ROTHSCHILD — Far from the liberal capital, Republicans gathered over the weekend to assess the state of a party in full control of the federal government, but showing signs of continued collapse in Wisconsin.

There were plenty of middle-aged white guys, one towing “Trump” the service dog and one in a Carhartt polo talking about conspiracist Alex Jones. Among the handful of African American attendees was a man sporting a “Black Guns Matter” T-shirt. An Appleton 25-year-old in a suit and tie talked up the need for more young people in leadership. A Dane County woman shared her thoughts on clamping down on illegal immigration and onshoring manufacturing jobs, as another attendee walked past in an American flag dress.

What many of these rank-and-file Republicans shared, as they gathered for the Wisconsin Republican Party’s annual convention, was applause for the sheer speed of President Donald Trump’s actions in office — and a desire for more moves to the right in the 2026 elections.

In purple Wisconsin, that film has played out before, and it didn’t go so well for Republicans. After Trump’s first election in 2016, the party lost control of the governor’s office and the state Supreme Court. April’s Supreme Court victory for Dane County Judge Susan Crawford means liberals will control the court through at least 2028 and could reshape the state’s congressional maps to help Democrats retake Congress in the midterms.

While there was some talk of blaming GOP state chair Brian Schimming for the poor April showing, none of that materialized in Rothschild. Instead, the party talked up the November victory and how to double down on the same Trumpian rhetoric heading into 2026.

Here’s how several of the 500 convention attendees at the Central Wisconsin Convention & Expo Center near Wausau assessed the first four months of Trump’s second term and what they want to see from GOP leaders going forward.

How state Republicans view Trump 2.0

Delegates were animated in their praise of Trump for keeping his campaign promises.

“It gets better every day,” said Rock County delegate Michael Mattus, accompanied by his Belgian service dog. “I’m happy every day. Wake up and thinking, what’s he gonna do today?” 

Adams County GOP chair Pete Church, who was elected chair of the state party’s county chairs at the convention, said he only wishes the U.S. House and Senate picked up the pace.

“It would be great if we could get Congress to actually put some of these things into law,” he said. “None of us really wants to see a government run by executive order, but that’s where we’re at.”

Delegates lauded Trump’s visit last week to the Middle East and his crackdown on illegal immigration.

“I have uncles, I have aunts that came over here illegally. I don’t associate with them,” said Martin Ruiz Gomez, 39, a one-time Milwaukee-based MMA fighter attending his first state GOP convention. “It’s not nothing against them, but they’re not doing things right.” 

The delegates even backed Trump initiatives that have less public support, such as tariffs. The on-again, off-again measures are viewed by some as making international trade fair and encouraging companies to create manufacturing jobs in the U.S., but recent polling has found more than 60% of Americans oppose them and worry they will raise prices. Rising prices was an issue that fueled Trump’s victory in November.

“Well, I was a little nervous about the tariffs when my (retirement savings account) went (down), but he’s doing what he set out to do,” said Calumet County delegate Linda Hoerth.

Portage County delegate Michael Zaremba agreed, saying the tariffs will eventually return more manufacturing jobs to the U.S.

“Just like with a pregnancy, you have to grow it, and then you have to experience the pain,” said Milwaukee County delegate Cindy Werner, who ran for the GOP nomination for lieutenant governor in 2022. “But then there’s joy that comes after that.”

Delegates happy with Trump’s performance were mild with any criticism.

“Trump hasn’t always been a big supporter of the Second Amendment. I mean, he is, but he also isn’t super firm on that,” said 25-year-old Reive Pullen, a gun-rights supporter from Outagamie County. 

Dane County delegate Tya Lichte could have done without Trump’s talk of taking control of Greenland or making Canada the 51st state.

“I understand he always likes to lead big and then heel back,” she said.

What more they want from GOP leaders

Soon, attention will turn to 2026 and the election for governor. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers hasn’t said whether he’ll seek a third term. His 2018 win over Republican Gov. Scott Walker marked the end of eight years of GOP rule in Wisconsin and came as Democrats flipped 41 seats to take back control of the U.S. House.

Hoerth, a board member of the Calumet County GOP, wants the next governor to “get rid of all this DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion)” and push for a state referendum on at what stage of pregnancy abortion should be legal in Wisconsin.

Hoerth likes the background of military veteran and Washington County Executive Josh Schoemann, the only announced Republican candidate for governor, based on Schoemann’s recent visit with her and other Calumet County Republicans.

“He got the entire group wound up looking at their phones, checking some different websites that he was telling us about,” she said. “It was great.” 

Another Republican mentioned as a potential gubernatorial candidate, northern Wisconsin U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, sounded like one. He used much of his convention speech to criticize Evers, but not to make any big announcements. 

Lichte, of Dane County, said she wants the next governor to follow Trump’s lead on reshoring jobs and to try to make Milwaukee a technology hub.

Milwaukee County GOP chair Hilario Deleon said reducing crime, taxes and the size of state government are top priorities.

Rock County’s Mattus, who called abortion “pro-murder,” said he became more active because “this world (is) becoming more communist and I’m not for that.” 

In the name of election integrity, Portage County’s Zaremba wants Republicans to get rid of the state Elections Commission and return to hand-counting paper ballots.

Some delegates expressed hope that their party can mend fences with nonprofits such as Turning Point USA in their efforts to elect Republicans. During the recent Supreme Court race there were disputes about how to campaign that went public and exposed rifts among conservatives.

“It’s all right that we don’t always agree, but when we’re taking those arguments to social media for the whole world to see, that’s where I don’t like it,” said Church, the new head of the county chairs. “The only way it can be fixed is through cooperation.”

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How die-hard Wisconsin Republicans rate Trump 2.0 and what they want in a governor for 2026 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.

Just six months ago, the Wisconsin Republican Party was flying pretty high. 

Despite an unsuccessful attempt to jettison U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, the GOP held its Wisconsin seats in the U.S. House and its majorities (albeit smaller) in the state Legislature. Donald Trump’s win in the Badger State put him over the top for a second term in the White House. 

Soon after, Brian Schimming was re-elected to a second two-year term as the party’s state chairman.

But, like a sudden drop in cabin pressure, things in politics can change quickly.

There is unrest among some Republicans as they prepare to gather for the state party’s annual convention on Saturday.

The meeting comes some six weeks after a stinging loss in the state Supreme Court election, in which Dane County Judge Susan Crawford defeated GOP-backed Waukesha County Judge Brad Schimel by 10 points, cementing a liberal court majority until at least 2028.

A few vocal critics blamed Schimming, who has promised an ”investigation” into what went wrong. Schimming declined an interview request. 

The party will meet in Rothschild, a village south of Wausau in Marathon County. One of the county’s leading Republicans, state Rep. Brent Jacobson of Mosinee, doesn’t blame Schimming for Schimel’s loss.

“That Supreme Court race was a reaction to Trump’s victory in November,” said Jacobson, who was elected to his first term last fall. “Democrats were super energized, and they simply turned out in far greater numbers than Republicans did.”

Jacobson said he is satisfied with Schimming’s performance and wants his fellow Republicans to turn the page. He credited Schimming with encouraging Republicans to embrace early voting during the November election, which Jacobson called “a difference maker,” and getting Trump to visit Dane County during the campaign.

“In politics, you have to have a short memory about losses,” he said. 

Julia Azari, a political science professor at Marquette University, said Schimming has a difficult job because Wisconsin “has a very unclear relationship with Trump and Trumpism.”

On the one hand, she said, Wisconsin helped Trump to victory in 2016 as well as 2024, but policies such as tariffs in his second term have met with pushback.

Azari also pointed to factors other than Schimming’s leadership for the Supreme Court outcome. She cited the involvement of billionaire Elon Musk in pushing Schimel’s candidacy as more important.

“A lot of it is related to resentment about Musk coming in from on high,” Azari said of Schimel’s loss. “I think Wisconsin voters are resistant to nationalization, and that the nationalization of party politics has had a limited impact here.”

