A U.S. Postal Service employee sorts packages inside the Los Angeles Mail Processing & Distribution Center in December. A new USPS rule on postmarks took effect on Dec. 24 that says mail might not be postmarked on the day it’s dropped off. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
The U.S. Postal Service has adopted a new rule that could create doubt about whether some ballots mailed by voters by Election Day will receive postmarks in time to be counted.
A USPS rule that took effect on Dec. 24 says mail might not receive a postmark on the same day the agency takes possession of it. The postal service says it isn’t changing its existing postmark practices and is merely clarifying its policy, but some election officials have looked to postmarks as a guarantee that mail ballots were cast before polls closed.
The new rule holds implications for 14 states and Washington, D.C., that count ballots arriving after Election Day if they are postmarked on or before that day — commonly called a “ballot grace period.” In these states, ballots placed in the mail by voters before the deadline may not be counted if the postal service applies a postmark after Election Day.
The USPS rule says that “the postmark date does not necessarily indicate the first day that the Postal Service had possession of the mailpiece.”
The USPS rule comes as the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to consider a case that could eliminate ballot grace periods nationwide. The court’s decision, expected late this spring or next summer, could render the issues raised by the postmark rule moot.
Mail-in voting surged in 2020’s general election amid the COVID-19 pandemic, when 43% of voters cast their votes by mail. The percentage of voters mailing their ballots has fallen from that peak but remains above pre-pandemic levels. About 30% of voters cast mail ballots in 2024, according to data gathered by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.
While the vast majority of mail ballots were successfully cast last year, hundreds of thousands weren’t counted. During the 2024 election, 584,463 mail ballots returned by voters were rejected by election officials — 1.2% of returned mail ballots. About 18% of those ballots were rejected because they didn’t arrive on time.
The USPS defended the change in a lengthy response to criticisms published in the Federal Register. The agency emphasized that it does not administer elections and doesn’t advocate for or against voting by mail.
The postal service repeated its advice that voters mail their completed ballots at least a week before Election Day. And it noted that voters may request a manual postmark at their local post office free of charge.
“If customers are aware that the postmark date may not align with the date on which the Postal Service first accepted possession of a mailpiece, they will be better equipped to adjust their plans accordingly,” the response reads.
“And if policymakers or other entities that create rules utilizing the postmark date are aware of what the postmark date signifies, they are better equipped to determine whether their rules adequately serve their purposes.”
Stateline reporter Jonathan Shorman can be reached at jshorman@stateline.org.
This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Wisconsin Examiner, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
Missouri Capitol Police officers conduct security checks on boxes of petition signatures submitted to force a referendum vote on the state’s new congressional map. State courts in Missouri and other states may decide whether new maps passed this year are used in the 2026 midterm elections. (Photo by Rudi Keller/Missouri Independent)
After Missouri lawmakers passed a gerrymandered congressional map this fall, opponents submitted more than 300,000 signatures seeking to force a statewide vote on whether to overturn the map. But Republican state officials say they will use the map in the meantime.
Missouri courts now appear likely to weigh in.
“If we need to continue to litigate to enforce our constitutional rights, we will,” said Richard von Glahn, a progressive activist who leads People Not Politicians, which is leading the campaign opposing the gerrymandered map.
As some states engage in an extraordinary redraw of congressional districts ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, state courts may decide the fate of the new maps. President Donald Trump has pushed Republican state lawmakers to gerrymander their states’ congressional maps, prompting Democratic state lawmakers to respond in kind.
Nationwide, state judges are poised to play a pivotal role in adjudicating legal challenges to the maps, which have been drafted to maximize partisan advantage for either Republicans or Democrats, depending on the state. Maps are typically only redrawn once a decade following the census.
While some state courts have long heard map-related lawsuits, the U.S. Supreme Court has all but taken federal courts out of the business of reviewing redrawn maps this year. On Dec. 4, a majority of the court allowed Texas’ new map, which seeks to secure five more U.S. House seats for Republicans, to proceed. A federal lawsuit against California’s new gerrymandered map, drawn to favor Democrats, hasn’t reached the high court.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s brief, unsigned majority decision voiced concern about inserting federal courts into an “active primary campaign,” though Texas’s primary election will occur in March. Critics of the court’s decision have said it effectively forecloses federal challenges to this year’s gerrymanders. The justices could also issue a decision next year that makes it more difficult to challenge maps as racially discriminatory.
State courts are taking center stage after gerrymandering opponents have spent decades encouraging them to play a more active role in policing maps that had been drawn for partisan advantage. Those efforts accelerated after the U.S. Supreme Court in 2019 limited the power of federal courts to block such maps.
“Basically, every one of the 50 states has something in its constitution that could be used to constrain partisan gerrymandering,” said Samuel Wang, director of the Princeton Gerrymandering Project.
State constitutions, which are interpreted by state supreme courts, typically have language that echoes the right to freedom of speech and association found in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, Wang said. They also include a right to equal protection under the law, similar to the 14th Amendment.
Some state constitutions guarantee free and fair elections, language that doesn’t appear in the U.S. Constitution. Thirty states have some form of a constitutional requirement for free elections, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
At least 10 state supreme courts have found that state courts can decide cases involving allegations of partisan gerrymandering, according to a 2024 review by the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School.
So far this year, California, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas and Utah have adopted new congressional maps. New maps also appear possible in Florida, Maryland and Virginia. A handful of other states — Alabama, Louisiana, New York and North Dakota — may have to change their maps depending on the outcome of court cases.
Some of those new or potential maps could face legal obstacles. Florida, New York and Ohio all have state supreme courts that have previously found problems with partisan gerrymanders. Maryland Democrats have so far not moved forward with a gerrymander, in part because of fears of an adverse decision from the state Supreme Court.
Four state supreme courts — including in Missouri — have determined that they cannot review partisan gerrymandering claims, though state courts may still consider challenges on other grounds, such as whether the districts are compact or contiguous.
Basically, every one of the 50 states has something in its constitution that could be used to constrain partisan gerrymandering.
– Samuel Wang, director of the Princeton Gerrymandering Project
In Missouri’s case, courts could also clear the way for a referendum vote over the new map, which is intended to force out U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Democrat who has represented Kansas City in Congress for the past two decades. Republicans currently hold six of the state’s eight congressional districts.
The map already faces a bevy of lawsuits, most notably over whether state officials must count some 103,000 referendum signatures gathered before the governor signed the map into law; at least 106,000 signatures are needed to send the map to voters.
Opponents of the new map have also filed lawsuits asserting the Missouri Constitution prevents redistricting without new census data and that an area of Kansas City was simultaneously placed into two separate congressional districts.
Missouri Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins’ decision this month (relying on an opinion from Missouri Republican Attorney General Catherine Hanaway) to implement the new congressional map, despite a submitted referendum petition, is expected to become the latest legal flashpoint. Opponents of the map argue it is now paused under state law.
Hoskins spokesperson Rachael Dunn said in a statement to Stateline that local election officials have until late July to verify referendum signatures — months after candidate filing ends March 31 and days before the Aug. 4 primary election. At that point, blocking the new map would be all but impossible, even if map opponents have gathered enough signatures to force a vote.
“Once signatures are all verified, the Secretary will certify the referendum based on constitutionality and verification,” Dunn wrote.
Hanaway’s office didn’t respond to questions.
Breaking out of lockstep
As federal courts limit their review of gerrymandering because of U.S. Supreme Court decisions, some state supreme courts are reluctant to wade into the issue because of a practice called “lockstepping.”
State supreme courts often interpret their state constitutions in line with — or in lockstep with — how the U.S. Supreme Court views similar language in the U.S. Constitution. Because the U.S. Supreme Court has declined to limit partisan gerrymandering, some state supreme courts have also declined to impose limits.
Gerrymandering opponents have used a variety of arguments over the years to try to prod state supreme courts out of lockstep. They have emphasized differences in wording between state constitutions and the federal one, and provisions in state constitutions — such as the free elections requirement — not found in the U.S. Constitution.
Sometimes these arguments work — and sometimes they don’t. The North Carolina Supreme Court in 2022 ruled against partisan gerrymandering. But after two Republicans were elected as justices that fall, the court reversed itself months later.
“Across the country, we have seen advocates turn to state supreme courts, and state courts in general, for state constitutional arguments against gerrymandering or voter suppression more broadly. And it’s been met with mixed success,” said Sharon Brett, a University of Kansas associate professor of law. In 2022 as litigation director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas, she unsuccessfully argued a case before the state’s high court challenging Kansas’ congressional map.
In states where legislatures draw congressional maps, some lawmakers argue that state constitutions shouldn’t be interpreted to curb legislative authority over mapmaking. Court-imposed limits amount to violations of the traditional separation of powers, they say, with the judiciary overstepping its authority to interfere in politics.
“We expect them to be nonpartisan. We expect them to be unbiased. We expect them to be fair. We expect them to read the constitution and to protect or at least respect the separation of powers,” said Utah Republican state Rep. Casey Snider, speaking of Utah courts during a floor speech earlier this month.
In Utah, state courts waded through a yearslong legal battle over whether state lawmakers must adopt a non-gerrymandered map. After the Republican-controlled legislature repealed and replaced an independent redistricting process, the Utah Supreme Court last year ruled lawmakers had violated the state constitution.
A Utah district court judge in November then adopted a congressional map that will likely lead next year to the election of a Democrat. The state’s four congressional seats are currently all held by Republicans.
“What we would like is them to redistrict based on population — fairly,” Katharine Biele, president of the League of Women Voters of Utah, said of state lawmakers.
Republican Gov. Spencer Cox called the Utah legislature into special session earlier in December to respond to the judge’s decision. Lawmakers pushed back candidate filing deadlines in hopes that an appeal to the Utah Supreme Court will result in a decision overturning the judge’s adopted map.
They also passed a resolution condemning the judiciary.
Constitutional concerns
As the Indiana legislature weighed a gerrymandered map to boost Republicans this month, some lawmakers were reluctant to constrain state courts. Democrats currently hold two of the state’s nine congressional districts.
The GOP-controlled Indiana Senate voted down the map in a major setback to Trump’s national redistricting push. The vote came after a floor debate where opponents raised concerns about limiting court involvement; the legislation included a provision sending any legal challenge directly to the Indiana Supreme Court, bypassing a jury trial.
Indiana Republican state Sen. Greg Walker said the measure violated the state constitution, which guarantees an “inviolate” right to a jury trial in all civil cases. “In legal terms, ‘inviolate’ has the implication of being sacred, as opposed to being just a piece of the law,” Walker said on the floor.
State Sen. Mike Gaskill, a Republican who sponsored the map, said during a speech that Indiana residents would benefit from a quick process to resolve legal challenges. “Both sides, in any case, want them to be settled quickly so that they don’t cause chaos and interruptions in the elections process,” he said.
If the map had passed, opponents would have likely attacked the measure using a provision of the Indiana Constitution that requires “free and equal” elections.
