive help with paperwork and navigating an unfamiliar polling place. 

Or she can fill out an application online and vote by mail, which she avoids because she can’t fill out a paper ballot without assistance.

“It’s kind of like, what’s the path of least pain?” she said.

For this Wisconsin Supreme Court election, given the potential for bad weather, she opted for early in-person voting at the Hawthorne Public Library, which isn’t her regular polling place. 

“There’s enough consistency here at Hawthorne, but still there are surprises,” she said, sitting at a table at the library on Madison’s east side. “Even the simple navigation of going to the table to get the envelope, getting in line. They’re queuing people to wait behind the blue tape, which, of course, I can’t see.”

She could opt for more hands-on help from poll workers to speed up the process, but she said she sees her voting trips as a chance to learn more about the potential barriers for people with disabilities.

Some voters who are newer to vision loss or have more severe barriers can quickly become demoralized by the extra energy they need to put into casting a ballot, especially if poll workers aren’t trained or ready to help, she said. 

“We’ve had voters say, ‘I’m not going back. I’m just not doing that again, doing that to myself,’ she said. “So then we lose a voter.”

If electronic voting were available, Jess said, she would do it a lot more often than voting in person because she wouldn’t have to depend on transportation or the weather. 

“It would just be absolutely liberating,” she said. “I might still vote in-person at my polling place periodically, because I like my poll workers, and I always like to visit with them and give them kudos. But it would surely ease some stress.”

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

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

How one voter navigates Wisconsin’s hurdles for people with disabilities is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Absentee voting didn’t used to be popular in Addison, a rural town of 3,300 in southeast Wisconsin. A few days before the last Supreme Court election in 2023, only about 60 residents had cast absentee ballots in person.

This year, at the same point in the election cycle, that number was over 300.

The sharp increase is due partly to Republicans’ recent embrace of absentee voting, especially in the nearly two-week period before Election Day when voters can cast absentee ballots in person. Washington County, where Addison is located, is one of the state’s most Republican counties and one of many Republican-dominated areas across Wisconsin where early voting rates have surged. 

But perhaps a bigger reason is a recent Washington County initiative aimed at making early voting more accessible for voters and more feasible for municipalities. The program compensates municipalities for the costs of extending their hours during the state’s early in-person voting period. It makes up for the gaps in municipal budgets that previously limited early voting opportunities.

“It really comes down to a matter of priorities,” Washington County Executive Josh Schoemann, a former municipal clerk, told Votebeat. “And there’s nothing more fundamental to county government and to government in general, in Wisconsin and America, than the opportunity for people to vote.” 

County absorbs the added costs for municipalities

The county first rolled out the initiative during the November 2024 election as part of a broader funding package approved by the county board. The package included over $150,000 for extended in-person absentee voting hours, voluntary audits and cameras for ballot drop boxes across the county. 

Public funding for such activities is more critical now after voters last year approved a Republican-written constitutional amendment banning private funding for election support, responding to a Republican outcry over private grants to fund election administration, especially in Democratic strongholds.

County Board Chair Jeff Schleif said he was eager to support the proposal because it would ensure that Republicans, who were just coming around to voting early, had the time and opportunity to do it, just as Democrats did in places like Milwaukee. 

“Our board is as conservative as it’s ever been,” he said, adding that extending early voting hours is helpful to everybody.

Moreover, Schleif said, the proposal would authorize and fund election audits that could debunk allegations from people like MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell that some voting machines were being hacked to change votes.

After the November election, about $71,000 of the funds remained unspent. This year, the county signed off on using that money to continue the program into this high-stakes April election.

For this election, the county is compensating municipalities at 150% of the added cost for extending their early voting hours beyond what they were in the April 2023 election. About 90% of the municipalities in the county are participating, Washington County Clerk Ashley Reichert, a Republican, said. The county also mailed voters a schedule of their town’s early voting hours.

Reichert said the initiative aims to provide local residents with voting opportunities comparable to urban areas, including weekend and night voting options. The additional hours benefit many residents who commute to Milwaukee for work and can’t vote during typical business hours, she said.

“We have quite a few very rural communities where the clerks are very part-time, and their budgets are small, and so for them, offering additional time was just not a feasible option,” she said. “Being able to take the funding off the table as a concern really helped quite a few of our municipalities.”

More hours for voting, and more voters showing up

Addison Town Clerk Wendy Fairbanks said early voting hours have expanded significantly due to the county’s support. In 2023, Addison’s early voting was generally open from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Thursday. Now it’s open as early as 7 a.m. and as late as 6 p.m., including Fridays.

“I’m able to bring in election workers to help me with this so I’m not doing it all on my own,” Fairbanks said. “Otherwise, I’d get no other work done.”

The county’s help, she continued, “takes the burden off the town, so that we’re not using money from our tax levy that could go towards road repair or something in the town.”

Another Washington County municipality, the village of Richfield, now offers Saturday hours for early voting thanks to county funding. About 90 residents participated on a recent Saturday, contributing to a total of 1,674 early ballots cast as of Thursday morning  — about double the amount from this time two years ago.

Village Administrator Jim Healy said the initiative was crucial for voters who couldn’t vote during regular hours. “We really felt strongly for these types of elections that have either state or national implications that we ought to try to go the extra mile,” Healy said, expressing hope that other Wisconsin counties might follow Washington County’s example.

In all, as of Thursday morning, Washington County had over 13,400 voters cast absentee ballots in person, nearly triple the number of votes at this point in the 2023 cycle and the fourth most in the state, despite it being only the 10th largest county by voting age population. 

While increased absentee voting means additional ballots to process, local clerks aren’t concerned about significantly longer counting times.

“This is absolutely adding one more thing,” Schoemann said, “but I also know that their biggest pain point is their budgets. They’re really, really tight. So we want to try to hit their biggest pain point where we can help them and get what voters want, and that is more opportunity.”

Other clerks look at the Washington County model

Reichert, the Washington County clerk, said she has heard from a number of county and municipal clerks, along with legislators, interested in replicating this initiative across the state. Right now, though, she said Washington County appears to be the only county offering municipal clerks that compensation. 

That may change soon: At a recent event, Rep. Scott Krug, a legislative leader who formerly chaired the Assembly Elections Committee, said one of his top upcoming legislative priorities was funding early voting so every municipality offers the same availability. He wasn’t available to comment further on Thursday.

Meanwhile, in most counties, early voting hours are uneven from town to town. In neighboring Ozaukee County, municipal clerks are staggering their hours to try to make time for residents seeking to vote early in person, said County Clerk Kellie Kretlow, a Republican. Some municipal election offices are open every day for early voting, while others are only open a few days across the nearly two-week voting period.

Sheboygan County Clerk Jon Dolson, a Republican, told Votebeat he was interested in the proposal but couldn’t see how his fiscally conservative board would approve a $15,000 funding increase, much less a $150,000 package like the one passed in neighboring Washington County. The county board recently cut the number of positions in his office, he said. 

So how did such a large spending proposal for election offices get through the fiscally conservative Washington County Board of Supervisors, which represents one of the most staunchly Republican constituencies in the state?

Schoemann, the county executive, said the board prioritized this initiative after years of disciplined budgeting and surplus management.

He said it was important for officials at the county level to take the lead, rather than expecting local clerks to each ask for help.

The proposals together were billed as an “election integrity package” that would enhance election security — a concern that Republicans have repeatedly raised.

Reichert, the county clerk, said it likely helped that the support for extended early voting hours was rolled into a broader package addressing security concerns around drop boxes and audits. Extending early voting hours itself addressed a security concern, she said, since some supervisors questioned whether mailed ballots would arrive too late or get lost in the mail.

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

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

How Wisconsin’s Washington County helped its municipalities expand early voting hours is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

A reader asked: Was Elon Musk’s endorsement of Brad Schimel a violation of lobbying laws because of Musk’s status as a federal employee?

We’ll get to that question in a second, but we also wondered about the answer to a related question: Are the cash giveaways from Musk’s America PAC ahead of the April 1 Wisconsin Supreme Court election legal?

Musk, the centibillionaire tech CEO turned efficiency czar for President Donald Trump, has dominated the Wisconsin Supreme Court race in recent weeks. Musk and affiliated groups have poured cash into the race between liberal candidate Susan Crawford and conservative candidate Brad Schimel, which will determine ideological control of the high court and could have national ramifications.

America PAC and Building America’s Future, two groups that are funded by Musk, have spent more than $16.7 million on advertising and voter mobilization efforts meant to aid Schimel’s candidacy. Musk has also donated $3 million to the Republican Party of Wisconsin, which can transfer the money to Schimel’s campaign.

Musk’s super PAC, America PAC, is offering registered Wisconsin voters $100 if they sign a petition opposing “activist judges.”

“Judges should interpret laws as written, not rewrite them to fit their personal or political agendas,” the petition reads. “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.”

Participants can also get $100 for referring another petition signer.

Late on Wednesday the super PAC announced that “Scott A.” from Green Bay had been selected to win $1 million after filling out the petition. That mirrors a move America PAC deployed in last year’s presidential race. 

It’s less clear whether America PAC’s “special offer” violates Wisconsin’s election bribery statute, according to Bryna Godar, a staff attorney with the University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative.

Here’s what the statute says:

The $100 reward for signing the petition “definitely falls into a gray area because (America PAC) is paying people to sign the petition,” Godar said. “The question is whether the payment is being given in order to induce anyone to vote or refrain from voting.”

“These payments kind of walk an uncertain line on whether they are amounting to that or not,” Godar added. 

Godar also noted that you have to be a registered Wisconsin voter to receive the payment, “so it does seem like it is inducing people to register to vote.” That violates federal law for federal elections, she said, but “federal law doesn’t apply to this election because there aren’t any federal offices on the ballot.” 

“Under the state law, that’s not specifically one of the listed prohibitions,” Godar said. “It’s definitely in a gray area and sort of walks the line.”

Late on Thursday, Musk announced he would “give a talk in Wisconsin” in a social media post that has since been taken down. 

“Entrance is limited to those who have voted in the Supreme Court election,” he wrote. “I will also personally hand over two checks for a million dollars each in appreciation for you taking the time to vote.”

An AI chatbot on Musk’s own social media site flagged the activity in the post as potentially illegal. “Though aimed at boosting participation, this could be seen as election bribery,” the AI profile @grok replied to someone asking if the post was legal.

In a follow-up email, Godar said giving “the payment for voting instead of for signing the petition much more clearly violates Wisconsin law.”

On Friday afternoon, Musk posted again: “To clarify a previous post, entrance is limited to those who have signed the petition in opposition to activist judges.”

“I will also hand over checks for a million dollars to 2 people to be spokesmen for the petition,” he wrote.

UPDATE (March 31, 2025, 9:00 a.m.): On Friday afternoon, Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul filed a lawsuit to bar Musk and America PAC from promoting the “million-dollar gifts.” The suit also sought to prohibit Musk and America PAC “from making any payments to Wisconsin electors to vote.” The case was randomly assigned to Crawford, who immediately recused, and then reassigned to Columbia County Circuit Court Judge W. Andrew Voigt. Voigt declined to hear the petition prior to Sunday’s event, so Kaul went to the Court of Appeals and subsequently the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Both turned down his request to stop Musk from giving away two $1 million checks, which he did on Sunday evening.

Violating the statute is a Class I felony, which can carry a fine of up to $10,000, imprisonment of up to three-and-a-half years, or both. 

A county district attorney or the Wisconsin attorney general would be responsible for filing criminal charges for violations of the statute, Godar said. It’s also possible someone could try to bring a civil claim to have a judge halt the payments. So far that hasn’t happened.

Now back to our reader question about Musk’s political activities as a federal employee.

Musk, in his role as a “special government employee” leading the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), is bound by the Hatch Act, a law prohibiting “political activity while you’re on duty, while you’re in the workplace, and the use of your official position to influence the outcome of an election,” said Delaney Marsco, the director of ethics at the Campaign Legal Center.

But special government employees like Musk are only bound by the Hatch Act while they’re on duty representing the federal government, Marsco said, so the world’s wealthiest man “is allowed to engage in political activity that might otherwise be prohibited as long as he’s not on duty when he’s doing it.”

The Hatch Act is intended to “maintain a federal workforce that is free from partisan political influence or coercion,” according to a memo from the U.S. Office of Special Counsel.

Wisconsin Watch readers have submitted questions to our statehouse team, and we’ll answer them in our series, Ask Wisconsin Watch. Have a question about state government? Ask it here.