For his part, Jacobson is looking ahead to the governor’s race in 2026, hoping for party unity. 

Democrat Tony Evers has not said whether he will seek a third term; so far one Republican, Washington County Executive Josh Schoemann, is in the race.

Jacobson said he expects more Republican candidates, but hopes not to see a repeat of 2022. He said that year’s GOP primary battle between businessman Tim Michels, who defeated former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch for the nomination, left the party hobbled against Evers.

“We can always learn from history and I would hope that we did that from 2022, so that we can not only be united but come out of the primary process with a lot more resources” in 2026, Jacobson said.

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

Wisconsin Republicans look for a reset at their upcoming state party convention 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 the clerk of Rock County, Wisconsin, gets a public records request for images of election ballots, much of it is easy to fulfill. For most municipalities in the county, it’s just a matter of uploading a photo of the ballot that’s already captured when it gets tabulated.

But for two of the county’s largest cities — Janesville and Beloit — it’s a lot more complicated, and time-consuming, because of a state law governing places that use a central counting facility for their absentee ballots.

For those ballots, Clerk Lisa Tollefson must redact the unique identifying numbers that the law requires poll workers to write on each one. Otherwise, the number could be used to connect the ballots to the voters who cast them. And because the numbers don’t appear in the same place on each ballot, Tollefson must click through the ballot images one at a time to locate and blot out the number before releasing the images.

To respond to records requests for this year’s April election, she had to redact the numbers from 10,000 ballot images. In November, it was over 23,000.

Given her other job duties, Tollefson says, fulfilling these requests can take months. Without that step, she says, she could fulfill public records requests in “no time at all.”

And it’s all due to a law that she and other clerks in the state say is not only outdated, but also a potential threat to the constitutional right in Wisconsin to ballot secrecy.

Tollefson and other county clerks said they support an ongoing legislative effort to repeal the law requiring election officials to write down those numbers. The proposal has come up in past legislative sessions but hasn’t gone far. It will be revived again this year, said Rep. Scott Krug, a Republican legislative leader and vice chair of the Assembly elections committee.

Number is obsolete and creates security risk, clerks say

The law might have been useful in the past, Tollefson said, when voters who changed their minds or made errors on absentee ballots that had been cast but not yet counted could void their ballot and cast a new one. The ID number allowed election officials at central count facilities to locate the ballot and cancel it before issuing a new one. 

But courts have since blocked voters from spoiling their absentee ballots, rendering the numbers obsolete. Now, if a voter tries to cast an in-person ballot after already voting absentee, the voter would be flagged in the poll books as having voted and would be turned away, Tollefson said.

Moreover, the labeling of ballots could pose a privacy risk at central count locations, where observers and poll workers might be able to match up numbers to deduce how someone voted, Tollefson said. The number written on each ballot corresponds with the voter’s number on the poll list, a public register that election officials use to enter information about voters.

There are rules in place to prevent an observer from connecting a ballot to the voter who cast it, Tollefson said, but she added, “We have laws that people shouldn’t steal, but they still do.”

Marathon County Clerk Kim Trueblood, a Republican, said the increased presence of election observers in recent years exacerbates that risk.

So far, there’s no indication that any observers or poll workers have intentionally used the numbers to link voters to their absentee ballots at central count. But election officials told Votebeat that the law creates an unnecessary risk, to go along with the significant added workload.

After the 2020 presidential election, Milwaukee County was asked to release images of its ballots as part of Donald Trump’s request for a recount in the county. The county had over 265,000 absentee ballots, all marked with identifying numbers that had to be redacted individually, Elections Director Michelle Hawley recalled. 

Given time pressures, the county hired its election vendor, Election Systems & Software, to do the redactions. It cost $27,000, which the Trump campaign covered as part of its recount request.

The county has since looked for ways to streamline the redactions and avoid outsourcing it, Hawley said. But the state law remains “extremely time-consuming,” she said. In addition to complicating records requests, she said, the law slows down absentee ballot processing as election officials at central count must write a number on every ballot.

Repealing little-known practice has had little momentum

Trueblood said the biggest obstacle to repealing the law may be simply that too few people know it exists. She said she has “talked to every” legislator from Marathon County and some were “horrified to learn” about what the law entails. 

“Hopefully the Legislature will do something about it,” she said.

Last session, the proposal to repeal the law had bipartisan support. The Assembly elections committee unanimously approved it after its Republican author, former Rep. Donna Rozar,  encouraged committee members not to discount the bill just because she wrote it with a Democrat. 

But the proposal was never introduced in the Senate and never got a floor vote in the Assembly.

Trueblood hopes the Legislature will act before 2026, when there will be an April Supreme Court election and legislative primaries and a general election later in the year.

If they just “cross off that little line in the state statute,” said Tollefson, “we would be good to go.”

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.

Clerks say an obsolete Wisconsin law creates needless work — and a threat to ballot secrecy 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 couple of years ago, Lorraine Beyersdorff was ready to retire from her job as clerk of the town of Texas, Wisconsin, after 34 years of service.

“I will not run again,” she said in a community Facebook post in late 2022. “Nomination papers can be circulated for signatures beginning December 1st. If interested, call me for more information.”

About a dozen people thanked her for a job well done. But no one filed nomination papers. Nobody called. And because of a quirk in Wisconsin law, no one from outside of the 1,600-person town could take the job. 

State law requires all elected town clerks — and the appointees who replace clerks departing mid-term — to live in the town where they serve. 

Beyersdorff, 73, knew there was another option: The town could switch from electing its clerk to appointing one. That would allow officials to consider candidates from outside the town’s borders.

But in small towns such as Texas — those with fewer than 2,500 residents — making that change is slow and cumbersome. It first requires a vote at a town meeting to put the measure on the ballot, then another vote by residents to approve it.

In Beyersdorff’s case, that months-long process stretched into years. She remained on the job until voters finally approved the switch in November. In April, the town appointed a new clerk, whom Beyersdorff is training. The clerk job is part-time — about 20 hours a week, though that varies depending on elections and other town business. 

“I wanted to get out, but I was OK hanging in,” Beyersdorff said. “After so many years, you’re almost scared to not have it. It’s been part of my life for so long, and because you can do it from home, it’s kind of intermingled with cooking and doing laundry and everything else.”

A proposal to make switching easier

Now, Wisconsin lawmakers want to streamline the process for towns like Texas. A bill introduced April 16 with bipartisan support would allow towns under 2,500 people to switch to appointing a clerk with a simple vote at a town meeting — no referendum required.

The proposal would also eliminate another hurdle: Under current law, even if a town approves the switch, it can’t take effect until the end of the current clerk’s term. The bill would let towns make the change immediately if the clerk position is vacant or becomes vacant.

The legislation passed committees unanimously last year but never received a full floor vote. The proposal authors, state Sen. Romaine Robert Quinn, a Republican who represents a northern Wisconsin district, and state Rep. Alex Dallman, a Republican from central Wisconsin, didn’t respond to requests for comment about the proposal. In a public hearing last year, Dallman said the proposal “will allow towns to operate more efficiently.”

Beyersdorff agrees. “You’d have a much quicker way to replace (clerks) and a bigger pool,” she said. “It can happen that somebody dies in the middle of the term, and then how do you replace them?”

Even in less dire situations, she said, appointing clerks can be advantageous because it allows the town to weigh qualifications heavily. In elections, Beyersdorff said, sometimes small communities vote for the people they know best, without caring “if they have any qualifications or even are capable of doing it.”

The multiple hurdles that small towns face under current law make it challenging for them to recruit and train qualified clerks, said Sam Liebert, a former clerk who is now the Wisconsin state director for All Voting is Local. “Giving local communities the flexibility to appoint their clerks is a common-sense solution.”

About one-third of Wisconsin towns now appoint their town clerks, and more are considering the switch, said Joe Ruth, government affairs director and legal counsel for the Wisconsin Towns Association. The role has become increasingly complex, and the longtime clerks who held the position for decades are aging out, he said.