This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Wisconsin Examiner, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
A person places flowers in front of a photograph of Mother Cabrini, patron saint of immigrants, during an interfaith service on behalf of immigrants in November in Miami. GOP reversals in this year’s elections, including in Miami, are setting off alarm bells for Republicans and could cause redistricting efforts to backfire. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
GOP reversals in this year’s elections, especially in some urban and immigrant communities, are setting off alarm bells for Republicans using redistricting to try to keep control of Congress in next year’s midterms.
Redistricting plans demanded by President Donald Trump in states such as Texas and Missouri — meant to capitalize on his stronger showing among certain urban voters in the 2024 election — could backfire, as cities in Florida, New Jersey and Virginia returned to Democratic voting patterns in off-year elections this past November.
Experts see the shift as a sign of possible souring on the administration’s immigration enforcement agenda, combined with disappointment in economic conditions.
Paul Brace, an emeritus political science professor of legal studies at Rice University in Houston, said Texas Republicans are likely to gain less than they imagine from new maps designed to pick up five additional seats for the party. He said minority voters’ interest in Trump was “temporary” and that he had underperformed on the economy.
“Trump’s redistricting efforts are facing headwinds and, even in Texas, may not yield all he had hoped,” Brace said.
Redistricting efforts in Texas spawned a retaliatory plan in California aimed at getting five more Democratic seats. Other states have leapt into the fray, with Republicans claiming an overall edge of three potential seats in proposed maps.
Cuban-born Jose Arango, chair of the Hudson County Republican Party in New Jersey, said immigration enforcement has gone too far and caused a backlash at the polls.
“There are people in the administration who frankly don’t know what the hell is going on,” Arango said. “If you arrest criminals, God bless you. We don’t want criminals in our streets. But then you deport people who have been here 30 years, 20 years, and have contributed to society, have been good people for the United States. You go into any business in agriculture, the hospitality business, even the guy who cuts the grass — they’re all undocumented. Who’s going to pick our tomatoes?”
As immigration arrests increase this year, a growing share of those detained have no criminal convictions.
New Jersey’s 9th Congressional District, which includes urban Paterson, went from a surprising Trump win last year to a lopsided victory this year for Democratic Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill. Trump won the district last year by 3 percentage points and Sherrill won by 16 points. The district is majority-minority and 39% immigrant.
There was a similar turnaround in Miami, a majority-immigrant city that elected a Democratic mayor for the first time in almost 30 years. Parts of immigrant-rich Northern Virginia also shifted in the governor’s race there.
There is an element of Trump-curious minority voters staying home this year.
– J. Miles Coleman, an associate editor at the University of Virginia Center for Politics
In the New Jersey district, Billy Prempeh, a Republican whose parents emigrated from Ghana, lost a surprisingly close 2024 race for U.S. House to Democrat Nellie Pou, of Puerto Rican descent, who became the first Latina from New Jersey to serve in Congress.
Prempeh this year launched another campaign for the seat, but withdrew after Sherrill won the governor’s race, telling Stateline that any Republican who runs for that seat “is going to get slaughtered.”
Prempeh doesn’t blame Trump or more aggressive immigration enforcement for the shift. He said his parents and their family waited years to get here legally, and he objects to people being allowed to stay for court dates after they crossed the border with Mexico.
“We aren’t deporting enough people. Not everybody agrees with me on that,” Prempeh said.
Parts of Virginia saw similar voting pattern changes. Prince William County, south of Washington, D.C., saw support for Democratic Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger jump to 67% compared with 57% for Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris last year. The county is about 26% immigrant and 27% Hispanic.
Asian American and Hispanic voters shifted more Democratic this year in both New Jersey and Virginia, said J. Miles Coleman, an associate editor at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, expanding on a November post on the subject.
However, some of those Virginia voters might have sat out the governor’s race, Coleman said.
“I do think there is an element of Trump-curious minority voters staying home this year,” Coleman said. “There were many heavily Asian and Hispanic precincts in Northern Virginia that saw this huge percentage swing from Harris to Spanberger, but also saw relatively weak turnout.”
The pattern is “hard to extrapolate” to Texas or other states with new maps, Coleman said, “but Democrats are probably liking what they saw in this year’s elections.”
He said one of the redrawn districts in Texas is now likely to go to Democrats: the majority-Hispanic 28th Congressional District, which includes parts of San Antonio and South Texas. And the nearby 34th Congressional District is now a tossup instead of leaning Republican, according to new Center for Politics projections.
The pattern in New Jersey’s 9th Congressional District this year was consistent in Hispanic areas statewide, according to an analysis provided to Stateline by Michael Foley, elections coordinator of State Navigate, a Virginia-based nonprofit that analyzes state election data.
New Jersey Hispanic precincts “swung heavily” toward Sherrill compared with their 2024 vote for Harris, Foley said in an email. He noted that New Jersey and Florida Hispanic populations are largely from the Caribbean and may not reflect patterns elsewhere, such as Texas where the Hispanic population is heavily Mexican American.
Pou, who won the New Jersey seat, said economics played a part in this year’s electoral shift.
“The President made a promise to my constituents that he’d lower costs and instead he’s made the problem worse with his tariffs that raised costs across the board,” Pou said in a statement to Stateline.
Micah Rasmussen, director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University, said immigration and pocketbook issues both played a role in places like the 9th District, as did an influx of Democratic campaign money.
“The biggest reason is a sense of letdown in President Trump,” Rasmussen said. “There were many urban voters who decided they liked what Trump was saying, they liked the Hispanic outreach, they bought into his economic message. And just one year later, they’re equally disillusioned.”
This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Wisconsin Examiner, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
After losing its case in two federal courts, a northern Wisconsin town has agreed to use an electronic voting machine designed for people with disabilities.
Senate President Mary Felzkowski (R-Tomahawk) said she hopes her "fellow assemblymen continue to put pressure on their leadership" to pass postpartum Medicaid expansion. Felzkowski spoke at a Republican press conference about postpartum Medicaid expansion in April. (Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner)
Senate President Mary Felzkowski (R-Tomahawk) said in a year-end interview with the Wisconsin Examiner that the year has been one of “very steady growth” and top priorities for her in the remaining legislative session include passing legislation to help bring down the cost of health care, advancing medical cannabis legislation and passing additional tax cuts.
Felzkowski pointed to the state budget in which lawmakers and Gov. Tony Evers increased funding for roads and transportation costs, cut taxes including for retirees, increased special education funding and dedicated funding to mental health initiatives. She was one of four Senate Republicans to vote against the state budget, a vote she said she took because of her opposition to increasing the state’s hospital assessment without health care reforms.
A slimmed down, 18-member Republican majority in the Senate this session and several GOP senators who took a stand against a compromise budget deal gave Senate Democrats an opening to come to the budget negotiating table, and to win compromises on school funding as well as stop cuts to the University of Wisconsin system.
Felzkowski said the slimmer margins this year have been normal.
“If you look back for the last 30 years, when the Republicans are in control, we are normally at 18-15 margin in the Senate,” Felzkowski said. “When we were up to like 22, that was kind of a gift, so we are a very strong Republican majority right now.”
Felzskowski said working on health care affordability will be her top priority when lawmakers return in January. This includes working on health care price transparency and working to advance her legislation that would make changes to the regulation of pharmacy benefit managers — third-party companies that manage prescription drug benefits between health plans, employers and government programs.
Health care and prescription drugs
Felzkowski’s bill would allow patients to use any licensed pharmacy in the state without facing penalties and require benefit managers to pay pharmacy claims within 30 days.
“Our neighbors to the south in Illinois just passed their version of PBM reform,” Felzkowski said, adding that her bill has passed out of committee and lawmakers are now discussing whether it will receive a full Senate vote.
Felzkowski’s health care price transparency legislation would require hospitals to make publicly available to consumers the standard costs of “shoppable services,” which would be defined as those that can be scheduled in advance such as x-rays, MRIs and knee replacements.
“What is one thing that you buy that you have no idea what it’s going to cost? It’s health care. That’s absolutely ridiculous,” Felzkowski said. “Other states have passed it. They’re starting to see the fruition of it and it does work. There’s a reason we have the fifth highest health care costs. It’s because our Legislature has not done anything to help bring those costs down and it’s time that we actually start doing that.”
Felzkowski, who has been a longtime advocate for legalizing medical cannabis, said the Senate is “closer than ever” to having a vote on the floor on a proposal to do so, but she believes the chances of the Assembly advancing legislation remain “slim.”
Felzskowski said she hopes legislation to extend Medicaid coverage for postpartum women from 60 days after giving birth to one year isn’t dead this session. Wisconsin is one of two states in the U.S. that haven’t accepted the federal extension.
“I hope that my fellow assemblymen continue to put pressure on their leadership… Deep red states, blue states as well as purple states across the nation have postpartum care for 12 months and they’ve done it because it’s the return on investments for taxpayers as well as being the right thing to do,” Felzskowski said. “We see baby thrive, we see mom thrive, and it actually lowers the cost down the road.”
Fate of WisconsinEye
Felzkowski said Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos are having discussions about solutions to the shutdown of WisconsinEye, the nonprofit service that provides video coverage of legislative hearings, floor sessions and Wisconsin state government business. WisconsinEye halted its livestream and pulled down its video archive last week due to a lack of funding.
“Even if we do something temporary to get us through a session… just get through until April and then do a really deep dive on what should be the next step,” Felzkowski said, adding that that includes looking at how other states cover their state government.
“The transparency is important,” she said, adding they want to ensure people still have access to government proceedings and a record is still being kept of it all.
Felzkowski said she hopes Republicans can get one more tax cut done before the end of the legislative session next year.
New tax cuts in the works
A few of the ideas legislators are considering include eliminating taxes on tips and overtime.
“Anytime we can return money to our citizens is a good thing,” Felzkowski said, adding that state Republicans would like to align Wisconsin tax cuts with federal policy. The federal megabill approved in July included a tax deduction on tips and overtime that will be available from 2025 through 2028.
This December, Wisconsin residents are experiencing the highest property tax hikes since 2018, according to a recent Wisconsin Policy Forum report. The report explained that state budget decisions including Evers’ veto that allows school districts an annual $325 per pupil increase for the next 400 years as well as lawmakers’ decision to not provide any increase to state general aid this year have led to the hikes.
Asked whether lawmakers will look to solutions for lowering property taxes, Felzkowski said it would take a new governor.
“We have given [Evers] numerous chances to reverse that 400-year veto and he keeps vetoing the bill, so it’s on the governor’s plate right now,” Felzkowski said. “Until we get a different governor in the East Wing and we can start seriously addressing education and all the things that are wrong with it, I don’t know what to say.”
Felzkowski said that even with the state budget surplus there wasn’t enough state money for the general aid increase.
“There were a lot of mouths to feed on that budget,” Felzkowski said. “With increasing revenues all over, there was not enough money out there to backfill that $325… We would have had to have raised taxes dramatically to do that. The dollars didn’t exist.”
