California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom departs after speaking about the Election Rigging Response Act at a news conference earlier this month in Los Angeles. California Democrats promised to retaliate if Texas gerrymanders its congressional map, and approved a new map that will go before voters in November. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

When California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom unveiled his plan to retaliate if Republican-led Texas redrew its congressional districts to favor the GOP, he affirmed his support for less partisan maps — and then promised to “meet fire with fire.”

“We’re doing it mindful that we want to model better behavior,” Newsom told reporters in Los Angeles earlier this month, nodding to the independent system his state currently uses to draw districts. “ … But we cannot unilaterally disarm. We can’t stand back and watch this democracy disappear.”

President Donald Trump’s call for Republicans to redraw U.S. House districts so the party can win more seats in the 2026 midterm elections — to gerrymander them — has triggered a redistricting frenzy this summer that also threatens to prompt moves by Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri and New York, among others. Ohio was already set to redraw its lines, even before the current fracas.

The battle for partisan advantage is placing Democratic politicians, advocates of less partisan maps and others who support curbs on gerrymandering in an uncomfortable position, pitting their desire for change against fears that Trump will take advantage of their scruples to wring more GOP seats out of a handful of key states. Some say they accept that Democratic states need to respond, while others warn retaliation will only yield short-term gains.

The Texas House passed a new map on Wednesday, clearing the way for a final vote in the state Senate and Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s signature. In California, lawmakers passed their own map on Thursday, setting up a statewide vote in November over the new districts.

Other states are now likely to follow, as Republicans and Democrats scramble for a political leg up.

But gerrymandering opponents say the current moment has the potential to produce new energy for their movement. More people are paying attention to gerrymandering, they say, and new polls show the public opposes the practice. The rush to redraw maps demonstrates the need for Congress to set national limits, they say.

“I think that the gerrymandering wildfire that we’re seeing across the country right now calls real attention to the urgent need for a national standard,” said David Daley, an author of books on gerrymandering and a senior fellow at FairVote, a Maryland-based nonpartisan group that supports ranked choice voting and multimember House districts to end the practice. “We will never have reform if a handful of states can act on their own.”

At the same time, some gerrymandering opponents fear states will unravel hard-fought victories. They wonder whether temporary measures, such as California potentially setting aside the independent commission it uses to redraw maps, could become permanent.

‘An unprecedented time’

State legislatures exercise primary control over congressional redistricting in 39 states, according to All About Redistricting, a compendium of information on map-drawing hosted by Loyola Law School in California. While some states use other methods, only nine states rely on independent commissions, which typically limit participation by elected officials and are favored by many gerrymandering opponents.

Most states draw maps once a decade after the census, making the mid-decade maneuvers and counter-maneuvers highly unusual (six states currently have only one representative, eliminating the need to draw district lines). But just a few seats could determine who controls the U.S. House. Republicans currently hold 219 seats to Democrats’ 212, with four vacancies.

“We affirm that gerrymandering, both racial and political, disenfranchises voters,” Virginia Kase Solomón, president and CEO of Common Cause, an organization that has long advocated for changes to the redistricting process, said during a press call the day before Newsom’s announcement.

“But this is an unprecedented time of political upheaval,” she said. People don’t want to see a situation develop where maps are redrawn every two years, she added.

The new Texas map could ease the path for Republicans to win an additional five seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Texas lawmakers rapidly advanced the redraw this week once Democratic state lawmakers returned to the state. They had traveled to other states to deny Texas House leaders the quorum required to approve the map, but returned after Newsom outlined California’s response.

Gerrymandering typically involves “packing” and “cracking.” “Packing” refers to the concentration of opposition party voters in a small number of districts to reduce competition elsewhere. “Cracking” means diluting the voting power of the opposing party’s supporters across many districts.

Texas Republicans have been frank that they are pursuing the redraw for partisan advantage. But they emphasize that no prohibition exists, in Texas or nationally, against mid-decade redistricting and that a 2019 U.S. Supreme Court decision cleared the way for states to draw maps for partisan purposes, removing the power of federal courts to police political gerrymandering.

The new maps give Republicans a chance of winning additional districts but doesn’t guarantee victories, they add.

“The underlying goal of this plan is straightforward: improve Republican political performance,” Texas state Rep. Todd Hunter, a Republican who carried the bill in the Texas House, said during floor debate on Wednesday. He added a short time later: “According to the U.S. Supreme Court, you can use political performance, and that is what we’ve done.”

Tricky terrain

As Texas moves forward and California prepares to respond, Common Cause illustrates the tricky terrain anti-gerrymandering advocates are now navigating.

The group, headquartered in Washington, D.C., fought to enact the California Citizens Redistricting Commission in 2008. But earlier this month, Common Cause declined to condemn California’s retaliation, saying it will judge the effort by whether the maps are a proportional response to gerrymanders in other states, whether the process includes meaningful public participation, and whether the maps expire and are replaced after the 2030 census through the state’s regular redistricting process, among other criteria.