It can be easier for towns to look for already qualified candidates who might live outside their municipal limits, he said, an option only available if the town appoints its clerk. By forgoing the currently required referendum that small towns need to make that change, towns can save the costs of administering that ballot question.

Ruth said that he often fields calls from towns that are desperate for help.

“We often hear the question, ‘We just lost our clerk. What do we do?'” he said. “Or, ‘We lost our clerk last year, we appointed someone to fill that vacancy, and now that person quit, and we can’t find anybody else.’ Those situations are really what have driven us towards these types of changes.”

The bigger challenge that towns face, Ruth said, is when elected clerks quit early in their tenure and no other town residents seek to replace them. Because state law prohibits towns from switching to appointing clerks until the end of the current term, towns can sometimes go one or two years without a clerk — a problem that this proposal would fix, he said. 

More complications in town of Wausau

While Beyersdorff was OK continuing in her job until the town could find a replacement for her, that wasn’t the case 10 minutes away in the town of Wausau.

Late last year, the longtime clerk retired and moved out of town. The town supervisors thought they had the situation under control: They appointed a town resident. That person quit after two weeks. 

Scrambling to find a clerk before the Wisconsin Supreme Court election in April, town supervisors advertised the opening in the town’s newsletter, during a budget meeting and on its website, said Sharon Hunter, a town supervisor.

People were interested in the job, she said, but they were typically working full time or had part-time jobs. “So the concern was the number of evening meetings, all of the responsibilities of the clerk, and especially running the elections,” she said.

Ultimately, nobody stepped up for the April election, so two town supervisors filled in. Hunter said she had been putting in an extra 20 hours of work per week between processing permits, licenses, keeping meeting minutes and preparing agendas, doing paperwork on the annual budget, and filing reports.

The town was lucky to have a chief election inspector — the official in charge of the town’s only polling place — with detailed knowledge, she said, because it would have been time-consuming for her to learn those duties.

In the April election, the town put forth a referendum to switch to appointing clerks, but voters  rejected it by a narrow margin. Hunter attributes the loss to the failure of supporters to explain why it was necessary. The town will try the referendum again in the future, she said.

For now, at least, the town has a clerk. In the April election, voters elected another clerk, who ran unopposed.

“I’m sure she’ll do a wonderful job,” Hunter said. “My concern is stepping in and not realizing all that is involved. Maybe she finds out that this is something she really doesn’t want to do and then she resigns. Well, then we’re in the same situation again, without a clerk for two years.”

Town clerk takes on extra role after nobody else steps up

If you were to stumble across Sam Augustin at her northern Wisconsin house early on a weekday, you would find her sipping a coffee at her table, surrounded by four laptops. 

One is a personal laptop. One is issued by Forest County, where she’s a board member. Another is from the town of Armstrong Creek, where she’s an elected clerk, and the last one from the town of Caswell, where she’s an appointed clerk.

It’s good to have all those laptops open at once, she said, because if she gets a call for help at any of her three public service jobs, she just has to wake up one of her laptops rather than locate it and start it up. It also helps that they’re four different colors, Augustin said.

Work for her didn’t used to be as complicated — or busy. Originally, she held the clerk position only in Caswell, where she lives. After the Armstrong Creek clerk died in late 2020, though, town officials approached her to become the clerk there, too.

“Nobody will step up in the town,” she said. “My grandparents said, ‘If you can help, you will help.’ Did I want to? Not necessarily, but I could not have, in good conscience, said no when I knew I could do it.”

Serving as a clerk in two communities is sometimes the reality in outstate Wisconsin, where about 30% of clerks leave their positions every year and, in Augustin’s view, younger people “don’t want to serve their community” despite more and more older clerks retiring.

It’s even more challenging because of frequent internet outages in rural Wisconsin. In big cities, Augustin said, clerks are used to the internet operating virtually everywhere.

“We have to go, ‘Oh no, the wind’s blowing the wrong way here. That means it’s going to knock out,’” she said.

Augustin said having Starlink, a satellite internet service, ensures she typically has internet.

“Most people don’t have that option up here because it’s not cheap,” she said.

When residents or town officials seek her help, she said, she can receive calls anytime from 7 a.m. until 10 p.m.

“You never know if they’re going to knock on your front door because everybody knows where you live,” she said. “So heaven forbid you don’t answer your phone. If they see your vehicle at your house, they’re going to stop.”

To be able to manage elections in two towns, she said, “you have to make sure you have good chief inspectors in place.”

“I have one town that’s better at it than the other,” she said, “so I tend to spend more time with one town than I do with the other.”

On Election Day in November, Augustin had to drive to the county seat in Crandon, 30 minutes away, to get more paper ballots for each of her towns, which are 11 miles apart. 

On top of that, she has to adjust to rapidly changing election laws, she said.

“You just have to make sure you’re keeping your poll workers trained,” she said. “You have to keep, make sure you’re keeping everybody abreast of everything. And it changes so fast.”

The demands of her job go far beyond just running elections.

In mid-April, she said, she had an accounting meeting at the county at 1 p.m., an annual meeting in Caswell at 5:30 p.m. and then work in Armstrong Creek at 6:30 p.m.

“Two would be my limit,” she said. 

Because towns of different sizes have to follow varying sets of laws, the best-case scenario is for people to be the clerk of two comparably sized towns, she said.

Augustin told Votebeat that she “definitely” supports the proposal. 

It can cost $1,000 or more to hold an election on a referendum to switch to appointing a town clerk, Augustin said, “and small towns don’t have that kind of extra money laying around.”

“The process would be a heck of a lot simpler,” she said, “because it can be delayed by a great deal of time, the way they make you do it.”

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.

Wisconsin towns facing clerk shortages seek an easier way to hire election officials 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.

Want to understand the levers of power in Wisconsin? Our statehouse team writes a weekly preview of what’s on the agenda in state politics and why it matters. It’s called Forward. The analysis below is an example of what you can expect in your inbox every Monday if you subscribe here. (Our newsletters are free, like all of our journalism).

Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan was arrested on Friday for allegedly helping a man living in the United States without legal status evade federal immigration authorities. Dugan faces two federal felony counts — obstruction and concealing an individual.

Dugan’s case is similar to a 2019 case brought by federal prosecutors against Massachusetts Judge Shelley M. Richmond Joseph. In that case, Joseph was accused of helping an unauthorized immigrant avoid an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent after a court appearance.

In both cases, federal officials alleged the state judges allowed the defendants to exit their courtrooms through alternative routes to avoid federal immigration officials waiting outside the courtrooms in publicly accessible areas.

In a criminal complaint filed last week, federal officials alleged that Dugan confronted immigration enforcement officials outside of her courtroom as they waited for a defendant who was scheduled to appear before her finished his court business. Witnesses reported that Dugan “was visibly upset and had a confrontational, angry demeanor,” according to the complaint. Dugan asked to see the warrant the immigration officials were acting upon and then referred them to see the county’s chief judge.

After returning to the courtroom, Dugan then escorted the man and his attorney through a door that leads to a “nonpublic area” of the courthouse, the complaint states.

A similar series of events unfolded in the Massachusetts case. After learning that an ICE agent was waiting to arrest a defendant, Joseph eventually had the man exit the courtroom through a nonpublic exit, federal authorities alleged in a 2019 indictment. A separate court official then helped him exit the building through a back door.

The Massachusetts case was dismissed in 2022. In exchange, Joseph referred herself to the Massachusetts Commission on Judicial Conduct, per The New York Times.

One key difference between the two cases: Joseph was indicted. Dugan was served a criminal complaint. To secure an indictment, prosecutors have to present evidence to a panel of everyday Wisconsin residents and convince them there is probable cause a crime has been committed. For criminal complaints, officials only have to get the sign-off of a federal judge, but then later have to secure an indictment from a grand jury, two former federal prosecutors told Wisconsin Watch.