Felzkowski said on education that she hopes Wisconsin will opt into the new federal education tax credit program. The program would provide a dollar-to-dollar tax credit of up to $1,700 to people who donate to a qualifying “scholarship granting program” to support taxpayer-financed private-school vouchers. Evers would need to opt the state into the program by Jan. 1, 2027, but so far has said he won’t.
Confident GOP will hold Senate in 2026
Wisconsin Republicans have held control of the state Assembly and Senate since 2010, and next year will test the strength of that majority when the state’s 17 odd-numbered Senate seats will be up for election for the first time under new legislative maps adopted in 2024.
Last year when the maps were in place for the 16 even-numbered seats, Democrats were able to flip four seats. In 2026, Republicans will need to make sure Democrats cannot flip two additional Senate seats to hold control of the body.
Felzkowski expressed confidence that they will do so.
“We will come back with a strong Republican majority. We have better policies, we have better ideas and we run great candidates,” Felzkowski said.
There will be several key, competitive districts in 2026 including Senate District 5, which is currently held by Sen. Rob Hutton (R-Brookfield), Senate District 17, which is currently held by Sen. Howard Marklein (R-Spring Green) and Senate District 31, currently represented by incumbent Sen. Jeff Smith (D-Brunswick) who will face a challenge from Sen. Jesse James (R-Thorp).
“We’re going to run on the same policies we’ve always run on: lower taxes, strong freedoms, strong economies, strong education and government getting out of your way so that you can live the American dream,” Felzkowski said. “The Democrats are going to run on an anti-Donald Trump policy, more government, more influence in your life. It’s all they’ve ever run for.”
Felzkowski said she didn’t think that 2025 election results in other states were going to be applicable in Wisconsin, though she said the new maps could be challenging for Republican candidates.
“Wisconsin is kind of a unique state. We’re a very purple state,” Felzkowski said. “We knew those candidates in Virginia were going to win, I mean, it’s a blue state so I mean you can’t really base us on what happened in Virginia and New Jersey… We’re going to be running in Democratic-gerrymandered seats, so we’re going to have to work very hard, but we will win.”
Wisconsin also has an open race for governor on the ballot next year. U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, who is considered the frontrunner in the GOP primary, and Washington County Executive Josh Schoemann, are the current Republican hopefuls.
Felzkowski said she probably won’t endorse in the Republican primary for governor, but she is looking for a candidate who is a “conservative reformer who’s willing to take on the tough issues from health care, education, and corrections, lowering taxes” as well as someone who will do “a deep dive into our agencies,” adding that she hopes they’ll work to root out “waste, fraud and abuse.”
The Democratic field of candidates is much larger including Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, state Sen. Kelda Roys (D-Madison), state Rep. Francesca Hong (D-Madison), Milwaukee County Exec. David Crowley, former Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation CEO Missy Hughes, former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, former Department of Administration Secretary Joel Brennan and former state Rep. Brett Hulsey.
For nearly two weeks following Election Day in 2024, former U.S. Senate candidate Eric Hovde, a Republican, refused to concede, blasting “last-minute absentee ballots that were dropped in Milwaukee at 4 a.m., flipping the outcome.”
Hovde earlier this year told Votebeat that he believes there are issues at Milwaukee’s facility for counting absentee ballots, but he added that he doesn’t blame his loss on that. He didn’t respond to a request for comment in December for this article.
In Wisconsin’s polarized political landscape, Milwaukee has become a flashpoint for election suspicion, much like Philadelphia and Detroit — diverse, Democratic urban centers that draw outsized criticism. The scrutiny reflects the state’s deep rural-urban divide and a handful of election errors in Milwaukee that conspiracy theorists have seized on, leaving the city’s voters and officials under constant political pressure.
That treatment, Milwaukee historian John Gurda says, reflects “the general pattern where you have big cities governed by Democrats” automatically perceived by the right “as centers of depravity (and) insane, radical leftists.”
Charlie Sykes — a longtime conservative commentator no longer aligned with much of GOP politics — said there’s “nothing tremendously mysterious” about Republicans singling out Milwaukee: As long as election conspiracy theories dominate the right, the heavily Democratic city will remain a target.
Milwaukee voters and election officials under constant watch
Milwaukee’s emergence as a target in voter fraud narratives accelerated in 2010, when dozens of billboards in the city’s predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods showed three people, including two Black people, behind bars with the warning: “VOTER FRAUD is a FELONY — 3 YRS & $10,000 FINE.”
Community groups condemned them as racist and misleading, especially for people who had regained their voting rights after felony convictions. Similar billboards returned in 2012, swapping the jail bars for a gavel. All of the advertisements were funded by the Einhorn Family Foundation, associated with GOP donor Stephen Einhorn, who didn’t respond to Votebeat’s email requesting comment.
Criticism of Milwaukee extends well beyond its elections. As Wisconsin’s largest city, it is often cast as an outlier in a largely rural state, making it easier for some to believe the worst about its institutions — including its elections.
“One of the undercurrents of Wisconsin political history is … rural parts versus urban parts,” said University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee political scientist and former Democratic legislator Mordecai Lee. As the state’s biggest city by far, “it becomes the punching bag for outstate legislators” on almost any issue.
“People stay at home and watch the evening news and they think if you come to Milwaukee, you’re going to get shot … or you’re going to get run over by a reckless driver,” said Claire Woodall, who ran the city’s elections from 2020 to 2024.
Election officials acknowledge Milwaukee has made avoidable mistakes in high-stakes elections but describe them as quickly remedied and the kinds of errors any large city can experience when processing tens of thousands of ballots. What sets Milwaukee apart is the scrutiny: Whether it was a briefly forgotten USB stick in 2020 or tabulator doors left open in 2024, each lapse is treated as something more ominous.
Other Wisconsin municipalities have made more consequential errors without attracting comparable attention: In 2011, Waukesha County failed to report votes from Brookfield when tallying a statewide court race — a major oversight that put the wrong candidate in the lead in early unofficial results. In 2024, Summit, a town in Douglas County, disqualified all votes in an Assembly race after officials discovered ballots were printed with the wrong contest listed.
“I don’t believe that there is anywhere in the state that is under a microscope the way the city of Milwaukee is,” said Neil Albrecht, a former executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission.
Black Milwaukeeans say racism behind scrutiny on elections
Milwaukee grew quickly in the 19th century, built by waves of European immigrants who powered its factories and breweries and helped turn it into one of the Midwest’s major industrial cities. A small Black community, searching for employment and fleeing the Jim Crow South, took root early and grew substantially in the mid-20th century.
As industry declined, white residents fled for the suburbs, many of which had racist housing policies that excluded Blacks. That left behind a city marked by segregated schools, shrinking job prospects and sharp economic divides. The split was so stark that the Menomonee River Valley became a shorthand boundary: Black residents to the north, white residents to the south — a divide Milwaukee never fully overcame.
The result is one of the most segregated cities in the country, a place that looks and feels profoundly different from the overwhelmingly white, rural communities that surround it. That contrast has long made Milwaukee an easy target in statewide politics, and it continues to feed some people’s suspicions that something about the city — including its elections — is fundamentally untrustworthy.
The Rev. Greg Lewis, executive director of Wisconsin’s Souls to the Polls, said the reputation is rooted in racism and belied by reality. He said he has a hard enough time getting minorities to vote at all, “let alone vote twice.”
Albrecht agreed.
“If a Souls to the Polls bus would pull up to (a polling site), a bus full of Black people, some Republican observer would mutter, ‘Oh, these are the people being brought up from Chicago,’” he said. “As if we don’t have African Americans in Milwaukee.”
Election workers count votes using a tabulation machine during Election Day on Nov. 5, 2024, at Milwaukee’s central count facility at the Baird Center. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
After former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes — a Black Milwaukeean and a Democrat — lost his 2022 U.S. Senate bid to unseat U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, Bob Spindell, a Republican member of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, emailed constituents saying Republicans “can be especially proud” of Milwaukee casting 37,000 fewer votes than in 2018, “with the major reduction happening in the overwhelming Black and Hispanic areas.”
The message sparked backlash, though Spindell rejected accusations of racism. Asked about it this year, Spindell told Votebeat he meant to praise GOP outreach to Black voters.
Milwaukee organizer Angela Lang said she finds the shifting narratives about Black turnout revealing. “Are we voting (illegally)?” she said. “Or are you all happy that we’re not voting?”
History of real and perceived errors increases pressure on city
The scrutiny directed at Milwaukee falls on voters and the city employees who run its elections.
Milwaukee’s most serious stumble came in 2004, when a last-minute overhaul of the election office contributed to unprocessed voter registrations, delayed absentee counts and discrepancies in the final tally. Multiple investigations found widespread administrative problems but no fraud.
“It was hard coming in at that low point,” said Albrecht, who joined the commission the following year, saying it gave Milwaukee the reputation as an “election fraud capital.”
In 2008, the city created a centralized absentee ballot count facility to reduce errors at polling places and improve consistency. The change worked as intended, but it also meant Milwaukee’s absentee results — representing tens of thousands of votes — were often reported after midnight, sometimes shifting statewide margins.
That timing is largely a product of state law: Wisconsin is one of the few states that prohibit clerks from processing absentee ballots before Election Day. For years, Milwaukee officials have asked lawmakers to change the rule. Instead, opponents argue the city can’t be trusted with extra processing time — even as they criticize the late-night results all but unavoidable under the current rule.
Proposals to allow administrators more time to process ballots — and therefore report results sooner — have repeatedly stalled in the Legislature. The most recent passed the Assembly last session but never received a Senate vote, with some Republicans openly questioning why they should give Milwaukee more time when they don’t trust the city to handle the ballots with the time it already has.
“The late-arriving results of absentee ballots processed in the city of Milwaukee benefits all attempts to discredit the city,” Albrecht said.
Without the change, to keep up with other Wisconsin municipalities, Milwaukee must process tens of thousands of absentee ballots in a single day, a herculean task. “The effect of not passing it means this issue can be kept alive,” said Lee, the UW-Milwaukee political scientist.
Some Republicans acknowledge that dynamic outright. Rep. Scott Krug, a GOP lawmaker praised for his pragmatic approach to election policy, has long supported a policy fix. This session, it doesn’t appear to be going anywhere.
Krug said a small but influential faction on the right has built a kind of social network around election conspiracy theories, many focused on Milwaukee. Because the tight counting window is part of the fuel that keeps that group going, he said, “a fix is a problem for them.”
2020 marked the shift to ‘complete insanity’
Albrecht said that while Milwaukee had long operated under an unusual level of suspicion, the scrutiny that followed 2020 represented a shift he described as “complete insanity.”
That year, in the early hours after Election Day, Milwaukee released its absentee totals, but then-election chief Woodall realized she’d left a USB drive in one tabulator. Woodall called her deputy clerk about it, and the deputy had a police officer take the USB drive to the county building. The mistake didn’t affect results — the audit trail matched — but it was enough to ignite right-wing talk radio and fuel yet more conspiratorial claims about the city’s late-night reporting.