Newsom’s proposal, the Election Rigging Response Act, will ask California voters in November to temporarily set aside the state’s redistricting commission and approve the new map drawn by the legislature. The commission would resume drawing maps following the census.

Recent polling shows widespread public opposition to gerrymandering. A YouGov poll of 1,116 Americans conducted in early August found 69% believe it should be illegal to draw districts in a way that makes it harder for members of a particular political party to elect their preferred candidates. The poll’s margin of error was plus or minus 4 percentage points.

The number of Americans who say gerrymandering is a big problem has jumped in recent years. In the YouGov poll, 75% of respondents said it is a major problem when districts are intentionally drawn to favor one party, up from 66% in a 2022 survey.

Some California Republicans have responded to Newsom’s proposal by defending the commission system. A group of Republicans sued in state court to block the plan, but the California Supreme Court on Wednesday denied a request to temporarily halt the effort.

‘Is this bad for reform?’

While members of the public might say they favor citizen-led commissions, they may not care deeply about the issue, said David Hopkins, a political science professor at Boston College who has written on polarization in American politics. He called gerrymandering a “classic process subject” that comes off as “inside baseball” to many people.

“The legislators in states that haven’t adopted commissions clearly don’t feel any particular political pressure to do so,” Hopkins said.

Some Republicans in states weighing a mid-decade gerrymander also discount the risk of a public backlash.

In Missouri, Republican Gov. Mike Kehoe may call a special session this fall to redraw the state’s map in hopes of gaining an additional GOP seat in the U.S. House. James Harris, a Missouri Republican consultant with close ties to GOP officials in the state, said he wasn’t concerned redistricting would create momentum to change the process.

Missouri voters in recent years have approved ballot measures favored by Democrats, including one in 2018 that empowered a nonpartisan demographer to draw state legislative districts, though not congressional districts. But Republicans led a successful campaign to convince voters to repeal the changes two years later.

Harris painted any new potential map as part of a national effort to help Trump — who received 58.5% of the vote in Missouri last November.

“I think the lens is wanting to make sure the president has a majority in Congress so he can actually govern for the last two years versus two years of investigations, gridlock,” Harris said.

Advocates of less partisan maps said lawmakers aren’t likely to surrender their own role in mapmaking. While some state courts may limit redistricting excesses, federal courts stopped policing partisan gerrymandering following the Supreme Court’s 2019 decision. And the high court may soon weaken the judiciary’s power to block race-based gerrymandering.

Samuel Wang, director of the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, which supports eliminating partisan gerrymandering, said the “one good thing” about the redistricting battle is that it’s prompted voters to pay attention to an arcane and technical issue. That could be a positive in the long run, he said, “if people can keep a cool head.”

Wang has written online that any response to Texas should remain measured and proportionate. California offers Democrats the only clean option to strike back, Wang wrote. Five Democratic seats could be added by redrawing the state.

“Is this bad for reform? I mean, I’m torn,” Wang told Stateline. “Because on the other hand, Democrats have been, over the last few decades, vocal in their advocacy for voting rights in various forms and now that advocacy is in question because they find a need to fight fire with fire.”

“So I guess the way I would characterize it is if they can hold it in check and not do it in every single state and just engage in whatever they’re doing where it will make a difference,” he said, “then we might not lose all the progress that’s been made.”

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.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

President Donald Trump returned to social media Monday with another barrage of unsubstantiated statements about the integrity of elections, following a meeting in which Russian President Vladimir Putin reportedly claimed that U.S. elections were “rigged” because of mail‑in voting.

Seizing on that assertion — despite there being no credible evidence to support it — Trump promised on Truth Social to “lead a movement” to phase out mail‑in ballots and voting machines and promote “watermark paper.” He suggested he would implement these changes with an executive order ahead of the 2026 midterms.

The post contains many other false, misleading or unsubstantiated statements about the use of mail ballots, including claims Trump and his allies have made before — even as more Republican officials have tried to encourage voting by mail.

His claims notwithstanding, courts have repeatedly rejected allegations of widespread fraud tied to mail ballots, and many democracies around the world use them. And under the Constitution, he has no explicit authority over the “time, place and manner” of elections. Experts say that an executive order like the one Trump describes in his post would be immediately challenged in court and unlikely to take effect.

Beyond that, any major change to voting by mail before the 2026 midterms would be a logistical nightmare for election administrators, and it would disproportionately affect voters who rely on it most, including overseas service members, veterans and people with disabilities.

Here’s a fact check of some of the key claims in his post.

What Trump said:

“States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them.”

Fact:

Trump’s claim that states are “merely an agent” of the federal government in elections is false, and contrary to decades of Republican orthodoxy on this point.