Now, the federal government has 21 days to seek an indictment, according to Laurie Levenson, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University and a former federal prosecutor. 

“It is unusual that this happened with an arrest and complaint because there really is no indication that the Judge was a flight risk or danger to the community,” she told Wisconsin Watch in an email. “They easily could have gone to the grand jury first and summoned her in IF the grand jury wanted to indict.”

Stephen Kravit, a Milwaukee area attorney and former federal prosecutor, said criminal complaints are rare in the Eastern District of Wisconsin and are usually reserved for “an exigent situation where the defendant’s whereabouts aren’t specifically known or the presence in this area is temporary.”

“None of that applies to a sitting Circuit Court Judge,” he added in an email.

Instead, Kravit said, “this was done in a hurry to make a political point.” He added, “Normally, a person charged even with felonies aged 60+ with no record and no chance of fleeing would be summoned to show up at an appointed time for booking and arraignment. Not here. And that was the point.”

🚘 Budget road trip. The Joint Finance Committee will hold a pair of hearings on Monday and Tuesday this week, stepping away from the Capitol in Madison to hear from Wisconsin residents in Hayward and Wausau about what they want included in the state’s next two-year budget.

It will be the third and fourth time so far that the committee has heard from the public on the spending plan. But as the GOP-controlled committee continues to go through the motions of crafting the budget, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, indicated last week that Republican lawmakers could punt on passing a new budget altogether.

Vos was reacting to a Wisconsin Supreme Court decision that left intact a move from Gov. Tony Evers that provided for annual public school funding increases for the next 400 years. “It’s certainly a possibility if we can’t find a way for us to get to a common middle ground,” Vos said of spiking the funding plan last week on the “Jay Weber Show.” “But that’s not the goal.”

“It’s something we’re talking about, but it wouldn’t be the first go-to,” Vos added, noting that it has never happened before. The state has passed a budget every two years since 1931, according to the nonpartisan Legislative Reference Bureau.

But even if the Legislature were to pass on sending a new spending plan to Evers, things in the state wouldn’t shut down. In Wisconsin, the state continues operating at the existing spending levels until a new budget is approved. 

📈 Student homelessness rising. Homelessness among K-12 Wisconsin students reached a new high in 2024, increasing 9% over the previous year despite total enrollment declining slightly.

That’s according to a new report from the Wisconsin Policy Forum, which found that a little more than 20,000 Wisconsin students were homeless in 2023-24. If that figure seems high, it’s because it is. Homelessness among students is counted using a definition that is more expansive than the one employed by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The federal McKinney-Vento Act defines homeless children and youth as those “who lack a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence.”

It’s the third straight year that student homelessness increased in Wisconsin, the report found, reaching a new high since the state Department of Public Instruction started keeping data in 2019.

“The number of students affected by homelessness has grown and is likely to continue to remain high in the near future as an insufficient supply of affordable housing remains a lingering problem throughout the state,” the report concludes. “Addressing the needs of this high-risk group of students could benefit not only them but also Wisconsin’s educational outcomes overall.”

Wisconsin Watch’s Hallie Claflin has been documenting the state’s rural homelessness crisis, including in her latest report about police departments transporting homeless people outside their jurisdiction. We’ll be watching the budget process closely to see if lawmakers address this issue or similarly treat it as out of sight, out of mind.

Arrest of Milwaukee judge echoes Massachusetts case — with one key difference 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.

President Donald Trump’s fluctuating tariff policies have kept the world guessing.

Uncertainty about what’s next — and how U.S. companies will absorb new costs —  has stirred anxiety among investors, business owners and consumers. 

“That whipsawing back and forth, that creates a tremendous amount of uncertainty,” said  Steven Deller, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who researches the state’s agricultural and manufacturing economy. “And one thing that the economy hates is uncertainty.” 

What does it all mean for Wisconsin? Fast-shifting policies make that difficult to definitely say. But Wisconsin Watch spoke with experts and examined economic numbers to provide some context. 

First, what are tariffs and why is Trump issuing them? 

Tariffs are a federal tax American importers pay when goods arrive from other countries. 

The U.S. previously forged free trade agreements with 20 countries that limited tariffs in trade. Trump’s tariffs have blown up the status quo and prompted retaliation that has harmed some domestic producers and further rattled the global economy. 

The Trump administration has cited several justifications for his policies, some of them conflicting. It says tariffs will boost manufacturing by encouraging Americans to buy domestic goods, reduce U.S. trade deficits and pressure countries to cut deals on other issues — like curbing the fentanyl trade and illegal immigration. 

To what do Trump’s tariffs apply?

First Trump added “national emergency” tariffs ranging from 10% to 25% on imports from China, Canada and Mexico. After adjusting those tariffs several times, he announced on April 2 a baseline 10% tariff on goods from all countries that export to the U.S., along with higher “reciprocal” tariffs on countries with which the U.S. has trade deficits — a move that set the stock market plunging. Trump paused most reciprocal tariffs days later. 

As it stands, most Chinese imports face tariffs of 145%, while Canada and Mexico face 25% tariffs, along with 10% for most everyone else. 

Trump has exempted some goods from reciprocal tariffs, including copper, pharmaceuticals, lumber and electronics such as smartphones and laptops. However, Trump administration investigations of the national security and economic effects of importing items he exempted could result in additional tariffs. The White House has placed a 25% tariff on steel and aluminum imports.

How is this playing in Wisconsin? 

Wisconsin’s large manufacturing and agricultural sectors make its economy strong, said Missy Hughes, secretary and CEO of the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. But business leaders she works with are increasingly hesitating to make big investments.

“It’s frustrating because our businesses were doing really well, and the Wisconsin economy is strong and has been strong for the last two years,” she said.

How much does Wisconsin import? 

Wisconsin imported more than $38 billion in goods last year, about half from countries facing the highest Trump tariffs: China, Canada and Mexico.

Machinery and electronic products made up about one-third of Wisconsin’s total import value last year. Pharmaceutical products, some of which Trump has since spared from tariffs, made up 12%.

Who bears the cost of tariffs?  

Importers pay tariffs to Customs and Border Protection when goods enter the country. The companies may absorb those costs or pass them to consumers by hiking prices — a common scenario.

Deller calls tariffs a regressive tax because they most affect people with lower income.

“They tend to spend their money more on goods than services,” he said. “They’re more likely to shop at a Walmart or a Dollar General-type store, and a lot of the goods that are sold in those kinds of stores come from international markets.”

How might tariffs affect Wisconsin manufacturers? 

“U.S tariffs might benefit domestic manufacturers if they serve as a negotiating tool to encourage other countries to lower their own tariffs or other barriers to trade,” according to a recent Wisconsin Policy Forum report. “They might also insulate Wisconsin manufacturers from international competition at home.” 

But they can harm Wisconsin producers by raising prices on raw materials or components that they import, such as steel or aluminum, the report added. Additionally, Trump’s tariffs have prompted retaliation that makes U.S. exports more expensive — at the risk of prompting foreign companies to drop Wisconsin suppliers.  

Wisconsin’s top exports are particularly vulnerable to retaliatory tariffs: industrial and electrical machinery, accounting for $10.9 billion or nearly 40% of state exports in 2024, according to the Wisconsin Policy Forum.

A New York Times analysis shows that Wisconsin workers may be among those hit hardest by retaliatory tariffs because affected industries support so many jobs in the state. 

“Economists don’t agree on anything except for tariffs. You put a hundred economists in the room, and you ask them are tariffs a good policy —  and 99 of them are going to tell you, no,” Deller said. “This is bad policy. At least the way that Trump is doing it. Everybody loses.”

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

DataWatch: Trump’s tariffs and Wisconsin’s economy 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.

After two high-profile cases in which candidates were unable to remove their names from the ballot, Wisconsin lawmakers are weighing a change to one of the nation’s strictest withdrawal laws.