The scrutiny only intensified. A joking email exchange between Woodall and an elections consultant, taken out of context, was perceived by some as proof of fraud after Gateway Pundit and a now-defunct conservative state politics site published it. Threats followed, serious enough that police and the FBI stepped in. Woodall pushed for increased security at the city’s election office, saying that “there was no question” staff safety was at risk.
A similar dynamic played out again in 2024, when workers discovered that doors on absentee tabulators hadn’t been fully closed. With no evidence of tampering but anticipating backlash, officials zeroed out the machines and recounted every ballot. The fix didn’t stop Republicans, including Johnson, from suggesting something “very suspicious” could be happening behind the scenes. Johnson did not respond to a request for comment.
Meanwhile, errors in other Wisconsin communities, sometimes far more consequential, rarely draw similar attention. Take Waukesha County’s error in 2011 — a mistake that swung thousands of votes and affected which candidate was in the lead. “But it didn’t stick,” said UW-Madison’s Barry Burden, a political science professor. “People don’t talk about Waukesha as a place with rigged or problematic elections.”
In recent years there was only one substantiated allegation of serious election official wrongdoing: In November 2022, Milwaukee deputy clerk Kimberly Zapata was charged with misconduct in office and fraud for obtaining fake absentee ballots.
A month prior, she had ordered three military absentee ballots using fake names and sent the ballots to a Republican lawmaker, an effort she reportedly described as an attempt to expose flaws in the election system. Zapata said those events stemmed from a “complete emotional breakdown.” She was sentenced to one year of probation for election fraud.
“We didn’t hear as much from the right” about those charges, Woodall said.
More recently, the GOP has raised concerns about privacy screens — a curtain hung last November to block a staging area and, earlier this year, a room with frosted windows. Republicans seized on each, claiming the city was hiding something.
Paulina Gutiérrez, the city’s election director, told Votebeat the ballots temporarily kept behind the curtain “aren’t manipulated. They’re scanned and sent directly onto the floor,” where observers are free to watch the envelopes be opened and the ballots be counted.
But the accusations took off anyway. Even Johnson, the U.S. senator, suggested the city was “making sure NO ONE trusts their election counts.”
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
The U.S. Justice Department sued three states and the District of Columbia on Thursday for not turning over requested voter information to the Trump administration.
Senators and two current representatives seeking Senate seats in 2026 have been touring the state to highlight affordability and the effects of Republican policy choices, including tariffs and cuts to health care at the federal level. Senate Minority Leader Dianne Hesselbein, second from left, listens as Christmas Tree farm operator Lance Jensen discusses his business with Hesselbein and Sens. Sarah Keyeski and Melissa Ratcliff, during a visit to Jensen's farm on Dec. 8. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)
Senate Minority Leader Dianne Hesselbein told the Wisconsin Examiner in a year-end interview that while she may have had a seat at the budget negotiating table this year, the Legislature still hasn’t engaged in as much bipartisan work as she had hoped.
Democratic lawmakers entered this year with bolstered numbers under new voting maps, but still in the minority. The closely divided partisan breakdown in the Senate — 15 Democrats and 18 Republicans — led to Republicans scrapping their plans to cut the University of Wisconsin budget and providing additional funding for K-12 schools, in budget negotiations with Democratic Gov. Tony Evers where Hesselbein had a seat at the negotiating table. But the current session still hasn’t matched up to Hesselbein’s “really high hopes at the beginning of the session that we were going to be able to do some really good bipartisan work.”
Hesselbein noted that at the start of the session, lawmakers introduced three bills she thought were “really strong.”
“Unfortunately, Republicans are refusing to work with us on those issues,” Hesselbein said. “I am hopeful that they will go spend time with their families back home over the holidays, and they will realize that we can still get a lot of great things done for the state of Wisconsin in the spring.”
One bill would provide school breakfast and lunch to students at no cost, another would make several policy changes aimed at helping bring down the costs of prescription drugs and the final one would expand the homestead tax credit to provide additional relief to low-income homeowners and renters.
Hesselbein said the “Healthy Schools Meals” legislation would help “every single kid, make sure they get a good nutritious lunch at school” and help “save the average family like $1800 a year on grocery costs.” She said the prescription drug legislation would help prevent more people from “choosing to cut their medicine in half” due to costs and the tax credit would help people stay in their homes longer.
“These were three really common-sense bills. I still really think they are, and all we needed was two Senate Republicans to help us get these bills across the finish line and show that they care about the people of the state of Wisconsin and that they want to do some bipartisan work,” Hesselbein said. “Unfortunately, they weren’t interested in doing that work with us, and they don’t have a plan to help people with the rising costs in the state of Wisconsin.”
Hesselbein said that passing helpful legislation, including the three bills she mentioned, could mitigate the upheaval of President Donald Trump’s administration.
“There’s so much chaos and confusion happening with the Trump administration that sometimes it’s hard to keep track of it day to day,” she said. “…What we can do as legislators in the state of Wisconsin is pass bills that actually help people.”
Hesselbein said Senate Democrats continue to have conversations with Republicans in the hopes that they can get more legislation passed. One pressing concern is the Knowles-Nelson stewardship program which, without legislative action, will sunset early in 2026.
“We’re very worried about that happening, so our doors are open to any ideas they have,” Hesselbein said of her Republican colleagues, adding that she hopes a bill authored by Sen. Jodi Habush-Sinykin (D-Whitefish Bay) can move forward.
Hesselbein noted that the stewardship program, which was created in 1989 to fund land conservation in Wisconsin, has bipartisan roots. It is named after former Republican Gov. Warren Knowles and former Democratic Gov. Gaylord Nelson and was signed into law by Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson.
“This has never been a partisan issue,” Hesselbein said, noting that the program is popular with people across Wisconsin who love the outdoors, “whether they’re going hiking or they’re fishing, or they’re hunting.”
Hesselbein also said she is hopeful that the bill she coauthored, which would bolster education on menopause and perimenopause, will advance. It received a public hearing in the Senate earlier this year.
Wisconsin Senate is the ‘most flippable’ in 2026
Next year will be a definitive election year in Wisconsin with control of the Senate, Assembly and governor’s office up for grabs.
Hesselbein said she believes that the Wisconsin State Senate is “the most flippable chamber” in the United States — and Democrats are working hard towards that goal. Wisconsin’s 17 odd-numbered Senate districts are up for reelections in 2026. It’s the first time new legislative maps adopted in 2024 that reflect the 50/50 partisan divide in the state will be in effect for those districts.
Hesselbein said Democrats are focused on winning districts that previously went to former Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024, former President Joe Biden in 2020, Gov. Tony Evers in his two elections and to Mary Burke, who lost to former Gov. Scott Walker in 2014.
Two seats targeted by Democrats to flip are Senate District 5, which is currently held by Sen. Rob Hutton (R-Brookfield) and Senate District 17, which is currently held by Sen. Howard Marklein (R-Spring Green).
“Fair maps and great candidates matter, and we already have people on the field that are out there knocking on doors listening to voters today on a cold day in Wisconsin… We have people that want to be elected to do the right thing for the people in the state of Wisconsin,” Hesselbein said.
Democratic candidates in Wisconsin and nationwide are hammering a message about affordability. Through the State Senate Democratic Campaign Committee, senators and two current representatives seeking Senate seats in 2026 have been touring the state to highlight the effects of Republican policy choices, including tariffs and cuts to health care at the federal level. They also recently launched an ad titled “Aisle 5.”
The ad opens as a group of Democratic lawmakers, including Sen. Sarah Keyeski (D-Lodi), Sen. Brad Pfaff (D-Onalaska) and Hesselbein, declare: “Same groceries from the same store. Same people in power, calling the shots and driving the prices up.” The words “Senate Republicans” pop up on the screen. “My colleagues and I are fighting every single day against tariffs that make beef, eggs, and even cheese more expensive,” Hesselbein says. “But guess what? They don’t care. We can’t keep hoping they’re going to make the right choice because they’ve shown us they won’t.”
Hesselbein vowed in the interview with the Examiner that under Democratic control the Senate will have more floor sessions, be more transparent and “be actually doing the people’s work.”
“When Senate Democrats are fortunate enough to be the majority, we will continue to work with our Republican colleagues and get the best policies to help the people in the state of Wisconsin, especially when it comes to rising costs,” she told the Examiner.
Senate Democrats’ ability to pursue their agenda will not only rely on winning the majority, but will also depend on who wins the consequential gubernatorial race, though Hesselbein said she is prepared to work with whoever wins.
“I was able to work with a Republican governor when Scott Walker was there. I was able to pass some bills,” Hesselbein said. “I’m hoping we have a Democratic governor so we can finally start listening to the people of the state of Wisconsin and get things done because we’ve been waiting a long time.”
Hesselbein said she doesn’t plan to endorse anyone in the Democratic primary for governor.
Many of the candidates have legislative experience including state Sen. Kelda Roys (D-Madison) and state Rep. Francesca Hong (D-Madison) as well as Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, Milwaukee County Exec. David Crowley, former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes and former state Rep. Brett Hulsey. Other Democratic candidates include former Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation CEO Missy Hughes and former Department of Administration Sec. Joel Brennan.
“I have too many friends,” Hesselbein said of her decision not to make an endorsement. “I have been in caucus with some of them… They are really good people, and when the going got tough, they never ran from an argument or anything, so I’m really looking forward to seeing how that race shapes up.”
Hesselbein said she is looking forward to seeing each candidate’s platform and a “robust” discussion among them.
“What are the plans that they have for the state of Wisconsin? How do they see us addressing rising costs and affordability? What is their plan for K-12 education, higher education? For the environment and all the things that we’ve been hearing about for years that people in the state of Wisconsin want us to effectively address,” Hesselbein said.
A Wisconsin judge ruled Monday there is enough evidence to proceed to trial in a felony forgery case against an attorney and an aide to President Donald Trump for their role in the 2020 fake elector scheme.
Dane County Circuit Judge John Hyland ruled that there was probable cause to proceed with the 11 felony forgery charges against Jim Troupis, who was Trump’s campaign attorney in Wisconsin, and Mike Roman, Trump’s director of Election Day operations in 2020.
The preliminary hearing of a third person charged, former Trump attorney Ken Chesebro, was postponed amid questions about what statements the man made to prosecutors that could be admitted in court.
— Scott Bauer, The Associated Press
Original story:
Five years after the 2020 presidential election, state-led cases against individuals involved in “fake elector” plans to overturn that year’s election results in favor of President Donald Trump have hit roadblocks.
Just this fall, a judge in Michigan dismissed the state’s case against 15 people accused of falsely acting as electors to certify the presidential election for Trump in 2020. A Georgia prosecutor, who took over that state’s case in November after the district attorney was removed, dropped the charges against Trump and other people who were accused of 2020 election interference in the state.
But unlike Michigan and Georgia, Wisconsin’s criminal case has not faced such legal stumbles so far. A preliminary hearing in the criminal case against former Trump campaign attorneys Kenneth Chesebro and Jim Troupis and former campaign aide Michael Roman was held Monday morning in Dane County Circuit Court.
