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.
Wisconsin Congressman Tom Tiffany addresses the audience in his speech during the Republican Party of Wisconsin state convention on Saturday, May 17, 2025, at the Central Wisconsin Convention & Expo Center in Rothschild, Wis. “Isn’t it great inflation is going down here in the United States of America and jobs are going up?” Tiffany said as he held up an egg carton and the audience applauded. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
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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A bipartisan coalition of lawmakers is pushing a fix to a 2022 Wisconsin Supreme Court decision that hampered the public’s ability to obtain attorney fees in certain public records lawsuits against public officials — but the top Assembly Republican remains noncommittal about the bill.
The case, Friends of Frame Park v. City of Waukesha, involved a public records dispute between the city and a citizen group. Waukesha was working to bring a semi-professional baseball team to town. A group of concerned residents, Friends of Frame Park, submitted a public records request to the city seeking copies of any agreements the city had reached with the team’s owners or the semi-professional league.
The city partially denied the request and refused to produce a copy of a draft contract. Friends of Frame Park hired an attorney and sued. A day after the lawsuit was filed, and before the local circuit court took action, the city produced a copy of the draft contract.
The case eventually worked its way to the state Supreme Court, which determined that Friends of Frame Park was not entitled to attorney fees because it technically had not prevailed in court — the group received the record without action from the circuit court.
The ruling “actually incentivizes public officials to illegally withhold records because it forces requestors to incur legal costs that may never be recovered,” said Bill Lueders, president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council, during a public hearing about the bill.
Max Lenz, an attorney representing the Wisconsin Newspaper Association, said the state Supreme Court ruling incentivizes public officials to “effectively dare the public to sue.”
“The Supreme Court’s ruling in Friends of Frame Park flipped the public records law presumption of openness on its head,” he said.
The legislation, spearheaded by state Sen. Van Wanggaard, R-Racine, would supersede the high court’s ruling and allow a requestor to obtain attorney fees if a judge determines that the filing of a lawsuit “was a substantial factor contributing to that voluntary or unilateral release” of records, according to the nonpartisan Legislative Reference Bureau.
The bill has garnered support from an unusual coalition of organizations. Seven groups, some of which frequently lobby, have registered in support of the bill, including the liberal ACLU of Wisconsin and the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty.
A similar version of the bill was approved by the state Senate last session but did not receive a vote in the Assembly. The legislation was approved by the state Senate last week.
The legislation’s path forward remains unclear. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, told reporters recently that “our caucus has never talked about it.”
“It’s certainly something we could discuss, but we don’t have a position on it at this time,” Vos added.
Are you interested in learning more about public records? Here’s a primer on what types of records should be accessible to you — and how to request them.
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Wisconsin has just one nuclear power plant. Republican legislation, along with an initiative from Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, could move the state toward more nuclear power.
The GOP-led Senate Bill 125, introduced in March, would require the state Public Service Commission, which regulates electric and gas utilities in Wisconsin, to conduct a nuclear power siting study.
The study would identify nuclear power generation opportunities on existing power generation sites, as well as on sites not now used for power generation.
It would help Wisconsin “catch up with other states that have already made important strides in exploring new nuclear energy,” said Paul Wilson, chair of the Department of Nuclear Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
State Sen. Julian Bradley, R-New Berlin, who introduced the bill, did not respond to requests for comment.
Groups registered in favor of the legislation include the Wisconsin Utilities Association and several employee unions. The PSC also supports the bill, noting that an amendment to the bill keeps the current timeline for the commission to review applications for such electricity generation.
Opponents include Sierra Club Wisconsin, which says nuclear power “poses significant risks due to its high costs, long construction timelines, unresolved radioactive waste issues and the potential for catastrophic accidents.”
The environmental group Clean Wisconsin says the nuclear industry, not taxpayers, should fund siting studies.
The effort to explore more nuclear energy is bipartisan in that, separately, Evers proposed in his 2025-27 state budget spending $1 million to do a nuclear power plant feasibility study.
Evers, calling nuclear energy clean, said in a statement to Wisconsin Watch that “with new advanced nuclear technology and the increasing need for energy across Wisconsin, it is long past time that we invest in new, innovative industries and technologies.”
Wisconsin’s only operating nuclear power plant, Point Beach, is near the Manitowoc County community of Two Rivers.
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.
Rep. Brent Jacobson, R-Mosinee, leaves the 2025 state budget address Feb. 18, 2025, at the Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
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.
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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.”
Rock County Clerk Lisa Tollefson, seen at an Aug. 29, 2023, hearing at the State Capitol in Madison, Wis., supports an ongoing legislative effort to repeal a law requiring election officials to write down unique ID numbers on absentee ballots. (Drake White-Bergey / Wisconsin Watch)
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.
The Legislature’s Republican-controlled budget committee used its first working meeting on the state’s next two-year budget to scrap Gov. Tony Evers’ recommended spending plan — but it offered clues to which of the public’s priorities remain in the mix and which are DOA.
Using committee rules, Republicans put a prohibition on committee members discussing certain ideas put forth by the governor — including proposals relating to some of the public’s top priorities: education funding, health care and child care — but left the door open to discussing some of his ideas even as they struck them from the budget document.
The Joint Finance Committee’s action marks the fourth time in four budget cycles that it has scrapped hundreds of the Democratic governor’s proposals — though some of them can return to the budget, in some form or another. GOP lawmakers on the committee have gotten used to “the way we have to manage Gov. Evers’ budgets,” committee co-chair Rep. Mark Born, R-Beaver Dam, told reporters, adding that the governor’s plan called for too much state spending.
Democrats on the committee denounced their GOP colleagues for tossing Evers’ budget.
“People are struggling, and it’s a challenging world,” said Rep. Tip McGuire, D-Kenosha. “The one thing we should not be doing, the one thing that nobody votes for their legislator to do, is to make their life harder.”
Committee co-chair Sen. Howard Marklein, R-Spring Green, panned the idea that Evers’ proposals were the only way to address certain issues in the state.
“This idea that the door is closed on all these things is pretty ridiculous,” he said during the committee’s meeting.
There is more than “one way to address issues and those will all be debated and built over the next couple of months,” Born added.
Here are issues legislators will and won’t be able to discuss as the committee crafts a spending plan over the next two months.
Education funding
The committee closed the book on a number of education issues. That includes a $148 million proposal from Evers to make school meals free to all K-12 students in Wisconsin regardless of income. The program would have taken effect for the 2026-27 school year.
The committee also shut down a $500,000 proposal to fund a grant program for peer-to-peer suicide prevention programs, $5 million in funding to help school districts encourage people to pursue a career in teaching and $1 million to pay for feminine hygiene products that can be distributed to Wisconsin students at school.
Though the committee voted to scrap scores of other Evers proposals, it did not vote to end the discussion on certain issues that were priorities for the governor and raised by the public at committee hearings.
One thing scrapped by the committee but left open for discussion was Evers’ $1.13 billion request to have the state pay for 60% of Wisconsin school districts’ special education costs. The state currently covers a third of such costs for public schools and upwards of 90% of costs for some private voucher schools. Multiple public hearing attendees said their public school districts have transferred thousands of dollars from their general funds to their special education funds to cover costs that have not been reimbursed.
The committee also tossed out a $212 million proposal to increase general per pupil aid and a $168 million request to fund school-based mental health services, but left the door open for future discussion on both topics.
The committee’s decision to definitively shut down some proposals but leave open others suggests lawmakers could increase spending for certain programs funded by Evers, just in different ways or amounts.
Health care
As it has throughout Evers’ time in office, the committee rejected a proposal to accept federal Medicaid expansion and used committee rules to block further discussion of the topic. Medicaid expansion has been a top priority for the governor during his six-plus years in office, but Republicans have repeatedly blocked efforts to expand the program.
Wisconsin is one of 10 states that have not yet expanded Medicaid. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, has defended that decision as insulating the state from the federal government scaling back Medicaid reimbursements.
Republicans on the committee also closed the door on a $100 million proposal from Evers to fund a program focused on lead hazard remediation. The funds would have been used to help low-income families remediate lead in homes built before 1950.
The committee also clipped a $1.4 million request from Evers to pay for a study to assess so-called “forever chemicals” and identify potential methods for limiting further human exposure. PFAS, as the chemicals are commonly known, have contaminated water sources across Wisconsin. Two years ago, the Legislature approved $125 million to help address PFAS contamination in the state. The funds have so far not been released, with Evers and Republicans at odds with how the money should be spent.
One key item lawmakers threw out but did not block future consideration of is postpartum Medicaid expansion. Wisconsin is one of two states that have turned down a federal expansion of Medicaid coverage for up to 12 months for new moms. Wisconsin’s coverage currently lasts 60 days after birth, far shorter than what health experts recommend. Evers’ proposal would have expanded coverage to one year.
A stand-alone bill that would provide Medicaid coverage to new moms for 12 months is currently working its way through the Legislature. It is co-sponsored by a majority of the Legislature’s 132 members. All six Senate Republicans on the Joint Finance Committee voted in favor of the stand-alone bill last month. Including it in the state budget could provide lawmakers a way to circumvent opposition from Vos, who has criticized the bill as welfare expansion.
Child care
Among the Evers provisions discarded by the committee without a possibility of future consideration were programs that would provide financial assistance to child care providers, assist workers with licensing and certification and pay down debt associated with child care accrued by certain qualifying families.
Child Care Counts was established in 2020 using federal funds to provide monthly stipends to child care providers to cover costs of their services and support the recruitment and retention efforts of child care workers in Wisconsin. But funding for the program is set to expire at the end of June.
Evers’ budget proposal would have allocated $442 million over the next two years to make the program permanent, funding annual payments to child care providers. The recommendation would also fund four new positions at the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families to oversee the program.
Without continued state support for the program, around 25% of child care centers in Wisconsin face the threat of closing once current funding runs out.