Under current Wisconsin law, once candidates qualify for the ballot, they can only be removed if they die. 

The restriction received renewed attention in August 2024, when Robert F. Kennedy Jr., running as an independent, unsuccessfully sought to withdraw from the Wisconsin presidential ballot — a request that ultimately reached the state Supreme Court. 

More recently, in January, Madison Ald. Dina Nina Martinez-Rutherford announced she was dropping out of her reelection race and endorsing her opponent, citing two major life events. Despite her public withdrawal, she remained on the ballot and was reelected in April.

On Tuesday, the Assembly Committee on Campaigns and Elections held a public hearing on the proposal written by Rep. David Steffen, a Republican, to allow candidates for certain statewide, congressional and legislative offices and independent candidates for president and vice president to withdraw from the ballot any time before the Wisconsin Elections Commission certifies candidates’ names. 

Steffen said he’s working on an amendment to address concerns raised by election clerks about how the proposal could disrupt tight ballot production timelines.

Calling the current law outdated, Steffen told lawmakers that candidates deserve a straightforward way to remove themselves from consideration before Election Day.

Clerks raise timeline concerns; Steffen promises amendment

While the bill would not apply to local or off-cycle races like Martinez-Rutherford’s, election clerks say even the limited version could still cause issues. They warned that allowing candidates to withdraw up until the day of certification doesn’t give them enough time to finalize ballots, which are often already in production before that point.

“I have no problem if a candidate wants to remove their name,” Columbia County Clerk Sue Moll, a Republican, said. “I just want to make sure that the timeline is such that we can meet our deadlines.”

Most states provide nominees who wish to drop out of a race some sort of off-ramp. Many states allow nominees to drop off the ballot between 60 and 85 days before an election. Some states require polling places to have notices clarifying candidates’ withdrawal if they drop out after ballots are already printed. 

Wisconsin law used to allow nominees to drop off the ballot if they declined to run, but it changed in 1977 to the current policy — allowing withdrawal only in the event of death.

Under the proposal presented on Tuesday, nominees could drop off the ballot anytime before the election commission certifies candidate names. 

Processing a candidate’s withdrawal on that last day would put clerks on a “really tight” timeline, Moll said.

Even with a head start to prepare ballots, county clerks are scrambling at the last minute to get their ballots programmed, printed and sent to municipal clerks in time for them to send out by the state’s legal deadline, which is 47 days before a federal election, Moll said. 

It would have taken about an extra half-day of work to reprogram everything if Kennedy dropped off the ballot last-minute, she said. It could take more time in counties that rely on vendors to prepare their ballots and program voting equipment, she added.

When a candidate changes his or her mind and drops out, Moll said, “Well, OK, that’s one candidate. What happens if there’s five candidates?”

Rock County Clerk Lisa Tollefson, a Democrat, told Votebeat that clerks would risk going past the deadline for sending out ballots if candidates waited until the last minute to drop out.

If the deadline to withdraw was about a week before the commission certifies candidates’ names, Tollefson said, “we should be OK.”

Steffen, the author of the proposal, said at the Tuesday public hearing that an amendment in the works would do exactly that: Require nominees to withdraw at least seven business days before the Wisconsin Elections Commission meeting to certify nominees. The amendment would require clerks to be notified of a nominee’s withdrawal at least five days before the meeting.

At the hearing, Tollefson said she agrees with the amendment. She told Votebeat that the timelines would still be tight under the amendment, particularly in bigger counties like Milwaukee County and Dane County, but that clerks should be able to get their ballots done in time. 

February and April elections don’t have long enough window

Giving nominees a path to withdraw their candidacy for the February and April elections — like the one Martinez-Rutherford won after trying to exit — would be virtually impossible because those elections are run in such a short time span, clerks told Votebeat.

Clerks only have about a week between the February and April elections to prepare their ballots, get them printed and send them out to municipal clerks, Moll said.

If the amended measure becomes law and plays out well, Steffen said he may introduce a separate proposal that addresses local races. But he also acknowledged the tight timelines that clerks face in February and April elections.

Just after the hearing, at the Eastmorland Community Center in Madison, Martinez-Rutherford, the candidate who won a city council seat in April despite informally dropping out of her race, said that she would remain on the council but that it would be “reasonable” to create a process for candidates to formally drop out.

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.

Dying to get off the ballot? Wisconsin bill offers another way out 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 April 1 Wisconsin Supreme Court election was the most expensive U.S. court race in history, drawing more than $100 million in campaign spending. 

That eye-popping figure has drawn plenty of headlines — as did the millions spent by billionaire Elon Musk to support Republican-backed Waukesha County Judge Brad Schimel, who lost handily to Dane County Judge Susan Crawford, backed by Democrats.

But the race also set another record in Wisconsin for a spring election not featuring a presidential primary contest: in voter turnout. 

More than 2.3 million people cast ballots in the election, according to Associated Press tracking. That amounts to nearly 51% of the voting age population, shattering the previous record for such elections of 39% in 2023.

The high turnout is part of a trend in Wisconsin politics since President Donald Trump’s first election in 2016, Marquette University’s John Johnson wrote in an analysis last week.

“Wisconsin’s electorate is just plain extremely engaged,” he wrote. “Scour American history and you’ll struggle to find an example of (a) state as hyper-engaged with, and narrowly divided by, electoral politics as Wisconsin in the present moment.” 

Last week’s election offered good news for Democrats, aside from the top-line figures in Crawford’s 55%-45% win. (The Supreme Court is officially nonpartisan, but Democrats backed Crawford, while Republicans backed Schimel.) 

When comparing the high-turnout 2024 presidential election to the latest Supreme Court race, voting shifted toward the Democratic-backed candidate in all 72 counties.

The biggest difference in the latest election, according to Johnson: “A majority of the million voters who stayed home are probably Republicans, or at least Trump supporters.” 

More broadly, it’s clear that the high stakes of the Supreme Court race drove most to cast ballots in an election that also included an officially nonpartisan contest for state superintendent of public instruction and a successful ballot measure to enshrine voter ID requirements in the Wisconsin Constitution. 

Nearly 200,000 people who cast ballots did not choose a superintendent candidate. Democratic-backed incumbent Jill Underly prevailed over Republican-backed Brittany Kinser by a 53%-47% margin — closer than the Supreme Court race. 

Additionally, about 76,000 voters did not weigh in on the voter ID amendment.

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

DataWatch: Record spending. Record turnout. We crunched some numbers from the Supreme Court contest 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.

It is too soon to definitively say whether Madison’s April 1 election went off without any problems. But city and county election officials told Votebeat that they were confident that new absentee ballot procedures put in place after 193 ballots went uncounted in November would prevent another major error.

Tuesday was the first high-profile election in Madison since the snafu in November, when 193 ballots in unopened ballot bags from two polling stations went uncounted during the presidential contest. Staff didn’t discover the ballots until much later, a critical lapse that prompted state and city investigations and the suspension of Madison Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl in March. A voter lawsuit is expected. 

Witzel-Behl’s replacement is City Attorney Mike Haas, formerly the Wisconsin Elections Commission administrator and a longtime election lawyer. This was the first election he has ever run as a municipal clerk.

Amid the investigation, city officials implemented new procedures to better track absentee ballots and ensure that oversights are detected before results are finalized.

New procedures add to the paperwork

The changes were apparent at Madison polling places, which had multiple new checklists and required paperwork to ensure that officials opened and processed every bag containing absentee ballots. They were also apparent at the clerk’s office, where at 9 p.m., employees had begun looking through election materials from each of the city’s 108 polling sites to make sure there weren’t any missing ballots.

At Madison West High School, where 68 of the ballots went missing in November, chief inspector Peter Quinn said just before 4 p.m. that the new procedures make a repeat error “basically impossible.” 

Quinn has been a chief inspector before, but he wasn’t the chief inspector at the school in November when the ballots went missing. 

