The city of Madison on Monday appealed a ruling that allows it to be sued for monetary damages for disenfranchising nearly 200 voters in the 2024 election, arguing the decision would unrealistically require “error-free elections” and expose municipalities across the state to liability for mistakes.
The appeal comes after Dane County Circuit Court Judge David Conway’s Feb. 9 ruling that Madison could face potential financial liability for disenfranchising 193 voters whose absentee ballots were unintentionally left uncounted. Notably, the city did not specifically contest the judge’s rejection in that ruling of its earlier argument that absentee voting is merely a “privilege” under state law — a claim that would have shielded it from damages.
Instead, the appeal centers on who has the authority to enforce election laws and whether voters can sue for negligence. The city argues that such complaints must go first to the Wisconsin Elections Commission and asks higher courts to revisit a landmark 1866 case that allowed damages against election officials who deprive citizens of the right to vote.
“It is not difficult to imagine how the circuit court’s ruling may be perceived as an opportunity by partisan actors to influence the election,” attorneys for the city, former Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl and Deputy Clerk Jim Verbick wrote in the filing.
A permanent path to sue for damages over accidental election errors without going first through the commission could “chill the willingness of individuals to volunteer to assist with elections, and the willingness of voters to participate in the political process,” they wrote.
Madison asks court to revisit landmark voting case
Much of Madison’s appeal asks the court to revisit a key finding in the landmark 1866 case that secured the extension of the franchise to Black Wisconsinites, Gillespie v. Palmer. In that case, the court held that state law allows plaintiffs to sue election officials for damages if they “negligently deprive citizens of the right to vote.”
The case arose after Ezekiel Gillespie, a Black man, was turned away from the polls in 1865. While voters had ratified a measure extending the franchise to Black residents 16 years earlier, it went largely unenforced, as state officials still disputed whether the change was valid. Gillespie sued, and courts ultimately ruled in his favor, concluding in 1866 that Black Wisconsinites had been wrongfully disenfranchised for 17 years.
Although Gillespie was intentionally barred from voting, the court’s ruling established negligence — not just intentional misconduct — as a basis for disenfranchised voters to seek damages. The Dane County Circuit Court relied on that broader standard in allowing the Madison lawsuit to proceed.
Madison officials in their latest appeal argue the lower court misapplied the precedent. In their view, Gillespie was about protecting the right to cast a ballot — a right that they say isn’t disputed in this case. No election official in Madison denied that the 193 Madison voters had a right to vote, they wrote. Rather, they contend, the voters’ ballots were unintentionally left uncounted after being cast.
If Gillespie is extended under these circumstances, the defendants argue, Wisconsin would be the first state to allow “any voter whose ballot is accidentally uncounted a right to sue for monetary damages,” a premise that they say requires immediate review by higher courts given the impending 2026 midterms.
They also contend the 1866 ruling predates Wisconsin’s modern election system, and relying on “such an archaic interpretation of Constitutional rights in Wisconsin is grossly in error and requires intervention before the case proceeds further.”
Madison’s filing “seeks to erode the protections” guaranteed in Gillespie, said Scott Thompson, staff attorney for Law Forward, which filed the case. “This argument follows the city’s failed attempt to throw out this case by arguing that the right to vote does not protect absentee voters from disenfranchisement. The right to vote has value, and the voters the city of Madison disenfranchised look forward to having their day in court.”
Bryna Godar, a staff attorney at the University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative, clarified that a court wouldn’t need to overturn the historic Black voting rights case entirely to rule that it doesn’t apply in the lawsuit against Madison.
“You could potentially read that case in a more narrow way, as applying only to intentional deprivation of the right to vote, as opposed to negligence and deprivation,” she said, adding that it’s likely that only a higher court could reinterpret Gillespie in such a way.
Law Forward’s response to Madison’s appeal is due on March 9. Then the Madison-based District 4 Court of Appeals is expected to determine whether the appeal may move forward.
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.
Rep. Derrick Van Orden stands out among vulnerable House Republicans: He has not softened his rhetoric on President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement tactics, despite public outcry over the killings of two U.S. citizens in Minnesota.
The Wisconsin Republican, whose seat is one of Democrats’ targets in the 2026 midterms, supported an investigation into Alex Pretti’s killing, but said his “support for federal law enforcement” would remain “unwavering.”
Van Orden told NOTUS he is holding firm in his support for the Trump administration’s deportation efforts because of the crime committed by unauthorized immigrants.
He cited a video posted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement last week alongside the caption, “American citizens raped and murdered by those who have no right to be in our country.”
“That’s why I back ICE,” Van Orden said. “Watch that video, and then you would never ask me that question again.”
“If you can look at that thing and see all these people that have been brutally murdered and the families that have been destroyed because of these criminal, illegal aliens, and you’re willing to turn your back to it, that means you have an alternative purpose or an alternative objective,” Van Orden said.
Van Orden’s hard-line position in support of the president’s mass deportation agenda in one of this year’s most competitive races will test the Trump agenda in the very part of the country that helped secure the president a second term in the White House.
His district includes the farmland and exurbs of Minnesota’s Twin Cities, spanning Wisconsin’s border with Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois. Van Orden won by a margin of 2.8 percentage points in 2024. Trump won the district by more than 7 percentage points. In a midterm cycle that favors Democrats, and at a time voters are losing trust in Republicans’ immigration agenda, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report rates the race as a “toss up.”
“We’re not a border state. It’s not something that was on the agenda prior to Trump. And obviously, people like Derrick Van Orden have taken the most extreme possible positions on an issue that I’m not sure was top of mind for most Wisconsin voters,” said Charlie Sykes, a conservative political commentator and Wisconsin resident.
Van Orden has shown his MAGA bona fides through issues like immigration and trade, where he has defended the president’s actions.
He followed the administration’s lead, expressing support for body cameras on immigration officers, a reform that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said she would implement after Pretti was killed. Democrats want to standardize that policy in a DHS funding bill.
“It allows good cops to be good cops, and it holds police officers that may not be doing what they should do accountable publicly,” Van Orden said. “And that makes the force better, that makes the American population trust law enforcement more.”
He said he will await the results of a full investigation into Pretti’s death, but has laid the blame for the rise of political violence squarely with Democrats, as many in the administration and Trump’s circle have done.