The Constitution gives power to Congress and the states — not the president — to the states to regulate the time, manner and place of elections.

Meanwhile, Republicans for decades have framed states’ rights as a fundamental principle. This stretches back to Barry Goldwater in the 1960s, through Ronald Reagan’s emphasis on “federalism,” and into recent decades where GOP leaders have framed decentralization of power as protection against “big government.”

Voting has been a primary example for that very point.

For example, after the contentious 2000 presidential election, Republicans fiercely defended Florida’s right to set its own recount rules. GOP leaders and state attorneys general argued in the Supreme Court case Shelby County v. Holder (2013) that federal oversight of state election laws was unconstitutional. Over the last decade, Republicans in Congress have opposed Democratic efforts to pass federal voting-rights legislation like the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, arguing they represented “federal takeovers” of elections. Then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in 2019 called the legislation “a one-size-fits-all partisan rewrite by one side here in Washington.”

In 2020, when Democrats proposed federal requirements to expand mail voting due to COVID-19, Republicans fought them off. And when Trump floated the idea of delaying the November election, Republican senators like McConnell, Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio reminded him that Congress and the states control election timing and procedures.

What Trump said:

“We are now the only Country in the World that uses Mail-In Voting. All others gave it up because of the MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD ENCOUNTERED”

Fact:

Many democracies use mail voting, including Germany, Switzerland, Canada, and Australia. Some use it more extensively than the U.S. No country has “given it up” because of widespread fraud. Fraud is rare in countries that use vote by mail, as it is here.

Germany has been using vote by mail since the 1950s; in its 2021 federal election, about half of German voters cast their ballots through the mail. In Switzerland, nearly all voters receive their ballots by mail, and more than 70% of voters return them in the same way. The United Kingdom allows any voters to request a mailed ballot, and about 20% of voters take advantage of the policy. The vast majority of European countries allow at least some form of mail voting, especially for citizens living abroad or for those with disabilities.

What Trump said:

Voting machines are “Highly ‘Inaccurate,’ Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial” and “cost Ten Times more than accurate and sophisticated Watermark Paper, which is faster, and leaves NO DOUBT, at the end of the evening, as to who WON, and who LOST, the Election.”

Fact:

Paper ballots still have to be counted — either by hand (which is slow and error-prone) or by machine. That’s why nearly every state that uses paper ballots still relies on scanners to tally them quickly and accurately.

Existing federal law also requires the use of at least one voting machine in every single precinct in the country, for use by voters who have disabilities that make casting a paper ballot difficult. Trump cannot invalidate federal law through an executive order, so voting machines aren’t going anywhere.

Watermarks are not a standard or proven safeguard, though some states do have them (or something like them). The places that use them still use machines to count these ballots.

What Trump said:

“Democrats are virtually Unelectable without using this completely disproven Mail-In SCAM. ELECTIONS CAN NEVER BE HONEST WITH MAIL IN BALLOTS/VOTING, and everybody, IN PARTICULAR THE DEMOCRATS, KNOWS THIS.”

Fact:

There is no evidence that one party “cheats” with mail ballots. Voting by mail is used by Republicans and Democrats alike, and in jurisdictions led by Republicans and Democrats. In fact, Republican voters are often more likely to use mail voting, especially in states like Arizona and Florida, where Republicans championed the practice until recently. In fact, there’s no evidence that vote by mail benefits either party over the other — multiple academic studies have reached this conclusion.

What Trump said:

“ELECTIONS CAN NEVER BE HONEST WITH MAIL IN BALLOTS/VOTING.”

Fact:

Mail‑in voting has consistently been shown to operate extremely securely due to robust safeguards. In states like Pennsylvania, counties that offer ballot curing — the ability to correct errors like missing signatures — report significantly lower rejection rates, demonstrating that the system isn’t rigged, but rather is responsive and adaptable.

Votebeat’s coverage highlights what research studies have shown repeatedly: Instances of fraud in mail-in voting remain exceedingly rare. Even when ballots get rejected, that’s typically due to procedural mistakes — not attempts at manipulation or deceit. Election administrators across the country work under strict, bipartisan protocols, including signature checks and secure handling procedures, to protect integrity. Courts and election officials routinely affirm the reliability of mail ballots when these protocols are followed. In both routine practice and under close scrutiny, mail-in voting stands out as both secure and trustworthy.

What Trump said:

“I am going to lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS…by signing an EXECUTIVE ORDER to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections.”

Fact:

Courts have ruled that Trump does not have the authority to unilaterally change federal election rules, as they consider several lawsuits challenging his March executive order.

In halting some provisions of that executive order, for example, a federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia wrote in April that “our Constitution entrusts Congress and the States — not the President — with the authority to regulate federal elections.” That ruling blocked Trump’s direction to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to take steps to require voters to prove citizenship when registering to vote.