“It’s a mistake that should not have been made,” Quinn said about the error, adding that the new procedures make it easier to catch discrepancies. 

Each polling site now receives updated lists throughout the day detailing every absentee ballot bag delivered. Each bag is identified by a seal number. Election officials check off one blank on that list when they open each bag and another blank when they process the ballots. This way, election officials know how many carrier envelopes they receive — and how many they’re supposed to count. 

Poll workers also record the number of ballots in each bag on two separate documents and, at the end of the night, complete a summary sheet confirming that the number of absentee ballots received matches the number counted or rejected.

Kevin Kennedy, former state elections chief and now a chief inspector at Madison’s Senior Center, called the new process “good documentation” — but said it can be overwhelming.

“My problem,” he said at 2 p.m., standing in front of the table where absentee ballots get processed, “is that there’s so many things to keep track of here.”

Kennedy pointed to an absentee ballot processing guide given to poll workers and said he wished the clerk’s office provided equally clear instructions for navigating the added procedures. While he believes the system is now less prone to error, he warned that paperwork redundancies can slow down the process.

Procedures still need to be refined

A half-mile away, Sam Peplinski, 19, stood outside the Nicholas Recreation Center polling place — the same site where his absentee ballot went uncounted in November.

“It was my first time voting,” he said of the experience, which shook his trust in elections. “It was just shocking.”

He said it’s unrealistic to expect perfection, but the loss of nearly 200 ballots made the issue “large enough to not be ignored.”

This time he voted at the polls on Election Day — but only because he just recently learned of the election date. “An unintended benefit,” he said.

At the end of the night, Haas, the interim city clerk, told Votebeat the new procedures might have been a little “overkill,” but said after the November snafu it’s better to have too much paperwork than too little.

​​Witzel-Behl, the city clerk on leave, put in place many of the new procedures between November and February, and more were added since then, but Haas said there wasn’t much time to get feedback on those procedures from the city’s poll workers.

“I think we just need more time to refine those, make sure that they’re workable for the inspectors,” he said.

Deputy Clerk Bonnie Chang told Votebeat that staff would spend Wednesday and Thursday looking through all the election materials that polling places return to the clerk’s office, making sure there aren’t any missing ballots there. They were also checking a new sheet that each polling site’s chief inspector fills out to make sure the number of ballots processed is equal to the number of ballots received.

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.

New election procedures in Madison made repeat of 2024 snafu ‘basically impossible’ 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.

This story was originally published by ProPublica.

Ten years ago, when Wisconsin lawmakers approved a bill to allow unlimited spending in state elections, only one Republican voted no.

“I just thought big money was an evil, a curse on our politics,” former state Sen. Robert Cowles said recently of his 2015 decision to buck his party.

As Wisconsin voters head to the polls this week to choose a new state Supreme Court justice, Cowles stands by his assessment. Voters have been hit with a barrage of attack ads from special interest groups, and record-setting sums of money have been spent to sway residents. What’s more, Cowles said, there’s been little discussion of major issues. The candidates debated only once.

“I definitely think that that piece of legislation made things worse,” Cowles said in an interview. “Our public discourse is basically who can inflame things in the most clever way with some terrible TV ad that’s probably not even true.”

More than $80 million has been funneled into the race as of March 25, according to two groups that have been tracking spending in the contest — the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy group that follows judicial races, and the news outlet WisPolitics. That surpasses the previous costliest judicial race in the country’s history, approximately $56 million spent two years ago on the Supreme Court race in Wisconsin.

Money is pouring into this swing state election so fast and so many ads have been reserved that political observers now believe the current race is likely to reach $100 million by Tuesday, which is Election Day.

“People are thoroughly disgusted, I think, across the political spectrum with just the sheer amount of money being spent on a spring Supreme Court election in Wisconsin,” said Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause Wisconsin, which has long advocated for campaign finance reform.

But the elected officials who could revamp the campaign finance system on both sides of the aisle or create pressure for change have been largely silent. No bills introduced this session. No press conferences from legislators. The Senate no longer even has a designated elections committee.

The current election pits former Republican Attorney General Brad Schimel, now a circuit court judge in conservative-leaning Waukesha County, against Susan Crawford, a judge in Dane County, the state’s liberal bastion.

Though the race technically is nonpartisan, the Democratic Party, including former President Barack Obama, has endorsed Crawford; the party has received financial support from liberal billionaire George Soros. On the other side, President Donald Trump posted a message on his social media platform on March 21 urging his supporters to vote for Schimel, and much of Schimel’s money comes from political organizations tied to Elon Musk.

The stakes are high. Whoever wins will determine the ideological bent of the seven-member court just two years after Janet Protasiewicz won a seat on the court and swung it to the liberals. With Protasiewicz on the court, the majority struck down state legislative maps, which had been drawn to favor Republicans, and reinstated the use of drop boxes to collect absentee ballots.

A Schimel victory could resurrect those and other voting issues, as well as determine whether women in the state will continue to be able to access abortion.

Two pro-Schimel groups linked to Musk — America PAC and Building America’s Future — had disclosed spending about $17 million, as of March 25. Musk himself donated $3 million this year to the Republican Party of Wisconsin. In the final stretch of the campaign, news reports revealed that Musk’s America PAC plans to give Wisconsin voters $100 to sign petitions rejecting the actions of “activist judges.”

That has raised concerns among some election watchdog groups, which have been exploring whether the offer from Musk amounts to an illegal inducement to get people to vote.

On Wednesday night, Musk went further, announcing on X a $1 million award to a Green Bay voter he identified only as “Scott A” for “supporting our petition against activist judges in Wisconsin!” Musk promised to hand out other million-dollar prizes before the election.

Musk has a personal interest in the direction of the Wisconsin courts. His electric car company, Tesla Inc., is suing the state over a law requiring manufacturers to sell automobiles through independent dealerships. Musk and Tesla did not respond to requests for comment about his involvement in the race.

Also on Schimel’s side: billionaires Diane Hendricks and Richard Uihlein and Americans for Prosperity, a dark-money group founded by billionaire Charles Koch and his late brother David. Americans for Prosperity has reported spending about $3 million, primarily for digital ads, canvassing, mailers and door hangers.

A Better Wisconsin Together Political Fund, a union-supported electioneering group, has ponied up over $6 million to advance Crawford. In other big outlays, Soros has given $2 million to the state Democratic Party, while Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, another billionaire, gave $1.5 million. And California venture capitalist Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, donated $250,000.

In Wisconsin, political parties can steer unlimited amounts to candidates.

State Sen. Jeff Smith, a Democrat and a minority leader, called the spending frenzy “obscene.”

“There’s no reason why campaigns should cost as much as they do,” he said.

Asked for comment about the vast amount of money in the race, Crawford told ProPublica: “I’m grateful for the historic outpouring of grassroots support across Wisconsin from folks who don’t want Elon Musk controlling our Supreme Court.”

Schimel’s campaign called Crawford a “hypocrite,” saying she “is playing the victim while receiving more money than any judicial candidate in American history thanks to George Soros, Reid Hoffman, and JB Pritzker funneling money to her campaign.”

Quizzed Monday by a TV reporter on whether he would recuse himself if the Tesla case got to the state’s high court, Schimel did not commit, saying: “I’ll do the same thing I do in every case. I will examine whether I can truly hear that case objectively.”

A decade after Wisconsin opened the floodgates to unlimited money in campaigns in 2015, some good government activists are wondering if the state has reached a tipping point. Is there any amount, they ask, at which the state’s political leaders can be persuaded to impose controls?

“I honestly believe that folks have their eyes open around the money in a way that they have not previously,” Nick Ramos, executive director of the nonpartisan Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, which tracks campaign spending, told reporters during a briefing on spending in the race.

A loosely organized group of campaign reformers is beginning to lay the groundwork for change. The Wisconsin Democracy Campaign recently called a Zoom meeting that included representatives of public interest groups inside and outside of Wisconsin, dark-money researchers and an election security expert.