“This is unfortunately true for many Democrats. They’re willing to put those American lives, throw them into the garbage can for political power, which means they have no business being in power,” Van Orden said.
There are issues where Van Orden has broken with the conservative mainstream. In January, he voted to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies to prevent coverage loss, though he is opposed to the program. He has advocated for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which he used as a child, though he voted for cuts to the program in the budget reconciliation bill.
Faced with a frustrated agricultural industry, Van Orden introduced a bill to create a path to temporary worker status for immigrant agricultural workers who self-deport and pay a fine. Wisconsin farms employ a large immigrant labor force.
“He has this interesting dichotomy of picking some of those softer issues that might appeal to independents and some others, versus his very strong pro-Trump issues where, obviously that’s going to settle well with the MAGA voters and the pro-Trump Republicans,” said independent political strategist Brandon Scholz, who formerly ran the Wisconsin Republican Party.
In contrast, other House Republicans facing heated reelection bids this year have moderated their positions on immigration enforcement, calling for a reassessment of the country’s immigration policy.
“Congress and the president need to embrace a new comprehensive national immigration policy that acknowledges Americans’ many legitimate concerns about how the government has conducted immigration policy,” Rep. Mike Lawler wrote for The New York Times.
Van Orden declined to comment on other Democratic demands for DHS reforms, which include a ban on masks and identification requirements for immigration agents, until the party funds the Transportation Security Administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Secret Service and the U.S. Coast Guard.
It is these nonimmigration agencies within DHS that Van Orden’s constituents are affected by during the partial government shutdown, which has left some without paychecks and blocked others from receiving their boating licenses to go out on the district’s many lakes, he said.
That message may work with his constituents, Scholz said. While Republican voters in Wisconsin may be concerned about immigration, the issue has not historically been top of mind for them.
“There are other issues for them that may be more critical to making a decision on what they’re going to do, i.e. economic issues,” Scholz said.
This story was produced andoriginally published by Wisconsin Watch and NOTUS, a publication from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Allbritton Journalism Institute.
Inside the mostly empty town hall in the town of Wausau on County Road Z last week, a handful of voters cast ballots in wooden booths for a school board race. The biggest question on the minds of local election officials wasn’t who would win — it was who would run elections next year.
After two clerks left within a year, longtime town supervisor Sharon Hunter stepped in because no one else would. Hunter’s term ends in April 2027. Nomination papers for a potential successor are due in January 2027, but local officials still don’t know who comes next.
“Sharon’s not going to do 29 years,” Deputy Clerk Amy Meyer said, referring to the long tenure of the clerk who resigned in late 2024, setting off the cascade of brief replacements.
Hunter, 72, laughed. “I’d be over 100 years old,” she said. “I don’t think you want me here with my walker.”
Hunter’s decision to step up in a town of 2,200 may seem insignificant. But Wisconsin’s election system — one of the most decentralized in the country — depends on people like her. The state requires each of its 1,850 municipalities to run its own elections. That means hundreds of local clerks are needed to keep the system running. By contrast, Texas, a state with nearly five times Wisconsin’s population, relies on county-level election offices and has about one-sixth as many local election officials.
That structure leaves Wisconsin unusually dependent on small-town clerks. Between 2020 and 2024, more than 700 municipal clerks here left their posts, the highest turnover by raw numbers in the nation. As rural communities age and fewer residents are willing or able to take on an increasingly complex job, replacing them has become harder — raising questions about how long the state’s hyper-local model can hold.
The system can absorb one vacancy. It strains under dozens. Elections get stitched together, paperwork piles up, and the quiet machinery of local government — licenses, payroll, meeting notices — shifts its weight onto whoever is left.
The town of Wausau municipal building is pictured Feb. 17, 2026. The town has had three clerks in the past year and struggled to keep the position filled until Sharon Hunter stepped in, giving up her vote as town supervisor. (Alexander Shur / Votebeat)
Meyer, 55, understands why people don’t want the job — she doesn’t want it either. Like her mother, she has worked elections in town for much of her adult life. She considered becoming clerk, but it wasn’t the right time. She doesn’t want residents coming to her house with ballots or questions, as they once did under the longtime clerk.
“There comes a point in the day where I want to turn my phone off,” Meyer said from the town hall, situated at the center of loosely stitched county roads dotted with ranch homes and small farms, some of them no longer in operation. “I don’t want to hear that your garbage didn’t get picked up, or your neighbor’s dog is barking,” she said. “I just don’t.”
In a small town, the clerk is often the first call for everything from election deadlines to everyday complaints — and the learning curve is steep.
“It’s going to take you practically the first year to learn everything,” Meyer said. “Now, we have somebody new in it, and we have spent half the term relearning.”
Older residents have long filled these roles, but clerks say the job has grown more demanding, with little added support. It is often thankless work for modest pay. In Wausau, the clerk earns about $27,000 a year with no benefits.
Even so, many residents remain committed to keeping elections at the town level. Hunter said preserving local control was her biggest reason for stepping in, though she has not decided whether to seek another term.
“But we do need to have someone coming after me,” she said. “Because I am old.”
In an aging town, succession is unclear
The rural town of Wausau sits just east of the city of Wausau, a community of about 40,000 that began as a logging town in the 1830s and now centers on manufacturing and a burgeoning ginseng farming industry. As the city has grown, the town has increasingly become a bedroom community, as its lower property taxes attract commuters. A handful of farms remain, but the town is less agricultural than it once was.
Its population is slowly growing — and steadily aging. That’s because retirees also make up a large and growing share of the town’s residents. Its median age has climbed by roughly a decade since 2000 and now hovers around 50 — a decade older than the statewide average. The town still must run elections, issue licenses and post meeting notices. What’s less certain is who will do it.
Here, as in many communities nationwide, the responsibility will likely fall to older residents. Nationally, nearly 70% of chief election officials are 50 or older, according to the Elections & Voting Information Center. In Wisconsin, that share climbs to almost 80%, with the oldest officials concentrated in the smallest jurisdictions.
One poll worker, knitting pink yarn during a lull between voters, said at 71 she was too old to take on the clerk’s job. She had encouraged a younger neighbor to consider it, she said, but the woman had just given birth.