A federal judge in Massachusetts later blocked the same provision of the order, writing that Trump exceeded his authority. That judge also blocked parts of the order telling the U.S. Justice Department to enforce a ballot receipt deadline of Election Day.

Nothing stops Trump from leading an informal movement, however. He’s arguably been doing that for years already, and while it has had some impact on policy, voters haven’t really changed their habits much.

Jen Fifield contributed reporting.

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for Votebeat‘s newsletters here.

Fact-checking Trump’s latest claims about mail ballots and 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.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth delivers remarks at Fort Bragg, North Carolina on June 10, 2025. (Daniel Torok/The White House)

This story was originally reported by Mariel Padilla, Grace Panetta and Mel Leonor Barclay of The 19th. Meet Mariel, Grace and Mel and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.

“In my ideal society, we would vote as households,” a pastor tells CNN. “And I would ordinarily be the one that would cast the vote, but I would cast the vote having discussed it with my household.”

Another agrees, saying he’d back an end to a woman’s right to vote: “I would support that, and I’d support it on the basis that the atomization that comes with our current system is not good for humans.”

The discussion of 19th Amendment rights was part of a news segment focused on Doug Wilson — a self-proclaimed Christian nationalist pastor based in Idaho — that was reposted to X by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The secretary is among Wilson’s supporters, and his involvement with Wilson’s denomination highlights how a fringe conservative evangelical Christian belief system that questions women’s right to vote is gaining more traction in the Republican Party.

Kristin Du Mez, a professor of history at Calvin University and author of “Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation,” said Wilson’s broader vision of Christian nationalism has gotten more attention over the past several years, alongside President Donald Trump’s rise to power.

“He was a fairly fringe figure, but this moment was really his moment,” she said. “And then as part of that, also, I think he signaled and gave permission to others that they didn’t need to hide some of their more controversial views, such as, should women have the vote? And that’s something that you didn’t hear proudly promoted from very many spaces, even just a handful of years ago.”

In the CNN interview, Wilson said he’d like to see the United States become a Christian and patriarchal country. He advocates for a society where sodomy is criminalized and women submit to their husbands and shouldn’t serve in combat roles in the military — a belief Hegseth has also publicly shared in the past though walked back during his confirmation hearings.

Hegseth appeared to support the nearly seven-minute interview with the caption, “All of Christ for All of Life.” Wilson has built an evangelical empire over the past 50 years that is centered in Moscow, Idaho, and now spans more than 150 congregations across four continents — including a new church in Washington, D.C. In July, Hegseth and his family attended the inaugural service at Christ Church, according to CNN.

“The Secretary is a proud member of a church affiliated with the Congregation of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), which was founded by Pastor Doug Wilson,” Sean Parnell, the chief Pentagon spokesperson, said in a statement to The 19th. “The Secretary very much appreciates many of Mr. Wilson’s writings and teachings.”

Du Mez said Wilson built his brand as a vocal critic of mainstream evangelicalism.

“They were too wishy washy,” Du Mez said, referring to Wilson’s view of much of White evangelicalism in the 1990s and early 2000s. “They were too soft. And so he was kind of bringing a harsher biblical truth, and that included things like a much more rigid application of biblical patriarchy. ”

In 2024, only 1 in 10 Americans qualified as Christian nationalism adherents, according to the Public Religion Research Institute.

Ryan Dawkins, an assistant professor of political science at Carleton College, said Christian nationalism hasn’t necessarily gotten more popular in the past 20 years. But there have been   partisan trends.

“While they used to be more evenly divided between the two parties, over the last two decades, Christian nationalists have sorted into the Republican Party at incredibly high rates,” Dawkins said. “Christian nationalism is almost non-existent within the Democratic Party today, at least among White Democrats.”

While it’s still far from a mainstream opinion, several figures within the Republican Party have flirted with the idea of repealing the 19th Amendment.

Paul Ingrassia, who Trump nominated to lead the Office of Special Counsel, suggested approval for the idea in a 2023 podcast. Podcast host Alan Jacoby told Ingrassia that his own wife is the “biggest misogynist this side of the Mississippi, by the way. My wife literally thinks women should not vote.”

Ingrassia responded, “She’s very based,” a term expressing support for a bold opinion.

During the 2020 Republican National Convention, Republicans featured anti-abortion activist Abby Johnson, who has advocated for a new kind of voting system where households, not individuals, would cast votes. Head-of-household voting has historically disenfranchised women and people of color by concentrating power on the male leaders of the home.

In the leadup to the 2016 presidential election, FiveThirtyEight, a political forecasting site, shared data that suggested if women didn’t vote, Trump would win. The hashtag #repealthe19th — a reference to the 19th Amendment, which grants women the right to vote — quickly went viral.