Another program removed from the budget would have provided a $4.5 million grant to Wonderschool — an organization aimed at meeting the demands of child care — to continue expanding child care in Wisconsin. The program also would provide $5.5 million to the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association to support child care workers in the state, including assistance with the licensing and certification process.
Another cut program would have used federal funds to reduce child care debt for qualifying parents.
Child care access and affordability have been a persistent problem in Wisconsin, with some families expressing concern over how they will cover the costs of child care without state support.
The Joint Finance Committee will continue its work on the budget throughout May and June. The state’s current fiscal year expires on June 30, but if a new budget isn’t yet in place, funding will continue at existing levels.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
A Democratic bill seeks to bring down house prices in Wisconsin by blocking hedge funds from buying single-family homes in the state.
“We know that there’s an access and affordability crisis in housing right now,” lead bill sponsor Sen. Sarah Keyeski, D-Lodi, told Wisconsin Watch in an interview, calling it a nationwide problem. “And as a state legislator, I want to see if I can do something about that crisis locally.”
Hedge funds pool money, generally from wealthy investors, and invest it in a range of markets seeking to make a profit, according to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. That sizable pool of cash “really gives them almost unlimited power to buy what they would like at prices that are often out of reach for a typical purchaser,” Keyeski said.
Hedge funds’ ability to outbid other prospective home buyers, especially individuals, increases housing costs and prices out middle class families, Keyeski argued.
While the Democratic lawmaker acknowledged the practice of investor-backed groups gobbling up houses isn’t widespread in Wisconsin, she noted that groups with deep pockets bought more than a thousand houses in the Milwaukee area beginning around 2018.
Three companies, VineBrook Homes, SFR3 and Highgrove Holdings, owned about 1,500 homes as of the end of 2022, according to a 2023 analysis from John Johnson, a research fellow at Marquette University’s Lubar Center for Public Policy Research and Civic Education.
VineBrook and SFR3 together owned almost 1,200 homes, deploying a “buy-to-rent” business model, Johnson said. However, in some instances, they were willing to flip their recently purchased homes. SFR3 paid about $2 million for 23 properties, Johnson found, later selling them for a total of $4.2 million.
Vinebrook now owns 703 properties, and SFR3 is down to 188, Johnson told Wisconsin Watch in an email.
There was an increase in investor-backed groups buying single-family homes in 2024, though still at a lower rate than before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to data from RedFin, a real estate brokerage and mortgage company. In the fourth quarter of 2024, for example, investor-backed groups bought 17% of the American homes sold in those three months.
The share of homes owned by large investment groups in the Milwaukee area was 14.9% in the last three months of last year, RedFin found, lower than the national average.
The increase in investor purchases was focused on single-family homes, RedFin found, as interest from deep-pocketed groups waned for townhouses, condos and multifamily properties.
Keyeski sees her bill as “a preemptive move” to protect other Wisconsin communities, she said.
The legislation also fits into a larger package of bills from Democratic lawmakers seeking to bring down costs for Wisconsin residents, Keyeski said.
The bill currently has 42 cosponsors — 41 Democrats and one Republican. But she said she has heard a positive response from both Democratic and Republican voters about the bill and is hopeful the legislation could get a hearing this session.
Legislative Republicans have so far not introduced any bills seeking to curb housing costs, according to a Wisconsin Watch review of legislative proposals. Sen. Romaine Quinn, R-Birchwood, who chairs the Senate Committee on Insurance, Housing, Rural Issues and Forestry, did not respond to questions about whether Keyeski’s legislation would get a hearing this session.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
The Joint Finance Committee has wrapped up its budget listening sessions around the state, and lawmakers will soon begin writing their own two-year budget for 2025-27, likely after throwing out Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ budget recommendations.
The public hearings — held in Hayward, West Allis, Wausau and Kaukauna — were attended by hundreds of residents who voiced their budget concerns and requests to the Republican-controlled committee.
Here are three of the budget-related issues that attendees raised most frequently.
Education funding
Education was the top concern at all four hearings, with many attendees voicing support for more higher education and K-12 school funding. Many residents also called for increased special education funding.
The Legislature reimbursed a third of Wisconsin school districts’ special education costs in the 2023-25 state budget. Private voucher schools receive up to 90% reimbursement of special education costs through a special program. Evers has proposed a more than $1 billion increase in special education reimbursements to meet a 60% coverage level in this year’s budget.
Multiple attendees said their public school districts have transferred thousands of dollars from their general funds to their special education funds to cover costs that have not been reimbursed. Others urged lawmakers to raise the special education reimbursement level to either 60% or 90%.
“Special education is mandated, it is regulated, and more than that it is important to our students and our staff,” Josh Viegut, assistant superintendent of the Wausau School District, told lawmakers in Wausau. “This year, our district will transfer over $10 million from our general education fund to our special education fund. By increasing the reimbursement rate to 60%, you would have a great impact on all students.”
A record number of public school referendums were held statewide last year, according to the Wisconsin Policy Forum, largely because inflation has exceeded the Legislature’s increases in per pupil revenue limits. Of the 94 questions on the ballot in February and April alone — the most in an odd-numbered election year since 2007 — 62 were operating referendums that asked taxpayers to raise their own property taxes to pay for daily school operations like utilities, routine maintenance and staff salaries.
“The state’s chronic underfunding of our public schools led Wauwatosa to recently pass its first operating referendum — the only way to prevent devastating cuts to our beloved teaching staff and programming,” a parent told the committee in West Allis. “Other school districts haven’t been so lucky.”
Last month, the state Supreme Court upheld Evers’ line item veto used in the 2023-25 state budget, in which he set in state law an annual increase of $325 in public school spending per student for the next 400 years. Republicans have criticized the decision and may seek ways to sidestep the governor’s veto power in this year’s budget.
As the federal government cuts funding to higher education, Republican lawmakers have pushed back on Evers’ $856 million budget request for the UW system. Wisconsin currently ranks 43rd out of 50 in state spending on public universities.
“This underfunding puts us at a disadvantage in the war for talent to retain and attract new students, faculty and future innovators,” Rocco Paulson, a student at UW-Superior, told the committee in Hayward. “This funding will directly support affordability — ensuring tuition remains stable … and making sure the possibility of raising our tuition doesn’t fall upon me and my fellow students.”
Health care
Other attendees raised concerns about federal threats to Medicaid, telling lawmakers how even a small cut to funding could greatly affect their respite care centers, disability care centers, in-home care programs and more.
“If anything would happen to any part of the Medicaid program, we would probably end up closing our doors, and we have 55 participants that come there every single day,” an attendee from the Balsam Lake Endeavors Adult Development Center told the committee in Hayward.
The Republican-controlled House of Representatives last month passed a revised budget resolution that would require the committee that oversees Medicaid to cut spending by $880 million over the next 10 years. Medicaid programs like BadgerCare, Family Care and IRIS provide coverage to 20% of Wisconsin residents, 38% of the state’s children and 60% of nursing home patients, according to the Department of Health Services.
An attendee from Washburn providing in-home care for a disabled individual expressed concerns that the Family Care program will face federal cuts.
“Any reduction of support for this program will make it impossible for me to continue providing care for this person … the person will once again become homeless and without care,” he told the committee. “Is the state prepared to house and care for these individuals?”
Evers’ budget request would accept federal Medicaid expansion and would add 897,000 low-income people to the state’s program. Wisconsin is one of 10 states that have not yet expanded Medicaid. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, has defended that decision as insulating the state from the federal government scaling back Medicaid reimbursements.
Child care
Residents also used the public hearings to express concerns regarding child care access in Wisconsin, with many supporting Evers’ $480 million funding request for Child Care Counts — a pandemic-era program that helps providers cover costs.
Affordable and accessible child care has been a persistent issue across the state. Wisconsin is losing hundreds of child care providers every year, according to the Department of Children and Families.
In 2023, the JFC voted to end state funding for Child Care Counts. With the program set to run out of funding at the end of June, 25% of child care providers may close without continued Child Care Counts funding, according to a recent DCF survey. Many others say they would have to raise their tuition rates.
Chris Phernetton told the committee in Hayward that she owns one of only two licensed child care centers in Burnett County. She said her center’s small margin of profit last year was only possible because of the Child Care Counts program.
“We raised our tuition rates in January to try to make up for the 50% cut to Child Care Counts, but as we feared, enrollment quickly dropped. Families in Burnett County can’t afford the new rates,” she said. “When families can’t find care, they can’t work.”
A mother of two young kids told the committee the cost of child care is overwhelming. Her children’s care center often closes early due to lack of staff “because it’s hard to find teachers to work for less than a livable wage,” she said.
“If we lose state support for child care, I don’t know what families like mine will do,” she said. “Like so many others, we face tuition hikes when we can barely afford unexpected early pickups … all because there simply aren’t enough teachers to stay open.”
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.
Sharon Drefcinski, chief election inspector for the town of Rib Mountain, Wis., right, boxes mailed-in absentee ballots to send to the county for archiving during the primary election on Aug. 11, 2020. Town Clerk Joanne Ruechel, left, sent out 1,348 absentee ballots ahead of the election. (Coburn Dukehart / Wisconsin Watch)
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.
“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.
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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 Courtdecision 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.
Democratic legislators on April 10 introduced Assembly Bill 227, which would expand Wisconsin’s existing election bribery laws to also prohibit people from making payments to voters in exchange for signing petitions during an election period.
The bill was introduced just nine days after the April 1 election, before which Elon Musk offered the public $100 to sign a petition opposing “activist judges.” At an event just two days before the election, Musk gave two Wisconsin voters $1 million checks.
Here’s what you need to know:
Context
Wisconsin law already prohibits election bribery and makes it illegal to offer “anything of value,” including money, to bribe an elector to go to or refrain from going to the polls, vote or refrain from voting, or vote or refrain from voting for or against a particular person.