Wausau’s shift reflects a broader reality in rural Wisconsin: The state built a system that depends on hundreds of small-town clerks and their deputies — a structure rooted in an era when farms were multigenerational, churches were full, and civic roles widely shared. That foundation is thinning. About a quarter of Wisconsin’s farms closed between 2002 and 2022, and churches are aging and shrinking. Volunteer fire departments and other local services report persistent staffing shortages.
There is no sweeping rural exodus. Rural counties are mostly growing, largely because retirees are staying or moving in. Wisconsin’s population is projected to age most rapidly in its rural communities, according to UW-Madison’s Applied Population Lab.
Voter check-in materials sit on a table during a school board election that affected only part of the town of Wausau. Turnout remained slow throughout the day. (Alexander Shur / Votebeat)
Originally from nearby Birnamwood, Hunter moved to the town of Wausau in the 1970s and has worked in public service ever since. For four decades, she wrote federal grants and helped low-income youth map out their futures through the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.
Her entry into town government came by accident. Upset over a town decision to pave the ends of some residents’ driveways, but not hers or her neighbors’, she ran for town treasurer. What began as frustration became a career: She spent 10 years as treasurer and two decades as a supervisor.
Her path shifted again after the former town clerk, Cindy Worden, retired after 30 years on the job. Supervisors appointed a replacement, but she left after two weeks because of a terminal cancer diagnosis. The next clerk resigned within months, overwhelmed by balancing the duties with a full-time job and raising a family.
As the town searched for a clerk, Hunter and fellow supervisor Steve Buntin, a retired auto mechanic, filled in. Supervisors listed the job on Facebook and the town website. Potential candidates declined. Some didn’t want the scrutiny of elections, and others resisted the administrative grind.
At one point, county officials offered to step in to run elections and charge about $1,000 per election. That was Hunter’s turning point, though stepping into the role meant giving up her vote on the town board — a sacrifice she did not take lightly.
“After you start, you kind of get hooked,” Hunter said. The residents might be “ornery most of the time,” but helping them navigate difficult choices is public service. “It’s in your blood.”
She can return to being a supervisor if someone else steps up as clerk, but, as Buntin put it, “nobody seems to be knocking down the door.”
Last April, the town asked voters to allow clerks to be appointed rather than elected, which would have permitted hiring someone from outside town limits. The referendum failed narrowly. A new state law has since made it easier for small municipalities to switch to appointments, but the town has yet to make the jump.
“You still have to have somebody come forward who wants to be a clerk,” Meyer said. “Just because the state law changed doesn’t make it all that easy.”
Clerks are hard to recruit, and harder to retain
Wausau sits in Marathon County, home to about 130,000 people. To run elections for that population, the county depends on roughly 60 municipal clerks — one in each city, village and town — layered beneath its elected county clerk. In most similarly sized counties elsewhere, such as St. Joseph County, Indiana, or Frederick County, Maryland, a single county office oversees elections for everyone.
There’s little appetite to abandon Wisconsin’s structure. Local clerks argue decentralization limits errors and keeps elections in familiar hands. But filling dozens of posts — and keeping them filled — is no easy task. Of the 13 new municipal clerks who have taken office in Marathon County since the April 2025 election, including Hunter, four resigned within months, County Clerk Kim Trueblood said. Since then, a fifth clerk — in the city of Wausau — has also stepped down.
Trueblood attributes part of the churn to recruitment practices that understate the job. Town and village chairs often approach potential clerks by describing the work as little more than taking meeting minutes.
“Then they get into a job, and it’s the elections, it’s all of the financial reporting, the liquor licenses, everything that they have to do — it’s just overwhelming,” she said. “And people who work a full-time job and have families, I don’t know how they do it.”
The pay rarely offsets the demands. In the town of Wausau, the clerk makes $27,628 per year plus a $1,000 mileage stipend, with no benefits. The job can require 10 to 20 hours a week — and far more around elections — covering everything from meeting notices and licenses to payroll and ballot administration.
Other municipalities in Marathon County pay far less. Kelley Blume, the clerk in the town of Marathon who’s also a deputy clerk for the county, earned just over $10,000 for her town role in 2025. During election seasons, she said, the hours stretch late into the night.
When she was first approached for the job about 10 years ago, she said town officials told her it would only be a couple of hours per week.
“It’s not a couple hours,” she said. “I feel bad for all of these new clerks that think it’s going to be easy.”
She is considering stepping down. The added responsibilities have grown heavier each year, she said, and she wants to spend more time with her children and grandchildren.
Waiting for the next name on the ballot
Hunter says she stepped in to preserve something she believes is worth protecting: the idea that elections should be run by people who know the roads and the names on the ballot, who know which farm sits beyond the bend and which houses were built last year. To her, local government isn’t an abstraction. It’s a neighbor answering the phone.
“I do feel local government is critical, and I would hate to see that be taken away from the residents,” Hunter said. “It’s important they have a voice, and it starts at their local government.”
She knows the structure is imperfect, but pride in local control runs deep here, even as the pool of residents willing to shoulder the work grows thinner. Ultimately, she said, the town may have to bend. Communities could share clerks or other services, even if that means loosening borders that have long felt fixed.
She’ll decide later this year whether to run again. If she doesn’t, she said, the town may take another vote on hiring clerks outside of town limits. In the meantime, she has no regrets about stepping up — even if nobody in town seems ready to follow her lead.
“It’s my civic duty,” she said.
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
The lawsuit details the state’s history of funding schools and the increasing reliance on property taxes through school referendums to try to keep up with costs. Education advocates call for state lawmakers to invest in schools at a Feb. 2025 rally organized by the Wisconsin Public Education Network. Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner.
A group of Wisconsin parents, students, teachers, school districts and education advocates are suing the Legislature over the current school funding formula, arguing that the system does not meet the state’s obligation to provide educational opportunities to all students as required by the state Constitution.
The suit was filed Monday evening in Eau Claire County Circuit Court by Madison-based nonprofit Law Forward and the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the state’s largest teachers union.
The plaintiffs in the suit are led by the Wisconsin Parent Teacher Association and include five school districts, including Adams-Friendship Area School District, School District of Beloit, Eau Claire Area School District, Green Bay Area Public School District, Necedah Area School District, the teachers union of each respective district, eight Wisconsinites including teachers, parents, students and community members, as well as the Wisconsin Public Education Network.
The lawsuit names the state Legislature, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester), Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu (R-Oostburg), and the Joint Finance Committee and its Republican and Democratic members.