And a former Trump-backed Michigan candidate for the U.S. House who has also held positions in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development was found to have made statements criticizing women’s suffrage while in college at Stanford University in the early 2000s. John Gibbs, now an assistant secretary at the agency, said that the country had been damaged by the 19th Amendment because women’s suffrage had led to an increase in the size and scope of the government. He added that women making up half of the population wasn’t enough reason for women’s suffrage. Gibbs’ 2022 congressional campaign denied he opposed women’s right to vote.

Kelly Marino, associate teaching professor at Sacred Heart University and author of “Votes for College Women: Alumni, Students and the Woman Suffrage Campaign” said that while conservative religious sects adamantly opposed to women’s suffrage have always existed, now there is renewed momentum.

“If you look at the way things played out in the past, we have this very liberal period followed by a conservative backlash,” Marino said. “And that’s what’s going on now. You have this period of liberalism where people were having a more expansive view of gender ideology, ideas about sexuality and women in politics. We had some pretty prominent female politicians that were making it pretty far in the last couple of years. And now there’s a backlash.”

Marino said the conservative backlash is reminiscent of the 1960s and 70s. There were significant progressive movements for civil rights, women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights and environmental protections. But at the same time, the early 1970s saw the emergence of the men’s liberation movement, which focused primarily on issues like divorce law and child custody.

“There’s some men who are promoting a sort of return to tradition, a patriarchal vision for society,” Marino said. “It’s always sort of there, but it’s gaining traction within mainstream consciousness again. And now, you have all this stuff about soft girls and tradwives — this gender ideal of women being the domestic homemaker within a traditional family structure. There’s been a big push for this radical Christianity and some of its values — it’s become really popular even among younger people.”

Joseph Slaughter, an assistant professor of history at Wesleyan University, said Wilson is having his moment in the spotlight — but it’s important to remember that he does not speak for the majority.

“He delights in upsetting people or saying transgressive, un-PC things,” Slaughter said. “Ten years ago, when he posted a video talking about man’s biblical duties — people just sort of yawned and dismissed him. Now, he’s saying things and they’re gaining more currency because of some of this other new right-wing masculinity and the online manosphere.”

Slaughter said it’s particularly concerning that Wilson’s teachings have found their support in a man as powerful as Hegseth.

“What does it mean for somebody who’s running an organization which has had its struggles over the years integrating women and trying to understand existential questions about women’s role in combat?” Slaughter said. “Are Hegseth’s views reinforced by his religion now? Does this church reinforce his cultural chauvinism? For somebody in his position, it’s certainly fair game to ask.”

Boxes of ballots wait to be counted at Milwaukee's central count on Election Day 2024. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

A bipartisan group of former elected officials from Wisconsin on Monday criticized President Donald Trump’s promise to end mail-in voting and the use of electronic voting machines. 

In a Monday morning post on his social media site Truth Social, Trump said that he’d issue an executive order to end the practices ahead of next year’s midterm elections. 

“I am going to lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS, and also, while we’re at it, Highly ‘Inaccurate,’ Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES,” Trump wrote.

Neither the president nor the federal government has the authority to manage election administration in this way. The law gives individual states broad power to decide how to run their own elections. 

Wisconsin’s election system is the most decentralized in the country, giving much of the authority over how to conduct voting to the state’s 1,850 municipal clerks. The state allows mail-in absentee voting without requiring voters to provide a reason, and the electronic voting machines approved for use in the state are incapable of connecting to the internet. Electronic voting machines are more accurate at tallying votes than a human hand counting them. 

After Trump’s post, the Democracy Defense Project-Wisconsin board, which includes former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, former Attorney General JB Van Hollen, former U.S. Representative Scott Klug, and former Democratic Party of Wisconsin Chair Mike Tate, said in a statement that such an action would increase inaccuracy in the state’s elections. 

“The Constitution is clear: the federal government does not administer elections at the state level,” the group said. “In fact, improved access to voting methods, including the electronic machines Wisconsin uses that produce paper ballots and are unable to be connected to the internet, have benefitted Republicans just as much as Democrats. Wisconsin has displayed time and time again that our elections are safe and secure, and while we can always make them more efficient, there is no tolerance for inaccuracy in our results.”

People participate in a naturalization ceremony last year at Liberty State Park in Jersey City, N.J. The Trump administration is encouraging states to use an online search tool to verify the citizenship of registered voters, alarming some Democrats and privacy experts. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

BILOXI, Miss. — The Trump administration is developing a powerful data tool it claims will let states identify noncitizens registered to vote. But Democratic critics and data experts warn it could allow the federal government to vacuum up vast quantities of information on Americans for unclear purposes.

Some Democratic election officials and opponents of the effort fear President Donald Trump wants to build a federal database of voters to target political opponents or cherry-pick rare examples of noncitizen voters to fuel a sense of crisis. Republican election officials allied with the president counter that he’s helping states to maintain accurate voter rolls.