In a deleted X post from March 27, Musk said $1 million checks would be awarded “in appreciation for you taking the time to vote” in the April 1 election between liberal Judge Susan Crawford and conservative Judge Brad Schimel. Musk followed this up with another X post a day later on March 28 to say the checks would be awarded to two individuals to be “spokesmen for the petition.”
On March 29, Democratic Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul filed a lawsuit against Musk and the Musk-affiliated America PAC. In the complaint, Kaul requested the court grant a temporary restraining order to stop Musk from promoting the $1 million gifts, calling the giveaway “a blatant attempt to violate Wis. Stat. § 12.11.”
But judges in Columbia County Circuit Court, the Court of Appeals and the Wisconsin Supreme Court refused to hear Kaul’s petition. Columbia County Circuit Court Judge W. Andrew Voight filed a dismissal order April 1, saying Kaul’s complaint lacked two of the four required elements for a temporary restraining order — no alleged irreparable harm and no explanation of why the temporary restraining order was the only possible solution.
Voight noted at the end of his dismissal that the court did not come to a conclusion as to whether Musk and America PAC’s actions were illegal.
Musk gave out the $1 million checks to two Wisconsin voters who signed his America PAC petition during a Green Bay rally on March 30.
The actions on behalf of Musk and America PAC consequently sparked debates regarding the legality and ethics of the petition.
The bill
In an effort led by Rep. Lee Snodgrass, D-Appleton, the “Petition Payment Prohibition Act” would expand existing election bribery laws to prohibit bribing voters to sign or refrain from signing election nomination papers, recall petitions and other petitions, including in support or opposition of candidates.
“To be clear, election bribery is already illegal in Wisconsin,” the co-authors wrote in a memo to their legislative colleagues. “However, Musk has attempted to circumvent this law by paying people to sign a petition instead — something not explicitly banned by current law.”
If passed, the bill would prohibit anyone from offering anything of value — exceeding $5 — to influence whether or not someone signs a petition relating to elections. These petitions include those opposing and supporting candidates or referendums, political or social issues, state law, and proposed or potential legislation, according to the bill.
The prohibition would only be enforced when it relates directly to an election or referendum or if it is circulated during an election period, which the bill defines as the period between Dec. 1 and the spring election or April 15 and the general election.
Under the bill, it would be illegal to pay someone $100 to sign a petition within an election period that is in support of a state referendum or a candidate.
Election bribery is currently a Class I felony, meaning if the bill passes, violators could face up to three-and-a-half years in prison, a fine as high as $10,000 or both.
So, what’s next?
So far 34 Democratic lawmakers support the “Petition Payment Prohibition Act,” in addition to Snodgrass. No Republicans have signed on.
The bill has been referred to the Committee on Campaigns and Elections where the Republican who heads the committee could schedule a public hearing and vote. Republicans who control the Legislature could then schedule it for a vote in the full Assembly. An identical version must also pass the Senate.
If this bill passes, it would be sent to Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, who can either sign or veto it.
Democratic sponsors said the bill should be bipartisan.
“Candidates and issue groups should use the strength of their message to attract voters to their cause, not cash bribes or promises of financial reward,” the sponsors said in a memo to colleagues. “It is a gross perversion of our democracy and must not be allowed to continue in future elections. Failing to act is a tacit acceptance that our votes are for sale. Rejecting this premise is something members of both parties should be able to agree on.”
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The city and county of Eau Claire recently asked Attorney General Josh Kaul to weigh in on the legality of police officers dropping off homeless people outside their jurisdiction.
Their request for an opinion cited several examples, including the Durand Police Department, which transported a woman in handcuffs to a city homeless shelter that has been over capacity and at risk of reducing beds.
The story includes interviews with the Durand police chief and the mayor of Santa Cruz, California, which recently outlawed the dropping off of homeless people without prior communication and a plan for helping the person find a housing solution.
On Oct. 27, a Durand police officer responded to a suspicious person call. He made contact with a woman who had committed no crimes but had nowhere to stay on a cold night.
She told the officer she was from Fargo, North Dakota, and waiting for a ride, but couldn’t explain how she arrived in Durand.
When that ride didn’t show, the officer asked if she had a credit card, which local hotels require homeless individuals to put down when using a motel voucher to stay overnight. She said she didn’t and didn’t know what to do.
There are no homeless shelters in Durand or Pepin County.
The officer then suggested she go to Sojourner House, a shelter in Eau Claire about 40 minutes away. She agreed to be transported in handcuffs, in accordance with what the officer said was department policy. He called several other shelters in communities outside of Durand, all of which were full for the night. Sojourner House didn’t answer, but he offered the woman a ride there anyway. She asked if the shelter was open.
“It’s hard to say. Once I get you up there, they might not even have a bed for you to go,” the officer told her, according to body cam footage obtained by Wisconsin Watch. “Once you get up there, ask them for resources — see what else is available to you up there.”
The officer dropped her off and left without contacting the shelter staff or Eau Claire city officials.
According to Eau Claire County Corporation Counsel Sharon McIlquham and City Attorney Stephen Nick, the shelter was full, and Eau Claire city police later took the woman to a hospital. She then had a run-in with UW-Eau Claire police for indecent exposure.
“They still found themselves homeless in an unfamiliar community and committed crimes — had to get medical attention,” Nick told Wisconsin Watch, referring to multiple people who have been dropped off in Eau Claire. “So not a good outcome for them or our community.”
But what started as a conflict between local agencies is now a legal question being posed to Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul: Should police departments in Wisconsin be allowed to transport someone experiencing homelessness out of their jurisdiction?
Body cam footage obtained by Wisconsin Watch shows a rural police officer trying — and failing — to connect a homeless woman with support services. Reporters Hallie Claflin and Trisha Young discuss what’s happening in the footage and what it illustrates about the specific challenges of addressing rural homelessness.
Nick said the problem has persisted for years in Eau Claire and extends far beyond the three examples cited in his January letter to the attorney general, asking his office to weigh in on the legality of these drop-offs.
“This is the first time we’ve received a communication along these lines, certainly since I’ve been attorney general,” Kaul told reporters at WQOW. “But I can say more broadly, some of the issues raised are ones that I think are true around the state.”
Democratic Gov. Tony Evers said the drop-offs display a need for more rural resources.
The letter pointed to instances of homeless individuals from neighboring counties being dropped off in Eau Claire by other agencies including the Menomonie Police Department and the St. Croix County Sheriff’s Office. McIlquham and Nick called it “a practice driven by a lack of good options,” but said the drop-offs are “unlawful at worst and unprofessional at best.”
“None of the individuals we referenced actually received care, and that is the most common outcome from these sort of transports,” Nick said.
Durand Police Chief Stanley Ridgeway said if his department is barred from carrying out these kinds of transports, the city’s human services department would have to pay other agencies or organizations to transport those in need of shelter. He added that rural communities like Durand lack rideshare services, public transportation or homeless shelters.
“In the end, it will increase our cost,” Ridgeway said. “Our hands will be tied.”
A statewide problem
The situation is not unique to Eau Claire. Police chiefs in Waukesha, Green Bay and Appleton told Wisconsin Watch they have dealt with a similar problem.
“For as long as I can remember, we have struggled with people from outside the Fox Valley coming to this area to utilize this invaluable resource,” Appleton Police Chief Polly Olson said. “We know they … may be given rides by other, outside law enforcement, or they find out through word of mouth about the shelters and resources in this area.”
Green Bay Police Chief Chris Davis told Wisconsin Watch these drop-offs happen occasionally, but he has asked agencies outside the county not to transport people because it strains local resources and makes it difficult for the homeless to return to their city of origin.
Drop-offs are also prevalent in Waukesha, with unhoused individuals coming from surrounding areas like Delafield, Hartland, Chenequa, Pewaukee and New Berlin. But Chief Daniel Thompson said the issue is complicated because the city is a hub for resources such as hospitals, mental health clinics, trauma centers, charitable organizations and shelters.
He said it makes sense that people experiencing homelessness in smaller, rural jurisdictions would come to Waukesha for services because their own communities often don’t have any.
But it’s a problem when other municipalities drop their homeless off in Waukesha simply because they don’t want to deal with them. This is particularly a problem at Waukesha Memorial Hospital, Thompson said.
In December, Wisconsin Watch reported that the state’s estimated homeless population has been rising since 2021, following national trends. It rose from 4,861 on a single night in 2023 to 5,037 in 2024. In rural Wisconsin, the increase was 9%, according to the annual homeless count.
Despite accounting for over 60% of the state’s homeless population in 2023, every Wisconsin county besides Milwaukee, Dane and Racine collectively contained just 23% of the state’s long-term housing with on-site supportive services, which experts say is the best way to address chronic homelessness.
‘Only because we have such poor options’
Police departments in Durand and Menomonie quickly responded to the letter sent to the attorney general, emphasizing the transports were voluntary. Police footage from both departments confirms the officers didn’t coerce the individuals, but did suggest the destination. Neither individual knew where Eau Claire was.
“They’re not looking to come here, they’re being asked if they want to come here,” Nick said. “When that’s being done by a uniformed police officer — that changes the circumstances quite a bit in terms of how voluntary that is.”
In the letter, McIlquham and Nick cited another example in which they say a woman who was a frequent source of contact for St. Croix County sheriff’s officers was dropped off at a gas station in Eau Claire without receiving any services. Eau Claire EMS, the county sheriff’s office and the city police department later responded to multiple complaints regarding the individual, who did not have ties to Eau Claire.
St. Croix County Sheriff Scott Knudson described the incident to WEAU as a “courtesy ride.” He did not respond to Wisconsin Watch’s interview request.
“I feel bad for Eau Claire that the facilities that we have available to us are in their jurisdiction, so sometimes they have to deal with the aftermath,” said Ridgeway, the Durand police chief. “But it happens a lot. That’s where the services are.”
Ridgeway told Wisconsin Watch the Durand Police Department will continue this practice as long as the attorney general allows it, adding that his department is not responsible for crimes these individuals may commit in Eau Claire. Asked how those individuals get back to where they came from, Ridgeway said that’s “out of our control.”