Jeff Mandell, co-founder of Law Forward, told reporters during a press call Tuesday that schools have been doing their best to fully prepare students to be productive and active members of society but that the current funding system is making it almost impossible.
“These folks are not magicians. They are not Rumpelstiltskin. They cannot turn straw into gold, and we do not have what we need for our schools to thrive,” Mandell said.
Mandell noted that the Wisconsin Supreme Court has previously considered the way schools are funded in the 2000 case Vincent v. Voight.
The Supreme Court found in the Vincent v. Voight case, which was initiated by a group of Wisconsin students, parents, teachers, school districts, school board members, citizens and the WEAC president, that the state’s funding formula was constitutional.
The majority opinion indicated that the Legislature had articulated that an equal opportunity for a sound basic education is “the opportunity for students to be proficient in mathematics, science, reading and writing, geography and history, and for them to receive instruction in the arts and music, vocational training, social sciences, health, physical education and foreign language, in accordance with their age and aptitude.” The opinion also concluded that as long as “the Legislature is providing sufficient resources so that school districts offer students the equal opportunity for a sound basic education as required by the constitution, the state school finance system will pass constitutional muster.”
Mandell said that in the 25 years since the ruling “things have gotten considerably worse, and we are at a point where, for many districts … they are on the verge of crisis.”
The lawsuit lays out the difference between how Wisconsin schools were funded in the 1999-2000 school year versus the 2023-2024 school year. School funding 25 years ago was comprised of 53.7% state funds, 41.6% local funds and 4.7% federal funding; in 2023-24, the mix had changed to about 45% state, 43% local and 12% federal funding.
“The fault for this crisis lies not at the feet of students, parents, families, teachers, staff, administrators, school districts, or elected board members,” the lawsuit states. “The shortcomings of our public schools are directly traceable to the Legislature’s consistent failures to ensure adequate state funding of public schools and to legislate a rational school finance system that meets constitutional mandates.”
The lawsuit states that school districts across the state are “facing financial crisis” because of expiring federal funding and stagnating state dollars.
The suit also details the state’s history of funding schools and the increasing reliance on property taxes through school referendums to try to keep up with costs. It also details the ways that the state’s school choice program, which was launched in the 1990s and has grown exponentially over the years, has reduced funding for public schools.
Law Forward was at the helm of the 2024 lawsuit that ended with the Wisconsin Supreme Court declaring the state’s legislative maps an unconstitutional gerrymander and is in the process of challenging the state’s Congressional maps.
Mandell said the plaintiffs in the suit include a geographically diverse group to highlight how this is a statewide problem. He said it is possible that other districts will reach out about joining the case and they will “figure that out as we go.”
Joshua Miller, an Eau Claire Area School District parent, told reporters that “the dire need for adequate funding has been made clear to the lawmakers, but they have refused to hear our pleas”
“The situation is sad, absurd, and it’s infuriating,” he said. “Wisconsin’s current school finance system is broken and this lawsuit, which I am proud to join, would be a way for the courts to force legislators to make a new system that works and actually meets the needs of the students of Wisconsin.”
Tanya Kotlowski, a plaintiff in the case and superintendent for the Necedah Area School District, said her district is going to referendum for a third time this spring to help fund its operations. In April, the school district plans to ask voters to approve a four-year operational referendum that would provide a total of $5.8 million in order to maintain the district’s current level of educational programming as well as operate and maintain the district.
Kotolowski noted that she and other school leaders have spent a lot of time advocating on behalf of their schools to lawmakers for additional funding. During the recent state budget cycle, school funding was one of the top issues brought up by members of the public at listening sessions held by the budget committee.
“Despite all of those efforts, the funding system has not kept up with the needs of our children and the needs of our current realities,” she said. “Our local referendum, some would argue or could argue, has been 100% funding that mandated legal, constitutional obligation.”
According to the lawsuit, the Necedah Area School District has directed over $6.6 million — all of its operational referendum revenue — to its special education fund over the past eight years.
Kotlowski said her district has been underfunded by $13 million for special education costs over the last decade, and that if funding had kept pace with inflation, the district wouldn’t need to go to referendum this year.
Mandell said that referendum requests used to be fairly rare and used when a school district had large projects.
“What we’re seeing now is a system where school districts have no choice but to go to referendum regularly to try to fund basic operations to keep the lights on and to keep payroll flowing, and it’s really a tremendous problem,” Mandell said.
Referendum requests that allow schools to exceed state-imposed revenue caps through approval from voters became a part of Wisconsin’s school funding equation in the 1990s. Lawmakers implemented school revenue limit caps as part of an effort to control local property taxes.
The revenue limits used to be tied to inflation, but that was ended in the 2009-11 state budget, leaving increases up to the decisions of state lawmakers and the governor, who have not provided predictable increases budget to budget.
The recent state budget did not invest any additional state dollars into school general aid, in part because lawmakers were upset with Evers’ 400-year partial veto in the prior state budget. The partial veto extended a $325 per pupil school revenue limit increase from two years to four centuries, giving, schools the authority to bring in additional dollars from state funds or property tax hikes. Without the state providing additional funding, many schools have turned to raising property taxes using the school revenue authority to help support their operational costs.
“I understand there’s a big political debate about that veto, and about that mechanism, we don’t have a position on this. What we’re saying is that the school funding mechanism is not sufficient and is unconstitutional, even with that,” Mandell said.
The state budget did provide additional funding for special education reimbursement, but recent estimates show that the amount of funding will not be enough to provide reimbursement at the promised rates of 42% and 45%. Increasing special ed funding is part of ongoing negotiations between legislative leaders and Evers.
The lawsuit comes as the legislative session is coming to a close.
The state Assembly adjourned for the session last week and the Senate will wrap up next month, but the only bills with a chance of becoming law are those that have already passed the Assembly.
Even if a deal arises out of the current negotiations on property taxes and school funding, Mandell said the problem identified in the lawsuit will still exist. He noted that a proposal from Evers included $450 million towards school general aids — an amount that is $2 billion less than what schools would get if inflationary increases had continued in 2009. Mandell said Evers is not named in the suit because it is the Legislature that is chiefly responsible for appropriating funds.
“This is not a problem that arose overnight. It has developed over decades, and it’s not a problem that will be solved overnight,” Mandell said. “Any deal that the Legislature and the governor might reach… is not going to solve the problem.”