They were looking for ways to champion reform during the current legislative session. In particular, they are studying and considering what models make sense and may be achievable, including greater disclosure requirements, public financing and restricting candidates from coordinating with dark-money groups on issue ads.

But Republicans say that the spending is a natural byproduct of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which equated campaign spending with free speech and opened the spigots for big-money races.

“For the most part, we don’t really, as Republicans, want to see the brakes on free speech,” said Ken Brown, past chair of the GOP Party of Racine, a city south of Milwaukee. Noting he was not speaking for the party, Brown said he does not favor spending limits. “I believe in the First Amendment. It is what it is. I believe the Citizens United decision was correct.”

Asked to comment on the current system of unlimited money, Anika Rickard, a spokesperson for the Republican Party of Wisconsin, did not answer the question but instead criticized Crawford and her funders.

Post-reform bill opened floodgates

At one point, Wisconsin was seen as providing a roadmap for reform. In 2009, the state passed the Impartial Justice Act. The legislation, enacted with bipartisan support, provided for public financing of state Supreme Court races, so candidates could run without turning to special interests for money.

The push for the measure came after increased spending by outside special interests and the candidates in two state Supreme Court races: the 2007 election that cost an estimated $5.8 million and the 2008 contest that neared $6 million, according to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.

Candidates who agreed in 2009 to public financing and spending limits received grants of up to $400,000 for the race. The money came from the Democracy Trust Fund, which was supported by a $2 income tax check-off.

“​​Reformers win a fight to clean up court races,” the headline on an editorial in The Capital Times read at the time.

But the law was in place for only one election, in April 2011. Both candidates in the court’s general election that year agreed to take public funding, and incumbent Justice David Prosser, a conservative, narrowly won reelection. Then Republicans eliminated funding for the measure that summer. Instead, the money was earmarked to implement a stringent voter ID law.

By 2015, GOP leaders had completely overhauled the state’s campaign finance law, with Democrats in the Assembly refusing to even vote on the measure in protest.

“This Republican bill opens the floodgates to unlimited spending by billionaires, by big corporations and by monied, special interests to influence our elections,” Rep. Lisa Subeck, a Democrat, said in the floor debate.

Wisconsin is no longer cited as a model. Activists point to other states, including Arizona, Oregon and Rhode Island. Arizona and Oregon established disclosure measures to trace the flow of dark money, requiring campaign spenders to reveal the original source of donations. Rhode Island required ads to name not only the sponsor but the organization’s top donors so voters can better access the message and its credibility.

Amid skepticism that Wisconsin will rein in campaign spending, there may be some reason for optimism.

A year ago, a proposed joint resolution in Wisconsin’s Legislature bemoaned Citizens United and the spending it had unleashed. The resolution noted that “this spending has the potential to drown out speech rights for all citizens, narrow debate, weaken federalism and self-governance in the states, and increase the risk of systemic corruption.”

The resolution called for a constitutional amendment clarifying that “states may regulate the spending of money to influence federal elections.”

And though it never came to a vote, 17 members of the Legislature signed on to it, a dozen of them Republicans. Eight of them are still in the Legislature, including Sen. Van Wanggaard, who voted for the 2015 bill weakening Wisconsin’s campaign finance rules.

Wanggaard did not respond to a request for comment. But an aide expressed surprise — and disbelief — seeing the lawmaker’s name on the resolution.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

DataWatch: Wisconsin gives little compensation to wrongfully convicted 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.

Gov. Tony Evers this week will propose a significant overhaul of Wisconsin’s corrections system, pushing a plan that would close one of the state’s two oldest prisons, renovate the other and convert the state’s youth prison into a facility for adult men. 

The proposal, which totals just shy of $500 million, will be included in the governor’s budget proposal, which he will unveil on Tuesday night. The governor shared details of the plan with reporters Friday morning.

The “domino series of facility changes, improvements and modernization efforts,” as Evers described them, would take place between approval of the budget and 2031. The proposal is the solution to the state’s skyrocketing prison population, Evers said, adding there is “not an alternative to my plan that is safer, faster and cheaper.”

The first step would be building a facility for youth offenders in Dane County, allowing the state to close its current beleaguered juvenile prison complex in Irma, home to Lincoln Hills School for boys and Copper Lake School for girls. The cost would be $130.7 million.

Completing the juvenile Dane County facility would be the latest step in a years-long effort to shutter Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake. A similar facility opened in Racine County earlier this month, with another juvenile facility in Milwaukee poised to open next year. With the addition of the Dane County facility, the state would be able to move youth offenders out of Lincoln Hills in early 2029, according to the Evers administration.

The Lincoln County complex would then undergo $9 million in renovations to be converted into a 500-bed, medium-security institution for men.

Another key piece of Evers’ plan would be converting Stanley Correctional Institution into a maximum-security facility for $8.8 million. That would allow the state to renovate Waupun Correctional Institution, the state’s oldest facility, where at times inmates were confined to their cells for months and denied medical care, according to an investigation by Wisconsin Watch and The New York Times. Waupun staff also have faced criminal charges following the deaths of five inmates. 

The estimated $245 million renovation would involve demolishing the prison’s existing cell halls and replacing them with new, medium-security facilities known as a “vocational village” — the first in Wisconsin based on a model used in other states. The facility would be “designed to expand job and workforce training to help make sure folks can be stable, gainfully employed and can positively contribute to our communities when they are released,” Evers said.

Under the plan, the John Burke Correctional Center in Waupun would also be converted to a 300-bed facility for women “with little to no capital cost,” said Jared Hoy, secretary of the Department of Corrections.

Green Bay Correctional Institution, constructed in 1898, would close under the proposal sometime in spring 2029 at a cost of $6.3 million. Many have pushed for the closure of the prison due to overcrowding, poor conditions and staffing issues.

To compensate for the lost beds, the last project in the “domino” series would add 200 beds to Sanger B. Powers Correctional Center in Brown County.

The governor’s budget will guarantee Green Bay staffers a role at another DOC facility to account for the prison’s closure, the Evers administration said. The facility would likely then be sold, the governor told reporters.

In totality, the plan aims to avoid building a new prison in Wisconsin, which the governor’s administration estimates would cost $1.2 billion and take a decade to construct. Evers said Friday that he had not discussed the plan with Republican lawmakers, but implied he was slated to meet with them over the weekend.

The state’s adult institutions were locking up more than 23,000 people as of Feb. 7. That’s more than 5,000 above the design capacity of Wisconsin’s prisons and more than 3,000 above levels four years ago when COVID-19 actions shrunk prisoner ranks.

Justice reform advocates have argued that Wisconsin can’t substantially improve conditions without decarceration, including releasing more inmates and diverting others to programs rather than prisons. 

Other states — some led by Republicans and some by Democrats — have managed to close prisons by adopting rehabilitation-focused reforms that cut thousands from the population. 

The governor is also seeking some policy changes that could trim the population. For example, he wants to expand the capacity of the state’s existing earned release program for nonviolent offenders with less than 48 months remaining on their sentences, allowing more inmates to access vocational training and treatment for substance use disorders.

Evers noted there are 12,000 inmates on a waiting list to access vocational programming, and expanding the earned release program would likely make another 1,000 inmates eligible for the program.

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

Tony Evers to propose $500 million prison overhaul, closing Green Bay facility by 2029 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.

Forcing county sheriffs to cooperate with federal immigration officials or risk losing state funding. A tax cut for service industry worker cash tips. Banning “foreign adversaries” from owning Wisconsin farmland. The GOAT committee. 

The first few weeks of the Legislature’s new session have been dominated by ideas inspired, at least in part, by President Donald Trump, as Wisconsin Republicans bring ideas pushed in Washington to Madison.

The localization of Trump’s agenda — which helped the president secure a slim but significant victory in November — comes as Republican lawmakers continue to set the legislative agenda in Wisconsin.

But Democratic legislative leaders are pushing back on that agenda, unlike many of their counterparts at the national level.