“These facilities receive funding from the federal government, state government, grants, donations — they’re not just receiving funding from Eau Claire County residents or city of Eau Claire residents,” Ridgeway said. “This is a service for all of western Wisconsin, and we’re going to take advantage of that service whenever we can.”
He defended the decision to drop a woman off in front of a shelter that was either full or not open.
“You might not tonight have a place, but they can tell you what time they open tomorrow so you can be in line to get services,” Ridgeway said. “We’ll continue to call and try to get a bed verified as being available, but if a person wants to be dropped off there, we’ll do so.”
In a March 11 press release, Catholic Charities of the Diocese of La Crosse said it is facing a potential decision to reduce Sojourner House’s operations from year-round to just six months, citing a loss of funding and a shortage of volunteers.
On one night in January, Dale Karls of the Western Dairyland Economic Opportunity Council told WEAU, Sojourner House, which has a normal capacity of 53, opened overflow spaces and housed 77 people.
Nick said he doesn’t doubt the officers were trying to help these people, “but the message needs to get out that they weren’t helped.” There’s been a growing need for homeless services since the pandemic as temporary services and funding have been rolled back, he said.
In the state’s 2023-25 biennial budget, the Republican-controlled Legislature rejected Evers’ recommendations to spend $24 million on emergency shelter and housing grants, as well as homeless case management services and rental assistance for unhoused veterans.
The Legislature also nixed $250 million Evers proposed for affordable workforce housing and home rehabilitation grants.
This year, Evers recommended another $24 million for homeless prevention programs in the 2025-27 state budget. Republican lawmakers who control the powerful budget committee vowed to throw out the governor’s budget and start from scratch this spring.
“The issue here is the disinvestment by the state and needed resources regionally,” Nick said. “It’s a law enforcement issue, but only because we have such poor options.”
A California city has outlawed the practice
In 2024, the city of Santa Cruz, California, outlawed the practice of transporting homeless people into the city without authorization. Mayor Fred Keeley told Wisconsin Watch the local ordinance has pressured surrounding communities to ramp up their own resources for the homeless.
The drop-off ban was sparked by an incident last summer when Hanford police drove a homeless woman with a disability nearly 200 miles to Santa Cruz — a city similar in size to Eau Claire — and left her outside a local shelter.
“I know that for decades, other cities in our county bring people and dump them in the city of Santa Cruz,” Keeley said. “Nobody should do this to us because we would never do it to you without a prior conversation.”
Keeley said these drop-offs almost never solve someone’s housing problem and instead shift the responsibility to another city. Santa Cruz is sympathetic to smaller municipalities with limited resources that are willing to coordinate with the city to arrange a transport, Keeley said, but that person should have some community ties.
Keeley said the city’s investments in permanent supportive housing and other programs have reduced the city’s street homelessness by more than 50% in the last two years.
Now, a bill has been introduced in the California Legislature that would ban local law enforcement agencies from transporting homeless individuals to another jurisdiction without first coordinating shelter or long-term housing for them. Keeley said he’s glad the issue is being taken up at the state level.
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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?
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.
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.”
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Wisconsin law generally requires trans people, including children, to publish their legal name changes in a newspaper. Some worry the requirement poses a higher risk with the Trump administration’s anti-trans policies.
Lawyers working with trans people say Wisconsin’s publication requirements further endanger the trans community by creating a de facto dataset of people that some fear could be used for firing, harassment or violence.
“We live just in constant terror of the wrong person finding out that we have an 11-year-old trans child. … All it takes is one wrong person getting that information, and what we could end up going through, becoming a target, is horrifying.”
A Wisconsin law has dissuaded at least one transgender resident from going through with a legal name change. “It can put people at risk of violence and blatant discrimination simply because of who they are,” an ACLU lawyer said.
Update, April 18, 2025: After this story was published, the family of a transgender boy who changed his legal name at 15 years old learned a judge approved their request to retroactively seal his name-change documents. Wisconsin state Sen. Melissa Ratcliff and other Democrats have also introduced the bill that would eliminate the publication requirement for transgender people, so long as they can prove they’re not avoiding debt or a criminal record.
A transgender teenager had to announce his previous name, or deadname, in the newspaper when he legally changed his name under Wisconsin law. He is trying to retroactively seal those records because of concerns related to the political climate. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
In 2022, after living as a boy and going by a new name for several years, a 15-year-old from Madison, Wisconsin, wanted to make it official. Like most teenagers, he dreamed of getting his driver’s license, and his family wanted his government identification to reflect who he really was.
But Wisconsin law has a caveat: He would have to publish his old, feminine name and new name in the local newspaper for three weeks — essentially announcing to the world that he is transgender.
In many instances, if he had committed a crime, the law would afford him privacy as a minor. But not as a transgender teenager changing his name.
His parents worry the public notice now poses a risk as President Donald Trump has attacked transgender rights, asserted that U.S. policy recognizes only two sexes and described efforts to support transgender people as “child abuse.” The publication requirements endanger the community, lawyers working with trans people say, by creating a de facto dataset of likely transgender people that vigilantes and even the government could use for firing, harassment or violence.
Transgender people are over four times more likely to be victims of violence, research shows. Most transgender people and their families agreed to be interviewed for this story only if they weren’t named, citing safety concerns.
“Publication requirements really leave folks open and vulnerable to discrimination and to harassment more than they already are,” said Arli Christian, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union. “It can put people at risk of violence and blatant discrimination simply because of who they are.”
Wisconsin’s legal process stems from a 167-year-old law, one of many statutes across the country that Christian said were intended to keep people from escaping debts or criminal records. Changing one’s name through marriage is a separate process that does not require publication in a paper.
Although the right to change one’s legal name exists in every state, the effort and risk required to exercise it vary. Less than half of states require people to publicize their name changes in some or all cases, according to the Movement Advancement Project, a think tank that tracks voting and LGBTQ+ rights.
Wisconsin law grants confidentiality only if a person can prove it’s more likely than not that publication “could endanger” them. But the statute does not define what that means. For years, some judges interpreted that to include psychological abuse or bullying, or they accepted statistics documenting discrimination and violence against transgender people nationwide.
In 2023, however, a state appeals court set a stricter standard after a trans teenager was denied a confidential name change in Brown County, home to Green Bay. The teen said he had endured years of bullying, in which peers called him slurs and beat him up. Court records show the Brown County judge asserted that publishing the teen’s name wouldn’t expose him to further harm because his harassers already knew he was transgender.
The teen argued that a public process would create a record available to people he met in the future. While the appeals court conceded a “reasonable judge” could agree, it found the Brown County judge had not improperly exercised her discretion in denying the request. Crucially, the appeals court determined that “endanger” meant only physical harm. The case wasn’t appealed to the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
Both of these trans girls living in Wisconsin requested the confidential name-change process after the 2024 presidential election. A 14-year-old likes cuddling her cat, playing video games and practicing piano. (Illustration by Shoshana Gordon / ProPublica. Source images obtained by ProPublica.)
A 12-year-old shares her artwork. (Illustration by Shoshana Gordon / ProPublica. Source images obtained by ProPublica.)
The combination of Wisconsin’s public requirement, the restrictive ruling and the Trump administration’s anti-trans policies has dissuaded at least one person from going through with a name change.
J.J Koechell, a 20-year-old LGBTQ+ advocate from suburban Milwaukee, tried to change his name in November but decided against it after a judge denied his request for confidentiality, ordering him to publish his change in the local paper and create a public court record if he wanted to proceed.
“That’s already dangerous,” Koechell said of a public process, “given our political atmosphere, with an administration that’s trying to erase trans people from existence completely, or saying that they don’t exist, or that there’s something wrong with them.”
At the end of March, Wisconsin Democrats announced plans to introduce a bill that would eliminate the publication requirement for transgender people, so long as they can prove they’re not avoiding debt or a criminal record. Republicans, who control the Legislature, will decide whether it will receive a hearing or vote.
There has been a push in some states to make it easier and safer for transgender people to update their legal documents. Michigan and Illinois laws removing publication requirements took effect earlier this year. And a California lawmaker introduced a bill that would retroactively seal all transition-related court records.
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, did not respond to emails and a phone call to his office seeking comment. Wisconsin Watch and ProPublica sought comment from four other Republican leaders in the Assembly and Senate. Of the two whose offices responded, a staffer for Assembly Majority Leader Tyler August, R-Walworth, said, “It doesn’t look like something we’d consider a priority,” and a staffer for Senate Assistant Majority Leader Dan Feyen, R-Fond du Lac, said he was not available for comment.
Asked about the safety concerns people raised, a White House spokesperson said, “President Trump has vowed to defend women from gender ideology extremism and restore biological truth to the federal government.”
No exceptions for minors
Wisconsin’s law requires a transgender person to publish the details of their identity to change their name whether they are an adult or a child. The notice requirement makes no distinction based on age.
This is less privacy than the legal system typically affords young people, confirmed Cary Bloodworth, who directs a family law clinic at the University of Wisconsin Law School. Bloodworth said both child welfare and juvenile courts tend to keep records confidential for a number of reasons, including that what happens in a person’s youth will follow them for a lifetime.
“I certainly think having a higher level of privacy for kids is a good thing,” Bloodworth said, adding that she thinks the publication requirement is unnecessary for people of any age.
An 11-year-old trans girl recently went through the name-change process. She enjoys playing with her dog and swimming, and her mom describes her as a “major science geek.” (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
A mom living near the Wisconsin-Illinois border whose 11-year-old daughter recently went through the name-change process said these proceedings should automatically be private for children.
“The fact that we still have to fight to get something as simple as a confidential name change for a minor who is obviously not running away from criminal or debt charges is just so frustrating and overwhelming,” she said.
The judge deciding their case seemed reluctant to grant confidentiality at first, questioning whether her daughter was being threatened physically, she said. The judge granted the confidential change. But the family remains shaken.