Are the cash giveaways from Elon Musk’s America PAC ahead of the April 1 Wisconsin Supreme Court election legal? is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

When Larry Jones arrived at the Wisconsin State Capitol on March 12, he didn’t know what he was getting into — let alone that he would be a viral internet sensation the next day. 

The 85-year-old self-described conservative had been invited by his grandson to a public hearing on a Republican-authored bill that would ban gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth in the state. He decided to make the short drive from his home in Milwaukee. 

“I thought, ‘OK, I’ll go up there and listen to a couple people moaning about some kind of problems and be there for a couple hours and be long gone,’” Jones told Wisconsin Watch. “I got into something that I really didn’t know a heck of a lot about.” 

The hearing was packed with speakers there to testify either for or against the bill. Most people were limited to two minutes, but the hearing lasted more than eight hours. Jones was there in support of the bill, but wasn’t intending to get up and speak. But after listening to nearly seven hours of testimony, he put his name down. 

“I have very little knowledge of gay people and things like that there, so when I came here, my eyes were opened,” he told the state Assembly’s Health, Aging and Long-Term Care Committee just after 9 p.m. “I was one of the critics that sat on the side and made the decision there was only two genders, so I got an education that was unbelievable. And I don’t know just exactly how to say this, but my perspective for people has changed. … I’d like to apologize for being here, and I learned a very lot about this group of people.”

After he spoke, several attendees applauded.

Shortly after, his grandkids told him about a video of his testimony going viral online — as of Sunday the video had nearly 1 million views on YouTube. They called him a hero.

“Thank you for the compliment, but what the heck are you talking about?” he recalled responding. 

Jones told Wisconsin Watch he doesn’t think he did anything out of the ordinary and spoke because he felt like he owed it to the people there protesting the bill. He never thought a few sentences would garner such attention. 

“After a day or two, my 15 minutes of fame were long gone, and I went back to who I am, just plain old Larry,” Jones told Wisconsin Watch. 

Others saw an act of courage.

“Listening to his testimony was incredible,” one user commented under the viral video of Jones on Instagram. “It is powerful and brave to admit that you were wrong and have learned. I wish many of our legislators had that same strength.”

The bill

Republican politicians in recent years have frequently targeted transgender rights. One of President Donald Trump’s first executive orders the day he took office disregarded biological nuance in declaring there are only two sexes, male and female, which can’t be changed, and that gender identity “does not provide a meaningful basis for identification and cannot be recognized as a replacement for sex.” A later order declared the country wouldn’t fund transition of youth from one sex to another or medical institutions that provide such health care.

Wisconsin Assembly Bill 104 would ban gender-affirming health care, including puberty-blocking drugs, hormone replacement therapy or surgery, for those under the age of 18. Under the bill, medical providers found to be providing this care could have their licenses revoked. The legislation faces a certain veto by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, who has vetoed a similar bill before. 

The authors of the bill — Sen. Cory Tomczyk, R-Mosinee, and Rep. Scott Allen, R-Waukesha — say it would “protect minors from making life-altering, irreversible decisions that cause mental and bodily harm.”

“They’re not voting on this bill as a person, they’re voting Republican party lines,” Jones told Wisconsin Watch. “That shouldn’t be that way. … Party line is a bunch of garbage.” 

It was just one of four bills raised in the Legislature in recent weeks targeting transgender youth in Wisconsin. Two others are aimed at banning transgender girls and women from participating in high school and collegiate women’s sports. Another would prohibit school employees from using a student’s preferred name and pronouns without parental consent. 

For hours, Jones listened to the stories of kids who wanted to transition and said it seemed like “their brain was tearing them apart.” He now believes the decision to receive gender-affirming care should involve a child, a qualified doctor and a parent — not lawmakers. He likened the issue to lawmakers banning doctors from providing abortions.

Just the introduction of such bills can have negative effects on LGBTQ+ kids, research shows. The Trevor Project, a nonprofit that works to end LGBTQ+ youth suicide, found in a 2024 national survey that 90% of LGBTQ+ young people said their well-being was negatively impacted due to recent politics. Research also shows that transgender youth who are called by their preferred names and pronouns are happier and healthier.

Jones said a 14-year-old transgender teen — one of the youngest speakers who advocated for their right to go on hormones — helped to change his perspective at the hearing. In their testimony, they shared that they had recently contemplated suicide.

“I started to listen to this kid, and it wasn’t some kind of whim or something like that. This kid was actually suffering,” Jones said. “And I thought to myself, nobody has to do that. You’re only a kid.”

The GOP-controlled committee voted to advance the bill. Republican lawmakers in the Assembly passed it last week. 

“Children are not allowed to get tattoos, sign contracts, get married, or smoke — so why would we allow them to physically change their gender?” Rep. Tyler August, R-Walworth, said in a statement. 

Jones had a different take. 

“All of these kids, they deserve a chance to see where they belong,” he said. 

Who is Larry?

Jones grew up in a small, rural unincorporated town in northern Michigan before moving to Milwaukee when he was 19 years old. 

“When I moved to the city, it was like I was a kid in a candy store. I discovered books, and once I discovered books, I discovered the world,” he said. 

For most of his life, he worked in the maintenance department at the Milwaukee County Community Reintegration Center  — a prison formerly known as the House of Corrections. There, he encountered gay men and women, but said he had never met someone who was transgender. 

“If there’s something you don’t understand or don’t know anything about, it kind of frightens you a little bit,” Jones said. 

When he was younger, he said LGBTQ+ people were “hidden.” 

“In the area where I grew up … men were men,” Jones said. “I was taught by men who had their own visions of what gay people were like. They were called ‘queers’ and ‘fairies’ and off-the-wall, ungodly names back in the day. As I grew older … the whole world changed.” 

Jones calls himself conservative, but said he’s willing to look at both sides of an issue. He mostly tunes into Fox News and local TV stations. He said he still has a lot to learn about the transgender community, and he’s made that his mission for the next six months or so. 

Prior to the hearing, he said he believed that someone who was transgender was “play acting” and simply changed their name and clothes along with a few other cosmetic things. 

“It’s through no fault of their own. I don’t think there’s a medical problem. I think these kids were born this way,” Jones said. “I looked at it through a different perspective, from a different set of eyes, and I promised myself that I would look into this with a clearer sense of understanding.”

After his testimony, a young woman handed him a note that read, “Thank you for being open to hearing all this and being open to changing your mind. That’s brave.” Jones kept it. 

His advice to others? “Don’t wear a pair of blinders and walk down the road. Keep an open mind.”

Wisconsin Watch reporter Jack Kelly contributed to this report.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

‘Just plain old Larry’: A Wisconsin man’s testimony about gender-affirming care went viral. Here’s his story. is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Election officials in Madison are already facing a state and city investigation into the series of errors that resulted in nearly 200 absentee ballots not being counted in last fall’s election. Now officials there face a claim for compensation in an unusual case that aims to emphasize the importance of properly counting all ballots and set a monetary penalty for denying people their vote. 

A liberal election law group called Law Forward served a $34 million claim this month against Madison and Dane County, seeking damages amounting to $175,000 for each Madison voter whose absentee ballot got misplaced. The filing is likely a precursor to a lawsuit, as the group is seeking out other disenfranchised voters to join its case.

“There is going to be a price to pay when you interfere with someone’s right to vote in Wisconsin,” said Scott Thompson, staff counsel for Law Forward.

Cases like this have a history that goes back to the voting rights fights of the late 1800s and 1900s, when officials intentionally sought to bar Black people from voting. But they’re highly unusual today — most voting rights cases seek only to have a challenged right restored, rather than damages — and experts say it’s unlikely that Law Forward’s claim in the Madison case will lead to any damages being paid out.

The threat of a financial cost for errors could add to the pressure on local clerk’s offices, which already deal with the challenges of new laws and court rulings, along with persistent scrutiny from election skeptics and lawmakers. (Madison’s city clerk has been placed on leave while the investigation into her office continues.) Some clerks around the state said they consider the errors in Madison serious, but questioned the move to assign liability.

Melissa Kono, the clerk in the small town of Burnside in western Wisconsin, said that instead of a payout to voters affected by an error, money would be better spent on developing a better system for clerks to manage the increasing number of absentee ballots, which have surged since the COVID-19 pandemic. The uncounted ballots in Madison were all absentee ballots.

Thompson acknowledged the potential impact of his group’s action on clerks. But he said it serves as a broader response to the steady stream of lawsuits filed by conservative groups since 2020 aimed at preventing officials from counting certain ballots because of the way they’re returned or the information they’re missing. In the context of these lawsuits, he said, it’s important to send a message that there should be a cost for disenfranchising people.

“Elections are about exercising the right to vote,” he said. “They’re not about finding ways to kick people off the voter rolls.” 

Legal filing says Madison and Dane County violated constitution

In a statement, Madison spokesperson Dylan Brogan didn’t directly address the Law Forward claim but said every ballot should be counted accurately and that the city is cooperating with ongoing investigations while conducting its own. 

Here’s what investigators have said about the case so far: In all, 193 absentee ballots that were sent to two polling places in the city for tabulation on Election Day went missing, and were not counted, even after they were found. For reasons still unknown, the election workers at those polling places never opened the courier bags containing those ballots. Those ballots then went to the city clerk’s office, but workers didn’t open one of the parcels until Nov. 12 and the other one until Dec. 3. 

The ballots in the bag opened on Nov. 12 could still have been counted — city and county officials have given conflicting accounts on why they weren’t.

The sum total of the oversights, Law Forward alleges in its claim, resulted in the unconstitutional disenfranchisement of the 193 voters. The group appears to be preparing for a class-action lawsuit and is welcoming the other disenfranchised voters to join the case. 

In the claim, the group cites two Wisconsin Supreme Court cases that it says allow it to sue for damages, even if what happened in Madison turns out to be a series of unintentional oversights. 

One of those cases was a judgment from 1866, in which the court ruled that government officers can be found liable for their actions in denying Black Wisconsin residents the right to vote, even if those actions are done without malice. The other is a 1916 finding that because a group of voters was entitled to vote, people depriving them of that right can be held liable for their disenfranchisement.

Claims like these typically move to lawsuits if they’re not resolved, and the city and county are unlikely to accept or negotiate the requested amount, likely prompting Law Forward to file suit this summer.

When voters seek monetary damages 

Why ask for money on behalf of the voters? Thompson said it’s because there’s nothing else to ask for besides money and a finding of the city’s wrongdoing. It was too late, he said, to give the voters back the right they had been deprived of: the right to vote and have their ballots counted in the November 2024 election.

Thompson said attorney-client privilege prevented him from disclosing how the group arrived at the $175,000 figure for each voter. Wisconsin law currently caps damages against government officials at $50,000. Thompson said a secondary goal of the forthcoming lawsuit is to have a court find that law unconstitutional and allow groups to seek larger damages. 

Voter lawsuits seeking monetary damages were never very common, but there were instances in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, typically tied to racial discrimination, said Justin Levitt, an election law professor at Loyola Marymount University and a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s civil rights division. 

The most prominent cases of this kind were in Texas, where between the 1920s and 1940s Black voters who were barred from voting in Democratic primaries because of their race sometimes sued for damages in court, Levitt said.

In those cases, Black voters were designed to be left out of the voting process. In Madison, by contrast, it appears at this point that a series of mistakes — not malice or intent — led to these ballots getting lost initially.

But Thompson cautioned against coming to conclusions about why the Madison ballots didn’t ultimately get counted.

“It is too early for anyone, I think, to say with certainty exactly what happened and why it happened here,” he said. 

Lawsuits seeking damages against government officials face two significant challenges, said Richard Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law: First, courts usually look for something more egregious than negligence, such as malicious intent. Second, he said, a number of legal doctrines usually give government officials a raised level of immunity. 

He said he couldn’t think of any cases of this kind, where voters deprived of their right to vote successfully sued election officials for damages, since the 1960s.

Clerks question monetary penalty for errors

If the city accepts the claim or a court does award damages, it could have a financial impact of millions of dollars and would send a signal across the state.

“It’s not normal for this quantity of ballots to go uncounted, and I think everybody recognizes that that’s not normal,” Levitt said. “If this case succeeded, it would substantially increase the stakes of an error like that.”

But Madison’s errors stand out as unusually serious, said Wood County Clerk Trent Miner, a Republican. He said he thinks that Law Forward’s claim proposes too high a penalty, but that it shouldn’t make clerks fear the prospect of penalties for the far less consequential errors that they encounter from time to time.

“Humans run elections, so errors will happen,” he said. “This, I think, pole vaults over a minor error.”