Legal experts said Wisconsin’s case at this point differs from those in Michigan and Georgia in key ways. There have been no major scandals so far, no changes have been made to people overseeing the case, and Wisconsin’s prosecution has a narrower focus than those in other states, said Lori Ringhand, a constitutional and election law professor at the University of Georgia School of Law.
“The prosecution isn’t of the electors,” Ringhand said. “It’s of the actual people, the very high-level Trump campaign people, attorneys who are accused of facilitating the entire scheme.”
Democratic Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul in June 2024 charged Chesebro, Troupis and Roman with 11 felony forgery counts each for generating documents that falsely claimed Trump won Wisconsin in 2020. The three men allegedly originated the fake electors plan in Wisconsin that spread to other swing states across the country with close vote margins between Trump and former President Joe Biden.
Wisconsin’s focus on Chesebro, Troupis and Roman could be a stronger case than if the state focused on the slate of false electors, Ringhand said. That’s because it’s hard to prove intent in the cases targeting just electors.
In the Michigan case, the Associated Press reported the judge in September said that the state failed to prove the electors had intended to commit fraud. A majority of the Wisconsin false electors said they did not believe their signatures certifying a Trump election in the state would be sent to Washington, D.C., according to an amended criminal complaint filed in December 2024.
“Against the electors themselves, I think it was going to be difficult to prove that they were intending to do something false or fraudulent, as opposed to just creating backup slates,” Ringhand said. “That evidence may look different with these people who are the very high-level organizers of the kind of nationwide effort to create these slates in order to perpetuate this narrative or create challenges or confusion on the House floor.”
The case in Georgia, which included Trump as a defendant, was marred by scandal as Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis was ultimately disqualified after news surfaced that she had a romantic relationship with a member of her prosecution team. That slowed the legal process, Ringhand said, and the new prosecutor saw challenges in the time delays and potentially prosecuting a sitting president.
While Wisconsin’s case hasn’t faced these obstacles, some could surface in the future, said Jeff Mandell, general counsel and co-founder of Law Forward. The organization filed a civil case against the state’s false electors, which was settled in 2023.
Assistant Attorney General Adrienne Blais, left, and Assistant Attorney General Jacob Corr, right, represent the state of Wisconsin as Jim Troupis, a GOP attorney and former judge, makes his initial appearance in court Dec. 12, 2024, at the Dane County Courthouse in Madison, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Mandell pointed out that it’s already taken the state a year and a half to just reach a preliminary hearing. The defendants this year have sought multiple times to dismiss the charges. Troupis, a former Dane County judge, last week requested all Dane County judges be prohibited from overseeing the case “to avoid the appearance of bias or impropriety.” Additionally, the Associated Press reported Friday that Wisconsin U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson asked the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate allegations from Troupis that the judge overseeing his case is guilty of misconduct.
More efforts to delay and “throw sand in the gears” could show up as the Wisconsin case advances, Mandell said.
“It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if one of the things the defendants have in mind is trying to make sure they don’t go to trial until after the 2026 election,” Mandell said. “Maybe they think there’s going to be a new attorney general who will drop the charge.”
Kaul is seeking reelection as attorney general next year. Fond du Lac County District Attorney Eric Toney, a Republican who ran against Kaul in 2022, announced in October his plan to challenge Kaul again in 2026.
Trump in November pardoned those involved in efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, including the three from Wisconsin still facing prosecution, but that action only protects those people from federal prosecutions.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
A judge has found the state presented enough evidence against Jim Troupis, who served as Trump’s Wisconsin attorney in the 2020 election, and Mike Roman, a 2020 campaign aide, for the criminal trial to go forward.
The Wisconsin Elections Commission on Thursday declined to send the state’s unredacted voter rolls to the federal government, joining more than a dozen states pushing back against disclosing sensitive voter information.
The commission’s move comes as the U.S. Department of Justice has asked all 50 states for their voter files — massive lists containing significant personal information on every voter in the country — claiming they are central to its mission of enforcing election law.
“The U.S. DOJ is simply asking the commission to do something that the commission is explicitly forbidden by Wisconsin law to do,” said Don Millis, a Republican appointee on the Wisconsin Elections Commission. “There’s a clear consensus that personally identifiable information is to be protected.”
While pieces of these lists are public, election officials typically redact voters’ Social Security numbers, driver’s license information and dates of birth before issuing them in response to records requests. The DOJ, in many cases, has asked for information not traditionally made public. That was also the case in Wisconsin: The DOJ requested voters’ partial Social Security numbers, license numbers and dates of birth.
The Wisconsin Elections Commission — which is made up of three Democrats and three Republicans — ultimately voted in closed session to send the DOJ a letter declining the request for unredacted voter information. Republican commissioner Bob Spindell appeared to be the only member in favor of cooperating with the federal government and said Wisconsin will likely face a lawsuit as a result of the commission’s choice.
The letter, signed by every commissioner except Spindell, says state law “explicitly prohibits” sending the unredacted voter list.
Officials in both Democratic and Republican states have pushed back on disclosing their voter rolls in response to these requests. On a podcast with conservative talk radio host Joe Pags, Assistant U.S. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said these states were refusing to cooperate because they were embarrassed that their voter rolls were not sufficiently cleared of inactive or unlawful registrants.
Rather, many states, like Colorado, have said the federal government isn’t entitled to unredacted voter information that could put voters at risk. The DOJ, they say, has not provided sufficient explanation for how the data will be used.
In early December, after receiving a memorandum of understanding similar to the one sent to Wisconsin, Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold told the DOJ to “take a hike,” adding that she “will not help Donald Trump undermine our elections.” The DOJ sued Griswold just over a week later.
All 50 states were asked to turn over their voting rolls, Dhillon said on the podcast: Four states have voluntarily cooperated, 12 are in negotiations, and 14 have been sued by the DOJ over their refusal.
Wisconsin election officials have repeatedly said that federal officials can obtain the publicly available, and therefore redacted, voter roll the same way anybody else can: by purchasing it online for $12,500.
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
A hearing in the felony case against a key figure in Wisconsin's false electors scheme will proceed Monday — even as allies of President Donald Trump have ramped up pressure to stall the proceeding.
Wisconsin politicians denounce the "billionaire loophole" that makes state elections so expensive, but they're still raising tons of cash. | Getty Images
Two high-profile candidates for governor of Wisconsin, Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany and Democratic former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, have denounced the unlimited flow of cash into state political campaigns. Then, practically in the same breath, both men announced their plans to raise tens of millions of dollars, signalling to their less well funded primary opponents that they might as well get out of the way.
In an interview with PBS Wisconsin on Dec. 5, Tiffany criticized “that pass-through loophole, I call it the ‘billionaire loophole,’” in Wisconsin law, adding, “there’s just so much money that comes into Wisconsin.”
“You can cry about it or you can compete,” Tiffany continued. “We choose to compete … We’re hoping to raise $40 million.”
As Baylor Spears reports, Tiffany actually voted for the “billionaire loophole” he now criticizes back when he was serving in the state Senate in 2015.
Mandela Barnes, in a recent campaign stop in Madison, told Spears and other reporters that he has raised a “strong haul,” in the first week of his campaign, and that he intends to raise a staggering $50 million by the end of the race. He added that he doesn’t like the role of money in politics. “It’s not a good sign,” he said, and his future goal is “to get big money out of politics” and enact “campaign and ethics reform.”
Back in 2015, when Republicans were ramming through the “billionaire loophole,” Barnes opposed it, saying at the time that it would allow “shady special interest money and allow for more corruption to go undetected and unprosecuted.”
Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause Wisconsin, remembers that moment well. Under former Republican Gov. Scott Walker, Republican legislative majorities passed the law eviscerating campaign finance limits along with other measures getting rid of the nonpartisan Government Accountability Board and eliminating the John Doe procedure that was used to criminally prosecute leaders of both political parties for campaign finance crimes in the infamous caucus scandal of the early 2000’s.
The 2015 law doubled the amount individuals could give to candidates. More importantly, it eliminated all limits on state party contributions to candidates and allowed coordination between candidates and outside groups that make issue ads supporting the campaigns. Donors were able to give as much as they wanted to political parties, which then funneled that money to candidates, creating the billionaire loophole to which Tiffany belatedly objects. The 2015 law cleared the way for outsiders like Elon Musk to pour limitless cash into state races to try to affect the outcome.
“The Republicans did that in 2015 because they were convinced that they would have a great financial advantage since they generally raised more money from donors and special interests,” says Heck. “Of course, what they didn’t anticipate was [former Wisconsin Democratic Party chair] Ben Wikler and the Democratic Party’s ability to take that big hole in the law and use it to raise massive amounts of money.”
Recently, Democrats in Wisconsin have been beating Republicans in the fundraising arms race. In 2025, in the most expensive judicial election in U.S. history, Susan Crawford, the candidate for the Wisconsin Supreme Court supported by the Democratic Party, raised $28.3 million compared with Republican-supported Brad Schimel, who raised $15.1 million. Outside special interests accounted for most of the spending on the race, with Musk alone putting in nearly $20 million through his political action committees and millions more laundered through the state Republican Party for Schimel, while the Democratic Party of Wisconsin funneled $10 million to Crawford.
The lesson of the 2015 law, says Heck, is, “be careful what you wish for.”
That certainly applies to Republicans, who lost the two most expensive state Supreme Court races in history as well as the last two record-breaking gubernatorial races won by Gov. Tony Evers with $93 million in total spending in 2018 and $164 million in 2022.
But it also applies to Democrats, who cannot count on continually bringing in more money than Republicans.
More importantly, when it costs tens of millions of dollars to win state elections, regular voters’ voices are drowned out by billionaires, who are not investing in candidates just out of the goodness of their hearts.
Heck believes that change will only come when voters demand reform, most likely because a big scandal clearly illustrates that politicians are doing favors for their donors in exchange for campaign cash.
“It’s going to require a bipartisan coming-together to establish some limits,” Heck says.
Even as the U.S. Supreme Court has opened the floodgate for campaign spending with the Citizens United decision, which in 2010 struck down a federal ban on political donations from corporations, and McCutcheon v. FEC, which in 2014 found that annual caps on total political donations from one person are unconstitutional, states have the ability to impose limits.
A report by the National Conference of State Legislatures shows Wisconsin is one of only 11 states that allow unlimited candidate contributions by state parties and among the top 10 for the highest limits on PAC contributions to candidates. Minnesota, Michigan, Illinois and most other states limit how much political parties can accept, which reduces the Elon Musk effect. Plus, “We are one of few states that allows so-called coordination between political candidates and outside groups,” Heck says.
The problem is that candidates, while acknowledging that massive amounts of money fueling their campaigns is a bad look, don’t want to unilaterally disarm.
But now, as the Trump administration drags the country to new levels of overt corruption, it could be a good time for a campaign that ties together billionaires’ destructive influence on society and the fact that they are buying our democracy.