Mandell said that the plaintiffs in the lawsuit are not looking for the court to decide on a specific amount of money that the state should provide to schools, but instead want the court to “fully explain and delve into how the finance system works, what the needs are, and to make some of those decisions.”
The lawsuit asks the court for a judgement that declares the Legislature hasn’t fulfilled and cannot “shirk” its constitutional obligation to fund schools at a sufficiently high level to “ensure that every Wisconsin student has an equal opportunity to obtain a sound basic education that equips them for their roles as citizens and enables them to succeed economically and personally in a tuition free public school where the character of instruction is as uniform as practicable.” It calls for the current funding system to be ruled invalid.
The lawsuit calls for relief that will “establish a schedule that will enable the Court — in the absence of a superseding state law, adopted by the Legislature and signed by the governor in a timely fashion — to adopt and implement a new school finance system that meets all relevant state constitutional guarantees.”
Mandell said, however, that it likely won’t be up to the court to decide exactly how the state should fund schools.
“There are almost an infinite number of options for how the Legislature could do this, but what we’re asking the court to do is to look at it and say to the Legislature, not good enough…. then we do expect that the Legislature and the governor will do their jobs,” Mandell said.
Mandell said that ideally a ruling would give lawmakers the opportunity to make changes in the next budget cycle. The budget process will kick off again in January 2027, after the state’s fall elections which will determine the make-up of the Senate and Assembly as well as choosing a new governor.
If the Legislature and the governor don’t fix the problem, Mandell said, the court should step in again.
Republican lawmakers have heard farmers’ concerns about President Donald Trump’s tariff agenda. Their response? Short-term pain, long-term gain.
Farmers faced a shrunken export market and operating costs after Trump enforced steep tariffs on key trading partners and farm materials last year. In response, the Trump administration will begin disbursing a $12 billion bailout to farmers due to “unfair market disruptions” at the end of this month.
Republican lawmakers from Wisconsin, a major agricultural producer, acknowledge the 2025 to 2026 crop season challenges, which resulted in an estimated $34.6 billion in losses for the industry, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation. But they’re arguing that the success of specialty crops and rosier-than-expected economic indicators are evidence farmers can withstand any turmoil the tariffs have caused.
“Our farmers understand that we have to level the playing field. And how do you do that? You do that with these tariffs,” U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden said. “In order to get to the long term, you have to get through the short term, and that’s the reason that this money’s going back to people in the agriculture industry.”
A bipartisan group of agricultural experts said the Trump administration’s policies have “significantly damaged” the American farm economy in a letter to Senate Agriculture Committee leadership this month, as first reported by The New York Times.
“It is clear that the current Administration’s actions, along with Congressional inaction, have increased costs for farm inputs, disrupted overseas and domestic markets, denied agriculture its reliable labor pool, and defunded critical ag research and staffing,” they wrote.
Wisconsin agriculture experts told NOTUS the administration’s bailout is undesirable and insufficient to cover many farmers’ lost revenue this year.
“They don’t solve the long-run problem of higher input costs and low prices; they are a Band-Aid to get us through this short-term problem,” said Paul Mitchell, the director of the Renk Agribusiness Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Agriculture professor and economist Steven Deller, also of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, had a similar view.
“We’re hemorrhaging thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars, and they’re giving us pennies,” Deller said, adding that farmers want “fair markets” and a “level playing field.”
Republicans in the state, however, are standing behind the president’s agenda, pointing to the administration’s stated goal to boost the manufacturing industry through baseline tariff rates for all countries, reciprocal tariffs and tariffs on goods from Canada and Mexico.
“Wisconsin, at the end of the day, is going to benefit as we bring manufacturing back to the state,” said U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, the likely GOP nominee for governor.
He blamed the North American Free Trade Agreement for sending manufacturing companies packing for cheaper operations in China. Trump replaced NAFTA during his first term in office with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement — a deal Tiffany applauded.
Trump administration officials have defended tariffs in cable television appearances and in congressional hearings as key to transforming the American economy, even as some agricultural industries languish. At a Senate Banking Committee hearing earlier this month, Democratic Sen. Tina Smith of Minnesota pressed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on whether instability in the agricultural markets is a result of Trump’s tariff policies.
“It has nothing to do with the tariffs,” Bessent said.
Still, there are some signs the administration could be responsive to the backlash. The Trump administration is planning to roll back tariffs on some steel and aluminum goods due to concerns the tariffs are hurting consumers, the Financial Times reported.
The soybean industry is one of the hardest hit by tariffs, which temporarily cost farmers the U.S.’ largest soybean trading partner, China. Although China fulfilled its initial purchase agreement last month and has agreed to purchase tens of millions more metric tons over the next few years, American soybean producers withstood an unprecedented five consecutive months without purchases by China.
This story was produced and originally published by Wisconsin Watch and NOTUS, a publication from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Allbritton Journalism Institute.
The final days of the Wisconsin Legislature’s 2025-26 legislative session are near.
The Assembly gaveled out for what could be the chamber’s final session day Friday preceded by a dramatic 24 hours that included longtime Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, announcing his retirement and a concession from Vos to allow votes on bills to extend Medicaid funding for low-income mothers and require insurance companies to cover screenings for women at increased risk of breast cancer. The bills have stalled in the chamber for months.
Lawmakers could still return for a special session on tax cuts as negotiations continue with Republican leaders and Gov. Tony Evers. Democratic lawmakers and Evers have called on Republicans to continue work at the Capitol in Madison instead of turning to the campaign trail ahead of elections later this year. Evers this week also said he plans to call a special session in the coming months for lawmakers to act on a constitutional amendment to ban partisan gerrymandering.
The Senate will continue to meet in March.
Here’s a rundown of what is still being debated, what is heading to the governor and some of the key items to get signed into law this session.
What is still being discussed?
Tax cuts
The context: State leaders learned in January that Wisconsin has a projected $2.4 billion surplus. Evers at the start of the year called for bipartisan action on property tax cuts for Wisconsinites. Republicans have agreed with the idea that those funds should be returned to taxpayers. But both sides have yet to officially agree on how.