Kono, the Burnside clerk, pointed out that the initial error of not counting the ballots at the polling sites was at the hands of the poll workers at the Madison polling sites who never opened or processed the 193 ballots.

“If you’re relying on unpaid or low-paid, glorified volunteers, essentially, what is the liability?” she said.

Even if the court doesn’t ultimately award monetary damages, the discovery phase of the expected lawsuit — where the two sides must share evidence — could significantly increase transparency around Madison’s ballot-counting errors, Thompson said. This process would likely place additional pressure on Madison and Dane County to fully disclose information beyond what has already emerged from ongoing city and state investigations.

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

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Madison’s missing-ballot mess leads to an unusual claim for monetary damages is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

The TV ads are dark and ominous. The faces of people convicted of serious crimes are flashed across the screen. A grim-sounding voice-over accuses one candidate of letting “a sex predator loose on our kids.” Another spot accuses the other of “putting pedophiles back on the street.”

These messages have for weeks blanketed TV broadcasts across Wisconsin and permeated digital media spaces like YouTube. Funded by candidates or third-party groups pushing a political agenda, they have largely focused on the same subject: crime and public safety. Another wave of ads is expected over the next two weeks.

The ads are meant to define Dane County Judge Susan Crawford and Waukesha County Judge Brad Schimel for voters ahead of the April 1 Wisconsin Supreme Court election.

The race has become “probably the most intense Supreme Court race the state has ever experienced,” said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “For the second time in a row, (the election is) going to determine the ideological direction of the Supreme Court. And, in part, the ideological direction of state government.”

High-profile cases concerning abortion rights, voting rights, legislative and congressional maps, labor rights, environmental issues, tax policy and power disputes between the state’s Democratic governor and Republican Legislature have all come before the court in recent years or are expected to arrive there in the coming months.

The candidates have mostly shied away from sharing their thoughts about those issues with voters, though it’s widely believed Crawford would side with the Democratic position and Schimel would side with Republicans.

Instead, the ads — which represent most of the candidates’ direct communication with voters — have focused on criminal prosecutions and sentencing practices.

But those two things have little to do with the work Crawford or Schimel will be doing when the winner is sworn in as a state Supreme Court justice in August, four political and legal experts told Wisconsin Watch.

A means to an end

The TV ads are a means to an end for both the campaigns and third-party groups, the experts told Wisconsin Watch.

“What the ads are about is not what the court is about,” Burden said. “When those justices get together in the state Capitol and hear cases, they’re about facts and precedent and legal theories and their understandings of the law, at least that’s the idea. But what the discourse is about — especially from the groups that are not the campaigns themselves but are these outside groups running ads somewhat independently — they can be about whatever the groups think would be effective to get their side a victory.”

The campaigns have zeroed in on issues that don’t often concern the work of the justices because “some campaign consultants somewhere concluded that they work,” said Marquette University Law School professor Chad Oldfather. Focusing on crime and public safety is a common playbook for judicial candidates across the country, Oldfather said. 

“The role of a state supreme court justice does not involve much day-to-day interaction with the workings of the criminal justice system,” Oldfather said, adding that tough-on-crime or soft-on-crime ads are a way for interest groups to motivate voters. 

A group like Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, the state’s largest business lobby and a heavy financial backer of conservative judicial candidates, including Schimel, is more focused on having a court that is friendly to business interests than it is concerned about the sentences Crawford has handed out, said Douglas Keith, a senior counsel in the Brennan Center’s Judiciary Program.

“The people who are spending money to run those ads, those are not actually the cases they care about,” he said in an interview. “This is just a visceral idea that they can use to get voters’ attention in an ad.”

But while the spending behind these ads has exploded, the approach itself is not new. In the 2008 Wisconsin Supreme Court race, conservative candidate Michael Gableman successfully ousted liberal Justice Louis Butler with the help of similar-sounding ads funded by WMC for $1.8 million — a quaint figure compared to the amounts groups have spent on the race so far this year.

An ad from Gableman’s campaign also sparked controversy. It pictured Butler side-by-side with the mugshot of a convicted rapist and made misleading assertions that Butler was responsible for getting the man out of prison. After the man was paroled in 1992, he committed another rape and was sentenced to 40 years in prison. The ad was unusually vicious for the time, but would fit among the ads in this year’s race.

Switching playbooks

At the start of the campaign, Crawford and Schimel both talked about wanting to bring “common sense” and “objectivity” to the court, but more recently they have tried to rally voters around more political issues.

Crawford initially backed away from Justice Janet Protasiewicz’s 2023 approach, in which the liberal then-candidate spoke openly about her “values” on abortion rights and gerrymandering — though in recent weeks the Dane County judge has been more forthcoming about her support for things like abortion rights. Crawford wants her work as an attorney to speak for itself, she said, pointing to her private practice work advocating for abortion rights, labor rights and voting rights.

“I think that tells a lot about my values and what I have worked for throughout my entire career,” Crawford told Wisconsin Watch in an interview earlier this month.

The race is about the “future of the court, and it’s about the fundamental rights and freedoms of Wisconsinites,” she said. “For me, it’s about how we interpret the laws and constitution in the state of Wisconsin. I believe they should be interpreted to protect the rights of every Wisconsinite. That’s really why I’m running.”

A Schimel victory, Crawford said, could result in the restriction of Wisconsin residents’ individual rights and liberties. “I’m running to be a common sense justice who wants to use our laws and constitution to protect every Wisconsinite,” she said. “(Schimel is) an extreme politician who has an agenda that he’s bringing to the Supreme Court.”

“That’s garbage,” Schimel fired back when Crawford made a similar assertion at the candidates’ sole debate. Schimel’s campaign did not respond to multiple interview requests for this story. 

Schimel seems to be embracing the Protasiewicz campaign approach, said Anthony Chergosky, a political science professor at UW-La Crosse. Giving stronger partisan cues to voters, like Schimel is doing, “was massively rewarding for (Protasiewicz),” he said. Pairing those cues with election-defining issues like abortion rights and gerrymandering helped carry her to a blowout victory, Chergosky added.

Accordingly, Schimel has tried to tap into President Donald Trump’s political movement to bolster his campaign.

“The stakes could not be higher here in Wisconsin,” he told conservative commentator Charlie Kirk during an interview late last month. “Leftists took over the majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court two years ago in 2023 and they’re going through a political agenda. They are working to wipe out every conservative reform that’s been passed in Wisconsin to make us strong, prosperous, safe. All those things are on the chopping block now.”

The court’s decisions to throw out the state’s gerrymandered legislative districts and take up a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Act 10, the Scott Walker-era law that crippled public employee unions, are two examples, he said.

Schimel said Trump’s election victory in November represented “a movement to save our nation.” Backing him on April 1 is a way to continue to be part of that movement, he said.

While speaking at an event the next day, Schimel continued to push that idea.

Prior to Nov. 5, he said, “America had walked up to the edge of the abyss and we could hear the wind howling. You could look down but you can’t see the bottom.” Trump’s victory let the country take “a couple steps back from that abyss,” he added.

“The job’s not done,” Schimel said. “And this is the message we have to get out to people: The job’s not done.”

Schimel is also appealing to Trump to visit Wisconsin to bolster his campaign, the New York Times reported last week.

Billionaires bloat spending

The stakes of the election — with the assistance of billionaires and outside groups — have already propelled the race to record spending. A recent WisPolitics.com tally found almost $59 million had been spent on the race with several weeks left to go, surpassing the record $56 million spent in the 2023 race between Protasiewicz and Daniel Kelly. Prior to 2023, the record for spending in a judicial election was $15 million in a 2004 Illinois contest.

Crawford’s campaign has been the biggest spender so far, dropping almost $23 million on just TV ads. The Madison judge’s fundraising has been boosted by the state Democratic Party, which has accepted sizable donations from liberal mega-donors like LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, George Soros and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker — all billionaires. 

While the maximum contribution individuals can make to candidate campaigns is capped in Wisconsin, there is no limit on how much one person can donate to a state political party. Those parties can then, in turn, make unlimited transfers to candidate campaigns, a loophole used to bolster candidate fundraising.

Billionaire support for Schimel has largely come through third-party groups, though Schimel’s campaign has spent some $8.8 million on ad buys. The Waukesha judge’s largest benefactor, by far, has been Elon Musk, the centibillionaire tech CEO serving as Trump’s efficiency czar.

Musk’s super PAC has spent more than $6.5 million on the race so far, the bulk of which has been on canvassing and voter outreach efforts to bolster Schimel. A second Musk-affiliated group, Building America’s Future, has spent $6 million on TV ads, according to a WisPolitics.com tally.

Chatter about the race’s spending dominated the contest’s only debate. Crawford called Musk “dangerous” and tied him to the firing of air traffic controllers and the increased price of eggs. 

“(Musk) has basically taken over Brad Schimel’s campaign,” Crawford continued, arguing that Musk is trying to buy himself a justice on the high court as Tesla filed a lawsuit seeking to open dealerships in Wisconsin. Crawford at one point called Musk “Elon Schimel.” The play comes as Democrats seek to make the election an early referendum on Musk and Trump. 

Earlier this month, the Wisconsin Democratic Party launched “a seven-figure grassroots effort to turn Elon Musk’s attempt to buy the Wisconsin Supreme Court race into a political disaster for Brad Schimel.” It includes a digital ad campaign, town hall events and billboards. Less than two weeks before Election Day, Crawford for the first time released an ad tying Schimel to Musk.

Schimel hit back, pointing to Soros’ financial support for Crawford, arguing the billionaire financier “funded DAs and judges who have let dangerous criminals out on the street.”

Another outside group funded by billionaire Richard Uihlein, Fair Courts America, has spent over $2.5 million on TV ads targeting Crawford. Americans for Prosperity, a group with close ties to billionaire Charles Koch, has spent over $1.2 million to boost Schimel.

Such heavy spending underscores how groups see the race as a means to advance their political agendas — despite being officially nonpartisan. The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, for example, recently added the race to its target list for the 2025-26 cycle. 

“Our mandate (at the DLCC) is obviously building Democratic power and securing and maintaining majorities in state legislatures,” said Jeremy Jansen, the group’s vice president of political. He added that the DLCC has been focused on state supreme court races in recent years that could affect that power, with a focus on redistricting.

“Investing in this race is a way to protect or preserve some of the work that the DLCC did in the most recent cycle and in previous cycles,” Jansen said, noting how Protasiewicz’s 2023 victory led to new legislative maps and 14 additional Democratic seats in the Legislature.

Republicans are eager for conservatives to retake a majority on the high court and protect the authority of the Legislature.

“For all the people who are concerned about concentration of power in the executive branch at the federal level, I think that we would have that happen here in Wisconsin,” Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, told reporters last month in response to a question about the stakes of the race. “We’re already seeing that the liberal court is taking power away from the Legislature simply because they don’t agree with us. I don’t think that’s right.”

A new normal

The final days of the campaign will be critical for both candidates. A Marquette Law School Poll from earlier this month found large portions of voters are unfamiliar with both candidates.

The survey of registered voters found that 38% of respondents lacked an opinion of Schimel and 58% lacked an opinion of Crawford. That’s “a very perilous position for a candidate to be in because it means that they need to define themselves quickly before the other side does it for them,” Chergosky said.

The Marquette poll did not feature a head-to-head question. But a poll commissioned by WMC earlier this month found the race tied 47% to 47%. The survey was conducted by OnMessage Inc., which receives an “A” rating from polling guru Nate Silver.

The same poll found that “fighting to uphold the rule of law,” “reducing crime and keeping violent criminals off the streets” and “ensuring that abortion is available and accessible in Wisconsin” are the top issues in the race. Those issues continue to be prominent among the ads being rolled out by the candidates and outside groups.

And while crime has long been an issue in these races, Oldfather said, “(before 2008) judicial campaigns just did not use to look like this.”

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

Vicious ads, record spending, Elon Musk: Wisconsin Supreme Court race reflects nasty, new normal is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

On April 1, voters will cast their ballots in a nationally watched election to select Wisconsin’s next state Supreme Court justice.

The election, which pits liberal Dane County Judge Susan Crawford against conservative Waukesha County Judge Brad Schimel, has already smashed the prior record for spending in a judicial race. In turn, TV stations across the state have been blanketed with ads from both campaigns and third-party groups. The ads reek of politics and often focus on issues that have almost nothing to do with what justices actually do.

So, what does the Wisconsin Supreme Court actually do?

What is the Wisconsin Supreme Court?

The Wisconsin Supreme Court is the highest court in Wisconsin’s judicial system. 

