An absentee ballot drop box in Madison, where officials lost and failed to count nearly 200 absentee ballots in the 2024 presidential election.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission voted 5-1 on Friday to institute its order against the city of Madison requiring that city officials make a number of changes to absentee ballot processes after the city lost and failed to count nearly 200 ballots during the 2024 presidential election. 

The Madison city clerk’s office told the elections commission in a memo Dec. 20 about the lost ballots from two Madison wards. A bag containing 68 unprocessed absentee ballots from two wards was found Nov. 12 in a tabulator bin, the memo stated. During reconciliation of ballots on Dec. 3, clerk employees found two sealed envelopes containing a total of 125 unprocessed absentee ballots from another ward. The discovery of the missing ballots was announced to the public Dec. 26. 

The missing ballots were not enough to change the result of any local, state or federal elections.

WEC launched an investigation into the error. In a report released last month, WEC found that “confluence of errors” and a “complete lack of leadership” in the city clerk’s office led to the ballots going missing. 

The investigation report also proposed a number of requirements for the city to improve its systems for tracking and counting absentee ballots. Those requirements constituted the order the commission approved on Friday. 

Among other things, the order requires the city to develop an internal plan delineating which employee is responsible for statutorily required tasks, print poll books no earlier than the Thursday before elections, change the absentee ballot processing system so bags and envelopes aren’t lost, update instructional materials for poll workers and complete a full inspection of all materials before the scheduled board of canvassers meeting after an election.

Commissioners followed through with enacting the order after interim City Clerk Michael Haas had sent a letter to the commission, requesting that the provisions of the order be made more broad and suggesting that the commission does not have the authority to enforce such changes to local election practices against just one municipality. 

“Individually-tailored orders for jurisdictions across the state also runs the risk of increasing, rather than decreasing, inconsistency of local election practices,” Haas wrote in an Aug. 6 letter to the commission. “If the Commission truly wishes to dictate the staffing, workflow, and procedures of municipal clerks at such a granular level, a regulatory guidance or rule-making that applies to all jurisdictions and that allows for thoughtful input by local election officials makes far more sense and is likely required.” 

In the letter, Haas wrote that the requirements of the WEC order were drafted in a vacuum from the city’s already existing election processes; that they give no end date or flexibility to election law changes made by the courts, Legislature or WEC itself; don’t address the logistic specifics of running an election in the state’s second largest city and don’t provide statutory reasons for the required changes. 

At the meeting Friday, Democratic Commissioner Mark Thomsen was the only member to vote against enacting the order. Thomsen argued that the order seemed “spiteful.” He said the city administered the 2025 spring election with no issues and that it still doesn’t have a permanent city clerk, so whoever is hired will be hamstrung by an order made because of actions they had nothing to do with. 

“I don’t think it’s fair to burden the new clerk with a set of orders that all the other clerks recognize no one else has to follow,” Thomsen said. “It is absolutely tragic that 193 people’s votes weren’t counted. They have separate legal remedies now. We have done what we needed to do. We’ve done an investigation, we’ve laid it out, and I do not think we should do a power grab and create burdens on the new clerk, whether or not we can exercise it.” 

But the supporters of the order said that not imposing it would mean letting the city off without being held accountable. Commission chair Ann Jacobs, a Democrat, noted that even though former Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl resigned after the incident, many staff involved in losing the ballots remain in the clerk’s office. 

“I think we need to order it also so that clerks across the state understand the level of seriousness that this commission takes with this,” Jacobs said. “The city needs to straighten out what happened here. And I don’t think there’s been sort of that reckoning yet.” 

Administrative rules 

The commission on Friday also reinstituted the administrative rulemaking process on a number of proposed rules that had been held up by a legislative committee. 

The Legislature’s Joint Committee for the Review of Administrative Rules (JCRAR) had previously suspended emergency rules written by WEC on a number of topics, including instructions for absentee voting and challenges to candidate ballot access. 

Last month, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled in Tony Evers v. Howard Marklein that JCRAR’s suspension of administrative rules amounted to an unconstitutional legislative veto. Under previous law, state agencies weren’t allowed to promulgate a permanent rule on a topic in which the committee had previously struck down an emergency rule. After the court’s ruling, WEC can once again start the rulemaking process. 

The commission voted to restart the process of establishing rules for challenging candidate nomination papers, challenging declarations of candidacy and mandating that local clerks use a uniform set of rules for absentee ballots.

Hundreds of people came to the Capitol on Thursday, Oct. 28 2021 to testify against the new voting maps drawn by Republican legislative leaders which advocates characterized as 'gerrymandering 2.0' | Wisconsin Examiner photo

The drama in Texas, where President Donald Trump has demanded that Republicans quickly draw new GOP districts to thwart the will of the voters and ensure his party retains control of Congress in the upcoming midterm elections, has created massive discord. 

Progressives and voting rights advocates are divided on whether California and New York should fight the Texas power grab by gerrymandering their own states, creating more safe Democratic seats, even if that means undermining fair maps and the authority of those states’ nonpartisan redistricting commissions.

In Wisconsin, which just got out from under one of the worst partisan gerrymanders in the U.S., and the impenetrable, outsized Republican majorities in the state Legislature it protected for a decade and a half, this issue hits particularly close to home.

It’s head-spinning to hear arguments for Democratic counter-gerrymandering in other states from the same people in Wisconsin who were recently crying out for fair maps. 

If Democrats are going to mount a serious challenge to the fascist takeover of our country by Trump and his minions, it’s hard to see how ceding the moral high ground and running roughshod over the principle that the will of the majority of voters should prevail is going to help. 

I get that it’s more satisfying to imagine a quick fix to the fascist takeover of every branch of government than to listen to a lot of vague talk about long-term plans to rebuild democracy. After all, election deniers and the architects of the Jan. 6 attack are now running the federal government, demanding access to voter lists across the country and deploying the FBI to arrest political opponents, including the Texas Democrats who’ve fled their state to stall the gerrymandering scheme there. 

But here in Wisconsin, where we’ve just finally beaten back the most gerrymandered map in the country, it’s depressing to imagine Democrats abandoning the high ground and scrambling to do exactly what Republicans did when they controlled all three branches of government, attempting to lock in permanent political control against the will of the people.

If we want democracy, fairness, and the rule of law, we need to champion, well, democracy, fairness and the rule of law. 

In this most extreme political moment, with every public institution and the continued existence of U.S. democracy in doubt, I understand why the long view frustrates people. The emergency is now. I understand that many voters want to see Democrats “fight fire with fire,” as Newsom put it.

But consider this: Republicans control more state legislatures (28 Republican versus 18 controlled by Democrats) and have trifecta control of all branches of government in more states (23 all-GOP states versus 15 all-Democratic). JD Vance just launched a tour of Republican states to encourage more mid-decade gerrymandering. And Trump wants to hold a new census for the purpose of redefining who can vote. Even if Democratic Govs. Gavin Newsom and Kathy Hochul succeed in gerrymandering California and New York, Democrats are not likely to win the nationwide redistricting war.

Meanwhile, democracy will be the first casualty of that war. California and New York would have to suspend the work of their nonpartisan redistricting commissions — the gold standard for fair, nonpartisan map-drawing — and take back partisan control of the process in order to carry out their threats. If they succeed, it is beyond unlikely that the politicians who pull off that short-term victory will ever cede back their power over the voting maps to the nonpartisan commissions again.