Republican arguments: In a letter to Evers on Feb. 16, Vos and Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu, R-Oostburg, said they would agree to Evers’ request for $200 million to boost the special education reimbursement rate and provide an additional $500 million to schools through the school levy tax credit. In return, Republican leaders wanted to see an income tax rebate in the form of $500 for individuals and $1,000 for married couples who filed their taxes in 2024, reducing state revenues by $1.5 billion. “We are trying to be bipartisan,” Vos told reporters after Evers said the proposal doesn’t balance what he wants to see for schools. “We accepted his number and actually went higher than he requested.”
Democratic arguments: Evers told WISN-12 that he would not sign the Republican plan Vos and LeMahieu sent him. He wants to see more money for schools, specifically general equalization aid, which are dollars that schools can use without as many constraints. The 2025-27 budget Evers signed last summer kept that aid flat from the previous year, which coupled with fixed revenue limit increases under Evers’ previous 400-year veto gives school districts more latitude to raise property taxes.
Latest action: Assembly Majority Leader Rep. Tyler August, R-Walworth, said Republicans are still intent that Evers should take the deal that was offered. “It checks a lot of boxes, if not all the boxes on the things he had previously asked for,” he said.
Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, takes questions from the press after Gov. Tony Evers’ State of the State address at the Wisconsin State Capitol on Tuesday, Feb. 17, 2026, in Madison, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Knowles-Nelson Stewardship
The context: In 2024, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled the Legislature’s top financial committee could not block the Department of Natural Resources spending for the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Fund that was created in 1989 for land preservation. Republicans did not reauthorize funds to keep the program going in the 2025-27 budget, which puts the fund on track to expire this summer. Bills led by Rep. Tony Kurtz, R-Wonewoc, and Sen. Patrick Testin, R-Stevens Point, would extend the program until 2028, but also pause the majority of land conservation projects for two years and require the DNR to study and inventory government-owned land for nature activities.
Republican arguments: Republicans blame the court’s decision for limiting legislative authority over how the dollars are spent. During a public hearing earlier this month, Testin said he understood the bills were imperfect but action was necessary. “If we do nothing, Knowles-Nelson Stewardship is dead,” Testin said.
Democratic arguments: Senate Democrats on Wednesday said stopping money for land conservation projects would essentially kill the program. Democrats had been participating in negotiations on the future of the fund, but the Republican proposal had only gotten “significantly worse.” “We cannot and will not support a bill this bad,” said Senate Minority Leader Dianne Hesselbein, D-Middleton. In September, Democrats introduced a proposal to reauthorize the program until 2032.
Latest action: The Senate was scheduled to vote on the bills during a floor session on Feb. 18, but removed the bills from its calendar. The bills already passed the Assembly in January. After Senate Democrats said they would not support the current proposal, Testin told WisPolitics he would have to drum up support from Senate Republicans to determine the fate of the fund.
Toxic forever chemicals (aka PFAS)
The context: Republican lawmakers and Evers in January announced they were optimistic about a deal on legislation about the cleanup of toxic forever chemicals referred to as PFAS. The 2023-25 state budget included $125 million for addressing PFAS contamination, but the Legislature’s finance committee has yet to release those funds to the Department of Natural Resources. In January, Evers and Republicans said bipartisan agreements so far included the release of the prior funds, protections for property owners who are not responsible for PFAS contamination and a grant program to help local governments with remediation projects.
Republican arguments: Republican Sen. Eric Wimberger, R-Gillett, has sought protections from the state’s spills law and financial penalties for “innocent landowners” who did not cause PFAS contaminations and seek help from the Department of Natural Resources.
Democratic arguments: The Environmental Protection Agency has previously issued health advisories on PFAS in drinking water. Evers in January argued that the state has a responsibility to provide safe and clean drinking water across Wisconsin.
Latest action: The Assembly passed the legislation, Assembly Bills 130 and 131, on 93-0 votes Friday evening. The Senate has yet to consider the bills, but Wimberger in a statement Thursday night said amendments in the Assembly “will help us get this vital legislation across the finish line in the Senate and signed into law by the Governor.”
Lawmakers listen as Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers delivers his final State of the State address at the Wisconsin State Capitol on Tuesday, Feb. 17, 2026, in Madison, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Online gambling
The context: Legal gambling in Wisconsin can only occur in-person on tribal properties, which means individuals who place online bets on mobile devices are technically violating the law. A proposal from August and Sen. Howard Marklein, R-Spring Green, would legalize online gambling if the server or device that a wager is placed on is located on tribal lands.
Supportive arguments: The bills from August and Marklein have bipartisan support. Lawmakers argue it provides clarity on what is legal in Wisconsin and protects consumers from unregulated websites.
Opposing arguments: The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty in a November memo argued that the bills would violate the Wisconsin Constitution and the federal Indian Gaming Act and provide a “race-based monopoly to Tribal gaming operations.”
Latest action: The Assembly passed the bill Thursday on a voice vote, meaning lawmakers didn’t record individual votes. It now heads to the Senate.
Funding for a public affairs network
The context: WisconsinEye, the nonprofit public affairs network that has filmed legislative proceedings since 2007, went dark in mid-December due to not raising the funds to operate this year. The Legislature previously approved a $10 million endowment that could only be accessed if WisconsinEye raised matching dollars equal to its request of state lawmakers. Legislative leaders approved $50,000 to bring WisconsinEye back in February, but the Assembly and Senate had opposing views of how to provide transparent viewing of legislative processes going forward.
Senate arguments: Senate Republicans specifically have been wary of providing funds to WisconsinEye and expressed frustrations at how the nonprofit spends its dollars. Senate Republicans proposed a bill that would seek bids for a potential public affairs network, which could go to WisconsinEye or another organization. “Maybe we are getting the best value currently with WisconsinEye, but we greatly don’t know,” LeMahieu told reporters this month.
Assembly arguments: Assembly Democrats and Republicans proposed a bill that would place the previously allocated matching dollars in a trust and direct earned interest to WisconsinEye. That could generate half a million dollars or more each year for an organization with a $900,000 annual budget. Assembly leaders said they wanted to ensure continued transparency at the Capitol.
Latest action: The Assembly earlier this month passed its bill 96-0 that would provide long-term funding support to WisconsinEye, but the Senate has yet to consider the bill. The Senate passed its bill on requesting bids for a public affairs network on Wednesday. The Assembly did not take up the Senate proposal before gaveling out for the year.
What is heading to Evers?