“We live just in constant terror of the wrong person finding out that we have an 11-year-old trans child,” she said. “All it takes is one wrong person getting that information, and what we could end up going through, becoming a target, is horrifying.”
Right before the pandemic, a teenager told her parents she was transgender. She spent much of that first year of her transition at home, attending virtual school like the rest of her peers in the Madison school district. She came out to only a few friends and wanted to keep her gender identity private, so she kept her camera off and skipped her high school graduation.
When she decided to legally change her name, the prospect of publicizing her transition terrified her, according to her mom.
A trans teenager was terrified of the public name-change requirement. She loves playing board games, reading and spending time with friends and her partner. (Illustration by Shoshana Gordon / ProPublica. Source images: obtained by ProPublica.)
“I explained to her that it’s in tiny, tiny print, and it’s in some page of the paper that no one is going to read,” her mom said. “But it felt to her like she was just standing out there in public with a ‘TRANS’ sign on her.”
While fewer people read physical newspapers these days, much of their content gets published online and is easily searchable. The court case, too, becomes a public record that is stored online and sometimes aggregated by other websites that show up at the top of search results.
The parents of the then-15-year-old boy who changed his name before getting his driver’s license discovered that happened to their son. When anyone — say, a prospective employer — searches the young man’s name, one of the first results shows his old name and outs him as trans.
“This is what somebody would use as their first judgment of him,” his mom said. “We certainly don’t want that to be something that people would use to rule him out for a job, or whatever it is he might be doing.”
Like many other states, Wisconsin does not have laws that ban discrimination against transgender people in credit and lending practices or in public spaces like stores, restaurants, parks, doctor’s offices and hotels. However, Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, issued an executive order in 2019 banning transgender discrimination in state employment, contracting and public services.
After Trump took office again and began issuing executive orders attacking trans rights, the boy’s family started to investigate how they could retroactively seal the court records related to the name change. It wouldn’t change what was in the newspaper, but it could help them remove the online records. The court records also contain sensitive information like their home address that someone could use to harass them.
A friend who was a retired attorney helped their son craft an affidavit describing his experiences. His mom read from it during an interview. “‘Because of recent political events, I fear violence —’” she said before breaking off. “Oh God, I hate even reading this. ‘I fear violence, harassment, retribution because of my status as a transgender person.’”
Her son, who is now 18, shared a statement over email.
“At this moment in time I’m probably more scared about being a trans person than I ever have been before, with the public record if you have my first and last name you can easily find my deadname and therefore find out I’m trans,” he said. “I would love to say that I feel safe and valued in our society but unfortunately I can’t, at times I feel that my personhood is being stripped away under this government.”
A trans teenager officially changed his name and now fears violence because that information is public. He enjoys doing puzzles with his family and creating metal artwork. (Photos by Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Anne Daugherty-Leiter, who has guided transgender clients and their families through the name-change process as board president of Trans Law Help Wisconsin, said where a person lives in Wisconsin, and therefore what court they must petition, affects their likelihood of getting a confidential change.
Confidentiality is important, she said, because of how the state handles changes to birth certificates. Wisconsin birth certificates that are issued through a confidential name change show only the new name. But if a person has to announce their name change publicly, birth certificates are amended to list both the person’s old and new names. Any time the person has to use that document, at the DMV or while getting a loan, it outs them, she said.
‘This is not who I am’
Koechell, a trans man and LGBTQ+ activist, was unwilling to go through with the name-change process after being denied confidentiality by a judge late last year.
Koechell lives in Waukesha County, a Republican stronghold where multiple schools have enacted policies critics have called anti-LGBTQ+.
A judge denied J.J Koechell’s confidential name change with an order that referred to the trans man as “she” and “her.” (Illustration by Shoshana Gordon / ProPublica. Source images: courtesy of J.J Koechell, obtained by ProPublica.)
In a letter to the judge, Koechell wrote that people had sent him multiple threats and posted his family members’ addresses online, all for “being an advocate and being transgender openly in my community.”
“I do not want to publish my deadname for people to use against me,” he said in an interview, using a term common among transgender people to refer to their birth names. “I don’t see a reason why people who are not particularly fond of me wouldn’t show up at a hearing like that and try and cause trouble.”
Court records show the judge denied Koechell’s confidentiality request and his request to reconsider. The judge’s order referred to Koechell, a trans man with a masculine voice and beard, as “she” and “her.”
Koechell decided the public process wasn’t worth the risk. But it’s hard, he said, to move through life with his old identification.
“When I go to a new doctor or new appointment or something, then that’s the name on my chart, and then I get called that in a waiting room full of people, and it’s super uncomfortable. I just want to disappear,” Koechell said. “Then eventually, I have to correct the doctors, and I’m like, ‘Hey, just to let you know, I don’t go by that name. This is not who I am.’”
Data from the latest U.S. Transgender Survey found that 22% of people who had to show an ID that did not match their identity experienced some form of negative consequence, including verbal harassment, discrimination or physical violence.
If the U.S. Senate passes the SAVE Act, which would require voters to prove citizenship with a passport or birth certificate, those consequences could include disenfranchisement. Transgender people who can’t change the name on their birth certificate or passport would be ineligible to vote, according to the liberal think tank Center for American Progress.
U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, a Texas Republican and chief sponsor of the bill, has said the legislation directs states to create a process for citizens with a “name discrepancy” to register. “No one will be unable to vote because of a name change,” he said.
Trace Schlax, a trans man in Wisconsin, has tried to change his gender marker and name on official documents. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
After Trump won in November, Trace Schlax, a 40-year-old IT project manager, decided to expedite changing his gender marker on his passport, figuring he could update his name later in state court.
“It matters,” Schlax said. He loves to travel but has encountered extra scrutiny from airport security with outdated documents. “I get comments from TSA when I go through to travel domestically, about my hair, about how I look. I get extra pat-downs.”
He sent his application in early December and crossed his fingers. He received it back in February, rejected. By that time, Trump had issued an executive order banning trans people from changing the gender markers on their passports.
Schlax decided to continue updating what records he could, like his birth certificate and driver’s license. He worries about having conflicting documents. Will he get accused of fraud? Will he have trouble flying?
But in the end, he decided it was still important to change his name and update his license to improve his day-to-day experience.
And he decided to go about it publicly. It felt less painful, he said, to accept the risks rather than detail his personal, traumatic experiences to a judge only to have them decide he hadn’t endured sufficient danger.
“Me changing my name and my gender marker affects absolutely no one but me,” said Schlax, who has a court date to change his name in late April. “Why does this have to be so hard? Why do I have to prove myself so hard?”
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.
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Former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman has agreed to surrender his license to practice law for three years due to several infractions during his investigation of the 2020 election, but his career — built on serving Republican party interests — began to spiral downward after his attendance at the 2016 Republican National Convention, according to new reporting from Wisconsin Watch.
Gableman’s participation as a sitting Supreme Court justice at the 2016 Republican Convention in Cleveland may have violated the state judicial code, which bans partisan political activity. He caused disturbances in two hospitality suites and was escorted out of the convention hall by Wisconsin Republicans. Less than a year later, he decided, at age 50, not to seek re-election to a second 10-year term.
Gableman was hired in 2020 by President Donald Trump’s first administration to work in the federal Office of Personnel Management. He was involved in implementing a Trump executive order to curb diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) training for federal employees. When Trump lost his 2020 bid for reelection, Gableman returned to the public spotlight by supporting claims the election had been stolen.
After Trump accused Wisconsin Republican leaders of not investigating election fraud and of “working hard to cover up election corruption,” Assembly Speaker Robin Vos announced at the state Republican Party convention that he had retained Gableman, a Trump-aligned former Supreme Court justice, to investigate the 2020 election.
Gableman was paid $117,000 for the investigation — more than twice the amount budgeted — and the investigation cost taxpayers a total of $2.8 million — four times the budgeted amount, including $432,000 for a recently settled public records lawsuit. It found no evidence to overturn the election. “He paid no attention to detail, he delegated almost all the work to somebody else and very poor follow-through,” Vos told Wisconsin Watch. “It seemed like Mike Gableman was more concerned about the money he was earning as opposed to finding the truth.”
Listen to Tom Kertscher talking about this story on WPR.
Wisconsin’s recent Supreme Court election, with its $100 million in record spending and wall-to-wall attack ads, spotlighted how politicized the state’s “nonpartisan” high court has become.
To understand how we got here, consider the rise and fall of former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, who has agreed to surrender his law license for behavior unbecoming of a lawyer, let alone a formertop judge.
Last November’s 10-count complaint filed by the Office of Lawyer Regulation, an arm of the very court he served on, is not the first time Gableman, 58, has been accused of an ethical lapse. But until now he has avoided public consequences. One example of Gableman’s actions, not previously reported, shows how closely intertwined an officially nonpartisan justice became with party politics.
Wisconsin Watch has learned that while a justice, Gableman attended the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland — in possible violation of judicial rules prohibiting attendance at party conventions — and while there, he appeared intoxicated and was escorted out of the convention hall after causing disturbances, according to two Wisconsin Republicans in attendance and a third briefed on the incident shortly after it happened.
Former longtime state GOP leader Steve King recalled then-U.S. Rep. Sean Duffy telling him that Gableman “has a problem and we need to get him back to his hotel.”
Gableman had established a solid legal career, having served in district attorney offices and courtrooms across the state. He made history winning election to the Supreme Court — the first candidate in four decades to defeat an incumbent justice.
But after the GOP convention in Cleveland, his career entered a downward spiral. His Republican support waned, and he decided not to run for a second 10-year term and disappeared from public life.
Then in 2021, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos hired Gableman as a special counsel to investigate Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss in Wisconsin.
At the time, it was not publiclydisclosed that Gableman had worked a $170,000 executive branch job in the final yearof Trump’s first administration.
According to newly obtained public records, Gableman’s compensation for the failed election probe was more than twice what was budgeted for his role.