On a deeper level, the Democratic gerrymandering fantasy takes the whole movement to oppose Trump in exactly the wrong direction. Instead of building grassroots support to counter an unpopular, authoritarian leader, it rigs the system to benefit a party whose whole problem is that it has lost the broad, popular support it needs to win elections and create a better, more enlightened government. 

Instead of trying to rig the maps to ensure a Democratic House majority in the next election, Democrats need to focus on winning elections and flipping seats in areas of the rural and industrial Midwest that were once reliably blue but have turned deep red.

To do that they need to make the case that health care, education and an adequate social safety net are bedrock rights in the richest nation on earth, and that we should not be giving tax breaks to billionaires by taking food out of the mouths of hungry children. 

They need to offer something to the farmers and factory workers and disaffected voters in rural and urban areas alike that is clearly different and better than the hate, corruption, and a determination to run roughshod over democracy that Republicans offer.

In Wisconsin, voting rights groups have been working on a campaign to push through a constitutional amendment modeled on one in our neighboring state of Michigan, to make sure that our voting maps are never again drawn up by partisan legislators.

That’s the kind of grassroots fight that helped Wisconsin finally overcome Republican gerrymandering. One important aspect of the fair maps movement is the way it engaged citizens to feel like participants, not spectators, in democracy, and to find their common interests instead of focusing on the politics of division. This, not more politicians in safe seats who don’t have to listen to voters, is what we need right now. 

The battle to beat back fascism does not turn on a handful of Democrats in protected districts. It turns on an organized uprising by the majority of people in the U.S. who are willing to join together despite their differences because they are sick and tired of having their democracy stolen from them, along with their health, safety, opportunity and hope. There’s no short cut to leading that fight. 

Former state Sen. Dale Schultz, left, listens as former Dane County Sheriff Davd Mahoney speaks in a panel discussion on "fusion voting" in La Crosse Wednesday. (Screenshot/LeaderEthics Wisconsin YouTube channel)

Could letting multiple political parties endorse the same candidate bring political reform to Wisconsin, or the nation?

That’s part of the idea being promoted by a bipartisan pair of retired politicians — former state Sen. Dale Schultz, a Republican, and former Dane County Sheriff Dave Mahoney, a Democrat.

Mohoney and Schultz believe that “fusion voting” — a system that allows multiple parties to endorse the same political candidate — could help remedy the disaffection with politics that they see becoming ever more widespread.

Talking with his two adult sons over the weekend, “both of them told me, ‘I don’t vote. I’m not going to vote because my voice doesn’t matter,’” Mahoney said during a panel discussion in La Crosse on Wednesday. “Unfortunately I hear that all too often.”

In his conversations in the community, “a consistent message was, ‘I’m not being represented by my party,’” Mahoney said.

Schultz and Mahoney have established United Wisconsin — for now, an affinity group, but in the future, they hope, a new political party.

Wednesday’s panel discussion provided a platform for the pair to make their case for fusion voting to a few dozen people at the Black River Beach Neighborhood Center in La Crosse and a broader audience watching on YouTube. It was hosted by LeaderEthics Wisconsin, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that defines its purpose as “promoting ethical leadership among elected officials.”

Making it possible for candidates to run on more than one party line would strengthen the power of third parties and give them “a seat at the table” as candidates and officeholders shape public policy, Schultz said. “We can provide agency so that their voices are heard, that they do have the ability to negotiate.”

As a state lawmaker he sought to work across party lines “in a collaborative way that would best serve all of us,” Schultz said. Disagreements were common, “but we didn’t hate each other. And at the end of the day, we were proud when we could jointly stand up in front of our constituents or the public in general and say we have a solution which we think is worth trying.”

That sense of comity has deteriorated, Schultz said. He believes fusion voting could help restore a stronger spirit of cooperation and re-engage “those who don’t believe anyone is listening to them, those who believe that the only choice they have is … voting for the lesser of two evils, voting for a third party and throwing away their vote, or simply not voting at all.”

Chapter 8 of the Wisconsin statutes has two laws that ban candidates from running on more than one party’s ticket. Statute 8.03(1) states that a candidate’s name may not be listed on the ballot more than once. Statute 8.15(1) bars candidates from running in more than one party’s primary election at the same time.

Changing those laws is at the top of United Wisconsin’s agenda. The organization, along with Schultz and Mahoney and three other people described as potential members of United Wisconsin, are suing in Dane County circuit court to have the two statutes thrown out.

The lawsuit declares that the laws violate rights guaranteed under the Wisconsin Constitution to freedom of association and speech, equal protection under the law, and free government.

The plaintiffs are represented by Law Forward, the nonprofit law firm that focuses on voting rights, democracy and related issues, along with John Franke of Gass Turek. Franke is a former judge who was appointed to the former Government Accountability Board in 2014 by then-Gov. Scott Walker. The board was later dissolved by the Wisconsin Legislature.

“We should not have the dominating party squeeze out the input from the third parties, and we should not have the voters that are inclined to vote in independent ways to also be squeezed out by the two major parties,” said Lee Rasch, executive director of LeaderEthics Wisconsin, as he introduced the discussion. Rasch is one of the other plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

Mahoney said United Wisconsin aims to cool down the increasingly hostile rhetoric between political parties.

“I care what’s important to us as Wisconsinites,” he said. “I care what’s important to us as Americans. We have far more in common than we have separating us.”

Mahoney said he’s alarmed by the increasingly hostile political rhetoric as well as threats and acts of political violence, such as attacks on two state lawmakers in Minnesota and their spouses, killing one of them and her husband.

“I’ve had many calls myself from current lawmakers who want my thoughts on their safety and what they do to protect themselves from a security standpoint being out in the public,” Mahoney said. “That should never happen. That should never happen in our democracy.”

Schultz and Mahoney said if the lawsuit succeeds in throwing out the two statutes United Wisconsin would become a standing political party and work to build a support base. The party would negotiate with candidates to adopt compatible policy positions in return for the party nominating one of the candidates to run on its own ticket.

Mahoney said that having to compete for a block of voters from a third party “might actually bring some common sense into the positions of both major parties and moderate them and certainly the rhetoric that they send out to their members and constituents.”

The spirit of fusion voting has a long and honorable history in Wisconsin, Schultz said, with the Republican Party at its founding in Ripon in 1854 bringing together a collection of splinter political parties united in their opposition to slavery.

The state laws that bar the practice were enacted in 1897. Historian Josh Kluever, a lecturer at Alvernia University in Reading, Pennsylvania, told the Wisconsin Examiner that the law was likely written in reaction to the 1896 presidential election, when both the Populist Party and the Democratic Party endorsed William Jennings Bryan.

Kluever is from Wisconsin and has written about the history of collaborative politics in the state involving the Socialist Party and Robert La Follette’s Progressive Republican wing and later Progressive Party.

While fusion voting was formally outlawed in Wisconsin, the two groups worked to accomplish similar objectives, he said in an interview, allying to pass legislation and refraining from running candidates against each other.

Currently, only New York and Connecticut have any form of fusion voting. Kluever said that it’s “tricky to predict” how more widespread fusion voting might change political dynamics in a state or the country.

Nevertheless, “it is a positive for the small-d democratic process to have people’s voices feel that they’re being heard,” Kluever said. 

This report has been updated with additional information about United Wisconsin’s legal representation in its lawsuit.  

A voter leaves a polling place after casting a ballot in the state’s primary election on March 5, 2024, in Mountain Brook, Ala. Before the November 2024 election, the Alabama secretary of state initiated a purge of thousands of registered voters but was blocked by a federal judge. (Photo by Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images)

Alabama resident Roald Hazelhoff treasures his newly won right to vote. When election officials flagged the naturalized U.S. citizen’s voter registration for possible removal last August, the Dutch native fought back.