The Trump administration has rolled out changes to the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, tool at the same time the U.S. Department of Justice is asking states for copies of their voter rolls. The timing, combined with questions about what happens to voter data uploaded to the program, has alarmed critics.

Trump wants Congress to pass a national proof of citizenship voter registration requirement and in March tried to unilaterally impose one for federal elections through executive order. But with the legislation stalled and the order halted by the courts, the citizenship data tool may offer a backdoor way to accomplish the same goal.

SAVE was originally intended to help state and local officials verify the immigration status of individual noncitizens seeking government benefits. But U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, this spring refashioned it into a platform that can scan states’ voter rolls if election officials upload the data.

Justice Department demand for state voter lists underscores their importance

The changes to SAVE, rolled out over just a few months and with little public debate, are “tinkering with sort of the bones of democracy,” said John Davisson, senior counsel and director of litigation at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington, D.C.-based research and advocacy group that argues privacy is a fundamental right.

“You’re talking about the voting process and who will be eligible to vote,” Davisson said. “And to take a system that is not designed for use in that process and repurpose it, really on the fly, without a formal comment process, without formal rulemaking, without congressional intervention — that’s pretty anomalous and pretty alarming.”

Previously, SAVE could only search one name at a time. Now it can conduct bulk searches, allowing state officials to potentially feed into it information on millions of registered voters. SAVE checks that information against a series of federal databases and reports back whether it can verify someone’s immigration status.

Since May, it also can draw upon Social Security data, transforming the program into a tool that can confirm citizenship because Social Security records for many, but not all, Americans include the information. NPR reported earlier on changes to SAVE.

“It is incredible what has been done, really since March,” Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray, a Republican who supports proof of citizenship requirements and the SAVE tool, told a gathering of state secretaries of state in Biloxi, Mississippi, last week.

Individuals registering to vote in federal elections must already sign a statement affirming they are citizens under penalty of perjury, and those who cast a ballot face criminal penalties and deportation. One study of the 2016 election placed the prevalence of noncitizen voting at 0.0001% of votes cast.

But as Trump has spread falsehoods about elections, Republicans have made purging noncitizens from voter rolls a central focus.

Democratic concerns were on display last week at the National Association of Secretaries of State conference, held at the Beau Rivage casino-resort in Biloxi. In interviews on the sidelines of the conference, Democratic secretaries of state voiced deep reservations — or outright opposition — about plugging their voter data into SAVE.

Maine Democratic Secretary of State Shenna Bellows said Aug. 6 that the federal government appeared to be trying to take over election administration. She formally rejected the Justice Department’s voter roll request two days later.

Bellows said the Department of Homeland Security told her in a recent phone call that it planned to retain SAVE data for 10 years for “audit purposes only.”

“Just like the [Justice Department] is asking us to hand over an electronic file of all the voters in our state, it seems like the Department of Homeland Security is through this backdoor system also asking us to share voter information about every voter in our state,” Bellows said.

At least one state appears to have granted the federal government sweeping authority over any voter data it provides to SAVE.

Indiana Secretary of State Diego Morales announced in July he had reached an agreement with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to access the newly expanded system for voter list maintenance. Indiana’s agreement allows the federal agency to use information the state provides for any purpose permitted by law, including criminal prosecutions.

Morales, a Republican, said in a news release that SAVE represented “another step in safeguarding the rights” of eligible voters. His office didn’t respond to Stateline’s questions.

The Trump administration has ramped up efforts to encourage state election officials to use the expanded program. The White House hosted a bipartisan “fly in” event for state secretaries of state on July 29. Multiple secretaries of state told Stateline that USCIS Director Joseph Edlow, who was confirmed on July 15, spoke at the event.

“The president is very much keyed in on voter list maintenance,” Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, a Republican, said in an interview — echoing other GOP secretaries of state who released statements praising the Trump administration after the meeting.

Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat who attended the meeting, said he questioned how the federal government would handle voter information provided to SAVE. He added that the Justice Department’s request for his state’s voter rolls raised his level of concern about how data would be used.

“When we disclose information, particularly personal identifying information, we need to have a handle on how it’s going to be used, by whom and under what circumstances,” Simon told Stateline.

The White House referred questions about SAVE and the event to the Department of Homeland Security and USCIS.

In response to questions from Stateline, USCIS didn’t directly answer whether the agency would share voter roll data with other parts of the federal government but confirmed it disposes of records after 10 years.

“The SAVE application is a critical tool for state and local governments to access information to safeguard the integrity of elections across the country. It’s no wonder many states have quickly adopted it, and we continue to promote the tool to other states and counties not using SAVE,” USCIS spokesperson Matthew Tragesser said in a statement.

“We look forward to continued optimization efforts and implementing more updates to SAVE.”

GOP pressure

Some Republican election officials and Trump allies have long wanted the federal government to take an expanded role in searching state voter rolls for noncitizens.