It has seven justices, each elected to a 10-year term in an April general election. If a vacancy occurs on the court, the governor appoints a replacement. That justice serves until an election can be held, which occurs in the first April without an already-scheduled state Supreme Court election.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court has the final authority on determining whether lower courts in state criminal or civil cases followed the law and also whether a Wisconsin law adhered to the state constitution.

In some rare instances, decisions from the Wisconsin Supreme Court can be appealed to the United States Supreme Court. But those appeals typically claim the state Supreme Court’s ruling in some way infringes on federal law or rights granted by the U.S. Constitution.

How do cases reach the Supreme Court?

Cases arrive at the state Supreme Court in a number of ways:

• A party who lost a case in the Court of Appeals, the state’s intermediate court, can ask the court to review the decision.
• Any party involved in litigation decided by a county circuit court may ask the high court to bypass the Court of Appeals and take a case. There are 71 county circuit courts in the state, each staffed by a varying number of judges. Circuit courts are sometimes referred to as “district courts” or “trial courts.”
• The Court of Appeals can ask the high court to take a case.
• The state Supreme Court, on its own motion, can decide to review a case appealed in the Court of Appeals directly.
• A party can petition the state Supreme Court to take a case directly, known as an original action.

Who are the current justices on the court?

Today’s court is generally believed to have four liberal justices and three conservative justices. Justices Ann Walsh Bradley, Rebecca Dallet, Jill Karofsky and Janet Protasiewicz make up the court’s four-member liberal majority.

The court’s three conservative members are Chief Justice Annette Ziegler and Justices Rebecca Bradley and Brian Hagedorn. Of those, Hagedorn has most frequently voted with the liberal majority, giving him the reputation of a swing vote.

The April 1 election is to replace Walsh Bradley, who is retiring after serving for 30 years on the high court.

Who is running on April 1?

Dane County Circuit Court Judge Susan Crawford and Waukesha County Circuit Court Judge Brad Schimel are jostling to be the state’s next justice.

Supreme Court elections are supposed to be nonpartisan. However, justices tend to adhere to liberal and conservative judicial and political philosophies, and partisan interests have spent heavily on candidates aligned with their interests.

Crawford is considered the liberal candidate. She has served as a Dane County judge since 2018. Prior to taking the bench, she worked for the state Department of Justice and served as chief legal counsel for Democratic former Gov. Jim Doyle. She has also worked in private practice, where she represented Planned Parenthood in litigation relating to abortion access. Crawford also worked on behalf of clients challenging the state’s voter ID law and Act 10, the Scott Walker-era law that hamstrung public sector labor unions. The Democratic Party of Wisconsin and liberal donors are heavily funding her campaign.

Schimel is considered the conservative candidate. He has served as a judge in Waukesha County since 2018. Prior to becoming a judge, he served one term as Wisconsin attorney general and spent eight years serving as the Waukesha County district attorney. He won both jobs campaigning as a Republican. As attorney general he led an unsuccessful national effort to invalidate the Affordable Care Act and appealed a federal court ruling that struck down a law restricting abortion access. Wealthy state and national Republican donors are backing his candidacy.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

What does the Wisconsin Supreme Court do? is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

In just two weeks, Wisconsin residents will head to the polls for another pivotal and closely watched election. 

Wisconsin Watch is a nonpartisan, nonprofit newsroom with a statewide focus, and one of our goals is to ensure that Wisconsin residents have access to reliable information before they head to the polls on April 1. 

We also know that most of you are busy people, which is why we’ve pulled together a short list of resources from our newsroom and other reliable sources. 

Here are the key statewide races: 

State Supreme Court

Candidates Susan Crawford, a Dane County judge backed by the court’s current liberal members, and former Attorney General Brad Schimel, a Republican judge from Waukesha County, are vying to replace longtime liberal Justice Ann Walsh Bradley, who is retiring.

• What you need to know: This election will determine whether the Wisconsin Supreme Court maintains a guaranteed liberal majority until 2028 or shifts to a 3-3 split, with conservative-leaning swing vote Justice Brian Hagedorn holding the deciding vote. Read our coverage here.
  
• Helpful resources: In addition to our reporting on why this race matters, we recently fact-checked the candidates’ campaign ads.
  
• Want more? Wisconsin Watch is hosting a free, live Zoom discussion about the Supreme Court election with statehouse reporter Jack Kelly on March 26 at 4 p.m. Central time. Submit your questions when you RSVP here or by emailing events@wisconsinwatch.org — your input will shape the conversation. 

State superintendent of public instruction

Incumbent Jill Underly, backed by the Democratic Party, faces education consultant Brittany Kinser, who is supported by conservative groups advocating for private school voucher programs.

• What you need to know: Underly has faced criticism from Republicans for adjusting the state’s proficiency benchmarks for standardized tests. She argues the changes better reflect what students are learning. Kinser’s platform focuses on expanding school choice statewide.
  
• Helpful resources: For a closer look, read our coverage from the primary and this deeper dive into the candidates’ platforms. Or, if you prefer video, we’ve got that on our YouTube channel. 

Constitutional amendment

Voters will also decide on a proposed constitutional amendment that would require individuals to present valid photographic identification to vote, with exceptions allowed by law.

• What you need to know: Proponents argue it safeguards election integrity, while critics warn it could disenfranchise groups less likely to possess valid photo IDs, particularly marginalized communities. The outcome could have lasting implications for future elections in Wisconsin.
  
• Helpful resources: Our partner Votebeat has written about the ballot measure. 

To find your polling location and see what local positions are on the ballot, visit MyVote Wisconsin. All you need to know is your address — the site will guide you through the rest.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

What you need to know before voting in April 1 election is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

In 2022, the Wisconsin Supreme Court, then dominated by conservatives, banned the ballot drop boxes that had been used for decades but became especially popular during the pandemic. Then, in 2024, after an election shifted its majority to liberals, the court reversed itself and made drop boxes legal again.

Yet the number of drop boxes available to voters around the state has dwindled. The flip-flopping rulings from a court that’s supposed to serve as the last word on Wisconsin law made many election administrators wary of offering drop boxes at all. So a state that once had nearly 600 drop boxes now has just a few dozen, largely clustered around Madison and Milwaukee.

It’s an example of how ideological swings on Wisconsin’s highest court and an influx of lawsuits in all Wisconsin courts are roiling parts of the state’s election law and complicating the work of local election administrators, with a real impact on voters. 

The court also reversed itself in 2023, when under liberal control it ruled that legislative maps chosen by the court in 2022, then under conservative control, were unconstitutional. That forced county clerks across the state to redraw their districts just months before an election.

And in a recent opinion about the tenure of political employees, liberal justices were explicit about their willingness to overturn more precedent-setting cases.

As a swing state with routinely close elections, Wisconsin was already a key battleground for fights over election law issues, but because of the state’s divided, gridlocked government — Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and the Republican-controlled Legislature have been at loggerheads since 2019 — more of those fights are ending up in court, with some high-profile cases before the Wisconsin Supreme Court.  

The court only rarely revisits past decisions, but those few instances have emboldened activists to initiate still more legal challenges. A case currently before the Wisconsin Supreme Court seeks to undo a law that gutted collective bargaining for most public employees — a law the court previously upheld under a conservative majority.

With another Supreme Court election approaching April 1, the court’s balance of power is once again at stake. That means its positions on voting rights and political appointments could shift yet again from where they were just a few months earlier. 

How legal experts view the court’s instability

Law experts say that the high court doesn’t often reverse itself on cases involving election administration and that some shifting is natural in a state where voters choose Supreme Court justices. 

Stability is a critical value in the law, said Chad Oldfather, a constitutional law professor at Marquette University. But there are other values that conflict with stability, he said, such as — in the case of redistricting — ensuring laws are constitutional.

But the recent instances, the experts say, reflect the increasing number of election issues being settled by the courts.

“This is a national problem, but we experience it disproportionately in Wisconsin because our elections are so close,” said Jeff Mandell, founder of the liberal law firm Law Forward and one of the state’s most prominent election attorneys.

Ultimately, the more intense fights over election law are a sign of changing political tactics, said Michael Kang, a law professor at Northwestern University. Political parties that once focused more on messaging and mobilization have gotten better at identifying how different voting rules can affect their turnout, so “election law generally has become more partisan.” 

“What’s more, I think judges have become more partisan, in terms of the spread between them ideologically and the way that they’ve applied their kind of philosophy to election rules,” he said. 

Clerks and election workers feel the impact

For election officials, the growing volume of lawsuits often makes the job harder. Courts take time to rule on cases, but once they rule, clerks have to move quickly to ensure compliance with new rules in time for the coming election. 

In the past that has meant clerks — many of whom have part-time positions and whose roles extend far beyond just running elections — had only a few weeks before an election to remove drop boxes and change procedures to stop filling in missing information on voters’ absentee ballot envelopes.

It’s especially challenging in a state like Wisconsin, where elections are run at the municipal level, said Sun Prairie Clerk Elena Hilby. “It’s not like you can tell this core group of 50 people, ‘This is how the law changed.’ You have to tell a core group of 1,850 people that it’s changed, and they need to change their ways.”

Hilby says she and other clerks hear the frustration from voters.

“They’re like, ‘What are you guys doing?’ And we’re like, ‘Well, it’s not us,’” she said. “And most of them know that, but just as it’s confusing for the voters, it’s confusing for us.”

Litigation can sometimes clarify murky election laws, Rock County Clerk Lisa Tollefson told Votebeat, but the frequency of lawsuits makes coordination difficult. It is her responsibility to communicate changes in the law to all of the county’s 29 clerks. Those municipal clerks then have to relay those changes to their election inspectors — some of whom work part time every few years. 

How the court cast a cloud over drop boxes

The drop box cases illustrate how the court’s inconsistency can undermine the effect of its rulings.

Drop boxes had been used widely across the state for decades, but their use grew significantly during the 2020 election, as voters sought a safer method for returning ballots amid the peak of COVID-19.

After the then-conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court banned drop boxes in July 2022 — ruling that voters had to return their ballots directly to the clerk — clerks had to adjust to the ruling quickly. A lower court had already ruled drop boxes illegal in January 2022, just weeks before a primary election, but the high court ruling made clear to clerks that their drop boxes couldn’t be used for ballots anytime soon. 

But it wasn’t as simple as removing or sealing off the drop boxes. Some Wisconsin municipalities used the same boxes for utility payments, which they wanted to continue collecting that way. So they had to put new instructions on the boxes that superseded the instructions included with the ballot.

Still, in some cases, voters kept returning their ballots to those drop boxes. Sometimes, clerks would return those ballots to the voter, only to have the voter hand it right back. In other cases, the ballot didn’t count at all. Voters who might have followed the procedure they had used in previous elections suddenly stood to lose their vote.

After liberals gained control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, a lawsuit successfully challenged the ban, leading to the reinstatement of drop boxes in 2024 — again, in July, just weeks before a primary election. Municipalities had to move quickly to make decisions about whether and how to make them available for the August and November elections. 

Some municipalities decided not to use drop boxes due to cost concerns and a belief that they were mainly useful during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In other places, the drop boxes returned, but with evidence of lingering suspicions from the legal arguments that led to the 2022 ban. Clerks had to take extra steps to reassure voters that the drop boxes were secure and not vulnerable to fraud. There would be fewer of them, and access would be limited. In Wausau, Mayor Doug Diny unilaterally removed the drop box against legal advice, leading to an ongoing local ethics probe and state criminal investigation into his conduct.

Despite being reversed, the court’s ban of drop boxes in 2022 has contributed to a persistent narrative that drop boxes aren’t an acceptable way to return ballots, said Bryna Godar, a staff attorney at the University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative.

Court opens the door to more challenges

The Wisconsin Supreme Court’s position on the state’s legislative maps has also swung back and forth, creating problems for election officials and voters and contributing to the perception that the court’s position is driven by partisanship.

In 2022, after the governor and Legislature couldn’t agree on a set of legislative district maps, the court chose boundaries that all but ensured significant GOP majorities in the statehouse.  After liberals took control in 2023, the justices struck down the Republican-drawn maps as unconstitutional, ordering the creation of new politically neutral maps. 

After those new maps were enacted in February 2024, six months ahead of the August legislative primary, clerks had to rearrange their voters, again, into new wards and districts — work that typically takes place once a decade. Mistakes were rare but consequential: In a couple of cases, clerks initially drew some voters into the wrong legislative districts, and in the northern town of Summit, voters showed up during the August 2024 primary to find that their ballots had the candidates for the wrong Assembly district. Ultimately, 188 voters were unable to vote for the candidates who would represent them. 