Hazelhoff, then a 67-year-old college instructor, sued to stop Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen, a Republican, from seeking to kick him and more than 3,200 other registered voters off the rolls. The lawsuit was part of a multifront legal challenge led by him and three other voters, along with voting rights groups and the Biden-era U.S. Department of Justice.

A federal judge halted Alabama’s effort within weeks — and Hazelhoff voted in his first presidential election last November without incident.

Ten months later, Hazelhoff is watching with deep concern as the Department of Justice, in President Donald Trump’s second term, is demanding that states turn over their voter registration lists and other election information, citing unspecified concerns with voter list maintenance.

“My initial reaction was of sadness that this could happen but that still a mistake could be made,” Hazelhoff, who lives in the Birmingham area, told Stateline. “Now, I’m more in a stance of saying this is the most fundamental right afforded to citizens of the United States, and I am a legal citizen of this country and I will fight for that right.”

The Trump administration’s effort to scoop up voter registration lists and other information from a growing number of states underscores how state-controlled voter lists are a major battleground in fights over access to the polls. The Justice Department told the National Association of Secretaries of State that it will eventually contact all states, an association spokesperson wrote in an email.

Minnesota, New Hampshire and Wisconsin have so far declined to provide full voter registration lists to the department amid questions over the legality of the requests and uncertainty over how the information will be used. Maine Democratic Secretary of State Shenna Bellows plans to deny a similar request, telling the Maine Morning Star that federal officials can “go jump in the Gulf of Maine.”

The Justice Department declined a Stateline request for comment.

Even before states began tangling with the department, how election officials oversee these lists — including when and why voters can be removed — was under increasing scrutiny. The stakes for voters are foundational: How states maintain the lists determines who is on them — and therefore who is able to vote. Power over voter registration lists is the power to shape the electorate.

“Voting should be easy, not akin to trying to get a U.S. passport when it’s been lost or stolen and you’re in Nicaragua, you know what I’m saying?” Hazelhoff said. “It should be something that we encourage and this is not encouraged. This is the exact opposite.”

Some states in recent years have signed up for competing systems to help identify duplicate or noncitizen voter registrations, after the largest operation came under fire from Trump. Election officials in some states have also entered into ad hoc agreements with some of their counterparts to share data.

Other states continue to tighten voter list maintenance requirements as well. New Hampshire legislators in June approved a bill requiring local officials to verify voter lists annually instead of once a decade; the governor signed the bill on Friday. Idaho lawmakers passed a bill, signed by the governor in April, that requires state agencies to share data with the state secretary of state to help check the accuracy of voter registrations.

Chief election officials in some states tout their annual or regular elimination of registrations.

Georgia Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced in mid-July that his office was sending cancellation mailers to 477,883 inactive registrants. Last week, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, directed local election officials to begin a new round of removals. The registrations will be eligible for cancellation in 2029 following a federally mandated notification process, he said in a news release.

The Trump administration is also pushing states to use a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services tool, typically used to determine the immigration status of people seeking government benefits, to identify noncitizen registered voters. The agency now allows state and local officials to conduct bulk searches using the tool, the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, program, instead of one at a time.

Voter fraud and noncitizen voting rarely occur. But Trump’s false claims of a stolen election in 2020, along with an uptick in anti-immigrant sentiment among conservatives before last year’s election, has driven attention to the voter registration lists.

Election officials and voting rights activists across the political spectrum agree accurate, up-to-date voter rolls ensure that elections remain secure. They split over how to balance cleaning the lists with protecting voters from accidental deletion — and where to draw the line between legitimate maintenance and politically driven purges.

“It has to be done fairly. It has to be done transparently. And it has to be done legally,” said Celina Stewart, CEO of the League of Women Voters, a nonpartisan group that often challenges voter restrictions in court, including the Alabama effort.

“I think that any time you are doing voter list maintenance in a way that disenfranchises more people or is careless, then there has to be a hard ‘no’ on things like that,” Stewart said in an interview.

After initial request, U.S. DOJ has not obtained Wisconsin voter data

New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan, a Republican, said he wants to find a middle ground where “everything is balanced.”

Scanlan declined to provide the Justice Department with his state’s voter rolls. He wrote in a July 25 letter that state law doesn’t authorize him to release the list to the department. Still, he noted that under the law the department could obtain voter lists by contacting local election officials.

In an interview, Scanlan also predicted the New Hampshire legislation requiring annual verification wouldn’t be an onerous change and would improve the accuracy of the rolls. He said he wants a system that makes voting easy, but one that’s also transparent and ensures everyone casting a ballot is a legitimate voter.

“I think that’s where we’re headed,” Scanlan said. “It’s not a straight line to get there.”

Undermining ERIC

Trump helped usher in the current era of division over cleaning voter rolls in March 2023 by attacking the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, and calling on states to pull out of the group. He posted on social media at the time that it “‘pumps the rolls’ for Democrats and does nothing to clean them up.”

Within months, eight Republican-led states had withdrawn.

The Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit allows member states to submit voter registration and motor vehicle department data. It also has access to Social Security death data and address change information from the U.S. Postal Service.

ERIC then identifies potential duplicate and out-of-date registrations, dead voters and possible illegal voting. Member states also reach out to individuals who are likely eligible to vote but haven’t registered, a requirement that angers some Republicans.

Some Democrats are now quick to point out what they see as the irony of Trump’s Justice Department voicing concerns with voter list maintenance practices after the president undermined ERIC — a system they say is effective in helping states clean their voter rolls.

“It is an extra layer of … hypocrisy and ridiculousness that they would turn around and be critical of the one organization” ensuring voter rolls are clean and up to date in its member states, said New York state Sen. James Skoufis, a Democrat who sponsored a bill passed by the state legislature to require New York to join ERIC. The measure hasn’t been delivered to the governor.

Twenty-five states — a mix of red and blue states, as well as presidential swing states such as Michigan, Minnesota and Pennsylvania — and the District of Columbia currently use ERIC. In an email, ERIC Executive Director Shane Hamlin wrote that the organization remains committed to attracting new members. Hamlin cited the New York legislation and noted that Hawaii recently joined.

Republican states haven’t coalesced around a single alternative to ERIC, but an Alabama-led system comes closest. The Alabama Voter Integrity Database, or AVID, includes Alabama and 10 other mostly Southern states; the latest state, Virginia, joined in late May.

The Alabama secretary of state’s office, which maintains the database, didn’t respond to multiple interview requests or written questions from Stateline.

“Voter file maintenance is the foundation of election integrity,” Allen, the Alabama secretary of state, said in a June news release. “Ensuring that Alabama’s voter file is the cleanest and most accurate voter file in the country has been a top priority of mine since day one.”

As states weigh the value of ERIC and AVID, some election officials aren’t racing to pick a side.

Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane, a Republican, said ERIC likely isn’t the right solution, though he said he had no reason to criticize it. To have an effective system, every state needs information from their neighboring states, as well as the states where their “snow birds” go, he said.

He identified those states as Florida in the East, Texas in the Midwest and California and Arizona in the West. Florida and Texas belong to AVID, while Arizona belongs to ERIC. California belongs to neither.

“We need a broader solution. … It’s tough in this environment, where everyone’s guards are up on the political spectrum,” McGrane said in an interview.

‘A total shock’

In Alabama, Hazelhoff said his experience demonstrates the nightmare that can unfold when voter roll cleaning crosses the line into an illegal purge.