“There has to be public disgust with the amount of money being spent,” says Heck. “If a candidate put corruption front and center, it might get a lot of traction.”
“Costs, like everything else, are out of control, and coming from a family that had to make every dollar count, I know what that feels like,” Joel Brennan said in his launch video. (Screenshot from campaign video)
Joel Brennan, formerly the Department of Administration (DOA) secretary under Gov. Tony Evers, announced his campaign for governor Thursday, saying that President Donald Trump’s “chaos and incompetence” are hurting the state and that “the numbers just aren’t adding up for Wisconsin families.”
“Costs, like everything else, are out of control, and coming from a family that had to make every dollar count, I know what that feels like,” Brennan said in his launch video. “I’ll be a governor who will stand up to Trump’s dysfunction and be laser focused on improving the lives of people across our state.”
In the video, Brennan introduces himself, saying many voters “probably don’t know much about me.” He talks about growing up as one of 11 children in a family that was “long on potential, although sometimes a little short on resources.” He relates that he worked in many jobs including landscaping, retail and deep frying egg rolls to help put himself through college and that his first car had no working blinkers.
“I’ve raised two great kids with my wife, Audra, passing on lessons like rolling up our sleeves to get things done and showing up for our community, and for 25 years I’ve worked with businesses and non-profits to create jobs and strengthen Wisconsin’s economy.”
Brennan served as the DOA secretary from 2019 through 2021. The agency is responsible for assisting the governor with the state budget, providing centralized purchasing and financial management for state agencies and working with the 11 federally recognized Native Nations in Wisconsin on gaming and coastal programs.
“It’s easy to forget how broken things were after [former Gov.] Scott Walker and his right-wing Legislature had spent eight years gutting state government,” Brennan said. “We got to work putting the state on firmer financial footing, generating a budget surplus of nearly $4 billion dollars and growing our rainy day fund to $1.7 billion, then COVID hit and all of that progress was put at risk. We stood up to the extremists and delivered help to tens of thousands of small businesses, farmers, and families across Wisconsin.”
Prior to his time in Evers’ administration, Brennan worked as the executive director of Discovery World, the largest science museum in Wisconsin.
Brennan stepped down from leading the DOA in December 2021 to serve as the president of the Greater Milwaukee Committee (GMC). The private-sector, nonprofit civic organization works to foster economic development and cultural growth in Wisconsin’s largest metro area.
Brennan joins a crowded field of hopefuls seeking the Democratic nomination next year. Candidates include Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, state Sen. Kelda Roys (D-Madison), state Rep. Francesca Hong (D-Madison), Milwaukee County Exec. David Crowley, former Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation CEO Missy Hughes, former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes and former state Rep. Brett Hulsey. The primary is scheduled for Aug. 11, 2026.
Roys criticized Brennan in a statement after his announcement over a position the GMC took on a Milwaukee Public Schools referendum last year, saying that Wisconsin needs “a leader who knows how to deliver higher wages, lower costs and the freedom to thrive.”
“While I look forward to a spirited primary, I will not be able to overlook the fact that only one of the candidates in this race tried to defeat a desperately needed referendum to fund our biggest school district,” Roys said.
The GMC, under Brennan’s leadership, was one of the city’s business organizations that opposed the $252 million operational referendum successfully sought by Milwaukee Public Schools in 2024. GMC expressed concerns at the time over transparency and the “failure to clearly articulate a measurable plan for how these additional financial resources will improve student outcomes.”
The Republican field for governor is not as expansive with just two candidates: U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, the frontrunner in the race, and Washington Co. Executive Josh Schoemann.
Wisconsin clerks say two decisions on legislation this week — a new law expanding towns’ ability to hire clerks and a veto that blocks broader standing to sue election officials — will help ease mounting pressure on local election offices, which have faced record turnover and increasing legal threats.
The new law allows small towns to more easily hire clerks who live outside of municipal limits, a change clerks say is urgently needed as finding small-town clerks has become harder in recent years amid increased scrutiny, new laws and ever-evolving rules. As the new law moved through the Legislature, some small towns ran elections with no clerks at all.
“There are lots of townships that will benefit from this,” said Marathon County Clerk Kim Trueblood, a Republican. “It’s going to help tremendously.”
In the past, towns with fewer than 2,500 residents had to hold a referendum to authorize appointing clerks instead of electing them. That took time, and the election requirement restricted who could serve, since elected clerks — unlike appointed clerks — must live within municipal boundaries.
The new law allows towns to switch to appointing clerks after a vote at a town meeting.
It also eliminates another hurdle: In the past, even if a town approved the switch, it couldn’t take effect until the end of a term. The law lets towns make the change immediately if the clerk position is vacant or becomes vacant.
That could be critical: Between 2020 and 2024, more than 700 of Wisconsin’s municipal clerks left their posts, the highest churn in the nation, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center. Trueblood said this proposal won’t be a complete fix to the clerk shortage but will go a long way toward easing it by allowing municipalities to recruit more broadly.
Likely beneficiaries of the new law include the town of Wausau, whose longtime clerk retired late last year. Town supervisors then appointed a town resident, who quit after two weeks, forcing supervisors to collectively assume the clerk’s duties for the April election.
In that election, the town put forth a referendum to permanently switch to appointing clerks, but voters rejected it by a narrow margin — something that Town Supervisor Sharon Hunter said was a matter of people not understanding why the measure was critical. The town also elected a clerk, but that same clerk quit in September and the town is once again without a clerk.
“There’s just a lot of different responsibilities,” Hunter said. “And I don’t think people realize that it’s not like in the olden days.”
Hunter added that she’s “very excited” about the new law.
“Elections are coming,” she said, “so we really need to find someone very quickly.”
Veto maintains high bar to appealing complaints
Clerks also welcomed Evers’ Friday veto of a bill that would have made it easier to sue election officials by expanding who has standing to appeal Wisconsin Elections Commission decisions in court.
The Democratic governor’s veto preserves a Wisconsin Supreme Court decision issued earlier this year that limits who can appeal WEC decisions to those who “suffer an injury to a legally recognized interest.” Republicans wrote the bill to expand standing to any eligible voters who file a complaint, regardless of whether they suffered harm — a change clerks warned would overwhelm election offices and the courts.
In his veto message, Evers echoed clerks’ concerns, saying the proposal would “open the floodgates to frivolous lawsuits that not only burden our courts, but our election systems as well.”
But Republicans said that despite clerks’ objections, the veto will make it difficult or even impossible to hold election officials accountable for breaking the law.
State Sen. Van Wanggaard, the Republican who wrote the bill, said it could stop a variety of complaints from going to court.
“The little guy gets screwed again,” he said in a statement. “This veto makes WEC an unanswerable body whose judgment can never be questioned by anyone.”
In the past, many lawsuits against clerks and other election officials began as administrative complaints filed with WEC before being appealed to court. Filing a complaint with the agency is the legally required first step for most election-related challenges, unless they are brought by district attorneys or the attorney general.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court decision that prompted the bill halted a lawsuit that challenged the legality of a mobile voting van in Racine. The court did not settle the underlying issue, instead dismissing the case because the liberals who hold a majority on the court determined the plaintiff had no standing.
Given the veto, that situation could recur, with legal questions about elections being left open because cases seeking to resolve them are ultimately dismissed over standing.
At the federal level, the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year heard oral arguments in an Illinois case over the legal standard political candidates must meet to challenge state election laws. A decision is pending.
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
Joel Brennan, former top cabinet official for Gov. Tony Evers, has joined the Democratic primary for governor, vowing to "stand up to Trump's dysfunction" and be "laser-focused" on improving peoples' lives if elected.
U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany has said his campaign is aiming to raise $40 million for the 2026 gubernatorial race. Tiffany delivers a speech at his launch event in Wausau in September. (Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner)
U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, the current frontrunner in the GOP gubernatorial primary, criticized the “billionaire loophole” that has led to record spending in statewide races in Wisconsin, even though he voted for the legislation that helped expand spending in 2015.
Tiffany has said his campaign is aiming to raise $40 million for the 2026 gubernatorial race. “We’ll see if we get there,” Tiffany said in an interview with PBS Wisconsin last week. “But, you know, Wisconsin, because of that pass-through loophole, I call it the billionaire loophole, there’s just so much money that comes into Wisconsin. But, you know, you can cry about it or you can compete. We choose to compete… We’re hoping to raise $40 million.”
Spending on Wisconsin statewide elections has grown substantially over the last decade in part because of an overhaul of the state’s campaign finance laws adopted in 2015 under the leadership of former Gov. Scott Walker and the Republican-led Legislature.
Republican lawmakers at the time argued that the changes to the campaign finance laws were necessary to align state law with U.S. Supreme Court decisions, including Citizens United v. FEC, which in 2010 struck down a nationwide ban on political donations from corporations, and McCutcheon v. FEC, which in 2014 found that annual caps on total political donations from one person are unconstitutional.
Under 2015 Wisconsin Act 117, Wisconsin lawmakers eliminated a state law that capped individual donations to all candidates and political committees in a single year at $10,000. Limits on contributions for each state and local office were increased and limits on contributions to party and legislative campaign committees were eliminated, creating a loophole that allowed unlimited money to flow through parties and committees into individual campaigns. The law eliminated restrictions on coordination between political parties and candidates and allowed for political parties and legislative campaign committees to make unlimited contributions to candidate committees.
The state law has become a topic of conversation again as the U.S. Supreme Court heard a case Tuesday challenging a federal law limiting the amount of money that political parties can spend in coordination with a candidate for office.
Tiffany has represented Wisconsin’s 7th Congressional District since 2020, but prior to that he served in the state Senate. As a state senator, Tiffany voted for AB 387, which later became Act 117, along with the other Senate Republicans. Only one Republican, former state Sen. Rob Cowles, voted against the measure.
Tiffany’s campaign has not responded to a request for comment about the vote and whether he wants to see changes to state campaign finance law.
At the time, advocacy groups and Democratic lawmakers warned the legislation would lead to obscene spending in Wisconsin elections. The Wisconsin Democracy Campaign warned in written testimony that the legislation would mean “billionaires and multimillionaires will have an outsized influence over who gets elected” and that political contests would “be less between candidates and more between tycoons.”
Spending in governors’ races was already growing following the U.S. Supreme Court decision and before the state law was adopted. In 2010, $37.37 million was spent on the governor’s race; in 2014, spending increased to $81.78 million. The increase in spending ballooned dramatically after the passage of the 2015 law.
A record-breaking $164 million was spent in 2022 on Wisconsin’s gubernatorial race. According to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, the cost represented a 77% increase from the previous $93.06 million record that was set in the 2018 governor’s race.
Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Mandela Barnes, who served in the Assembly in 2015, did not vote on the campaign spending bill, joining the rest of his Democratic Assembly colleagues who said it was a conflict of interest for lawmakers to rewrite the laws that govern their campaigns. He is the only Democratic candidate in the current crowded primary field who was in the Legislature at the time.