Under liberal control, the court has also expressed a willingness to reverse more of its previous rulings. 

In allowing Wisconsin’s chief election official, Meagan Wolfe, to remain in office past her term, the justices relied on a 2022 ruling by the then-conservative-led court that permitted other political appointees to stay on after their terms expired. But liberal Justice Jill Karofsky, in a concurring opinion joined by two other liberals, said “it may behoove” the court to overturn that same decision. That comment prompted conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley to suggest that the liberal majority didn’t respect precedent.

Such an apparent invitation to overturn precedent is somewhat common in the U.S. Supreme Court but far rarer in the Wisconsin Supreme Court, Mandell of Law Forward said.

Mandell sees the potential risks of that pattern but said the volume of election litigation is unlikely to ease anytime soon. He is one of the state’s most prolific election lawyers, frequently arguing before all sorts of state courts and the Wisconsin Elections Commission on behalf of clients seeking to expand voting access.

“I get it, I’m part of the problem. We would be better off with less of this election litigation,” he said. But if people advocating for wider voting access stop fighting these cases, he said, the other side will have the unilateral ability to shift policies. 

“It’s not quite clear what the path out of this is,” he said, “or where we’re going to get some kind of rational, deliberative process that tries to fill these holes and bring our election code up to speed.”

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

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Why more of Wisconsin’s election law disputes are ending up in court is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

A behind-the-scenes legal effort to force Congress to call a convention to amend the Constitution could end up helping President Donald Trump in his push to expand presidential power.

While the convention effort is focused on the national debt, legal experts say it could open the door to other changes, such as limiting who can be a U.S. citizen, allowing the president to overrule Congress’ spending decisions or even making it legal for Trump to run for a third term.

Wisconsin Watch and ProPublica have obtained a draft version of a proposed lawsuit being floated to attorneys general in several states, revealing new details about who’s involved and their efforts to advance legal arguments that liberal and conservative legal scholars alike have criticized, calling them “wild,” “completely illegitimate” and “deeply flawed.”

The endeavor predates Trump’s second term but carries new weight as several members of Trump’s inner circle and House Speaker Mike Johnson have previously expressed support for a convention to limit federal government spending and power.

Article V of the Constitution requires Congress to call a convention to propose and pass amendments if two-thirds of states, or 34, request one. This type of convention has never happened in U.S. history, and a decadeslong effort to advance a so-called balanced budget amendment, which would prohibit the government from running a deficit, has stalled at 28.

Despite that, the lawsuit being circulated claims that Congress must hold a convention now because the states reached the two-thirds threshold in 1979. To get there, these activists count various calls for a convention dating back to the late 1700s. Wisconsin’s petition, for example, was written in 1929 and was an effort to repeal Prohibition. The oldest petition they cite, from New York, predates the Bill of Rights. Some others came on the eve of the Civil War.

“It is absurd, on the face of it, that they could count something that had to do with Prohibition as a call for a constitutional convention in 2025,” said Russ Feingold, a former Democratic senator from Wisconsin who co-wrote a book critical of convention efforts like this one. “They’re just playing games to try to pretend that the founders of this country wanted you to be able to mix and match resolutions from all different times in American history.”

To avoid the threat of a convention, the legislatures in some states like Colorado and Illinois have passed resolutions withdrawing their petitions. The draft lawsuit says those actions don’t count because “once the Article V bell has been rung, it cannot be unrung.” Nearly half the states the draft counts have rescinded their petitions.

The draft lawsuit is the work of the Federal Fiscal Sustainability Foundation, a low-profile nonprofit that has drawn support from balanced budget advocates and the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council. The group’s chair, David M. Walker, oversaw government accountability as U.S. comptroller general during both the Clinton and Bush administrations. The draft lawsuit is signed by Charles “Chuck” Cooper, a high-powered conservative lawyer in Washington, D.C., who represented Trump’s previous attorney general during the special counsel’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Walker and his team have shopped the lawsuit to over a dozen state attorneys general and Republican-controlled legislatures seeking to find states to serve as plaintiffs, according to emails obtained through records requests, public testimony and interviews. Alongside ALEC’s CEO, they met with members of the Utah attorney general’s office in 2023, trying to recruit the state to take the lead, and planned to meet with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, emails show. Lawmakers in Utah, Arizona, South Carolina and West Virginia have sought to get their states to join the lawsuit.

Walker declined to confirm the authenticity of the draft complaint and wouldn’t say which states have signed onto the lawsuit. But it mirrors the legal arguments Walker and his group have made, and the document’s metadata shows Cooper’s firm authored it. Neither Cooper nor his firm returned repeated requests for comment. An ALEC spokesperson said the group has merely provided a “forum” to “exchange ideas.”

Walker said an attorney general’s office has written its own version with “modifications.” He said he hopes the states will announce their intent to sue within the next two months and file shortly after.

Walker and the draft complaint say the convention is necessary to confront the national debt and would be limited to discussing fiscal responsibility.

“Some people think that the convention would get together to basically rewrite the Constitution. That’s totally false,” Walker said. “That has nothing to do with what we’re proposing. Under Article V, it’s just a separate way to get an amendment to the existing constitution.”

Dozens of legal scholars and hundreds of civil society groups, organized by the government watchdog Common Cause, have warned that it would be exceedingly difficult to constrain a convention to just one idea and that calling one would expose the entire Constitution to revision. Some of them say the risk has grown under Trump.

“Nobody is observing any restraints on their power,” Georgetown law professor and convention critic David Super said. “If he continues to lose in the courts, one can imagine he will be trying to get a convention to adopt his view of presidential powers.”

Asked to respond, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly accused Wisconsin Watch of having “TDS” (Trump derangement syndrome) and being a “dark money” group. (Wisconsin Watch makes its donors public here.)

Sam Fieldman, of the campaign finance reform group Wolf-PAC, has individually worked with the foundation on the lawsuit. He said the process empowers states to check the federal government and change the Constitution if Congress fails to act.

“People who are claiming that this process will lead to tyranny are sitting here twiddling their thumbs while we are heading toward tyranny like a rocket right now,” Fieldman said.

‘Fuzzy math’ and a ‘time machine’

Throughout history, the Constitution has been amended 27 times, including to abolish slavery and provide women with the right to vote. An amendment must be approved by two-thirds of both houses of Congress. It then must be ratified by three-quarters of the states to become law.

The Constitution also offers another way: Congress can call a convention after two-thirds of state legislatures request one.

But Article V provides few other details. It does not say what constitutes a valid application or how to add them together to reach 34. Nor does it say how a convention should run. It does not enumerate specifics on delegates, such as who can serve and how states should select them, nor whether each state gets one vote or votes relative to population. And it does not specify whether a convention can be limited to specific issues.

As of now, the three-fourths ratification requirement still stands. Critics fear delegates could take the extreme step of lowering the threshold to make it easier for the amendments to pass, a scenario that proponents dismiss as “fear mongering.”

Fewer than half the states have laws or policies governing convention procedures. The majority of those would give state legislators, rather than voters, the ability to select delegates. They’d also permit each state one vote, according to a 2023 review by the Center for Media and Democracy, a progressive government watchdog.

The center obtained audio of former Republican Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania at a private ALEC workshop saying that because “most states are going to be controlled by Republicans,” rural and Republican voters will have “an outsize granted power” in a convention.

“We have the opportunity as a result of that to have a supermajority,” he said, even though “we may not even be in an absolute majority when it comes to the people who agree with us.”

Santorum did not return emails seeking comment.

Over the years, people from across the political spectrum have attempted to call conventions for various topics, such as campaign finance reform and congressional term limits. None of the advocates have tried to use states’ old calls that didn’t specify a topic to reach the required 34.

But during a 2020 ALEC presentation, a balanced budget activist named David Biddulph debuted a new theory: By combining old resolutions that generally called for a convention with ones for a balanced budget amendment, the nation already surpassed the threshold.

Biddulph said he based his theory on a paper authored by Robert Natelson, a former law professor who focuses on Article V, and published by the Federalist Society in 2018. But Natelson’s paper did not claim the threshold had been reached, and in an interview, he said he disagrees with activists claiming otherwise.

During the presentation, moderated by former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Biddulph announced that his organization, which became the Federal Fiscal Sustainability Foundation, was encouraging attorneys general to file suit against Congress.

Biddulph did not respond to repeated calls and emails seeking comment.

That same theory forms the basis of the draft lawsuit, which counts six petitions that called for a convention without stating a specific purpose alongside balanced budget ones to support their claim for a convention.

“They realize they will never get to 34 honestly now, so they are talking about a new math,” said Nancy MacLean, a historian whose book “Democracy in Chains” discusses the dangers of a convention. Some convention opponents, like Super, refer to this as the “fuzzy math” theory.

During a legislative hearing in Utah, Sharon Anderson, a conservative opponent of a convention, used a metaphor to criticize the counting method.

“A certain team, discouraged that they hadn’t scored the winning touchdown yet, devised a way to win the game,” Anderson said. “Instead of actually getting the ball into the end zone, they would basically add up all the yards they had gained until they totaled a distance needed to cross the goal line.”

But Natelson, a member of ALEC’s board of scholars who is cited repeatedly in the lawsuit, said if lawmakers had wanted to limit their calls to specific topics, they could have done so.

The second key part of the foundation’s legal argument is timing, which opponents like Super refer to as the “time machine” theory. Wisconsin passed a balanced budget amendment resolution in 2017, yet the draft instead includes the state’s Prohibition-era petition because it’s counting applications on the books between 1979 and 1998 — a period when the draft argues at least 34 existed.

Unmentioned, however, is that almost nobody during that period claimed that the nation had surpassed the threshold.

This is unlike recent debates over the Equal Rights Amendment, which would prohibit discrimination based on sex. Some argue that enough states have now approved the amendment, but the U.S. archivist declined to certify it because Congress explicitly set a deadline for ratification that states did not meet.

Getting states on board

Biddulph and others began to enlist state support in 2022 with an email that announced: “The historic milestone of 34 Article V state resolutions calling for an amendment convention to propose a Balanced Budget Amendment (BBA) has finally been achieved, and surprisingly it happened over 40 years ago.”

The message, obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy and provided to Wisconsin Watch and ProPublica, asked states to pass a resolution demanding Congress call a convention and directing the state’s legislature and attorney general to “take such actions as will require Congress’s compliance.”

Republican state lawmakers in Utah and South Carolina responded within days, introducing measures incorporating some of the proposed language.

“We have a tremendous opportunity as a state to deal with an issue that is a very serious and grave moment in our nation,” Utah state Rep. Ken Ivory, a Republican who introduced the measure, said at a legislative hearing in February 2022. “It’s the power of the state to be able to deal with the excessive debt and the financial explosion and the swindling, as Thomas Jefferson said, the swindling of the future on a massive scale.”

Since the Utah hearing, Arizona and West Virginia have also introduced measures demanding Congress call a convention. West Virginia’s was the most explicit, resolving to “commence federal court action” against Congress, and advanced the furthest, passing the state House of Delegates before stalling in its Senate. So far, none of the resolutions has been adopted. West Virginia’s was reintroduced last month.

In February 2024, activists believed they were close to filing the lawsuit, emails obtained through a public records request show. The Senate presidents and House speakers in Utah and Arizona signed letters expressing their interest in joining a federal lawsuit against Congress to force a convention on fiscal issues.

In an email that was cc’d to the Arizona lawmaker who sponsored the state’s resolution, convention supporter Mike Kapic celebrated Utah’s and Arizona’s interest as a “win.”

“One more and UT says they’ll lead the filing in federal court,” Kapic wrote. “Then watch other states rush to file.”

It still hasn’t happened. The Arizona Legislature does not have standing to file a lawsuit on its own, a spokesperson for the state attorney general said, and the Democratic attorney general has not agreed to take the case.

A spokesperson for the Utah attorney general’s office declined to comment on whether the state had agreed to file the suit.

Ivory said by email that he is unaware whether Utah has any current plans to sue Congress. “New AG, New Congress, New President,” he wrote, adding that he believes “negotiations” may be taking place with Congress “with potential promising results,” but that he is not involved.

Alaska is the only state listed on the draft complaint, but the state attorney general’s office would not confirm whether it has joined.

In Congress, Texas Republican Rep. Jodey Arrington has also introduced resolutions to trigger a convention, including one he put forward last month. His office did not agree to an interview.

If Congress does call a convention, it would likely be up to delegates to keep it from creeping into other parts of the Constitution.