“That was a total shock when that happened,” said Hazelhoff, who was born in the Netherlands, moved to the United States in 1977 and became a citizen in 2022.

In August 2024, he received a letter from the Board of Registrars in Jefferson County, where he lives, informing him his voter registration had been made inactive and that “you have been placed on a path for removal from the statewide voter list.”

The reason, the letter said, was that Allen had provided information showing Hazelhoff was issued a noncitizen identification number by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security while also being a registered voter.

After Hazelhoff and others sued, U.S. District Court Judge Anna M. Manasco, a Trump appointee, ruled that Allen had blown past a deadline in federal law that prohibits systematic purges of ineligible voters less than 90 days before a federal election.

Allen had announced his purge 84 days before the election, she wrote, and had later admitted his purge list included thousands of U.S. citizens. He had also referred everyone on the list to the Alabama attorney general’s office for criminal investigation, despite the inclusion of citizens.

When Hazelhoff went to his polling place last year, he said he still felt some trepidation, even after the court ruling. He questioned whether he would be escorted out for casting an illegal vote.

“It worried me,” Hazelhoff said. “But then the actual voting experience was great and the people were polite. The system seemed to be working.”

Stateline reporter Jonathan Shorman can be reached at jshorman@stateline.org.

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.

Poll workers process ballots in Janesville, Wis., in November. A 2025 survey of local election officials found concern about federal cuts to election security. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Local election officials across the country fear the loss of federal support for election security, according to a new survey.

Sixty percent of local election officials expressed some level of concern, a survey by the Brennan Center for Justice found. The center, a left-leaning pro-democracy institute, surveyed 858 officials between mid-April and mid-May.

The concern comes as President Donald Trump has curtailed federal election security work. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, in March halted its election security work. A month earlier, the Department of Government Efficiency task force also fired 130 cybersecurity workers at the agency.

And Trump in April ordered an investigation into Christopher Krebs, a former agency director who had vouched for the security of the 2020 election, which Trump falsely claims was stolen.

Federal cuts mean election officials are going to need more financial support from state and local governments, said Lawrence Norden, vice president of Brennan’s Elections and Government Program. The federal government has the advantage of being able to see the “big picture” and more easily share information with election officials across the country, he said.

“That is going to be difficult for states to replicate,” Norden said. “It doesn’t mean it’s impossible, but they have to start rethinking how they’re sharing information about what they’re seeing with each other.”

Cybersecurity has long been a concern of states — and not just in elections. Only 22 of 48 states that participated in a voluntary 2023 cybersecurity review conducted by federal agencies met or exceeded recommended security levels.

In the Brennan survey, 36% of local election officials said they were very concerned about federal cuts to election security services, while 24% said they were somewhat concerned and 21% said they were a little concerned. Nineteen percent said they were not concerned at all.

Sixty-one percent of local election officials expressed some level of concern over cuts to the federal cybersecurity agency specifically, with 32% saying they were very concerned. The survey had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Stateline reporter Jonathan Shorman can be reached at jshorman@stateline.org.

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.

Don Millis and Ann Jacob, the former and current chairs of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, testify Tuesday, Feb. 4, at an Assembly hearing on a commission rule for election observers. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

Wisconsin was one of several states included in the U.S. Department of Justice’s request for statewide voter registration data — files that include data on millions of Americans. However, after WEC pointed DOJ to state law that would require the Department to pay $12,500 for the data, it has not followed up on the request, according to a Wisconsin Elections Commission spokesperson. 

The DOJ requests for voter data from at least nine states have raised concerns about what the Trump Administration plans to do with the information as President Donald Trump has remained fixated on disproven  conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

Correspondence from US DOJ to WEC – 6.17.25

Through the spring and early summer, DOJ officials have requested information from state election authorities based on allegations that states have violated federal election laws. The June 17 letter sent to Wisconsin alleges that Wisconsin has not complied with the Help America Vote Act, a 2002 law meant to streamline and modernize the election process. 

The letter requested that WEC give DOJ Wisconsin’s statewide voter registration list, provide information on how the state manages the files of  voters who become inactive by moving elsewhere or dying and how it verifies voter citizenship. Most of the questions surround topics that have been common complaints among purveyors of election conspiracy theories over the past half decade. 

On July 2, WEC’s chief legal counsel Jim Witecha sent a letter in response to DOJ on behalf of the six election commissioners. The letter gives detailed answers to many of the questions while asserting that state law prevents the commission from simply handing over the voter data. 

State law requires that the elections commission charge a fee for obtaining voter registration data and the price for obtaining the full list is set at $12,500.

USDOJ Response Letter

“Wisconsin law requires the Commission to charge a fee for access to voter registration data and makes no exceptions for elected officials, government agencies, journalists, non-profits, academics, or any other group,” the letter states. 

More than two weeks later, the DOJ has not yet filed a request to purchase Wisconsin’s voter rolls, according to WEC spokesperson Emilee Miklas. 

Information about DOJ’s request to WEC is located on the state agency’s FAQ webpage, along with answers to questions that have been repeatedly raised by election deniers in the state.

Michael Haas, Madison city attorney and acting city clerk, addresses the Wisconsin Elections Commission on Thursday. (Screenshot/WisEye)

The city of Madison has three weeks to review an order on how to prevent election officials from repeating a mistake they made in the November 2024 election, when they failed to count nearly 200 ballots.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission voted Thursday to hold off on the order after the Madison city attorney and acting city clerk, Michael Haas, urged the commissioners to first give the city a chance to negotiate its details.

“We have concerns about the approach that would require Madison and Madison alone to implement specific new procedures without the opportunity for our staff to consider their impact and practicality and to provide feedback” to the elections commission, Haas told the commissioners during the public comment period at the start of the meeting.

The city alerted the commission on Dec. 20, 2024, that 193 absentee ballots from three wards were never processed — 68 from two wards that were found on Nov. 12 and 125 from another ward found on Dec. 3.

“The failure to count the 193 ballots in Madison was a result of a confluence of errors,” wrote commission members Ann Jacobs and Don Millis, in their report on their joint investigation. Jacobs, a Democrat, is the current commission chair; Millis, a Republican, is the former chair.

The report found “a complete lack of leadership” by Madison’s city clerk at the time, Maribeth Witzel-Behl, after the uncounted ballots were discovered. Witzel-Behl resigned in April.

“These ballots were treated as unimportant and a reconciliation nuisance, rather than as the essential part of our democracy they represent,” Jacobs and Millis wrote.

“The buck didn’t stop anywhere,” Jacobs told the commissioners.

While the report found violations of state election law, it stipulated that those weren’t crimes and that there was no recommendation for criminal referrals.

“This is not a criminal investigation,” Jacobs said. “The focus of this investigation has been discovering what happened and making sure it doesn’t ever happen again in Madison and throughout the state.”

The report’s proposed order requires the Madison city clerk to produce a plan for which employees handle each task in running an election; to print pollbooks that record absentee ballots no earlier than the Thursday before the election; and to watermark ballots that arrive after that date.

Pollbooks printed three weeks before the Nov. 5 election and ballots that were marked with a highlighter, but not watermarked, when they arrived after the books were printed were among the anomalies the report found in the Madison case. 

The proposed order also includes requirements for the city clerk’s office and election officials who handle and process absentee ballots on Election Day.

Haas said “wholesale personnel management changes” in the order could be costly and that it didn’t account for changes the city has already made in its procedures.

Commission member Mark Thomsen urged the body to separate the report from the order, postponing the order so the city clerk’s office could respond.