Last summer the Trump-aligned litigation group America First Legal, co-founded by Trump adviser Stephen Miller, encouraged states to submit to the Department of Homeland Security the names of individuals for citizenship or immigration status verification.

Some states did just that. Texas, for example, asked USCIS to verify the citizenship of some voters in September, and Indiana asked the agency to verify 585,774 voters in October. The same month, 16 Republican state attorneys general signed a letter criticizing Homeland Security, then under the Biden administration, for failing to work with states on verification.

Trump’s DOJ wants states to turn over voter lists, election info

After Trump took office, GOP state officials kept up the pressure. Twenty-one Republican secretaries of state urged Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in February to prioritize SAVE improvements.

On April 16, Indiana sued the department in federal court for not responding to its verification request last fall. USCIS announced an overhaul of SAVE less than a week later.

As the agency continues to remake SAVE, the tool will soon allow searches using the last four digits of a Social Security number, multiple state secretaries of state told Stateline. The agency confirmed the feature is under development and will be available soon but didn’t provide an exact date.

The change would mark another significant expansion of the program because most states collect the last four digits when individuals without a driver’s license register to vote.

Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane, a Republican, said SAVE represents a better way to verify citizenship than a state law requiring voters to produce documents. “I think there’s a real opportunity for us to do a lot of this through just sharing of information and I think that’s what we’re seeing happen,” McGrane said in an interview.

Unreliable data?

But some voting rights advocates and experts on government data caution against an overreliance on Social Security data.

The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, a progressive policy nonprofit, has noted that Social Security only began tracking the citizenship status of all applicants in 1978 — meaning the database doesn’t include comprehensive citizenship information for older Americans. Additionally, Social Security may not always have up-to-date information on the status of naturalized U.S. citizens.

The nonpartisan Institute for Responsive Government also warned in May that since SAVE hasn’t used Social Security numbers to verify citizenship in the past, its accuracy and effectiveness are unknown. The success of the expanded SAVE program may also partially depend on whether it has adequate staff and resources, it said.

U.S. House passes bill targeting voting by noncitizens, which is already against the law

A 2017 Government Accountability Office report found that between fiscal years 2012 and 2016, about 16% of the nearly 90 million SAVE searches required additional verification, which the institute says often translates into federal workers manually checking files. Now that SAVE allows bulk searches, the need for manual checking could rise dramatically.

Nick Doctor, director of implementation at the Institute for Responsive Government, said in an interview that a tool confirming the eligibility of registered voters in a way that doesn’t burden individuals can be a good thing. But he emphasized that it depends in large measure on SAVE’s implementation.

“The changes that have been made to SAVE happened very quickly and, to my knowledge, we haven’t seen releases on the level of accuracy of that information,” Doctor said.

During interviews, Republican secretaries of state stressed that voters aren’t kicked off the rolls because SAVE can’t verify their citizenship. Instead, an inability to verify would likely trigger a follow-up process with the voter.

“Just because we get something back from the SAVE database, it’s not a cut and dry, especially on those they’re not sure about,” Hoskins, the Missouri secretary of state, said.

Still, Arizona illustrates why some Democrats worry about any large-scale effort to ask voters — especially longtime, older residents — to prove their citizenship. After the state discovered errors in how it tracked voter citizenship dating back years, election officials are contacting some 200,000 voters seeking proof of citizenship documentation.

Some have been casting ballots for decades without incident and many feel targeted, Arizona Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said during a presentation at the state secretaries of state conference. “They feel insulted when they get that letter,” Fontes said.

Charles Stewart III, a professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies elections, said Arizona may actually point to the potential usefulness of SAVE. If Arizona runs its voter roll through the program, a list of 200,000 voters needing citizenship verification would perhaps drop into the hundreds, he suggested.

“There’s a lot of good-government reasons to believe that something like this, governed properly and governed with fail-safe mechanisms, could have an upside,” Stewart said.

Connecticut Democratic Secretary of State Stephanie Thomas told Stateline that every secretary wants tools to keep voter lists as clean as possible. But the details are important.

When she hears of something new, Thomas said she asks whether it’s the best option available and whether “the i’s are dotted, the t’s crossed.” She said she’s asked USCIS a series of questions about SAVE and is waiting on some responses.

“When it comes to voter lists,” Thomas said, “I don’t want Connecticut voters to be a guinea pig.”

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.

Protesters gather in Milwaukee's Cathedral Square to march and rally as part of the No Kings Day protests nationwide. (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)

Voting rights activists continue to be divided over gerrymandering. Here in Wisconsin, members of the Fair Maps Coalition, who just recently succeeded in getting representative voting maps for our state, are understandably alarmed by escalating threats to gerrymander the whole country, as Wisconsin Public Radio reports.

“I just hate it at its core,” Wisconsin League of Women Voters Executive Director Debra Cronmiller told WPR of the gerrymandering duel between Texas and California, as each state seeks to carve out more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.