The entire investigation cost taxpayers nearly $2.8 million, a new figure that includes a $432,000 open records lawsuit settlement reached earlier this month. The total is more than four times the $676,000 that was budgeted for the project.
Gableman’s career — from his first major courtroom job in 1999, to the pivotal 2008 Supreme Court election, to perpetuating Trump’s debunked election conspiracies — is a case study in what can happen when partisanship entangles the government branch most shielded from political volatility.
‘Always the adult in the room’
Raised in Waukesha County as the youngest of five in a middle-class family, Gableman stood out for doing right, his cousin David Gableman told Wisconsin Watch. The former justice, through his cousin, declined to be interviewed and didn’t respond to other interview requests.
While growing up, “he was always the adult in the room,” David Gableman said. “Always the serious one, very focused. … He always wanted to have an impact, he always wanted to make a difference in life.”
Ripon senior yearbook photo, 1988. (Courtesy of the Ripon Crimson)
A multiyear classpresident at New Berlin West High School, Gableman earned a bachelor’s degree in history and education from Ripon College. At Ripon, he was sports editor of the yearbook and a member of BetaSigma Pi.
In earning his law degree in 1993 from the Hamline School of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota, Gableman made the dean’s honor roll.
Gableman, who never married and has no children, was aided in his career rise by Republican Party connections and a willingness to move to rural areas.
After working as a county government attorney and prosecutor in Langlade, Forest and Marathon counties in northern Wisconsin, in 1999 Gableman was appointed by GOP Gov. Tommy Thompson as district attorney in far-northwestern Ashland County.
Looking back, Thompson doesn’t see it as odd that he didn’t choose a local attorney, though he acknowledged he doesn’t recall even interviewing Gableman.
“I’m sure that Michael Gableman’s name came forward as an individual, that he was a Republican and that he was a good lawyer,” Thompson told Wisconsin Watch.
Gableman later described himself as an independent when Thompson appointed him. His first recorded campaign contribution in a Wisconsin election was to a Democrat — $500 in 1998 to then-state Assembly Rep. Greg Huber, who represented Marathon County.
Ashland County was something of a GOP launching pad at the time. Gableman was preceded as district attorney by J.B. Van Hollen, who went on to become Wisconsin’s attorney general, and succeeded by Duffy, now Trump’s transportation secretary. Van Hollen and Duffy also had been tapped for the job from outside the county.
Another GOP connection sets up a Supreme Court run
Running unopposed, Gableman was elected Ashland County district attorney as a Republican in 2000. District attorneys, unlike judges, can run with a partisan affiliation.
By then, Gableman chaired the county Republican Party. In 2002, he cut short his term as district attorney to take an administrative law judge position 260 miles away inAppleton under Thompson’s successor, GOP Gov. Scott McCallum.
The low-profile, largely bureaucratic position handles disputes within government agencies. But it gave Gableman the title of judge.
Just two months later, McCallum appointed Gableman to a vacant circuit court judgeship nearly 300 miles away in Burnett County.
Scott McCallum is seen in the 2002 Wisconsin gubernatorial debate, broadcast by C-SPAN.
It played out in a partisan way.
Gableman had not applied for the Burnett County judgeship. Yet McCallum chose him over two local applicants recommended by McCallum’s advisory committee for judicial appointments.
Gableman contributed $2,500 to McCallum’s campaign in the months before the appointment and headed up some McCallum fundraising events.
Asked why he picked Gableman, McCallum told Wisconsin Watch he knew Gableman “as a supporter of mine” and considered him a good attorney and a hard worker.
“It came down to it, the other two were Democrats, I appointed Gableman,” he said.
It’s true that one of thefinalists, then-Burnett County district attorney Ken Kutz, was a Democrat. But the other, Mark Biller, then district attorney in neighboring Polk County, was a Republican. McCallum didn’t respond to requests to clarify his recollection of Kutz and Biller.
McCallum made it clear when interviewing Kutz that the selection process was decidedly partisan.
“The first question was, ‘Why the hell should I appoint a Democrat for judge in Burnett County?’” Kutz recalled to Wisconsin Watch.
Biller was in the right party, but he had lost his run for Polk County judge months earlier.
He said McCallum chose Gableman because McCallum was “looking for someone who could use that job for higher office and advance party goals.”
“He went out there and just campaigned to death,” Kutz recalled of Gableman’s run for Burnett County judge several months after being chosen by McCallum. “The guy is a politician like nobody’s business.”
Nasty ads taint 2008 race
Gableman “ran a real tight courtroom” and performed well as a Burnett County judge, said Kutz, who succeeded Gableman after Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle appointed him to the bench.
Gableman helped create the county’s Drug and Alcohol Court, one of the first in Wisconsin, its Restorative Justice Program that helps divert offenders from jail, and inmate and juvenile justice community service programs.
But in deciding to run for Supreme Court in 2008, he was virtually unknown outside of GOP circles. Republicans speaking on condition of anonymity said Gableman emerged as the candidate after better-known conservatives opted not to challenge the incumbent Justice Louis Butler.
Butler, a former Milwaukee County judge and the state’s first African American justice, had been appointed in 2004 by Doyle. Both he and Gableman were running statewide for the first time.
Gableman’s campaign, led by former state Republican Party executive director Darrin Schmitz, cast Gableman as a law-and-order candidate, drawing a contrast with Butler, who previously had worked as a public defender.In attack ads, Gableman’s supporters nicknamed Butler “loophole Louie” — suggesting Butler would use legal loopholes to help criminal defendants.
Gableman stayed on message, said David Gableman, who accompanied his cousin on many campaign trips. “It didn’t matter what the question was,” Gableman would always quickly pivot to how many sheriffs had endorsed him, his cousin said.
Screen grab from Michael Gableman’s promotional video for his Supreme Court run. (From YouTube channel @gableman1)
He also received heavy backing from business interests, especiallyWisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, which wanted a reliable conservative to flip what they viewed as an activist Supreme Court.
The court had issued a series of controversial rulings, including one finding that individual manufacturers could be held liable for a child’s lead paint injuries, even without proof they were responsible.
WMC and other conservative groups spent $2.75 million backing Gableman, nearly seven times what his own campaign spent, the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign estimated.
Louis Butler (Wisconsin Supreme Court file photo)
At the time, the $6 million spent on the race — a fraction of the $100 million spent in the 2025 Supreme Court contest — passed the previous campaign spending record for a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat. That record had been set the previous year and was itself four times higher than the previous spending record.
Gableman defeated Butler by nearly 3 points, becoming the state’s first candidate to unseat an incumbent justice since 1967.
In his victory speech, Gableman declared a triumph for “judicial conservatism.”
William Bablitch, a former Supreme Court justice, said at the time: “Right now, the impression of the people of the state is justice is for sale, and some are going to get a fairer shake than others.”
Surviving accusations of misconduct
In what would become a pattern, Gableman was accused of two ethical lapses during and soon after the 2008 campaign.
Liberal advocacy group One Wisconsin Now alleged Gableman had made campaign fundraising calls for McCallum from his taxpayer-funded Ashland County district attorney’s office in 2002. One Wisconsin Now produced records showing 55 calls had been made from Gableman’s office and from his government-issued cellphone to McCallum fundraisers and donors, McCallum’s campaign office and others.
One Wisconsin Now requested investigations, but several authorities, including Van Hollen, Duffy, the Government Accountability Board and the Office of Lawyer Regulation, refused.
The calls “sent the message that he was political,” said Sachin Chheda, who ran Butler’s campaign. “It also sent the message that he was willing to push the envelope.”
Gableman also faced a judicial oversight investigation for a misleading campaign ad he approved three weeks before the election.
The ad falsely implied that, as a public defender, Butler used a loophole to free imprisoned rapist Reuben Lee Mitchell, who later molested a child. In fact, Butler’s representation didn’t result in a reduced punishment and Mitchell committed the later crime only after serving his prison sentence.
“It just shows he was willing to do anything,” Scot Ross, former head of One Wisconsin Now, said of Gableman.
David Gableman noted there were harsh attack ads on both sides, recalling that another relative didn’t vote for his cousin after ads accused him of giving light sentences to sex offenders.
Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman acknowledges applause after taking the oath of office in a ceremony at the Capitol in Madison, Wis., on Oct. 24, 2008. Gableman was sworn in by former Justice Donald Steinmetz. (Craig Schreiner / Wisconsin State Journal)
In October 2008, just two months after Gableman was sworn in, the state Judicial Commission filed a complaint against him, alleging his ad violated the state judicial code of conduct.
The commission dropped the case in 2010 after the Supreme Court deadlocked 3-3 on what to do about the complaint. Gableman didn’t participate. The other three conservative justices saidthat while the ad was “distasteful,” its statements were “objectively true” and protected by the First Amendment.
Reliable conservative falls out of favor with his party
Gableman’s tenure on the Supreme Court was marked by controversy.
When Justice Ann Walsh Bradley accused Justice David Prosser of putting his hands around her neck during an argument — an incident witnessed by four justices — Gableman’s account was the only outlier, characterizing the 5-foot-3 Walsh Bradley as looming over the 5-foot-9 Prosser, according to a sheriff’s report.
Gableman also claimed to sheriff’s investigators that Walsh Bradley had smacked him on the back of the head in the presence of their colleagues for calling Shirley Abrahamson, then the chief justice, by her first name. No other justice corroborated his story.
Ethics complaints were filed with twostate agencies over Gableman’s acceptance of two years of free legal services, likely worth tens of thousands of dollars, in the case filed against him over the Butler ad. As a justice, Gableman did not recuse himself from cases argued by Michael Best & Friedrich, the law firm that provided his free legal aid. He ruled in favor of the firm’s clients five times, more than any other justice during his tenure on the court, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported. No action was taken against him from those complaints.
Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman speaks during a court hearing Sept. 17, 2015, at the Grant County Courthouse in Lancaster, Wis. Also pictured are Justices David Prosser and Ann Walsh Bradley. (Jessica Reilly / Telegraph Herald)
A strong conservative on the court, Gableman wrote the court’s 5-2 opinion upholding Act 10, the 2011 law that effectively ended collective bargaining for most Wisconsin public employee unions. He also wrote the 4-2 decision that ended what was known as the John Doe II criminal investigation into Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s coordination with outside groups during the 2011 and 2012 recall elections that Act 10 triggered.
Then Cleveland happened.
Attending the Republican National Convention was problematic for a sitting justice. The state Judicial Code of Conduct directs judges to “avoid partisan activity” and says they may not “participate” in political party conventions. But what’s labeled as a comment on the rule says judges “may attend public events, even those sponsored by political parties or candidates, so long as the attendance does not constitute the kind of partisan activity prohibited by this rule.” In recent years, Wisconsin candidates for the Supreme Court and a justice-elect have spoken at state Democratic and Republican party conventions.
One Republican, speaking on condition of anonymity, said he witnessed Gableman being “loud and obnoxious” at the convention. Gableman appeared to be intoxicated before other attendees escorted him out of the convention hall and back to his hotel, the Republican source said.
That source and another Republican, who was not in attendance, said they were told by party colleagues that Gableman belligerently insulted Janesville U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, then speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, in a hospitality suite, before Duffy became involved and whisked him away.
Spokespersons for Duffy and Ryan did not return messages seeking comment.
David Gableman said he drove to the convention with his cousin, though they didn’t attend all of the same events together. He said he wasn’t aware of any incidents.
The Republicans who declined to be identified said the incident added to concerns about whether Gableman would be the best candidate toback in 2018. In June 2017, Gableman, then only 50, announced he would not run for a second term.
In 2020, Gableman was hired by the federal Office of Personnel Management at a salary of $170,800 putting him among the highest-paid 10% of employees in the agency. Gableman wasinvolved in implementing a Trump executive order tocurb diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) training for federal employees, a precursor to what would happen this year with Trump’s second administration.
2020 election probe becomes new focus
When Trump lost the 2020 election and fought the result in court with baseless claims of voter fraud, Gableman, no longer working in government, became a lieutenant in Trump’s election fraud-fighting army.
Gableman, like Trump, “has always been kind of anti-establishment,” believes “the swamp” is deep and that politicians aren’t accountable, David Gableman said. “He’s been loyal to Trump not because he’s a blind soldier, but because he has similar political beliefs.”
Defending Trump also allowed Gableman to return to the public spotlight.
Michael Gableman, formerly a justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, speaks at a rally for President Donald Trump at American Serb Hall in Milwaukee on Nov. 7, 2020, after Joe Biden had won a bitterly fought contest for president over Trump. (Mike De Sisti / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel via USA TODAY NETWORK)
Four days after Trump’s loss to Joe Biden, Gableman suggested at a pro-Trump rally in Milwaukee that the election had been stolen.
In June 2021, Trump accused Vos, the state’s Assembly speaker, and other Wisconsin GOP leaders of “working hard to cover up election corruption.”
The next day, Vos announced at the state Republican Party convention that he had retained Gableman to investigate the 2020 election.
The move took pressure off Vos and other Wisconsin Republicansfrom Trump’s base. They were placating Trump by choosing a Trump-aligned former Supreme Court justice to lead the investigation.
Vos miscalculated.
It wasn’t widely known at the time that Gableman had been working for Trump’s administration in 2020. Asked if he knew, when hiring Gableman, that the former justice had been working for Trump, Vos said he didn’t think so.
Gableman began his first months of election investigation work at the New Berlin Public Library because he didn’t own a computer.
It didn’t go well. Gableman acknowledged having little understanding of how elections work. He also:
Tried to jail the mayors of Madison and Green Bay for refusing to submit to depositions, which he had no authority to do.
Endorsed various false claims about lawmakers’ power to decertify Biden’s election victory, which the New York Times reported had lended “credence to the conspiracy theories.”
Deletedrecords in violation of state regulations, leading Dane County Circuit Judge Valerie Bailey-Rihn to say Gableman appeared to have “gone rogue” and “run amok” by refusing to comply with the state’s open records law.
His work did please one fan, however.
In April 2022, Gableman attended a party at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, where Trump praised him before an audience: “Michael, you’ve been unbelievable,” The Washington Post reported.
His efforts drew derision from Wisconsin legal authorities and even the party leader who hired him.
In June 2022, a year into the election investigation, Dane County Circuit Judge Frank Remington asked the Office of Lawyer Regulation in a court order to discipline Gableman. Remington found Gableman in contempt of court and fined him $2,000 per day for refusing Remington’s order to produce documents. Gableman also displayed “sneering” and mocking behavior in court, Remington wrote, and “destroyed any sense of decorum and irreparably damaged the public’s perception of the judicial process.”
Vos fired Gableman two months later, in August 2022, calling him an “embarrassment.”
After the firing, Gableman’s name was removed from his law school’s list of notablealumni.
Gableman was paid $117,000, more than double the $55,000 that had been budgeted, according to a previously unreported document Wisconsin Watch obtained from the Assembly clerk.
“He paid no attention to detail, he delegated almost all the work to somebody else and very poor follow-through,” Vos told Wisconsin Watch. “It seemed like Mike Gableman was more concerned about the money he was earning as opposed to finding the truth.”
Reviews by the nonpartisan Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau, the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty and The Associated Press found no evidence of uncounted, miscounted or fraudulent votes that would have had any bearing in Wisconsin in the 2020 election.
Election probe leads to lawyer regulation complaint
Gableman’s work was supposed to conclude within a few months. Ultimately, the nearly 14-month probe cost taxpayers $2.77 million, including $1.82 million for outside lawyers. Earlier this month, the state agreed to pay $431,843 in legal fees to American Oversight, a group that sued over destruction of records related to the investigation.
Less than a month after being fired, Gableman told a gathering of Outagamie County Republicans: “Our comfort is holding us back from taking the action that’s necessary. … It’s that very comfort that is keeping us from what our Founders knew to be the only way to keep an honest government, which is revolution.”
Even while under investigation for lawyer misconduct, he continued to advance his election conspiracies to sympathetic audiences.
Michael Gableman is photographed at a Senate Committee on Shared Revenue, Elections and Consumer Protection hearing about the nomination of Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe on Aug. 29, 2023, in the Capitol in Madison, Wis. Gableman previously acted as special counsel to Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, to investigate the results of the 2020 U.S. presidential election in Wisconsin. (Drake White-Bergey / Wisconsin Watch)
The Wolf River Area Patriots promoted its January meeting by touting a Gableman speech on the importance of electing conservative Waukesha County Judge Brad Schimel to the state Supreme Court.
About 50 people turned out in tiny New London, two hours northwest of Milwaukee. The meeting was open to the public. Gableman spoke in his resonant baritone for more than an hour, stoking fear and spreading unproven theories about casting votes in the names of overseas military service people or the deceased, and saying Wisconsin elections “are only as secure as the worst criminally minded fraudster wants them to be.”
Gableman said little about Schimel, who went on to lose the April 1 election, other than that he was superior to eventual winner Susan Crawford. He called Crawford “a particularly nasty piece of work.”
At more than $100 million, the Schimel-Crawford race set a national record for spending on a state supreme court contest and featured droves of misleading attack ads that have become common since Gableman’s 2008 campaign.
The state Office of Lawyer Regulation’s case against Gableman, which includes allegations raised in a 100-page complaint from the Law Forward law firm in March 2023, saidhe violated 10 counts of Supreme Court rules of professional conduct for attorneys. He is accused of making false statements about a judge, an opposing attorney and two mayors; making false statements to the Office of Lawyer Regulation; disobeying a court order; and violating the state open records law and confidentiality rules.
Gableman had gone from a top jurist sworn to uphold the constitution to a political player accused of lying in court and breaking laws.
He initially denied the charges, which could have led to the permanent loss of his law license.
But on April 7, he capitulated.
In the settlement filing: “Gableman hereby stipulates that he cannot successfully defend against the allegations of misconduct … and agrees that the allegations of the complaint provide an adequate factual basis for a determination of SCR (Supreme Court Rules) violations as alleged in each of the ten counts of the complaint.”
He agreed with this admission to losing his license to practice law for three years.
The proposed settlement must be approved by two more authorities to become official:
A lawyer serving as referee in the case.
And the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
Some research for this article was provided by Audrey Nielsen of the nonprofit Sunlight Research Center, which assists newsrooms with investigative reporting.
Madison’s city clerk, Maribeth Witzel-Behl, resigned Monday as the city and state continued to look into how she and her staff lost track of nearly 200 ballots that never got counted in November.
Witzel-Behl, who took the post in 2006, gained wide recognition for running elections in the state’s second largest city during the pandemic and multiple presidential elections. In all, she oversaw more than 60 elections.
But her reputation took a blow in the November 2024 election, when 193 ballots from two polling stations went missing on Election Day and never got counted. Clerks and the Wisconsin Elections Commission have criticized her for failing to promptly inform state and city officials about the issue.
“On behalf of city of Madison residents, I want to extend my gratitude to Maribeth for her commitment and dedication to public service,” Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said.
Witzel-Behl was placed on leave in March, with Mike Haas, the city attorney and former commission administrator, acting as clerk in the interim. It’s unclear who will replace Witzel-Behl; Haas previously told Votebeat he does not want the job permanently. The city is undertaking a national search, officials said.
Madison interim City Clerk Mike Haas, left, acting in the role since Maribeth Witzel-Behl was placed on leave, and Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell, right, address the press at the City-County Building in Madison, Wis., after the spring election on April 1, 2025. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
In addition to ongoing city and state investigations, the November error has also led to legal action, with a liberal election law group seeking $34 million in damages on the grounds voters were disenfranchised.
In its probe, the Wisconsin Elections Commission found that mistakes by the clerk’s office began well before Election Day, including printing poll books for the two polling sites earlier than recommended by the commission.