“We have oversight but clerks run the elections, and it seems to me that we should at least defer to the city and the clerk on the specifics of an order,” said Thomsen, a Democrat.

Republican commissioner Bob Spindell agreed. “I’d like to see this cool off a bit and give Mike [Haas] the chance to come back as he’s requested,” he said.

The commission approved the report, minus the order, on a 5-1 vote, with Spindell the lone dissenter, saying that the former clerk “should not be crucified” over the incident.

A motion to approve the order failed on a tie vote. Commissioners then voted unanimously to defer it, giving the city until Aug. 7 to offer comments and setting a follow-up meeting for Aug. 15.

A voter casts an early ballot at a polling station in Milwaukee in 2023. Wisconsin is among at least nine states that have received requests from the U.S. Department of Justice for voter information, raising concerns among election officials about how the Trump administration will use the data. (Photo by Morry Gash/The Associated Press)

The U.S. Department of Justice is seeking the voter registration lists of several states — representing data on millions of Americans — and other election information ahead of the 2026 midterms, raising fears about how the Trump administration plans to use the information.

The DOJ is also demanding Colorado turn over all records related to the 2024 election, a massive trove of documents that could include ballots and even voting equipment. The Colorado inquiry, the most sweeping publicly known request, underscores the extent of the administration’s attention on state election activities.

At least nine states have received requests for information over the past three months, according to letters from the DOJ obtained by Stateline. Some states also received emails from a DOJ official last week asking for meetings to discuss information-sharing agreements.

The department’s focus on elections comes after President Donald Trump directed U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi in March to seek information about suspected election crimes from state election officials and empowered her to potentially withhold grants and other funds from uncooperative states.

For years, Trump has advanced false claims about elections, including the idea that the 2020 election that he lost was stolen. Now back in power, his administration is taking a new level of interest in how states — and even local authorities — administer elections.

Last week, a political operative approached several Republican county clerks in Colorado to enlist them in election integrity efforts in light of Trump’s sweeping March executive order overhauling elections administration. One clerk told Stateline the operative claimed to represent the White House.

“Whatever the Trump administration tries to pull is very unlikely to be successful,” Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat, said in an interview, calling Colorado elections very secure. “With that said, do I think they are trying to undermine our elections at large in this country? Absolutely.”

DOJ has sent letters to Alaska, Arizona, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, in addition to the request to Colorado.

The letters have typically asked election officials to describe how they register voters and work to identify duplicate registrations and individuals not eligible to vote, such as people with felony convictions and those who have died. The Washington Post earlier Wednesday reported on the letters; Votebeat and NPR previously reported on some of the letters as well.

Most letters also ask about each state’s process for flagging noncitizen applicants. Noncitizen voting is against federal law and incredibly rare, but Trump and his allies have promoted false claims about its prevalence. The Trump administration is also conducting a general crackdown on illegal immigration.

The letters call on election officials to turn over voter registration lists, which in some instances contain data on millions of residents in their states. This request has raised the most concerns, with some experts saying it’s unclear exactly why the DOJ wants the information.

“They don’t make much sense as law enforcement investigations. That makes me think that there’s some other purpose,” said Justin Levitt, who served as senior policy adviser for democracy and voting rights in the Biden White House and is now a law professor at Loyola Marymount University.

Trump’s proof of citizenship elections order blocked for now in federal court

While many states make their voter registration lists available to the public, Levitt emphasized the data could still be largely off-limits to the federal government. Federal privacy law sometimes restricts how the government can use data that’s publicly obtainable. The DOJ may need voter information in some individual circumstances, but “that’s not blanket permission to go vacuuming up data.”

The DOJ didn’t respond to questions for this story.

Federal laws restrict the federal government’s ability to centralize information on Americans, said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research. Even if states provide voter registration information to the public, they often redact sensitive information.

In Orange County, California, the DOJ sued local election officials in June, seeking unredacted voter registration information, such as Social Security numbers and driver’s licenses, as part of an investigation into noncitizen voting.

More than 350 election officials from some 33 states participated in a conference call about federal actions on Monday hosted by Becker, who was previously an attorney in the DOJ Voting Rights Section during the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. He said the interest in the call shows the level of uncertainty and anxiety over the current “federal imposition” on election administrators.

“The DOJ seems dead set on acquiring personal information on voters, including driver’s license numbers, Social Security numbers and dates of birth — records that are highly protected under federal law and under state law and which state election officials are sworn to protect,” Becker said.

Sweeping Colorado requests

In Colorado, the amount of data the DOJ wants is enormous. On May 12, Harmeet Dhillon, an assistant U.S. attorney general in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, sent a letter to Griswold, the secretary of state, asking for access to “all records” related to the 2024 election.

Federal law requires state election officials to preserve records related to elections for 22 months. Typically, the rule ensures records are preserved in case any lawsuits are filed over an election. In the letter, Dhillon referred to a complaint against Griswold’s office alleging noncompliance with records retention laws, but provided no details.

Experts on election administration who spoke to Stateline expressed shock at the scope of the demand to Colorado. The request encompasses a vast trove of material, potentially including ballots.

“The amount of records being requested from a place like Colorado … it’s really, really significant in terms of the volume of materials that are required to be retained,” said Neal Ubriani, a former voting rights litigator at the DOJ during the Obama and first Trump administrations and the current policy and research director at the nonpartisan Institute for Responsive Government.

Colorado elections have previously drawn Trump’s attention. Former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, a staunch Trump supporter, is serving a nine-year prison sentence after a conviction in state court for allowing unauthorized access to voting equipment in 2021.

On May 5 of this year — a week before the Dhillon letter to Griswold — Trump posted on social media that Peters should be released, calling her a “political prisoner.” Griswold noted the timing.

“I think the bigger picture is Donald Trump is continuing to try and rewrite the 2020 election and destabilize the ’26 and ’28 elections,” Griswold told Stateline.

Trump signs broad elections order requiring proof of citizenship

The Colorado Secretary of State’s Office responded to the DOJ by providing copies of the state’s master voter file and voter history file. All of the information provided is also available to the public.

Some Colorado Republican county clerks in recent days have also been approached by Jeff Small, a political operative who worked at the U.S. Department of the Interior during the first Trump administration. Stateline and Colorado Newsline spoke to three GOP clerks who said they had spoken to Small last week.

Steve Schleiker, clerk of El Paso County, which includes Colorado Springs and is the most populous county in the state, said that on July 9 he received a text and call from Small, who introduced himself in a voicemail as someone who “works for the White House.”

Schleiker said that when he called back, Small said he wanted to build relationships with clerks because the Trump administration was unhappy with progress on the president’s elections executive order. He later connected Schleiker with a Homeland Security official who wanted to test the security of El Paso County’s election systems, said Schleiker, who added that he opposed the request.

Weld County Clerk Carly Koppes said she also heard from Small, but that Small told her he wasn’t under contract or being paid for the calls. Small indicated he was making the calls on behalf of former colleagues, Koppes said.

Small, a former Capitol Hill chief of staff who now works for a Colorado-based government affairs firm, didn’t return a call to his office on Wednesday. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that the agency works with local partners to ensure elections remain safe.

“We don’t disclose every single conversation we have with them,” an unidentified DHS spokesperson wrote in an email.

Matt Crane, executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association, said he was aware of 10 clerks approached by Small. He noted that every clerk approached by Small hails from a county that uses Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems.

While Dominion is widely used in Colorado, it’s also been the subject of election conspiracy theories. A former candidate for county sheriff in southwest Colorado was arrested in June, accused of firebombing a clerk’s office. Colorado Public Radio reported the suspect, according to law enforcement, had spoken publicly about trying to get rid of the county’s Dominion machines.