Barnes said in a press release in 2015 that he opposed the bill because Republicans rejected an amendment that would have delayed implementation until after the 2016 election cycle. He said Republicans “acted in blatant self-interest for their campaign committees by voting down my effort,” so he “recused myself from voting on ultimate passage of this outrageous proposal.”
Barnes also said then that with the legislation Republicans had “fully embraced the darkness of corruption by voting to rig the rules to line their own campaign pockets with shady special interest money and allow for more corruption to go undetected and unprosecuted.”
Barnes, a former lieutenant governor and U.S. Senate candidate, recently said he is aiming to raise $50 million over the course of the race, but at the same time criticized the escalation in campaign spending.
“It’s not a good sign for things. I wish that were not the case,” Barnes told reporters Monday. “The goal is to get big money out of politics. The goal is for campaign and ethics reform… We should be taking more steps to reduce the impact of money in politics.”
Other Democratic candidates include Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, Milwaukee Co. Exec. David Crowley, state Sen. Kelda Roys, state Rep. Francesca Hong, Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. CEO Missy Hughes and former state Rep. Brett Hulsey.
Washington County Executive Josh Schoemann is the only other Republican candidate currently in the race.
Barnes and Tiffany have not had to file campaign finance reports yet as they entered after the last deadline. Candidates’ next campaign finance filing deadline is Jan. 15, 2026. Those reports will cover July 1, 2025 through Dec. 31, 2025.
Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Mandela Barnes spoke with bike shop owner Mitch Pilon about rising costs under President Donald Trump and the effects of tariffs. (Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner)
Even with a crowded Democratic primary field, gubernatorial hopeful Mandela Barnes told reporters Monday that he is focusing his efforts on the Republican candidate he might face in November 2026 and he has raised a “strong haul” in the first week of his campaign.
Barnes, a former lieutenant governor and U.S. Senate candidate, visited Black Saddle Bike Shop (where he said he’s often had his bike serviced) on the North Side of Madison. The stop was part of Barnes’ “Wisconsin Way” tour, launched last week after he announced his campaign. He has joined a field of candidates in the Democratic primary that includes Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation Missy Hughes, state Sen. Kelda Roys (D-Madison), state Rep. Francesca Hong (D-Madison) and former state Rep. Brett Hulsey.
Barnes said his fundraising so far is “something that’ll make my mom proud,” though he wouldn’t expand on how much money he has raised. He said his goal will be to raise $50 million in the race overall, though he also criticized the need to raise so much.
Barnes noted that during Gov. Tony Evers’ successful second bid for the office, Evers spent around $42 million to defeat Republican businessman Tim Michels, who spent $28.48 million. A record-breaking $164 million was spent in 2022 on Wisconsin’s gubernatorial race.
“It’s not a good sign for things. I wish that were not the case. The goal is to get big money out of politics. The goal is for campaign and ethics reform,” Barnes said, adding that reform is needed at both the state and federal levels. “We should be taking more steps to reduce the impact of money in politics,” he said.
Barnes said the first week of the campaign has been exciting, and he has been trying to talk to as many people as possible. He spoke with bike shop owner Mitch Pilon about rising costs under President Donald Trump and the effects of tariffs.
“With an absence of support from the federal government, even if the state doesn’t have all the resources to make it better, at least staving off some of the worst from happening, I fully believe that’s a responsibility of state government,” he told Pilon, adding that he wants to help “tip the scales back into the favor of working people.”
Pilon, who opened the shop in February 2020, said making ends meet has been a challenge for him and his partner, who is a social worker.
“In Wisconsin, after 10 years, your student loans should be absolved, which they’re not going to be now, and she has a master’s degree… that’s $100,000 in debt at social worker’s compensation,” Pilon said. The Trump administration has sought to upend student loan forgiveness programs this year. “I own a small business. I work really hard… we can’t afford a house.”
“[Trump] promised to lower costs for people,” Barnes told reporters after the conversation. “He said he was going to bring back manufacturing to this country, specifically to this state. It hasn’t happened. As people continue to feel the pinch, tough decisions are being made.”
Barnes said he got into the race because of the urgency of those sorts of challenges.
“It’s a critical moment that calls for leadership. It calls for boldness, to not just take on the president, but to also offer real solutions for the problems that people are facing,” Barnes said. “So this is one of many small businesses that we’ll be showing up to… over the course of this campaign.”
Pilon also asked Barnes about one of the obstacles that his campaign will need to overcome — his failed challenge to U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson in 2022. Barnes has faced pushback to his campaign due to that loss.
“We lost the Senate race…” Pilon said. “How do you get over that? How do you rise above that?”
Barnes responded that he didn’t get into the race for “personal reasons.”
“I got into it because there was work that needed to be done,” Barnes said. “I don’t feel like the job is being done and, alright, that’s a wakeup call to go out there and raise my hand and do the job.”
“How do you change people’s minds?” Pilon asked.
“A lot of it is personal stories and experience,” Barnes said.
It has been rare for candidates in Wisconsin to succeed in winning a statewide race after an earlier loss. Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School poll, found in an analysis of previous governor and U.S. Senate election results that the last time a candidate won one of those statewide campaigns after losing a previous one was in the 1970s. Examples of failed second chances include Tom Barrett, who lost bids for governor in 2010 and 2012, Tim Michels, who lost to Evers in 2022 after he lost a bid for the Senate in 2004, and Russ Feingold, who lost Senate races in 2010 and 2016.
Barnes is undeterred by the precedent.
“There’s a lot of history that would suggest I wouldn’t ever become lieutenant governor,” Barnes said in answer to a question about Franklin’s second-change analysis. “There’s also, you know, in terms of historical precedent, I don’t know that there is a precedent that suggests anybody on the Democratic or Republican side has a better chance of winning.”
Barnes ran for the Democratic lieutenant governor nomination in 2018 in a two-person race, going on to win on the same ticket as Gov. Tony Evers. He was elected and served as the state’s youngest and first Black lieutenant governor from 2019 to 2023.
Wisconsin’s gubernatorial race next year is wide open for the first time since 2010.
During the 2022 Senate race, Barnes became the Democratic nominee after other high-profile candidates dropped out weeks before the primary.
Barnes denied he helped push the other Democrats out of the race then. He also said primaries are good for democracy when asked whether he wants other candidates to coalesce around him.
“I think it should be a battle of ideas, whether it’s a large primary or not, but would never that’s never been my style to try to get anybody out of any race,” Barnes said. “As you know, from the way I got in, I showed up by challenging someone in a primary election, so it’d be very hypocritical of me to suggest anybody get out.”
Barnes previously served in the Wisconsin State Assembly for two terms from 2013 to 2017. He gave up his seat in the state Assembly in 2016 to challenge former State Sen. Lena Taylor (D-Milwaukee). He lost the primary by more than 11,000 votes.
Barnes said his campaign will be focused not just on unifying Democrats but on a “unifying message to defeat extremists and extremism.”
“It does not matter what your favorite ideology might be, there’s a place for you in this campaign because it is about improving quality of life for everybody,” Barnes said.
With about 10 months until the primary, Barnes said he’ll be focused on the Republican candidates in the race. U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany is the presumed frontrunner for the Republican nomination.
“This is about pointing out flaws and failures, and Tom Tiffany as he stands as the front runner, his failures and leadership, his decisions to go lock-step with the president who has made things worse for Wisconsin,” Barnes said. “Tom Tiffany didn’t go to Washington to make things better for us, and we shouldn’t expect him to improve things for us as governor.”
The primary election is scheduled for Aug. 11, 2026.
Reading Time: 10minutesClick here to read highlights from the series
A record $144.5 million was spent on Wisconsin’s 2025 Supreme Court election. That’s more than every state Supreme Court election in 2021-22 combined, and far more than the $45.6 million spent in 2000 on all state Supreme Court elections that caused court watchers to warn about “a new and ominous politics of judicial elections.”
Wisconsin’s two major political parties are now the largest donors to judicial candidates. The state has also seen an unprecedented level of out-of-state spending in recent years.
Wisconsin’s narrow political divide, hot-button political issues like abortion and collective bargaining, loose campaign finance laws, lax recusal rules for justices and even holding elections in the spring are all contributing to Wisconsin’s unique spending situation.
Wisconsin is one of 22 states that initially elect justices. The majority of states appoint them with some adding retention elections.
Public financing of elections has failed twice here, and the public remains strongly in favor of elections. Other states have found ways to combine merit selection or some other form of appointment vetting with retention elections to ensure justices are beholden to the law, rather than interest groups or political whims.
A quarter-century ago, the total cost of every state Supreme Court race in the country reached an unprecedented $45.6 million, prompting the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University to warn “a new and ominous politics of judicial elections” posed a “threat to fair and impartial justice.”
Yet in 2025, spending on one Wisconsin Supreme Court seat reached $144.5 million, even more than the $100.8 million spent on 68 state high court contests in the nation in 2021 and 2022.
At the same time, this state’s two major political parties have become the largest donors to the candidates for an officially nonpartisan office. And the last two justices elected in Wisconsin received most of their individual campaign contributions from outside the state.
State Supreme Court races have become everything they were never meant to be — highly partisan, astronomically expensive national political battles in which candidate ideologies overshadow qualifications for an office requiring them to “administer justice … faithfully and impartially.”
Several factors are driving the massive spending in Wisconsin, one of 22 states that elect justices rather than appoint them. The factors include:
Hot-button issues that turn on ideological control of the high court, such as abortion.
Wisconsin’s narrowly divided electorate, state government and court composition.
Campaign finance laws and federal court rulings that have loosened campaign finance limits.
Lax recusal rules for justices in cases involving their major political donors.
Electing justices in April, which grew out of an early desire for a nonpartisan judiciary.
Some of those factors have pushed up spending in high court races in other states into the eight-figure range, but only Wisconsin — the first to see nine-figure spending on a court contest — has them all.
“It’s the whole picture that makes us so obscene,” said Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause Wisconsin, which advocates for transparent and accountable government.
Voters could be in for more of the same, facing a high court election every spring for the next four years. And even if the 2026 race doesn’t break records, it’s shaping up to be another multimillion-dollar contest.
High costs for high courts
In Wisconsin, high court candidates in the 1990s typically spent around $250,000 each. The first million-dollar campaign featuring negative TV ads was in 1999, but the next year candidates pledged to run positive campaigns and it only cost $430,963.
Howard Schweber, professor emeritus of political science and legal studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, called those earlier races “gentlemanly” and “low-key affairs.”
But such spending exploded after Justice Louis Butler wrote a landmark 2005 product liability decision, holding that a lead paint poisoning victim could sue product manufacturers without proving which company was responsible.
Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce spent an estimated $2.2 million to elect conservative Annette Ziegler in 2007 and $1.8 million to help Michael Gableman unseat Butler the next year. Both races set state records at almost $6 million apiece.