Postpartum Medicaid
Lead authors: Sen. Jesse James, R-Thorp/Rep. Patrick Snyder, R-Weston
What it does: The bill extends postpartum Medicaid coverage in Wisconsin for new moms from current law at 60 days to a full 12 months after childbirth.
The context: Wisconsin is just one of two states that have yet to extend postpartum Medicaid for new mothers for up to one year. The proposal has been brought up in the Legislature for years, but Vos has long been the roadblock for getting the bill across the finish line, often objecting to the idea as “expanding welfare.” “Anybody who’s in poverty in Wisconsin today already gets basically free health care through BadgerCare. If you are slightly above poverty level, you get basically free health care from the federal government through Obamacare,” Vos told reporters earlier this month. “So the idea of saying that we’re going to put more people onto the funding that the state pays for, as opposed to allowing them to stay on the funding that the federal government pays for, it doesn’t make any sense to me.”
How they voted: The Senate passed the bill on a 32-1 vote in April, with Sen. Chris Kapenga, R-Delafield, voting against. The Assembly voted 95-1 Thursday to send the bill to Evers’ desk, with Rep. Shae Sortwell, R-Two Rivers, as the lone vote against. Vos voted to pass the bill.
Dense breast cancer screenings
Lead authors: Sen. Rachael Cabral-Guevara, R-Fox Crossing/Rep. Cindi Duchow, R-town of Delafield
What it does: The bill requires health insurance policies to cover supplemental screenings for women who have dense breast tissue and are at an increased risk of breast cancer, eliminating out-of-pocket costs for things like MRIs and ultrasounds. The proposal has been referred to as “Gail’s Law,” after Gail Zeamer, a Wisconsin woman who regularly sought annual mammograms but was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer at age 47.
The context: The proposal has been stuck in the Assembly for months after near-unanimous passage in the Senate last year. Some Republicans had concerns about the bill being an insurance mandate. Vos told Isthmus in January that federal regulations might not make the bill necessary in Wisconsin, but ultimately allowed a vote on the Assembly floor.
How they voted: The Senate passed the bill in October on a 32-1 vote. The Assembly passed the bill Thursday on a 96-0 vote.
Key bills signed into law (outside the state budget)
Wisconsin Act 42 – Cellphone bans during school instructional time
Lead authors: Rep. Joel Kitchens, R-Sturgeon Bay/Cabral-Guevara
What it does: The law requires Wisconsin school boards to adopt policies that prohibit cellphone use during instructional time by July 1. By October districts must submit their policies to the Department of Public Instruction.
How they voted: The bill passed the Assembly along party lines in February 2025 and passed the Senate on a 29-4 vote in October.
When Evers signed the bill: October 2025.
Wisconsin Acts 11, 12 – Nuclear power summit and siting study
Lead authors: Sen. Julian Bradley, R-New Berlin/Rep. David Steffen, R-Howard
What it does: The laws created a board tasked with organizing a nuclear power summit in Madison and directed the Public Service Commission, which regulates utilities, to study new and existing locations for nuclear power and fusion generation in the state. In January, the Public Service Commission signed an agreement with UW-Madison’s Department of Nuclear Engineering and Engineering Physics to complete the siting study.
How they voted: The Senate passed and the Assembly passed the bill in June 2025 on a voice vote.
When Evers signed the bills: July 2025
Wisconsin Act 43 – Candidacy withdrawals for elections
Lead authors: Steffen/Sen. Van Wanggaard, R-Racine
What it does: The law gives Wisconsin candidates a path other than death to withdraw their name from election ballots. The bill was proposed in the wake of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s effort to withdraw his name from the ballot in Wisconsin after he exited the presidential race in 2024 and endorsed President Donald Trump.
How they voted: The Assembly passed the bill in June. The Senate approved the bill on a 19-14 vote in October.
When Evers signed the bill: October 2025
Wisconsin Act 48 – Making sextortion a crime
Lead authors: Snyder/James
What it does: The law makes sexual extortion a crime that bans threatening to injure another person’s property or reputation or threatening violence against someone to get them to participate in sexual conduct or share an intimate image of themselves. Lawmakers named the bill “Bradyn’s Law” after a 15-year-old in the D.C. Everest School District who became a victim of sextortion and died by suicide.
How they voted: The Senate passed and the Assembly passed the bill on a voice vote.
When Evers signed the bill: December 2025
Wisconsin Act 22 – Informed consent for pelvic exams for unconscious patients
Lead authors: Sen. Andre Jacque, R-New Franken/Rep. Joy Goeben, R-Hobart
What it does: The bill requires that written consent is obtained from a patient before medical professionals at a hospital perform a pelvic exam while that person is unconscious or under general anesthesia.
How they voted: The Senate and the Assembly passed the bill on a voice vote.
When Evers signed the bill: August 2025
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
There’s an election in Wisconsin on Tuesday, but don’t be alarmed if that comes as a surprise — in most places there isn’t much, if anything, on the ballot.
The Feb. 17 spring primary seeks to narrow down any contests where there are more than two candidates competing for a single seat ahead of the April 7 spring general election. With no statewide primaries on the ballot, voters will be tasked with narrowing down municipal, judicial and school board elections.
Voters can see what’s on their ballot by visiting myvote.wi.gov and entering their address.
The biggest statewide race this spring, the Wisconsin Supreme Court election, features only two candidates, appellate court judges Maria Lazar and Chris Taylor, so they won’t be on the primary ballot Tuesday. There are also dozens of school district property tax referendums on the April 7 ballot, but none on the primary ballot.
In Madison, voters will vote in the Dane County Circuit Court judge Branch 1 primary, choosing two candidates to contend on April 7 to replace current Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Susan Crawford. In Green Bay, residents will narrow down candidates for city council if their district includes more than two candidates. There are no primary elections in the city of Milwaukee, but neighboring municipalities may have elections.
Polls are open Tuesday from 7 a.m. until 8 p.m. Voters can register at the polls.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
It’s the last year of Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers’ final term, and activity at the Capitol since January reflects much of how the last eight years have gone with the Republican Legislature.
GOP lawmakers continue to send conservative bills to Evers’ desk for a likely veto. such as a proposal to allow people to seek legal action for injuries from gender transition procedures when they were a minor. Evers in January called for Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, to allow a bipartisan bill that would extend postpartum Medicaid to new moms to “finally” reach the governor’s desk, while Vos last week told reporters it wouldn’t advance.