“I think the really important thing to say here is that it was Republican clerks who stood up to a Republican administration and said, ‘No, we’re going to follow the law,’” Crane said.

The intent of the efforts by Small and the federal government “has been muddied up it seems,” Montrose County Clerk Tressa Guynes said. Based on her conversations with other clerks, she said, it appeared Small represented one thing to other clerks and then “represented maybe a watered-down version by the time it got to me.”

Guynes said Small wanted to discuss Trump’s elections executive order. She said Small asked whether she would be willing to support a federal task force’s efforts in an advisory role.

“I said absolutely I will advise,” Guynes said. “I said I’m frankly glad that they’re finally reaching out to the boots on the ground, the people who actually conduct the elections, instead of listening to those who have never conducted a Colorado election.”

Letters to other states

As Colorado grapples with the most far-reaching request, other states are choosing how to respond. In Wisconsin, the state election commission responded to a DOJ request for the voter registration list with instructions on how to request public voter data.

Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, responded on June 2 — after DOJ in a May 20 letter told the state to ensure voter registration applicants provided a driver’s license number, if they have one, instead of a partial Social Security number. The DOJ also wanted Arizona to check voters against a state database to look for noncitizens.

Fontes replied that Arizona complies with federal law and conducts checks using a state motor vehicle division database.

“We are focused on dealing with DOJ in a good faith manner while ensuring we are following the letter of federal and state laws,” Fontes spokesperson JP Martin wrote in an email to Stateline.

More recently, Arizona received a letter July 10 from DOJ about implementation of Trump’s elections executive order. Rhode Island Democratic Secretary of State Gregg Amore also received an email about the order the same day, according to a copy provided to the Rhode Island Current.

In the email, Scott Laragy, principal deputy director in the Executive Office for United States Attorneys, asks for a call to discuss a possible information-sharing agreement to provide DOJ with information on individuals who have registered to vote or have voted despite being ineligible, or those who have committed other forms of election fraud.

The email echoes the language in Trump’s elections executive order, which calls for DOJ to reach information-sharing agreements with states. While much of the order, which focused on proof of citizenship in elections, has been struck down in federal court, provisions related to information sharing remain.

The executive order directs Bondi, the U.S. attorney general, to prioritize enforcement of federal “election integrity laws” in uncooperative states. It also requires her to review grants and other DOJ funds that could be withheld from states that resist.

Some states have already struck deals with the Trump administration. Indiana Republican Secretary of State Diego Morales announced an agreement last week with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services allowing the state to access a database to verify the citizenship of registered voters. Alabama Republican Secretary of State Wes Allen has signed a similar agreement.

“With your cooperation, we plan to use this information to enforce Federal election laws and protect the integrity of Federal elections,” Laragy wrote to Rhode Island.

Janine Weisman of the Rhode Island Current and Lindsey Toomer of Colorado Newsline contributed to this report. Stateline reporter Jonathan Shorman can be reached at jshorman@stateline.org.

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.

A Wisconsin Fair Maps Coalition yard sign posted in 2020. The coalition has begun a new round of work advocating for an independent, nonpartisan system of drawing Wisconsin's legislative maps. (Photo by Tony Webster/Wisconsin Fair Maps Coalition)

With court-ordered maps that have made more Wisconsin legislative races competitive for both political parties, pro-democracy advocates are turning back to a longstanding objective: a permanent change in how the maps are drawn.

Instead of state lawmakers who are currently in charge, political reform groups are organizing to move the task to a new, independent commission that would draw Assembly and Senate districts every 10 years, following the new U.S. census, in ways that reflect Wisconsin’s close political divide.

“Our goal is to have a more accountable legislative body,” says Iuscely Flores, organizing director for the Wisconsin Fair Maps Coalition.

A change will require an amendment to the Wisconsin Constitution, which currently assigns the task of drawing legislative districts to the Wisconsin Legislature.

Until 2011, the state’s redistricting process generally went well for nearly half a century, according to Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause Wisconsin. The Legislature was closely divided between Republicans and Democrats. Regardless of the governor’s party, the other party usually had a slim majority in either the Senate or the Assembly.

“It was split control,” says Heck. “Redistricting was usually incumbent protection, but it wasn’t particularly partisan.”

The 2010 election in Wisconsin changed that, with Republicans for the first time in a half-century getting control of the governor’s mansion and both houses of the Legislature.

In 2011 the lawmakers drew what became widely recognized as one of the most gerrymandered legislative maps in the country. “They picked the most partisan maps they could,” says Heck.

The 2012 election showed the impact: Wisconsin voters reelected Democratic President Barack Obama to a second term and sent another Democrat, Tammy Baldwin, to the U.S. Senate. And 51% of the votes for the Wisconsin Assembly were for Democratic candidates. Yet Republicans won 60 of the 99 seats in the lower house.

In the years that followed, Common Cause, the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign and the League of Women Voters all took up the cause of putting redistricting in the hands of an independent body, arguing that a group of citizens drawn from across the political spectrum could more accurately reflect the state’s true political makeup.

While the idea gained public support, it got the cold shoulder from the Legislature’s majority.

Then came the maps drawn after the 2020 census, approved in 2022 following a legal battle that was settled by the conservative majority in the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Those maps further solidified a lopsided balance between the parties in the Legislature.

In 2023, voters flipped the Court’s balance from conservative and aligned with the Republican party (although the justices are officially nonpartisan) to a majority elected with the support of the Democratic Party. For reform advocates, the switch presented a new opportunity, and the focus turned to a lawsuit challenging how the 2022 maps were drawn.

The outcome of that lawsuit in 2024 produced maps that more closely reflected the narrow partisan divide in the states. In the 2024 elections, Democrats picked up four state Senate seats, erasing a GOP supermajority, and added 14 seats in the Assembly.

While those maps were closer to fair, however, a larger problem remains, reform groups argue: the Wisconsin Constitution gives the lawmakers the ultimate power to draw their districts in ways that preserve their political advantage.

The process for amending the state constitution requires lawmakers to vote on a proposal in two successive legislative sessions, then for voters to endorse the amendment in a statewide referendum. That means a little more than four years must pass before the change could be instituted.

Flores says the coalition is keeping an eye on that timeline, with plans to engage lawmakers from both parties next year in order to get legislation introduced and passed.

“We have to fix this permanently — that is what we are now focused on,” says Penny Bernard Schaber, leader for the Fair Maps Coalition’s team in the 8th Congressional District. “We want to put both parties on notice that we need to fix what we are doing.”

Even as the maps lawsuit was underway, advocates for bigger change were continuing to meet and organize, Flores says. And after the Court ruling and the adoption of the new, fairer maps, the work for an independent redistricting body kicked into higher gear.

An ad hoc committee on redistricting reform met monthly and later more often over the last year, with participants drilling down into alternatives for structuring independent redistricting bodies.

“We were able to really study how independent redistricting commissions in other states really worked,” Flores says.

“We looked at every single state that has an independent commission,” says Debra Cronmiller, executive director of the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin. There were conversations with academics and other groups that draw legislative maps.

“We tried to glean from all of that information what would work best for Wisconsin,” Cronmiller said.

The Wisconsin Fair Maps Coalition has drawn up a draft for how a Wisconsin commission might work, but Flores emphasizes that it’s still a work in progress.

The coalition has begun a series of community hearings to engage the public, explain the concept and refine the details. Hearings were held in the Milwaukee North Shore suburbs in June and in Dodgeville on July 12.