Similar story lines have played out nationwide as big-money donors target court races to influence specific cases or issues, said Douglas Keith, deputy director of the judiciary program at the Brennan Center. In the latest Wisconsin election, Elon Musk spent $55.9 million to boost conservative Waukesha County Judge Brad Schimel, who lost to liberal Dane County Judge Susan Crawford. Musk’s Tesla Inc. was suing to overturn the state law prohibiting auto manufacturers from owning their dealerships, a key part of Tesla’s business model.
Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice-elect Susan Crawford celebrates her win against Waukesha County Circuit Court Judge Brad Schimel in the the spring election, April 1, 2025, in Madison, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Big spenders are rarely transparent about their agendas, instead pouring their money into television advertising with lurid accusations about how candidates handled criminal cases that have little connection to what the Supreme Court does.
Big donors are reinforcing a growing feeling among voters that “the court is just one more institution to obtain the policies that we (the voters) want,” said conservative former Justice Dan Kelly, who lost multimillion-dollar races in 2020 and 2023.
The stakes range all the way up to control of the White House. In 2020, President Donald Trump contested more than 220,000 absentee ballots from Milwaukee and Dane County. The state Supreme Court ruled 4-3 to toss the suit.
The 2020 presidential election was part of a nationwide record five times in 24 years that Wisconsin was decided by less than one percentage point. The same swing-state energy pumps up both sides in high court races — even though only two of the last 12 contested court elections were that close.
And while conservatives ruled the court for 15 years after Gableman’s election, their majority was never more than five of seven seats, meaning that a change in ideological control could be just one or two elections away. That’s one of the most common factors driving big-spending court elections nationwide, Keith said.
Parties crash in with cash
Wisconsin has tried to keep partisan politics out of court elections since its founding. The first state constitution prohibited electing judges at the same time as most other state officials, aiming to discourage parties from nominating judicial candidates.
Wisconsin is one of only four states that hold judicial elections in the spring or summer. Candidates in other states running in the fall are competing for donations with many other high-profile races, Keith noted.
Another major factor that has supercharged spending in Wisconsin came in 2015, when a Republican campaign finance overhaul allowed unlimited donations to political parties and unlimited contributions from parties to candidates.
Donations from state and local Republican parties jumped more than fivefold, from $75,926 in 2016 to $423,615 in 2018. After fundraising powerhouse Ben Wikler took over as state Democratic Party chair in 2019, state, local and national Democratic parties gave their preferred candidates $1.4 million in 2020, $9.9 million in 2023 and $11.8 million in 2025.
Together, the two major parties spent $34.9 million on officially nonpartisan Supreme Court races from 2007 through 2025, almost all of it in the last three campaigns. Democrats outspent Republicans nearly 2 to 1.
In February, the Marquette Law School Poll found 61% of Wisconsin voters believe party contributions reduce judicial independence, compared with 38% who think partisan support gives voters useful information about candidates.
Party contributions represent less than one-quarter of the $161.5 million that special interests spent on the last 12 Supreme Court races. Conservative organizations and business interests spent $80.2 million supporting conservative candidates, while progressive groups and unions spent $46.4 million backing liberal candidates.
For the entire 2007-2025 period, spending on so-called “issue ads” — which try to persuade voters without explicitly endorsing a candidate — totaled $40.2 million, $31.8 million for conservatives and $8.4 million for liberals.
Out-of-state donors didn’t play a major role in high court elections until relatively recently. From 2007 through 2018, most Supreme Court candidates received more than 90% of their individual donations from state residents, with Gableman being the biggest exception at 32%, according to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, a campaign finance watchdog.
But the out-of-state cash exploded for liberals after 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court allowed each state to regulate abortions.
Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewicz positioned herself as the abortion rights candidate and took in a record $3.6 million — 57% of individual contributions — from donors outside Wisconsin. Crawford, who had represented Planned Parenthood, received $14.6 million from out-of-state donors or 69% of her individual contributions.
Public financing fails
Wisconsin has tried and failed to stem the tide of judicial spending.
After the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1976 decision saying campaign spending limits violate the First Amendment, the Legislature enacted the nation’s most comprehensive public financing law. Taxpayers could check a box on their income tax returns to designate $1 of their taxes for public financing.
That system “worked extremely well for over a decade,” according to a 2002 analysis by the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. However, in 1986 the Legislature stopped adjusting maximum campaign grants for inflation. Taxpayer participation waned from 19.7% in 1979 to 5% in 2002.
After the record-spending 2007 campaign, all seven justices called for “realistic, meaningful public financing for Supreme Court elections.”
But the system Democrats passed in 2009 lasted for just one Supreme Court campaign before Republicans repealed it in 2011. New Mexico is now the only state funding judicial campaigns with taxpayer dollars.
State Sen. Kelda Roys, D-Madison, wants to revive the law, which she calls “really important to preserving judicial integrity.”
Roys, who is running for governor, said she’s considering amounts 10 times higher than what she called the “laughably low” original grants of $100,000 for primary candidates and $300,000 for general election candidates.
Conflict over conflicts of interest
Public financing doesn’t stop special interests from spending big on issue ads or through independent expenditures on ads that clearly state who they favor or oppose, but strict recusal rules for judges could disincentivize such expenditures.
After the 2007 and 2008 elections, justices fielded four petitions asking them to clarify recusal rules. The petitions from groups such as the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin urged the court to set thresholds for when donations or outside spending by a litigant or attorney would require a justice to recuse. Conversely, WMC and the Realtors Association called for rules that would not require justices to recuse based only on how much a litigant or attorney had spent supporting their campaigns.
The court voted 4-3 in 2010 to adopt verbatim the rules backed by WMC. Explaining the new rules, the court majority argued that disqualifying judges based on legal campaign donations “would create the impression that receipt of a contribution automatically impairs a judge’s integrity.”
By contrast, several states and the American Bar Association’s Model Code of Judicial Conduct “require judges to recuse when a party or a party’s lawyer have contributed more than a specific amount to a judge’s campaign.” A few other states call for recusal based on campaign contributions but don’t set a specific dollar limit.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court hearing room is seen Sept. 7, 2023, at the State Capitol in Madison, Wis. (Andy Manis for Wisconsin Watch)
In 2017, 54 retired judges petitioned the high court to toughen recusal rules. When the 2010 rules were adopted, the petition noted, the majority contended that direct donations were too small to influence justices because contributions were capped at $1,000 from individuals and political action committees. But the 2015 campaign finance law boosted the donation limits to $20,000 for individuals and $18,000 for PACs.
Similarly, the petition said, the 2010 majority had argued that judicial candidates couldn’t be held responsible for groups making independent expenditures and running issue ads because at the time they were legally barred from coordinating with those groups. But the 2015 law also loosened the coordination rules.
The retired judges wanted to require litigants and their attorneys to disclose their contributions to the judges hearing their cases at each level. Supreme Court justices would be required to recuse if they received contributions or benefited from outside spending of more than $10,000, with lower amounts for lower court judges.
But the Supreme Court rejected the petition on a 5-2 vote along ideological lines. Most of the conservative justices in the majority said they trusted judges to decide when to recuse.
The issue could be revived. Liberal Chief Justice Jill Karofsky said at a WisPolitics event in October she is committed to holding an “open” and “transparent” hearing about establishing new court recusal rules.
Alternatives to electing judges
In the current legal environment, holding down spending on Supreme Court campaigns could remain challenging as long as Wisconsin elects justices.
Not all of the other systems succeed in taking the politics out of choosing judges. The process of appointing federal judges is widely viewed as partisan, particularly for the U.S. Supreme Court. And even some retention elections have become multimillion-dollar contests, as activists try to change the ideological balance of state high courts.
However, 11 states have set up independent nonpartisan or bipartisan nominating commissions to choose justices by merit. Many other countries select judges through civil service systems. And 12 states use independent performance reviews of judges to help voters or appointing authorities decide whether judges should keep their jobs.
In 1940, Missouri voters approved an appointment system in which a nominating commission screens judicial applicants based on merit. The governor then chooses a judge from a list of potential nominees presented by the commission. Newly appointed judges typically serve a relatively short first term before facing voters in a yes-or-no retention election to keep their jobs for a longer second term.
Some form of commission-based gubernatorial appointment is now in place in 22 states.
Wisconsin is one of 10 states that don’t require their governors to consult a nominating commission or seek confirmation for a high court appointee.
Although 57% of all Wisconsin Supreme Court justices were first appointed by governors to fill vacancies, past efforts to switch to appointing justices faced pushback.
Former Justice Janine Geske said that she had long supported elections because they “made justices more human and someone who people can identify with.” But her perspective has changed.
“People are so sick of these terrible ads that relate to issues that the court doesn’t decide,” Geske said.
Geske said she leans toward appointment if nominees are screened by a bipartisan commission and if the governor must choose from the commission’s list.
Kelly, the former conservative justice, also said he supports appointment with Senate confirmation. Kelly said judges “must reject politics entirely” in their rulings, and appointment offers “much more protection against politics” than elections.
February’s Marquette poll found 90% support for continuing to elect justices, with relatively minor differences by party.
Nonpartisan or partisan elections?
Since 2000, all eight states with fully partisan elections have had million-dollar court contests, while only nine of the 13 states with nonpartisan elections — including Wisconsin — have had one.
In October, the Marquette poll found 56% of state voters thought high court races have become so partisan that candidates should run with party labels. Nearly two-thirds of Republicans backed the idea, with Democrats and independents almost evenly split.
After liberals won four of the last five Supreme Court races, Wisconsin Republican U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden called for moving all spring elections to the fall of even-numbered years.
Washington County Executive Josh Schoemann, a GOP gubernatorial candidate, is calling for shifting only the statewide contests for Supreme Court and superintendent of public instruction to fall and moving primaries for fall races from August to April.
Schoemann said he didn’t have a strong feeling about whether high court elections should remain nonpartisan, but he added, “Everybody acknowledges that they’re largely partisan races anyway. … Let’s be honest about what they are.”
To keep or not to keep
Most states with independent commissions skip the confirmation process and wait for voters to decide the justices’ future in retention elections. Altogether, 20 states use retention elections for at least some high court races.
As an alternative to incumbent justices facing voters the Brennan Center advocates for a single term of 14 to 18 years, and the State Bar of Wisconsin has called for a single 16-year term, compared with Wisconsin’s current 10-year terms.
Although no state restricts justices to a single long term, Rhode Island justices are appointed for life, like federal judges; Massachusetts and New Hampshire justices serve until mandatory retirement at 70; and Hawaii has an independent commission that decides whether to reappoint justices after an initial 10-year term.
Brennan Center data show four states with head-to-head judicial elections have escaped the national trend of high-spending races: Minnesota, Oregon, Idaho and North Dakota.
In Minnesota, candidates and their supporters spent just $637,011 to elect 10 justices from 2013 through 2022 — a period when Wisconsin candidates and their allies spent almost $33 million, according to the Brennan Center and the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.
Both states share a history of nonpartisan elections, but unlike Wisconsin, Minnesota elects justices in the fall for six-year terms, with no restrictions on how many seats can be on the ballot in the same election.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
Login