“These are not serious proposals,” said Assembly Minority Leader Greta Neubauer, D-Racine. “They are political; they are for the right-wing base. But they are simply not addressing the problems that the people of Wisconsin are facing.”

Immigration crackdown

Last week, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, and Sen. Julian Bradley, R-New Berlin, unveiled legislation to mandate cooperation between Wisconsin law enforcement and federal immigration authorities.

The bill would require “sheriffs to request proof of legal presence status from individuals held in a county jail for an offense punishable as a felony,” according to analysis from the Legislative Reference Bureau. It also compels sheriffs to “comply with detainers and administrative warrants received from the federal department of homeland security regarding individuals held in the county jail for a criminal offense.”

If a sheriff shrugs the law, the sheriff’s county would face a 15% cut in state aid in the following year, according to a draft of the bill. But the bill isn’t about targeting places like Dane and Milwaukee counties — where leaders have pledged not to cooperate with federal authorities — said Assembly Majority Leader Tyler August, R-Lake Geneva. “It’s about just ensuring that every county is operating the same and that there isn’t a refuge for these violent criminals.”

While introducing the bill, flanked by two dozen of his GOP colleagues, Bradley said the legislation should garner bipartisan support, pointing to the Laken Riley Act — a similar crackdown on theft and violent crime committed by unauthorized immigrants — that received some Democratic support in Congress. It was the first bill signed into law under the new Trump administration.

“Only far-left extremists in this country believe that someone here illegally that commits a felony should be allowed to stay,” Bradley said.

No tax on tips 

State Sen. Andre Jacque, R-De Pere, is one of four Republican lawmakers circulating a bill that would eliminate taxes on cash tips earned by service workers — a proposal Trump heavily touted on the campaign trail. Then-Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, later announced support for the policy as well. 

Jacque and a group of bipartisan lawmakers last introduced the bill in 2019, but it never became law. He said it’s heavily favored by those in the hospitality industry.

Trump’s push to enact a similar policy at the federal level made this the ideal time to reintroduce the bill in Wisconsin, Jacque said.

“Having a federal administration that is putting some political capital towards making that part of the equation happen certainly adds a lot of fire to being ready to be aligned at the state level,” Jacque said.

In 2019, the bill, which only would have exempted cash tips from taxation, was estimated to reduce the state’s revenue by nearly $4.7 million annually. A fiscal estimate of the current bill has not yet been released. It would not exempt the majority of tips, which are left on a credit card. 

Banning ‘foreign adversaries’ from owning land

Another state bill introduced by Republicans last month would prevent “foreign adversaries” from “countries of concern” from acquiring forestry and agricultural land in the state. 

The legislation mimics Trump’s campaign promises in January 2023 to ban Chinese nationals from buying farmland and owning other “vital infrastructure,” citing national security concerns. Jacque, an author of the bill, said he wasn’t aware of Trump’s previous support for a similar proposal. 

Jacque introduced similar legislation in 2023 that never became law. He pointed to bipartisan congressional support for similar “foreign adversary” bills introduced at the federal level. It’s a “common-sense concern” that “resonates with the public,” Jacque said. 

GOAT Committee

The Government Operations, Accountability and Transparency Committee is new to the Assembly this legislative session. Like DOGE, the federal Department of Government Efficiency led by Elon Musk, it’s 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, said the committee will work “to identify opportunities to increase state government efficiency and to decrease spending.” 

“The people of Wisconsin want to see their hard-earned tax dollars being spent on services that directly affect them, not on the expansion of programs that benefit only select groups of people,” she said in a written response to questions from Wisconsin Watch. “GOAT will investigate ways in which the state can reallocate revenues away from excessive wants and funnel them more into critical needs without increasing spending.”

One motivating factor for her 2022 Assembly run was “to bring my professional experience in process improvement to the public sector because so many glaring inefficiencies in state agencies were exposed during the pandemic,” Nedweski said, noting she wanted to improve “fiscal accountability” for the state long before DOGE was a concept.

The committee was created in response “to an outpouring of demand from the people,” Nedweski said, adding that “DOGE is making fiscal conservatism cool and accessible to more people.”

“The performance of state agencies under the current administration has often been subpar under this administration relative to the tax dollars invested,” she said. “If the (state) agencies are not going to take honest looks in the mirror as to how they can better serve Wisconsinites, GOAT will. Whether or not the Governor chooses to work with us is up to him.”

GOAT serves a different role than the Legislative Audit Bureau, Nedweski said, noting that a “top objective of GOAT is to be responsive to real people facing everyday challenges with state government.” 

While the committee may work with LAB and the Joint Audit Committee, “the function of GOAT will be less technical than Audit and more directly responsive to a wide range of stakeholder concerns,” she said.

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

Trump policies come to Wisconsin in first weeks of new session 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 Wisconsin Supreme Court unanimously ruled Friday that the state’s chief election official, Meagan Wolfe, can stay in her job even though her term has expired, heading off a yearslong effort by some Republicans to oust her.

The court found that although Wolfe’s term expired in 2023, the Wisconsin Elections Commission had no duty to reappoint or replace her because her position isn’t vacant. The decision relied largely on a 2022 precedent that continues to bitterly divide justices.

“I am thrilled because Meagan Wolfe is an outstanding administrator and we are lucky to have her at the helm of the agency,” said Ann Jacobs, the chair of the election commission and a Democrat.

After the ruling, Wolfe said she was “excited to continue to work with elections officials around the state” and praised clerks for the work they do.

What was the dispute?

Wolfe became the Wisconsin Elections Commission’s administrator in 2018 after working for the agency and its predecessor in other roles and has been a holdover appointee since the summer of 2023. She is considered one of the most respected — and scrutinized — election officials nationwide, but she became a Republican target after President Donald Trump lost Wisconsin in the 2020 election and took heat for the commission’s decisions in administering that election. 

The case focuses not on Wolfe’s performance as administrator, but rather on the legality of appointees staying on after their terms expire. 

Wolfe’s four-year term expired in July 2023, and the Republican-led state Senate appeared poised to reject her confirmation if the Wisconsin Elections Commission had voted to reappoint her. All three Republicans on the commission voted to reappoint Wolfe, but the Democratic commissioners abstained from the vote. They cited a 2022 Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling stating that appointees can stay in their roles past the end of their terms. That meant Wolfe wasn’t formally reappointed and therefore not subject to another Senate confirmation proceeding. Still, Senate leaders took a vote to fire her.

Who were the plaintiffs and defendants? 

After the Senate voted to fire her, Wolfe and the Wisconsin Elections Commission sued Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu, a Republican who pushed for the ouster. The lawsuit, first filed in Dane County Circuit Court, also names former Senate President Chris Kapenga and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, both Republicans, as defendants.

What were they asking for? 

Wolfe and the commission asked the court to declare that she was properly continuing in her role and that the commission didn’t have to appoint an administrator just because her term had expired. Republicans asked the Wisconsin Supreme Court to require the commission to appoint an administrator, a move that could have led to Wolfe’s ouster. 

“WEC does not have a duty to appoint a new administrator to replace Wolfe simply because her term has ended,” conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court Chief Justice Annette Ziegler said.

What happens now? 

The decision means Wolfe can stay on until the commission chooses to reappoint her or appoint somebody else, or until she chooses to leave.

After the 2024 election, Wolfe told Votebeat that she has “no immediate plans to leave” if she wins this case and continues having commissioners’ approval. She said she would reconsider that if her position makes it harder for the commission to operate or receive state financial support in the upcoming budget.

In a concurring opinion Friday, three liberal Supreme Court justices signaled that they’re open to reviewing the 2022 case that was the basis for the ruling. In that case, the court had a conservative majority and ruled that appointees can legally stay in office past the expiration of their terms until the state Senate confirms a successor. At that time, the court’s liberal justices dissented.

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.

Meagan Wolfe can stay on as Wisconsin’s top election official, state Supreme Court rules 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.