On Wednesday evening, there will be a hearing in Green Bay at the Brown County Central Library starting at 5:30 p.m. On Thursday one is scheduled for Wausau, and more meetings are planned through the summer and into the fall.

“We’re trying to get community input,” Flores says. “There are questions we still don’t know the answers to, and we’re learning so much  — it’s been an amazing, citizen-led process that I don’t think I’ve seen before.”

The groups and individuals working on the project are considering “how to make sure that the commission accurately reflects and represents the people of Wisconsin — how to make sure that we incorporate people from different political backgrounds, different ethnicities,” Flores adds. “We’re trying to be what Wisconsin looks like.”

A federal appeals court ruled Monday against a Wisconsin town that disavowed electronic voting machines, siding with the U.S. Justice Department’s argument that this would unfairly harm voters with disabilities.

What’s the dispute? 

Leaders of Thornapple, a town of 700 people in northern Wisconsin’s Rusk County, voted in 2023 to stop using electronic voting machines, in favor of allowing only hand-marked ballots. They did without the machines for two elections in a row, in April and August 2024. 

The DOJ, under the Biden administration, sued the town in September 2024, arguing that its decision violated the Help America Vote Act, which requires every “voting system” to be accessible for voters with disabilities. Accessible voting machines allow voters with disabilities to hear the options on the ballot and use a touch-sensitive device to mark it.

The town argued that it wasn’t subject to the federal law’s accessibility provision because its use of paper ballots didn’t constitute a “voting system.” 

A district court judge rejected the town’s argument last September and ordered it to use electronic voting machines for the November presidential election. The town appealed that order, but did use a machine in November. 

On Monday, a three-judge panel in the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the lower-court order, finding that “individuals with disabilities would lack the opportunity to vote privately and independently if they only had access to a paper ballot.”

The court based that finding partially on Thornapple Chief Inspector Suzanne Pinnow’s testimony about a blind woman who relied on her daughter’s assistance to fill out a ballot, and a man who had a stroke and who needed Pinnow to guide his hand so he could mark a ballot.

Who are the parties? 

The DOJ had sued two northern Wisconsin towns and their officials in September after both decided not to use electronic voting equipment for at least one federal election. One of the towns, Lawrence, immediately settled with the Justice Department, vowing to use accessible voting machines in the future.

Thornapple officials decided to fight the case. They’re currently represented by an attorney with the America First Policy Institute, a group aligned with President Donald Trump.

Why does it matter? 

The case reaffirms what has long been election practice in Wisconsin: Every polling place must have an electronic voting machine that anybody can use but is especially beneficial for voters with disabilities. 

Distrust of voting machines, which has grown on the right following misinformation about the 2020 election, has led to a movement to ban them across Wisconsin. But the Thornapple case shows that for now, municipalities still have obligations under federal law to allow voters to cast ballots on electronic machines.

The case is relevant nationally, too. Since Trump took office in January, the U.S. Justice Department has withdrawn from multiple voting-related cases. But the Justice Department forged ahead in this lawsuit, signaling that, at least for now, it is not backing the movement to forgo electronic voting equipment entirely.

What happens now? 

Thornapple is “considering our options,” said Nick Wanic of the America First Policy Institute. The case could get appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court or proceed in the lower federal court. 

Although the order that required Thornapple to use accessible voting machines applied only to the November 2024 election, at this point, two federal courts in this case have ruled that towns must have accessible voting machines for people with disabilities.

“Voters with disabilities already face many barriers in the electoral process, and making sure they have access to a voting system which allows for basic voting rights to be met is a minimum — and legal — standard that they should not be worried about when exercising their right to vote,” said Lisa Hassenstab, public policy manager at Disability Rights Wisconsin.

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

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

Wisconsin town loses federal appeal over its ban on electronic voting machines is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

An absentee ballot drop box used by the city of Madison. (Wisconsin Examiner photo)

The Wisconsin Elections Commission found that the city of Madison failing to count nearly 200 absentee ballots cast in last year’s November election was the result of a “confluence of errors” and a “complete lack of leadership” in the city clerk’s office, according to a draft report of WEC’s investigation into the incident. 

The Madison city clerk’s office told the elections commission in a memo Dec. 20 about the lost ballots from two Madison wards. A bag containing 68 unprocessed absentee ballots from two wards was found Nov. 12 in a tabulator bin, the memo stated. During reconciliation of ballots on Dec. 3, clerk employees found two sealed envelopes containing a total of 125 unprocessed absentee ballots from another ward. The discovery of the missing ballots was announced to the public Dec. 26. 

The missing ballots were not enough to change the result of any local, state or federal elections.

WEC’s investigation into the matter was led by the commission’s chair, Ann Jacobs, a Democratic appointee, and Don Millis, the commission’s most recent Republican-appointed chair. The investigation took six months and involved 13 depositions and the review of more than 2,000 documents. 

The report on the investigation, which goes to the full commission for approval in a meeting next week, found five counts in which the city’s clerk, Maribeth Witzel-Behl, acted “contrary to” state election law. 

Witzel-Behl resigned from her position in April after nearly 20 years as city clerk. 

The investigation found that the city exposed itself to mistakes by printing the pollbooks for polling places — the log in which election staff records when a voter’s ballot has been received and counted — three weeks before Election Day. That time frame meant that by the time polls opened on Nov. 5, the record in the book of which voters had already returned their absentee ballot was out of date. 

Additionally, the city “failed to track absentee envelopes and bags” meaning that large manila envelopes and courier bags full of absentee ballots weren’t numbered and organized by ward. 

“This meant that the polling places would not know how many Courier Bags or Carrier Envelopes to expect and with what seal numbers,” the report states. “Had they been given those numbers, they would have been able to immediately know if they were short a bag or an envelope and could have immediately looked for the missing item.”

According to the report, the most likely explanation for the ballots not being counted at the polling places on Election Day is that they were never delivered to the polls. 

Much of the report is a blistering criticism of Witzel-Behl’s leadership and response to the missing ballots, particularly her decision to leave on vacation on Nov. 13 — while the city was still working through the ballot reconciliation process. 

“The lack of action by the City Clerk with regard to the found ballots is astonishing,” the report states. “She demonstrated no urgency, let alone interest, in including those votes in the election tally. At the time the Ward 65 ballots were found, the county canvass was continuing, and those ballots could have easily been counted. That would have required the City Clerk to take the urgent action that the situation demanded.” 

“Instead, she went on vacation and, per her testimony, never inquired about them again until mid-December,” the report continues. “There was nobody who took responsibility for these ballots. It was always someone else’s job. Rather than acknowledge these significant errors, the City Clerk and her staff either ignored the issue or willfully refused to inform the necessary parties and seek assistance. These actions resulted in nearly 200 lawful voters’ votes going uncounted – an unconscionable result.  This profound failure undermines public confidence in elections.”

The report found that Witzel-Behl potentially violated state law by abusing her discretion to run Madison’s elections, printing the pollbooks too early, failing to maintain records on the handling of absentee ballots, failing to properly oversee the staff responsible for counting the absentee ballots and failing to inform the city’s board of canvassers about the missing ballots. 

“It was the job of the City Clerk to immediately take action once notified about the found ballots, and she did nothing,” the report states. “It was the responsibility of the Deputy Clerk to take action in her absence, and he did nothing.  These ballots were treated as unimportant and a reconciliation nuisance, rather than as the essential part of our democracy they represent.”