Historians generally agree that the 1787 constitutional convention itself was a runaway convention. Delegates met in Philadelphia to amend the Articles of Confederation, a process that required unanimity among states. Instead, they scrapped the entire document and drafted the Constitution, proposing a lower threshold for states to ratify amendments.

Mollie Simon of ProPublica contributed research.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Wisconsin Watch. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

How a push to amend the Constitution could help Trump expand presidential power is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Madison Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl has been placed on administrative leave at least through the April 1 election, as city and state officials continue to investigate how she and her staff lost track of nearly 200 ballots on Election Day last fall, the city announced Wednesday. 

Mike Haas, Madison’s city attorney, will take over her duties in the interim. Municipalities typically prefer not to make changes to election oversight so close to an election, but Haas, a former administrator of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, is widely considered one of the state’s foremost experts on election law. It’s not clear when — or whether — Witzel-Behl will return to her post.

“Given the nature of the issues being investigated, we felt this was a necessary step to maintain public confidence in the operations of our clerk’s office,” Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said.

The scrutiny of Witzel-Behl follows a series of oversights that contributed to the mishandling of ballots during the 2024 election.

In its probe, the Wisconsin Elections Commission found that mistakes began well before Election Day. One involved the poll books showing the list of registered voters in each ward. For the two polling locations where 193 ballots went missing, Witzel-Behl’s office printed the poll books on Oct. 23, nearly two weeks before Election Day, despite commission guidance urging election officials to print poll books as close to the election as possible. 

If the poll books had been printed later, they would have automatically marked certain absentee voters’ ballots as having been returned, making it clearer to poll workers on Election Day that some ballots had been received but not counted. Instead, poll workers manually highlighted the poll books to indicate returned ballots — a method that Wisconsin Elections Commission staff warned could have made it less clear to city and county officials reviewing the election results that some ballots were still outstanding. 

“I am genuinely troubled by the number of profoundly bad decisions that are recited in these materials leading up to Election Day,” commission Chair Ann Jacobs, a Democrat, said in a meeting last week.

In that commission meeting, Jacobs also highlighted what she called an “absolutely shocking set of dates post-election, where every opportunity to fix this is ignored.”

In a statement to Votebeat, Jacobs said she wasn’t surprised by Witzel-Behl being placed on leave.

“We cannot have elections where properly cast ballots are not counted due to administrative errors,” she said. “City Attorney Michael Haas is to be commended for stepping in to manage the upcoming April 1 election with less than three weeks to prepare … I have every confidence he will do everything he can to restore trust in Madison’s elections.”

Clerk’s staff found the first batch of ballots — 68 in total — in a previously unopened courier bag in the clerk’s office on Nov. 12, while Dane County was in the middle of certifying the election. 

There are conflicting accounts of what happened next: An unidentified Madison election worker claimed that the county was informed about the ballots that day, but Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell has vehemently denied this. Either way, Witzel-Behl, who told Votebeat she was on vacation for much of the time following Election Day, didn’t follow up with the county, and those ballots were never counted. She also failed to immediately notify state or city officials outside the clerk’s office.

A second batch of 125 ballots was discovered in the clerk’s office on Dec. 3. However, staff didn’t relay that information to the Wisconsin Elections Commission until Dec. 18 — well after the state certified the election. The commission then notified Haas about the error, and Haas relayed the news to the mayor’s office — which is when both learned of the problem for the first time.

While Witzel-Behl has sought to address some of the issues, her office remains under scrutiny from the Madison mayor’s office, the state and now a civil claim seeking damages for the ballots that went uncounted. She has proposed procedural changes, including requiring clerk’s staff to verify all election materials received on Election Night and ensuring that each polling place receives a list of the absentee-ballot courier bags it handles to prevent any from being overlooked.

The April 1 election that Haas will oversee for Madison includes a pair of high-profile contests: a race for a pivotal Wisconsin Supreme Court seat and a ballot question on whether the state’s photo ID requirement for voting should be enshrined in the constitution. Supreme Court elections typically draw a high turnout, especially in Madison. 

Haas said he expected a smooth election, despite the investigation.

“I am completely confident in the ability of the highly trained, incredibly competent professional staff at the Clerk’s Office to continue the operations of the office without interruption, including conducting the upcoming spring primary election,” Haas said. “I look forward to working with them to ensure a secure, transparent, and safe election.”  

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

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Madison puts city clerk on leave amid investigation into missing November ballots is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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’s DOGE-inspired effort gets off to more collegial start is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

For months, Republican lawmakers on the powerful Joint Finance Committee have cast doubt on the reauthorization of Wisconsin’s land stewardship program following a July state Supreme Court ruling that prohibited the legislative committee from blocking projects after the funds have been budgeted. 

A 2023 Wisconsin Watch investigation found that the GOP-controlled committee had increasingly used a secretive “pocket veto” power since Democratic Gov. Tony Evers was elected to block conservation projects under the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Program. Lawmakers refused to take action on some projects, preventing them from moving forward.

The program has been funded at roughly $33 million annually since 2015 and is currently funded through 2026. But only $20.1 million of those funds were spent in fiscal year 2023-24, according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau.

That $33 million allotment hardly stacks up to the amount the program used to be funded. In 2007, the program was reauthorized for another decade and allocated $86 million annually for land purchases, though that was reduced to $60 million a year in the 2011 budget, then $50 million in the 2013 budget before bottoming out at $33 million in the 2015 budget.

Since the 6-1 ruling — with two conservative justices joining the liberal majority — GOP lawmakers have seemed poised to let a popular, bipartisan program die because they don’t have final say over spending on the projects. 

“It’s unfortunate that Gov. Evers’ lawsuit (which resulted in the Supreme Court ruling) removed all accountability of the stewardship program, which helped ensure local voices were heard and that taxpayer resources were spent wisely,” Rep. Mark Born, R-Beaver Dam, co-chair of the JFC, said in a statement. “The entire program is now in jeopardy.”

In an interview with the Cap Times, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, said the odds that Republicans would renew the program were less than 50%. 

But JFC vice chair Rep. Tony Kurtz, R-Wonewoc, told Wisconsin Watch that he is hopeful the program can continue and that nobody in his caucus wants the program to end. 

“I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure the program is sustainable for the future,” Kurtz said in an interview.

Since 1989, when the program began, the state has spent more than $23 million in stewardship funds in Kurtz’s 41st Assembly District. The program has funded nearly 330 projects in the district ranging from trail developments and campground upgrades to habitat protection and boat launch construction. 

In his executive budget proposal last month, Evers proposed a 10-year renewal of the program with a $1 billion price tag. Kurtz said the budget committee isn’t going to adopt that proposal, but he’s committed to seeing the program reauthorized for “the next couple of years.” He said every lawmaker has a Knowles-Nelson project “in their backyard” that they might not even know about.

“It is a large price tag,” Kurtz said. “But we do need to make the investments. The investments are valuable for the long-term conservation of Wisconsin.” 

Following a series of listening sessions held in his district, state Sen. Howard Marklein, R-Spring Green, said attendees spoke in support of the program. 

“I am supportive of the program and hope to see it continue, but many of my colleagues in the legislature have reservations,” Marklein, co-chair of the JFC, said in a statement. 

Kurtz said it’s unfortunate the program has become a partisan fight in the Capitol and that some lawmakers are “negative” toward the program, adding that Knowles-Nelson is “more than just one project.” 

Conservation advocacy groups like Gathering Waters have pushed back against the JFC’s threats to kill the program, which provides millions of dollars in grants to local governments and nonprofits.

“I think legislative leaders were certainly unhappy about losing that Supreme Court case in such an unambiguous way,” Charles Carlin, director of strategic initiatives for Gathering Waters, told Wisconsin Watch. “There is constantly a temptation for lawmakers to get pulled into partisan battles where politics becomes more about winning than it does about good policy.”

When asked if he would veto a state budget that eliminates funding for Knowles-Nelson, Evers said he would use his partial veto power to reject “that part of it.”

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

Republican lawmakers diverge on future of conservation stewardship program is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

What is a year of life behind bars worth for someone who didn’t commit a crime?

One standard in Wisconsin suggests it’s no more than $5,000.  

That’s the maximum compensation the state offers for each year of incarceration to those wrongfully convicted of crimes — capping payouts at $25,000 across all years, with rare exceptions. 

Of the 35 states with wrongful conviction compensation laws, Wisconsin is stingier than most. 

The state on average pays about $4,200 per year of wrongful incarceration to those who filed and received compensation, according to an analysis of data collected by the National Registry of Exonerations. Meanwhile, Wisconsin is not among the 19 states that offer additional non-monetary compensation for health care, education, counseling and re-entry into society. 

The federal government, by contrast, offers up $50,000 per year of incarceration to those wrongfully convicted in the federal system, or up to $100,000 per year for those who were on death row. 

“One can be so quickly wrongfully convicted but it takes years to recover,” Fred Saecker, who in 1996 was exonerated by DNA testing for a rape he didn’t commit seven years earlier, testified to a legislative committee in 2017. “When we are released, we are sent out to fail without resources, health care or opportunities.”

In rare cases, the Wisconsin Claims Board can recommend that the Legislature provide additional compensation to exonerees. 

Daryl Holloway in 2022 received $1 million plus $100,000 in attorneys’ fees for the 24 years he spent wrongfully convicted of sexual assault charges. Just two years later, Derrick Sanders was awarded the state maximum of $25,000 for 26 years he spent in prison.

Sanders, who in 1993 was wrongfully convicted of murder, had requested more than $5.7 million from the state, citing his innocence, lack of a criminal record at the time of his arrest and his honorable discharge from the U.S. Navy. Although the board recognized “clear and convincing” evidence of his innocence, he was awarded a tiny fraction of that request. 

State Sen. LaTonya Johnson, D-Milwaukee, supported past legislation to boost the compensation maximum. She said the current limit falls short of what’s just or helpful to someone reentering society.

“You can’t take away somebody’s entire life and then say, ‘Here’s $25,000, go start over,’” she said. “What does that begin to cover?”

Jarrett Adams was denied compensation in 2009, two years after being released from prison. Adams was a teenager in 2000 when an all-white Jefferson County jury convicted him of sexual assault. A federal appeals court later vacated the conviction, citing insufficient evidence and ineffective counsel. But in denying his claim for compensation, the Wisconsin Claims Board wrote that he lacked “clear and convincing” evidence of his innocence.

Adams went on to earn a law degree and was part of the legal team that successfully argued for a new trial for Richard Beranek, who spent two decades in prison on rape, battery and burglary charges before being exonerated with the help of DNA evidence. 

Adams testified in 2015 in support of bipartisan legislation to change compensation practices.

Among other changes, the legislation would have raised the limit on compensation to $1 million for all years of wrongful incarceration while adding additional services to help exonerees reenter society. The legislation unanimously cleared the Assembly but died in the Senate.

“There are no programs designed to help those wrongfully convicted reenter society,” Adams wrote in his testimony. “However, those who are convicted and released from prison are afforded services by the state.”

Years have passed since the last such proposal in the Legislature. Johnson said she would back similar legislation if it returned, but Republican colleagues tell her they lack the appetite. 

In the past 20 years, 61 people have had convictions reversed in Wisconsin, collectively spending about 500 years imprisoned. Of that group, 27 applied for compensation, with 15 receiving some amount. 

In each denial, the claims board concluded that the wrongfully imprisoned person lacked “clear and convincing” evidence of innocence.

Johnson said she was “shocked” by such denials.

In denying Danny Wilber’s compensation claim following the 2022 reversal of a first-degree murder conviction that sent him to prison for 16 years, the claims board wrote that vacated judgments or exonerations based on legal technicalities such as ineffective counsel or unjust treatment in court do not necessarily prove innocence.

Wilber’s conviction was vacated because the extreme way he was shackled in court could have prejudiced the jury.  

Wisconsin law “does not provide compensation to individuals who simply establish that their convictions have been overturned, it provides compensation to individuals who establish their innocence by clear and convincing evidence,” the board wrote. 

The claims board is currently considering requests by Robert and David Bintz, who spent 24 years in prison for a murder in Green Bay that they didn’t commit. They seek about $2.1 million each.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

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Democratic Gov. Tony Evers still wants certain powers restored to his office.

In his executive budget proposal, Evers last month proposed repealing a series of controversial laws that were approved in a 2018 “lame-duck” session after he defeated his Republican predecessor Gov. Scott Walker, but before he took office. The laws stripped the governor and attorney general of certain powers and instead gave them to the Legislature.

He’s called for repealing the laws in all four of his proposed budgets.