Had the poll books been printed later, they would have automatically indicated that certain ballots had been returned, making it clearer to poll workers on Election Day that some ballots had been received but not counted.
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 denied that. Witzel-Behl, who according to records obtained by Votebeat was on vacation for much of the time following Election Day, didn’t follow up with the county, and those ballots were never counted.
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 he relayed the news to the mayor’s office — which is when both learned of the problem for the first time.
Facing growing scrutiny, Witzel-Behl 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.
Those measures were implemented fully in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election, for which she was on leave. The city apparently didn’t have any significant oversights in that election. City officials say they’re still refining the procedural changes.
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
At an April 1 hearing, in a sign of what the most contentious issues will be in this year’s state budget, the Republican-controlled budget committee only heard from two state agencies: Corrections and the Universities of Wisconsin system.
UW system President Jay Rothman told lawmakers he agreed with Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ assessment that the 2025-27 biennial state budget is a “make it or break it” budget year for the public university system.
Evers’ budget request for the Universities of Wisconsin matched the agency’s ask of $856 million in additional funding over two years, which would be one of the largest increases in the university system’s history. Evers told reporters this funding, in addition to $1.6 billion proposed for capital projects, is essential even without the Trump administration’s threats to cut university funding.
Republican lawmakers on the Joint Finance Committee asked Rothman to justify “administrative bloat” across the system’s 13 universities, as well as the sizable budget ask. Rothman said while the request is large, Wisconsin currently ranks 43rd out of 50 in state spending on public universities. Evers’ budget would add 214 state-funded positions to UW campuses. Rothman said that excluding UW-Madison, the universities have lost over 1,000 positions since 2019.
The share of the UW system budget that comes from state funds has decreased by about 15 percentage points in the last two decades, from 33% to 18%.
“If we get the budget funded, we will not have to raise tuition,” Rothman told the JFC. “If we don’t get funded at an adequate level, that’s one of the levers we have. We keep our branch campuses open, that’s another lever we have that I don’t want to have to use.”
But amid declining birth rates and enrollment in public schools across the state, Republican lawmakers questioned whether the $856 million ask is reasonable considering university enrollments may soon drop significantly. Five of the 13 campuses had enrollments shrink last year.
“You cannot cut your way to success,” Rothman told the committee. “You need to invest.”
State funding for UW-Madison — the state’s flagship university — in inflation-adjusted dollars was $644 million in 1974. Since then, it has declined by $93 million in inflation-adjusted dollars, according to the university’s 2023-24 budget report. Figures aren’t available system-wide.
Republican Rep. Mark Born, co-chair of the committee, asked Rothman why the request called for 13 new staff positions — one on each campus — to support students who have aged out of the foster care system. He cited a UW system report that found there were 420 students in that program across nine of the campuses. He questioned why a position would need to be created at a school like UW-Platteville, which served nine of those students last year. The report also shows that the program didn’t serve all 570 students who qualify, including 23 on that campus.
“I think this is a shining example of the governor’s desire to grow government and your desire to grow your system, and it’s not focused on the reality of how you invest in this stuff,” Born told Rothman.
Rothman said the intent behind the positions is to expand the number of foster care students who could be served.
GOP lawmakers critique admissions process
Republican lawmakers have criticized enrollment and admissions at the state’s flagship university in recent years, citing constituents who say their high-achieving children have been rejected from attending UW-Madison. They have also raised concerns that the university is denying admission to in-state students in favor of out-of-state or international students.
Unlike some of the smaller Wisconsin campuses, UW-Madison has maintained high enrollment numbers likely due to its ability to attract out-of-state and international students.
If the university significantly increased its enrollment of in-state students from an already declining pool of applicants, enrollment at other UW system schools could be negatively affected, UW-Madison Vice Provost for Enrollment Management Derek Kindle told WPR.
During the April 1 hearing, Sen. Rob Stafsholt, R-New Richmond, said he adamantly believes in retaining Wisconsin-based students in the university system. He asked Rothman why one of his young constituents — who has a 4.3 GPA, 32 ACT score and a father who is a military veteran — was rejected from UW-Madison.
“How are we not serving our own kids, as they graduate, by admitting them to our universities before we spend taxpayer dollars and increase taxpayer dollars to attract people from other parts of the world?” Stafsholt asked.
Rothman said he didn’t have the specifics of that student’s case, but pointed to a bill signed into law last year that allows graduating high school students who rank in the top 10% of their high school’s graduating class to gain admission to any UW system school and guarantees admission to UW-Madison for those in the top 5% of their class. The bill takes effect for college admissions starting next fall.
In fall 2024, UW-Madison admitted around 59.3% of in-state applicants, down from an average of 66.8% over the previous nine years. The out-of-state U.S. student admission rate was 46.5%, and the international student admission rate was 33.3%, compared to a previous nine-year average of 52.7% and 38.6% respectively.
The questioning was similar to a national talking point about high-achieving students being rejected from universities, which some Republicans have attributed to diversity, equity and inclusion practices. Right-wing activists like Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, have questioned whether the government should be funding higher education.
On the same day as the hearing, Kirk took to social media to share an example of a high-achieving student similar to the one Stafsholt spoke of.
“Why are we giving hundreds of billions of dollars to universities so stupid they won’t offer this kid an admission because of his skin color (and let’s be honest, that’s why he was rejected everywhere)?” Kirk wrote on X. “Defund the college scam.”
Slashes to federal funding loom over UW-Madison
Last month, the federal Department of Education notified UW-Madison that it was one of 60 universities across the country under investigation by the Office for Civil Rights. The letter warned that the university could lose federal funding if it failed to protect its Jewish students.
The move was part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on antisemitism on college campuses, which has involved detaining, deporting and terminating the visas of students with ties to the national pro-Palestinian protests last spring.
UW-Madison is also one of 45 universities being investigated for alleged racial discrimination related to its diversity, equity and inclusion practices. The Trump administration has made sweeping threats to pull federal funding from colleges that continue to consider race and diversity in their policies and programs.
But how much funding is at stake here?
According to the Associated Press, out of 50 public universities under OCR investigation, UW-Madison is among the top five that received the most federal revenue in 2022-23. The university collected more than $827 million in federal funds that year, which was just over 20% of its total revenue.
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It’s a question that is widely misunderstood, but yes, unauthorized immigrants do pay taxes.
While many immigrants are still paid “under the table” for their work, the majority pay income and payroll taxes on their wages, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. While an exact number is difficult to determine, a 2013 estimate from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy suggested at least half of all unauthorized workers in the United States pay income taxes.
An estimated 70,000 unauthorized immigrants live in Wisconsin, about 47,000 of whom are employed, according to the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. About two-thirds of those had lived in the U.S. for 10 years or more. But that information, while the most recent available, is now over five years old. The Department of Homeland Security estimated that there were 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the country as of 2022.
In 2018, unauthorized immigrants in Wisconsin paid an estimated $157 million in federal taxes and $101 million in state and local taxes, totaling nearly $258 million, according to the American Immigration Council. That estimate dropped slightly to a total of $240 million in federal, state and local taxes as of 2022.
Unauthorized immigrant workers nationwide paid an estimated $97 billion in federal, state and local taxes in 2022, according to a July 2024 report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
But how do they pay taxes without being identified by authorities?
Unauthorized workers who lack a Social Security number can instead apply for an individual taxpayer identification number through the Internal Revenue Service — a system created in 1996 — to file their income taxes. As of December 2022, there were an estimated 5.8 million active ITINs in the United States, according to the Administration of the Individual Taxpayer Identification Number Program.
Taxpayer ID numbers allow unauthorized workers to file tax returns. All that is required to obtain an ITIN is an application that does not require proof of work authorization or proof that you reside in the United States legally.
ITIN holders’ tax information has historically been legally protected and could not be shared with the Department of Homeland Security or Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Unauthorized immigrant workers had been able to get one without threat of the information being shared with authorities who may find and deport them.
But on April 7, the IRS and the Department of Homeland Security struck a deal on behalf of the Trump administration to share taxpayer data on unauthorized individuals under final removal orders. The agreement faces legal challenges.
Some unauthorized immigrants provide employers with fake Social Security numbers, someone else’s number or a previously valid number. When they’re hired, most employers do not and are not required to verify the identification numbers with any government entity, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.
But when tax return season comes around, the IRS will not accept filings that include a fake, stolen or invalid Social Security number. If unauthorized workers want to file their taxes and create a paper trail, then they will often obtain an ITIN.
The Social Security Administration may alert an employer when an employee’s name and Social Security number on a W-2 form do not match, but it cannot enforce any penalties. The IRS rarely ever investigates employers with a high number of W-2 forms that don’t match. According to the Bipartisan Policy Center, this is due to limited resources and employers’ ability to simply claim they asked an employee for the correct number, which is all that is required of them by law.
The financial penalty for each W-2 discrepancy is so small that the federal government often will not investigate it. Legally, a mismatched name and number cannot be considered proof that a worker is in the country illegally.
Why would unauthorized workers decide to pay and file taxes?
According to the Bipartisan Policy Center,many unauthorized workers choose to pay taxes in the hopes that it will eventually help them gain citizenship. Should a pathway to citizenship ever be established through a comprehensive immigration bill, a history of paying taxes can be viewed as a way to show “good faith.”
While many unauthorized immigrants pay taxes, they do not qualify for many benefits like Social Security retirement, Medicare coverage and the federal earned income tax credit — despite contributing billions of dollars in federal payroll taxes that help fund these programs.
If they purchase goods and services in a community, unauthorized immigrants pay sales taxes just like others do. When buying a home, they will pay state and local property taxes as well.
Wisconsin Watch readers have submitted questions to our statehouse team, and we’ll answer them in our series, Ask Wisconsin Watch. Have a question about state government? Ask it here.
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.
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.”
Rep. David Steffen, R-Howard, listens to testimony during an Assembly committee hearing March 11, 2025, at the State Capitol in Madison, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
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.
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.
“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.
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