If the report is approved by WEC, it will require Madison to certify it has taken a number of actions to correct the problems from November. Those requirements include developing an internal plan delineating which employee is responsible for statutorily required tasks, printing poll books no earlier than the Thursday before elections, changing the absentee ballot processing system so bags and envelopes aren’t lost, updating instructional materials for poll workers and completing a full inspection of all materials before the scheduled board of canvassers meeting after an election. 

WEC is scheduled to vote on the report’s findings at its July 17 meeting.

Don Millis and Ann Jacob, the former and current chairs of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, testify Tuesday, Feb. 4, at an Assembly hearing on a commission rule for election observers. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

The Wisconsin Elections Commission on Monday published a new permanent administrative rule to guide how election observers are allowed to conduct themselves at polling places. 

On Friday, the commission voted 5-1 to approve the rule after more than two years of work that involved the participation of a 24-person advisory committee made up of municipal clerks, poll workers, political parties and outside groups including advocates for people with disabilities and right-wing election conspiracy outfits. 

The final rule order specifies who is allowed to observe elections and defines the boundaries of what observers are allowed to do at a polling place. The rule also dictates when poll workers are allowed to call law enforcement to diffuse a situation and includes provisions to require that observers be allowed to use available chairs and restrooms and for how the news media is allowed to operate inside polling places. The rules are different for members of the media, who are allowed to take videos and photos inside polling places while observers are not.

WEC commissioners of both parties advocated for the passage of the rule, arguing that while not perfect, the compromise reached to create the rule was better than the vague interpretation of state law that had previously governed observers. 

But even after their involvement on the advisory committee, election skeptics opposed the rule’s enactment. WEC commissioner Robert Spindell, a Republican who has often flirted with election conspiracy theories, was the lone vote against the rule going into effect. 

Republican lawmakers on the Legislature’s Joint Committee for the Review of Administrative Rules (JCRAR) had denied the passage of an emergency rule instituting similar provisions earlier this year. JCRAR deadlocked on a vote to deny the permanent rule’s enactment in April, allowing it to move out of the committee and back to WEC for final approval. 

“Today marks a significant milestone that will ensure election observers, election officials, and voters all have a clear and consistent understanding of the observer process,” WEC Administrator Meagan Wolfe said in a statement. “After years of thorough public hearings, advisory committee input, and careful drafting, this rule enshrines standards for election observers that ensure participation in our electoral process.”

The commission will hold a meeting later this year to approve new guidance for election clerks administering the rule, according to a news release. The rule is set to go into effect Aug. 1.

Wisconsin Republicans are proposing an expansion of early voting, with new requirements for municipalities statewide, but some local officials say the one-size-fits-all mandate wouldn’t make sense for Wisconsin’s smallest communities.

The proposal would require every municipality in Wisconsin, regardless of its size, to offer at least 20 hours of in-person absentee voting at the clerk’s office, or an alternative site, for each election. The bill’s authors say they want to reimburse local governments for the added costs, though they haven’t yet clarified how they would do that. 

Sen. Rachael Cabral-Guevara, a Republican, said she wrote the bill after noticing the stark difference in early voting availability between rural and urban municipalities.

In the Fox Valley cities that used to be part of her district — Appleton, Oshkosh and Neenah — early voting was widely available, she said. But in many of the rural areas that she began serving after the latest redistricting cycle, she said, “nobody has early voting.”

She argues the proposal would provide more flexibility for voters and offer an alternative for those who are uncomfortable voting by mail.

Local election officials generally welcome increased access, but worry about the 20-hour mandate being a burden on smaller communities. 

Acknowledging the pushback, Cabral-Guevara said, “Why should we have hesitation about giving people the opportunity of voting? Why shouldn’t there be equity across the state for rural versus urban?”

In-person absentee voting access varies across Wisconsin

In cities like Madison and Milwaukee, voters have nearly two weeks before an election to cast an in-person absentee ballot. They can vote in one of multiple locations, and at almost any time of the day. 

That isn’t the case in rural Wisconsin.

Some rural municipalities provide just a one- or two-hour window for in-person absentee voting during that two-week period. In others, in-person early voting is done by appointment only at a clerk’s home, which acts as an official office for that purpose. Many have no clear policy at all for in-person absentee voting.

Clerks in smaller towns expressed mixed feelings about the proposed changes.

In Luck, a northwest Wisconsin town with about 900 residents, Patsy Gustafson serves as a part-time clerk, generally working three or four hours per week and arranging in-person early voting by appointment only. This proposal would require her to work over double her normal hours during the early voting period.

“I think I’d be sitting around a lot of that time for nothing, but hopefully it would make more people that wouldn’t otherwise vote come,” she said.

Gustafson said she supports state reimbursement to municipalities — “elections are expensive,” she said — but questions how the state would cover her added costs, especially because she’s salaried. 

Cabral-Guevara said the funding formula is still being finalized.

In Elcho, a town of about 1,200 people in northern Langlade County, the 20-hour requirement would be unnecessary, Clerk Lyn Olenski told Votebeat. 

“I guess I wouldn’t want that,” she said about the proposal. “We don’t have that many people that want to vote early.”

The 20-hour mandate would make even less sense for smaller municipalities, Olenski said.

“If we had 100 people, I sure wouldn’t want to sit in there for 20 hours,” she said.

Cabral-Guevara said she believes behavior could shift as early voting becomes more accessible.

“I believe that there is a duty as a clerk to make sure that there is easy access for people to be able to vote,” Cabral-Guevara said. “And if they’re sitting around, well, then they can find other things to do if they would like.”

That may be wishful thinking in places like the village of Yuba, which has only 43 registered voters. Clerk James Ueeck, who also works full time for the county in another role, said he would have to request time off from his main job to be able to provide 20 hours of early voting. 

Even if every voter in the village cast a ballot early, the total time required wouldn’t come close to 20 hours. And his office would still have to keep polls open on Election Day.

“For us, it makes no sense,” he said. “I would rather just leave it where I can do it by appointment.”

Ueeck added that many clerks in Richland County also work full-time jobs and might resign their clerk positions if the mandate becomes law.

Rep. Scott Krug, a Republican from Rome and co-author of the measure, told Votebeat that he has heard concerns from small-town clerks over the 20-hour requirement. He said he’s open to tweaking the measure — for example, requiring fewer hours in communities with fewer than 250 voters. But he said there must be “access everywhere” to early voting.

Similar versions in Washington County and Connecticut

The Republican proposal mirrors a local initiative in Washington County, where officials have offered to cover the costs for municipalities that voluntarily expand early voting hours.

For the April 2025 election, the county compensated municipalities at 150% of the added cost for extending their early voting hours beyond what they were in the April 2023 election. About 90% of the municipalities in the county participated. Unlike the state proposal, Washington County’s plan had no mandated minimum hours.

Early voting has been taking off across the country, too. At this point, 47 states offer some version of in-person early voting. In Connecticut, which recently passed an early voting initiative, the program requires every municipality to be open between four and 14 days for early voting, depending on the election, regardless of population size. 

In Union, Connecticut — a town of just 800 residents — Clerk Heidi Bradrick said only eight voters showed up during the 14 days of early voting in May.

“I understand their desire to have it,” she said, “but they definitely need to take into account the size of the municipality. We always laugh, like, ‘What if we get everybody to vote the first day? Can we close?’”

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

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

Wisconsin election officials seek more flexibility in proposed early voting mandate is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Number is obsolete and creates security risk, clerks say

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Repealing little-known practice has had little momentum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clerks say an obsolete Wisconsin law creates needless work — and a threat to ballot secrecy is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.