One law Evers targeted, for example, specifies that when the state Senate rejects the governor’s nominees for state government positions, the governor may not reappoint that person to the same position. The law clarifies what “with the advice and consent of the Senate” means in other parts of state law. Evers’ proposal to cut the statute prompted outrage from one Republican senator last week.

“What’s the point of advice and consent of the Senate if the person can serve after being rejected by the Senate?” Sen. Van Wanggaard, R-Racine, said in a statement. “Can you imagine the uproar from Gov. Evers and Democrats if President Trump or former Gov. Walker did this?”

“This is a repeal of the 2018 lame-duck provisions Republicans passed because you were mad about losing to a Democrat,” Evers’ spokesperson Britt Cudaback fired back on social media. 

The statute is just one of many approved by GOP lawmakers over six years ago as they moved to swiftly strip powers from the incoming governor and attorney general, sending fast-tracked bills to Walker’s desk during his final weeks in office.

Among those last-minute changes was a move to block governors from re-nominating political appointees who are rejected by the Senate, which is controlled by Republicans. More than 180 of Evers’ appointees have yet to be confirmed by the Senate. Republicans have fired 21 of his picks since he took office in 2019, according to the nonpartisan Legislative Reference Bureau. Evers has tried to repeal the Senate advice and consent law in all four of his budget proposals.

Attorney General Josh Kaul, whose authority was also hampered by the laws, has challenged the lame-duck laws for years. In 2020, the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s then-conservative majority upheld the GOP’s last-minute legislation. But now, with a 4-3 liberal majority, Kaul has asked the court to decide whether one of the laws — granting the GOP-controlled Joint Finance Committee the ability to reject settlements reached by the Department of Justice in certain civil lawsuits — is constitutional.

While these legal challenges have persisted for nearly six years, Evers has attempted to repeal lame-duck laws via another route: his state budget proposals.

“This is why you read the actual language of the budget,” Wanggaard said. “Trying to sneak this through is exactly why Republicans start from scratch in the budget.”

Evers has attempted in all four of his budget proposals to repeal a lame-duck law that gave the speaker of the Assembly, the Senate majority leader and the co-chairs of the Joint Committee on Legislative Organization — positions held by Republicans for more than a decade — the power to authorize legal representation for lawmakers, allowing them to hire counsel outside of the DOJ.

In all four budgets, Evers has also proposed striking down a lame-duck statute that requires at least 70% of the funding for certain highway projects to come from the federal government each year. If the Department of Transportation is unable to meet this, the law allows the department to propose an alternate funding plan that must be approved by the GOP-controlled JFC. 

The governor also proposed overturning a statute in all four budget proposals requiring the Department of Health Services to obtain legislative authorization before submitting requests for federal waivers or pilot programs. It also requires DHS to submit plans and progress reports to the JFC for approval, additionally granting the committee the power to reduce DHS funding or positions for noncompliance.

In each budget proposal, Evers has also tried to overturn other lame-duck statutes that grant Republican-controlled legislative committees greater power, such as approving Capitol security changes and new enterprise zones. 

Republican lawmakers have rejected the governor’s efforts in the previous three budget cycles. That will likely be the case again this year.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

Gov. Tony Evers attempts to repeal Wisconsin lame-duck laws in budget again is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

An Assembly Republican is using the authority of the Elon Musk-inspired GOAT Committee to investigate the diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives of local governments across the state before the committee has even met.

Rep. Shae Sortwell, R-Two Rivers, the committee’s vice chair, confirmed Thursday he sent or plans to send information requests to all 72 counties and the state’s 50 largest cities. Wisconsin Watch first reported Thursday that Sortwell had sent requests on Feb. 20 to multiple cities and counties. 

The requests state that GOAT “has been charged with undertaking a review of county use of taxpayer dollars for positions, policies, and activities related to diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Sortwell’s emails ask for “documentation” from January 2019 to the present relating to the following items:

• DEI-related grants the communities may have received.
• the communities’ “adopted/enacted” DEI policies. 
• any DEI training programs the communities might be involved with.
• the titles and salaries of employees with DEI-related positions. 
• and the “estimated associated costs” of DEI-related policies and trainings.

Officials for Fitchburg, Manitowoc, Oshkosh and Racine told Wisconsin Watch their respective cities plan to treat and fulfill Sortewll’s request like any other public records request they receive.

Sortwell did not respond to questions for Wisconsin Watch about his information requests and the committee’s work.

The committee is new to the Assembly this legislative session. It is inspired by the so-called federal Department of Government Efficiency — which has bulldozed through federal agencies in the early days of the second Trump administration — and is similarly named after a pop culture meme (GOAT is shorthand for greatest of all time; DOGE is named after a meme turned cryptocurrency).

The committee’s chair, Rep. Amanda Nedweski, R-Pleasant Prairie, recently told Wisconsin Watch the body was created “to identify opportunities to increase state government efficiency and to decrease spending.” Nedweski did not respond to questions about the committee’s work for this story.

The move to investigate DEI policies was made without the knowledge of the committee’s Democratic members, according to a Tuesday letter the three lawmakers sent to Nedweski, a copy of which was obtained by Wisconsin Watch.

“One member sending a request implying the participation of the entirety of the Committee’s membership violates the spirit of bipartisanship and cooperation you have shared with us as your intent for the Committee,” Reps. Mike Bare, Francesca Hong and Angelina Cruz wrote. “Empowering one Committee member to act in the interest of an entire Committee’s membership without their prior knowledge or consent is a dangerous precedent.”

The three Democrats also questioned the committee’s authority to seek the information. Sortwell’s request cites a little-known statute that states “departments, officers and employees of Wisconsin state government, and the governing bodies of the political subdivisions of this state, shall assist legislative committees in the completion of their tasks.” “Political subdivisions” include counties, cities, villages and towns.

“They shall provide legislative committees with ready access to any books, records or other information relating to such tasks,” the law continues.

But, the Democratic lawmakers argue, the committee “does not have any discernible ‘task’ before it.” They noted the committee has not met and no bills have been referred to it.

“The committee has nothing but a name,” Bare told Wisconsin Watch in an interview. “That’s all we know about it.”

Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, said GOP lawmakers are searching for “grants that are going to local governments that have requirements in them that add extra cost or extra burden that we could look to say we’re not going to allow that to happen.”

Lawmakers are requesting information from local governments because Democratic Gov. Tony Evers has not granted GOP legislators access to state agencies, Vos said.

The speaker added that the goal is “to make sure that whatever we are rooting out for waste, fraud and abuse, we have data to be able to utilize, and it’s just hard to get from an administration that’s uncooperative.”

Vos also rejected Democrats’ concerns that Sortwell is operating without notifying his colleagues first.

“It’s pretty normal to do fact gathering before you have a hearing,” Vos said. “I don’t know why anybody would be concerned. I am the subject of open requests at least weekly. It’s not always the (most fun) part of your job, but it’s part of what makes Wisconsin’s government open.”

In a social media post on Thursday, Sortwell affirmed he sent the requests and said he plans to request information from state agencies as well.

“Just because you don’t like it and whine about it, doesn’t mean I can’t do it,” he wrote in response to concerns from his Democratic colleagues, pointing to a memo issued Thursday by the Wisconsin Legislative Council, the Legislature’s nonpartisan attorneys.

The memo concludes there is “no reason why a committee vice chairperson would not be able to” request information with the blessing of the committee’s chair — which Sortwell said he has.

Numerous counties have also received communication from the GOAT Committee, according to a legal memo crafted for the Wisconsin Counties Association.

The memo questions whether the committee’s requests were submitted to the correct bodies of government and outlines concerns that responding to the request for five years of information “may involve a significant undertaking requiring expenditure of county staff resources.”

“There are concerns surrounding the validity of the request and a county’s legal obligation to respond,” the memo states, adding “we understand there may be legitimate concerns the GOAT Committee is attempting to address.”

Bare expressed concerns GOP lawmakers would try to hold up resources for local governments unless they cut back on DEI initiatives, which was a piece of a larger deal in 2023 that reworked how the state sends aid to local governments.

Part of that bill allowed the city of Milwaukee and Milwaukee County, both of which were facing financial headwinds, to increase the sales tax in their jurisdictions to raise additional revenue. But the legislation also mandated that both Milwaukee governments “may not use moneys raised by levying taxes for funding any position for which the principal duties consist of promoting individuals on the basis of their race, color, ancestry, national origin, or sexual orientation.”

Vos deployed a similar playbook to target DEI efforts on UW System campuses during the last budget cycle.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

Republican uses GOAT Committee authority to investigate local government diversity efforts is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and Republican lawmakers continue to dig in their heels during a yearslong tug-of-war over how regulators should hold property owners liable for contamination caused by “forever chemicals” known as PFAS.

They are pushing competing proposals to protect so-called innocent landowners — those who didn’t knowingly cause their PFAS pollution — from liability under Wisconsin’s decades-old environmental cleanup law.

Evers’ two-year budget proposal, introduced last week, exempts some owners of residential and agricultural land. The proposal would also fund testing and cleanups of affected properties.

His budget takes a narrower tack than the approach spearheaded by a Republican who has long sought to protect innocent landowners.

During the previous legislative session, Sen. Eric Wimberger of Oconto co-authored an innocent landowner bill that lawmakers passed along party lines before an Evers veto.

The governor accused Republicans of using farmers as “scapegoats” to constrain state authority. His staff warned that if Republicans present the same proposal this session, Evers might veto it again.

Wimberger says Evers’ staff has failed to respond to his requests for an outline of innocent landowner exemptions Evers would support. Wimberger is now circulating two draft bills co-authored with state Rep. Jeff Mursau, R-Crivitz, that contain provisions virtually identical to the vetoed legislation. Those include grants for municipalities and owners of PFAS-contaminated properties.

The proposals also would limit the Department of Natural Resources’ power to require property owners to pay for cleanups and extend liability exemptions to certain businesses and municipalities.

“The governor needlessly vetoed the plan over protections for innocent landowners,” Wimberger said in a statement. “Now, after delaying this relief for a year, he says he wants to protect innocent landowners. While it’s encouraging to see him change his mind, he is no champion for pollution victims.”

How does the state handle PFAS-contaminated farmland?

Wisconsin’s spills law requires reporting and cleanup by parties that pollute air, soil or water or if they discover contamination from a past owner. That is because, in part, allowing pollution to remain on the landscape could be more dangerous to human health than the initial spill.

The DNR has held parties liable for PFAS contamination they didn’t cause but also has exercised discretion by seeking remediation from past spillers instead of current property owners. 

PFAS, short for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a family of more than 12,000 compounds commonly found in consumer products like food wrappers, nonstick pans and raincoats along with firefighting foam used to smother hot blazes. Some are toxic.

The chemicals pass through the waste stream and into sewage treatment plants, which commonly contract with farmers to accept processed sludge as fertilizer.

Testing is now unearthing PFAS on cropland from Maine to Texas. Several hot spots are located in Wisconsin too, among the more than 100 PFAS-contaminated case files the DNR currently monitors.

The agency maintains it has never, and has no plans to, enforce the spills law against a property owner who unknowingly received PFAS-contaminated fertilizer. But Republican lawmakers don’t trust those promises.

How do the budget and draft bill proposals compare?

Evers’ bill would exempt only residential and agricultural properties polluted with PFAS-contaminated sludge. Affected landowners would have to provide the DNR access to their property for cleanup and not worsen the contamination.

Evers’ innocent landowner exemption would sunset by 2036. 

Meanwhile, the Republican draft bills would prevent the DNR from enforcing the spills law when the responsible party qualifies as an innocent landowner and allow the department to clean up its property at its own expense.

The first bill focuses on innocent landowner provisions, while the second, larger proposal adds grant programs without specifying appropriations. Wimberger explained introducing two bills would “ensure the victims of PFAS pollution get the debate they deserve” and prevent Democrats from “playing politics” with PFAS funding and policy.

Unlike Evers’ budget proposal, the draft bills don’t release $125 million in aid to PFAS-affected communities that has sat in a trust fund for 18 months.

The Legislature allocated the funds in the previous two-year budget, but its GOP-controlled finance committee hasn’t transferred the cash to the DNR.

Lawmakers in both parties have bristled over the languishing money, with Democrats contending the committee could transfer it without passing a new law. The nonpartisan Wisconsin Legislative Council says lawmakers would be on “relatively firm legal footing” if they did so.

Republicans, meanwhile, say transferring the dollars without limiting DNR enforcement powers would not effectively help impacted landowners. They say the DNR could treat a landowner’s request for state assistance as an invitation for punishment.

The previous, vetoed bill garnered support from all three Wisconsin local government associations, but environmental groups, the DNR and Evers said it shifted PFAS cleanup costs to taxpayers.