“We can’t save democracy by suppressing voters, and this has to be an opportunity to think about a new process and standards, especially in Wisconsin,” iuscely Flores, Wisconsin Fair Maps organizing director, told WPR.

But the president and CEO of Common Cause, the national organization dedicated to voting rights and fair elections, told members last week that the group “won’t call for unilateral political disarmament in the face of authoritarianism.”

The Common Cause position is tricky. On the one hand the group reaffirms its commitment to nonpartisan redistricting commissions. On the other hand it gives its blessing to California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to suspend exactly the sort of nonpartisan commission the group endorses — and which Wisconsin fair maps advocates have long been fighting for. Supposedly, suspending the commission is a temporary measure while Democrats in the legislature draw up gerrymandered districts in time for the midterms. After they do that, Common Cause, Newsom and various Democrats claim California can undo the gerrymander later and restart the fight for fair maps. Really?

“Independent redistricting commissions are one way — and by far the best way — to draw fair maps and achieve fair representation for every single American,” Virginia Kase Solomón, Common Cause president and CEO wrote in a letter to the group’s members. But, a follow-up email from Common Cause reiterated the group’s non-opposition to Newsom’s plan in California, saying, “As the nation’s leading anti-gerrymandering advocacy group, we understand that Trump and Republican leaders’ attempt to lock in unaccountable power poses a generational threat to our ability to decide our own futures.”

Maggie Daun brought up those same dire threats on her Civic Media radio show when she grilled me about my last column arguing that we can’t gerrymander our way back to democracy. What if this is the existential moment and Trump is about to send troops into cities across the U.S. and destroy democracy, Daun asked. I agree with her that we’re in an existential moment. But just because we want Democrats to do something to stop Trump, as so many people so passionately do, that doesn’t mean that gerrymandering to get a narrow Democratic majority in the House is the right thing to do. For one thing, a new House majority won’t be seated until 2027 and won’t fix the immediate crisis.

Trump is already sending troops into Democratic cities. And his plan to try more federal takeovers will likely unfold before the midterms. What we need right now is a massive popular movement to resist authoritarian overreach, local leaders who stand up to Trump, and courts that continue to hold the line on his administration’s assault on the rule of law.

The courts have played the biggest role in restraining Trump so far, issuing injunctions and blocking his orders Their power has been badly limited by the U.S. Supreme Court, which curtailed judges’ power to issue nationwide injunctions and greenlighted some egregious administrative actions. The current Supreme Court majority has also helped Trump’s larger project of dismantling democracy by gutting the Voting Rights Act and by allowing partisan gerrymandering — which delayed but ultimately did not derail Wisconsin’s efforts to get fair maps.

Common Cause has led the fight against both partisan gerrymandering and the destruction of voting rights. On Saturday, the group declared a National Day of Action, with rallies in communities across the country, including in Wisconsin, to resist Trump’s Texas gerrymandering scheme and his unprecedented deployment of federal troops to run roughshod over local communities. But the group’s message is somewhat muddled, mixing strong language about fairness and voting rights with tolerance for the prospect of blue-state counter-gerrymandering.

One good thing about the gerrymandering brushfire spreading across the nation is that it has provoked a bipartisan backlash. Republicans in New York and California, facing the prospect of being drawn out of their seats, have begun speaking out against the gerrymandering plan for Texas, Politico reports.

Some quick math suggests that Republicans are likely to win a nationwide redistricting war that pulls in Missouri, Indiana, Florida and other red states. But Republicans who are in a minority in California and New York are still worried about losing their seats. “Redistricting is not really an ideological exercise as much as a self-interest exercise,” California-based GOP strategist Rob Stutzman told Politico. Hence blue state Republican House members are calling for their colleagues to stand down in Texas and other red states, lest they lose their seats in the blue state counter-gerrymander. 

Instead of looking to gerrymandering, which is unfair, diminishes democracy and escalates hyper partisanship, opponents of the Trump administration need to keep building a big, pro-democracy movement that unites a majority of the country against Trump’s authoritarian overreach.

Wisconsin could lead the way. 

U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan, who has been holding town halls in Republican districts, reports being deluged with worried questions from both his own and his GOP colleagues’ constituents who don’t like the cuts to Medicaid, food assistance, and Social Security staffing in the unpopular “Big Beautiful Bill Act.” Most Americans don’t want to give away their health care, security and well-being so Elon Musk can get a tax cut.

Unfortunately, right-wing activists have played a long game, stacking the Supreme Court, blocking Democratic nominees, destroying the Voting Rights Act and putting the whole Heritage Foundation Project 2025 plan for authoritarianism in place. That won’t be undone in a single midterm election. But it is possible to leverage a broad-based populist movement of people who recognize it’s in their own interest to fight back. 

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.

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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.