Environmental groups also feared Republicans on the finance committee would continue withholding the $125 million even if the legislation had advanced — protracting the stalemate while weakening the DNR.

Nor would risking “unintended consequences” of weakening the spills law be worth $125 million, which would scratch the surface of remediation costs, environmental critics said.

Expenses in Marinette County alone, which is coping with PFAS contamination linked to a firefighter training site owned by Johnson Controls International, already exceed that amount.

The Milwaukee Business Journal reported the company upped its reserves by $255 million to finance the cleanup. With the increase, the company has recorded charges of about $400 million since 2019.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

Who pays for PFAS? Governor, GOP lawmakers wrestle over cleanup liability is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

With years of continued gridlock between the Republican-controlled Legislature and Democratic governor, the Wisconsin Supreme Court has become the arbiter over some of the most heated election rule debates — from redistricting and drop boxes to the status of the state’s top election official. 

That’s what makes April’s Supreme Court election a race to watch. It features two candidates with a stark ideological divide, competing for the seat of a retiring liberal justice and the chance to secure a majority in the current 4-3 liberal court. And it could determine how voters cast ballots in elections for years to come.

Conservative Brad Schimel is a Waukesha County judge and former Republican attorney general. Liberal Susan Crawford is a Dane County judge and former assistant attorney general under a Democratic administration. While the court is technically nonpartisan, both candidates are running with the support of their respective state parties, with partisan politicians providing endorsements on both sides.

“We don’t know what cases are going to come forward or what the facts or the arguments would be,” said Barry Burden, a UW-Madison political science professor and founder of the Elections Research Center. “But Crawford versus Schimel being on the court does send it in a different ideological direction.”

There are several election-related disputes the new justice may help settle. Fights over electronic voting, Wisconsin’s membership in the multistate Electronic Registration Information Center, and election officials’ ability to access citizenship data are brewing in lower courts. 

More lawsuits may yet be filed if conservatives retake control of the court. Since liberals gained a majority in 2023, they have overseen a case that led the Legislature and governor to redraw the state’s previous Republican-drawn legislative maps in a way that didn’t give either party a built-in advantage. They also legalized drop boxes, which the conservative court banned in 2022.

A victory for Crawford would probably give liberals the final say on election issues for the next two years. That’s because the next two seats up for grabs — one in 2026 and one in 2027 — are both currently held by conservatives.

A Schimel victory would give conservatives the majority, but not as much security. One of the justices providing that majority would be Justice Brian Hagedorn, a sometimes swing voter whom Burden called “the least predictable justice.”

So a court with Schimel wouldn’t be “as reliably conservative as a 4-3 liberal majority would be reliably liberal,” Burden said.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court could have an outsized role in the coming years given the apparent willingness of President Donald Trump’s administration to defy some federal court orders, said Eileen Newcomer, voter education manager at the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin. That dynamic could send more issues to state instead of federal court, Newcomer said.

One of the most crucial roles the winning candidate may have during his or her tenure is participating if the court settles disputes over election results. In 2020, the then-conservative court narrowly rejected Trump’s lawsuit to overturn that year’s presidential election, which he lost.

Two candidates diverge on election law

The clearest difference between the candidates on election law is their stance on requiring photo IDs for voting. Crawford was among the lawyers to represent the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin Education Network in its challenge to the requirement soon after it became law in 2011. She later called the law “draconian.” 

Schimel, on the other hand, said the requirement kept Wisconsin elections secure, crediting the law for President Donald Trump’s 2016 victory in the state. Schimel’s campaign has pointed out Crawford’s past opposition to the law.

Whoever wins may have a chance to weigh in on the photo ID issue.

The April ballot also has a question that could put the photo ID requirement in the state constitution.

If voters approve the question — which is likely given widespread support for the law and a muted campaign against the ballot measure — overturning the requirement would be all but impossible. Still, experts say, the court or Legislature may still be able to provide some exceptions to the requirement. That means the Supreme Court’s majority could decide just how broad those exceptions could be.

If voters elect Schimel and approve the measure, Burden said, the requirement would be secure. But if voters reject the proposal and elect Crawford, he added, “it’s very likely that some group brings a challenge to the voter ID law.”

Cases that the justices may weigh in on

One lawsuit that appears headed to the Wisconsin Supreme Court is over whether voters with disabilities should be allowed to receive, mark and return ballots electronically. Currently, that privilege is reserved for military and overseas voters. Voters with disabilities in Wisconsin allege that their lack of access to electronic voting violates their rights. 

Another issue that could come before the court is the legality of ballot drop boxes. The court under a conservative majority banned them in 2022, but liberals lifted the ban after they took over the court. A conservative group could bring a case seeking to ban them again if Schimel wins, Burden said.

“They seem very willing to entertain new arguments about the same issue,” Burden said.

Newcomer, from the League of Women Voters, said revisiting settled issues and reversing precedent a third time would “undermine people’s confidence in the court.”

Still more battles are taking place over noncitizen voting, an issue that Republicans are seeking to draw attention to, despite scant evidence that it actually happens in any widespread manner. As part of their campaign, Republicans have been seeking access to Department of Transportation data showing the citizenship status of registered voters. Much of the department’s information is outdated, but some conservatives have sued for access nonetheless to understand the scale of noncitizen voting in the battleground state.

“If that’s what conservatives want, they’re going to be dissatisfied,” Burden said. “But they might still go to the court and try to get some kind of relief or action if they feel like a bunch of officials around the state are not doing all they can to weed out noncitizens from the voting rolls.”

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

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

How the Wisconsin Supreme Court race could decide future of election law is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers unveiled his 2025-27 biennial budget proposal last week — a two-year plan totaling nearly $119 billion compared to the $100 billion budget currently on the books.

Republicans lawmakers who control the powerful budget writing committee immediately vowed to throw out the governor’s spending plan this spring. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, said Evers’ proposals are “dead on arrival.”

Many of the governor’s recommendations have been reviewed and rejected by GOP lawmakers in previous budgets, like his plans to expand Medicaid or legalize marijuana.

But in this year’s budget address, he introduced several new items. Here are four examples from the governor’s fourth state budget proposal. 

No tax on cash tips 

“No tax on tips” quickly became a Republican mantra on the 2024 campaign trail after it was heavily touted by President Donald Trump. But Democrats have followed suit, coming out in support of the popular policy.

For the first time, Evers is seeking to eliminate income taxes on cash tips in the budget, a proposal that mirrors a Republican-authored bill in the Legislature. The plan would reduce state revenue by just under $7 million annually — a paltry amount compared to the roughly $11 billion in individual income tax the state expects to collect each year. 

“Interesting. @GovEvers wants to eliminate tax on tips (great idea, swear I heard it somewhere before) but not a single Democrat co-sponsored the bill that Sen. (Andre) Jacque and I authored to create tax exemption for tips. I’m glad we can count on Evers’ support,” state Sen. Julian Bradley, R-New Berlin, wrote on X.

Service industry workers might shrug when they discover that the tax exemption would only apply to tips left in cash and would not exempt the majority of tips, which are left on a credit card. But that’s not the only reason why Jason Stein, president of the Wisconsin Policy Forum, says the proposal would have little impact.

“Many of the lower wage workers who receive tips may not have to pay any state income taxes as it is,” Stein told Wisconsin Watch. “There are other policies like the earned income tax credit that would benefit low-wage workers…they’re more industry-neutral. They’re profession-neutral.” 

Free college tuition for Native American students

In another new proposal, Evers recommended providing full tuition waivers for any student who is a Wisconsin resident, a citizen of any of the state’s 11 federally recognized tribal nations and enrolled at a Universities of Wisconsin System or Wisconsin Technical College System school. The governor’s office could not confirm the cost of this specific proposal, but noted it is part of a $129 million effort to increase affordability in the UW System over the next two years. 

The proposal mirrors the Wisconsin Tribal Education Promise already in place at UW-Madison, which covers all educational costs for Native students who are citizens of a tribal nation. That program began last fall, is not tied to household income and is funded in part by philanthropy rather than state funds.

The program was announced in December 2023, shortly after Universities of Wisconsin regents struck a deal with Republican lawmakers to end diversity hires across their campuses in exchange for previously approved employee raises and project funding. Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin said the program is a testament to the university’s commitment to diversity.

Universities in other states have launched similar initiatives in recent years, granting in-state tuition for Native students.

Auditing health insurance companies 

Evers wants Wisconsin to be the first state in the nation to audit insurance companies that frequently deny health care claims. But the details of this plan, such as how frequently an insurance company would have to deny claims to be audited, are slim. 

“If an insurance company is going to deny your health care claim, they should have a darn good reason for it. It’s frustrating when your claim gets denied and it doesn’t seem like anyone can give you a good reason why,” Evers said. “If an insurance company is denying Wisconsinites’ claims too often, we’re going to audit them. Pretty simple.” 

The plan would cost $500,000 in program revenue, potentially from new fines, for two full-time positions over the next two years “to establish a framework for auditing high rates of health insurance claim denials among insurers offering plans in the state over which the office has regulatory authority.”

The new office would set the percentage of claim denials that would warrant an audit. The office would then enforce “corrective action” through fines or forfeitures. 

New tax bracket for millionaires

Evers is also seeking new ways to increase state revenue. This includes his plan to “ensure millionaires and billionaires in Wisconsin pay their fair share” through a new individual tax bracket of 9.8% that would apply to income for single and married joint filers above $1 million. For married couples filing separately, income above $500,000 would also fall under this tax bracket.

The new tax is estimated to generate nearly $1.3 billion over the next two years. 

The current top income tax rate is 7.65%, covering married joint filers with an income above $420,420 and individuals with an income above $315,310.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

Here are four items in Gov. Tony Evers’ $119 billion budget that he hasn’t previously proposed is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers unveiled his 2025-27 biennial state budget proposal. The nearly year-long process is now picking up speed, but the next two-year budget is still far from being finalized. 

Over the next few months, the Legislature’s powerful Joint Finance Committee, controlled by Republicans, will make significant changes to Evers’ proposals before approving a final budget bill. During this time, the politically divided executive and legislative branches will wrestle over funding for public schools, child care, higher education, Medicaid expansion and much more. 

Another budget surplus expected

Wisconsin ended its 2024 fiscal year with a more-than-expected $4.6 billion budget surplus and is on pace to end the current fiscal year with a $4.2 billion surplus. Republicans want to reduce the surplus by passing income tax cuts before the budget debate begins, while Democrats are urging more funding for things like K-12 education.

The Legislature must pass a budget signed by the governor every two years in order to use up state revenues for government operations. A budget period begins on July 1 of each odd-numbered year and concludes on June 30 of the next odd-numbered year. The last two-year budget totaled nearly $100 billion. 

Here’s what this hectic process will look like: 

The process involves three main entities that work to both create and pass the budget: the governor, the Legislature and state agencies. 

State agencies like the Department of Public Instruction and the Department of Natural Resources calculate their financial needs for the upcoming cycle and submit formal funding requests, which were due to the State Budget Office back in September. The Department of Administration then analyzes and compiles the requests for the governor. 

The governor then spends months crafting an executive budget proposal based on these requests, and community listening sessions are held across the state in December. On Tuesday he will give his budget address, which he is legally required to deliver to the new Legislature. Proposed funding for state agencies will be made available. 

Soon after that — likely in March — Evers will reveal his capital budget proposal, which includes spending plans for long-term projects like new UW System buildings. 

Then, the Joint Finance Committee will review and revise Evers’ budget. Under a divided government since 2019, the committee has scrapped the governor’s proposals and written its own. In 2023, GOP lawmakers began this process by stripping nearly 550 of his proposals.

Lawmakers on the Joint Finance Committee typically hold their own community listening sessions in April.  The committee typically completes its revisions by the end of May.

Then, lawmakers in both houses of the Legislature — the Republican-controlled Senate and Assembly — have until the end of the fiscal year on June 30 to pass the budget before it heads to Evers’ desk for signing. Here, he can use his controversial partial veto power to remove specific appropriations from the budget bill, also allowing him to delete large sections of language and manipulate words or numbers.

In 2023, Evers made national headlines after he manipulated punctuation in the Legislature’s budget to extend school funding for 402 years. A case challenging the partial veto is pending before the Wisconsin Supreme Court. In the meantime, Republican lawmakers have introduced a constitutional amendment that would strip away the governor’s partial veto power.

If the budget is not signed into law by July 1, the state will continue to operate under the previous budget passed in 2023 until the new one is signed.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

Here’s how Wisconsin’s state budget process works is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.