As the political world turns to who might be Wisconsin’s next governor, Evers and Republicans are attempting to negotiate a tax cut in the wake of a projected $2.4 billion state surplus reported in January. The last time there was an open governor’s seat the state faced a multibillion-dollar deficit. Surpluses have been a regular feature of the last eight years of split government.
“There have been plenty of times in the last eight years where we have had a disagreement and we had a public argument with Gov. Evers,” Vos said last week. “I think there’s a long list of things where I think he’s just wrong on the issue. But on this one, considering the fact that he came out and sincerely said he wants to do something on property taxes. We feel the same. I don’t know why we wouldn’t negotiate in good faith to try to find something that can actually get across the finish line.”
Evers, who is not seeking reelection in 2026, will give his final State of the State address before the Legislature at 7 p.m. on Tuesday. Part of Evers’ legacy during his two terms as governor is his navigation of split government and the oftentimes contentious relationship between his administration and the legislative branch.
Asked to reflect on his own legacy, Evers highlighted for Wisconsin Watch three specific achievements: a deal that kept the Brewers in Milwaukee through 2050, a shared revenue deal that boosted state support for local municipalities and the replacement of heavily gerrymandered GOP maps with “fair maps.” But he also criticized the often contentious relationship with the Legislature.
“There’s something wrong when lawmakers are spending more time thinking of new and creative ways to circumvent the governor and the executive branch than working to address pressing challenges facing our state. So, for the last seven years, we’ve been hard at work to restore the separation of powers and hold the Legislature accountable to the will of the people that elected us,” Evers said in a statement to Wisconsin Watch. “My promise to the people of Wisconsin was — and is — that I will always work to do the right thing and get things done. Now, today, thanks in part to the fair maps we enacted, we’re seeing more collaboration and more compromise than seven years ago, and I believe most Wisconsinites would say that is a good thing because that is how government is supposed to work. So, while we haven’t agreed on 100 percent of the issues 100 percent of the time, I’m proud of the good bipartisan work we’ve accomplished together over the last seven years.”
Evers’ defeat of Republican Gov. Scott Walker in 2018 marked a change in the Legislature’s relationship with the governor’s office. For eight years prior, a Republican governor and Legislature meant conservative ideas — slashing the power of public sector unions, strict voter ID, concealed carry, corporate tax cuts — became law with ease. Evers, a moderate Democrat, became a check on that power.
Since then, and despite Evers’ frequent calls for bipartisanship, the governor and legislative Republicans have been engaged in a yearslong tug-of-war over their powers. It’s a relationship that has been marked by court cases, record-breaking numbers of gubernatorial vetoes and the Legislature advancing numerous constitutional amendments that don’t need Evers’ signature. While Evers has served as a check on far right legislation, Republicans have shrugged at Evers’ calls for special sessions on Democratic issues such as abortion rights and gun safety.
“I think the most telling was the 2020 COVID experience,” said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center and political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The state was facing a bunch of crises that year. … There were so many things the state needed to address and there was not a single bill passed in the Legislature and sent to his desk that year. Instead, the two branches were mostly pointing fingers at each other.”
Despite the partisan battles, every other year a compromise between the two sides has brought the biennial state budget across the finish line on schedule and with billions of dollars in unspent tax revenue that has shored up the state’s fiscal health.
“The governor is open to meeting with anybody to try and get things done,” said Rep. Christine Sinicki, D-Milwaukee, who was first elected to the Assembly in 1998.
His easygoing demeanor has helped that relationship with the Legislature, Sinicki said. Republicans seem to recognize that, too.
“When you talk to Gov. Evers, you realize he’s sincere,” Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu, R-Oostburg, told the audience at a recent WisPolitics event. “I think he’s a sincere person, but (there’s) obviously a lot of things we don’t necessarily agree on.”
Conflict and the courts
Several power disputes between Evers and the Legislature have ended up before the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which transitioned from a conservative to liberal majority during Evers’ two terms. They include:
In 2020, the court’s conservative majority sided with Republican lawmakers who challenged the Evers administration’s powers when the governor’s office extended the “Safer at Home” order during the coronavirus pandemic.
In late 2023, the court’s new liberal majority struck down the Republican legislative maps, ruling they were unconstitutional. Evers in 2024 signed the current maps into law.
In 2025, the liberal majority upheld the governor’s veto powers after Evers used his veto pen to raise school district revenue limits annually for the next 400 years.
Sen. Chris Kapenga, R-Delafield, is leading a constitutional amendment to prevent the governor from using veto powers to increase taxes or fees.
“The state Supreme Court has given the executive branch unprecedented power,” Kapenga said in a statement to Wisconsin Watch. “Nowhere is this more apparent than in the use of the partial veto pen.”
One of the other significant disagreements of the Evers era that reached the Supreme Court has been the oversight of administrative rules, or policy changes sought by executive agencies like the Department of Natural Resources.
Republicans have long criticized these policies as red tape for Wisconsin businesses. The 2018 lame duck legislation gave the Legislature the ability to delay the implementation of policies from state agencies, such as a ban on conversion therapy or updating surface water quality standards.
Evers sued the Legislature on the issue. In 2025, the Supreme Court’s liberal majority last summer ruled that a key legislative committee that oversees administrative rules could not block the Evers administration’s policies from going into effect. The Legislature is essentially in an advisory role now, said Rep. Adam Neylon, R-Pewaukee, one of the co-chairs of the Joint Committee on Review of Administrative Rules.
“I think that people are expecting more from an executive role or from the governor and it’s in some ways disrupted the balance of the co-equal branches of government,” Neylon said. “I think, especially a lot of the court decisions upholding the 400-year veto or Evers v. Marklein, which took away our oversight of the rulemaking process, I think we’re in an era now that the power has been slowly drifting into the executive and I think real people do feel that.”
The balance of power is a legitimate concern for the Legislature to have, but Republicans prior to the Supreme Court’s decision asserted control over the process in ways that often negatively affected public health issues, said Sen. Kelda Roys, D-Madison, one of the Democrats running for governor and a member of the administrative rules committee.
“The most important legacy is the court decision, Evers v. Marklein, that says, basically, the Legislature can’t be judge, jury and executioner,” Roys said.
What’s next
Whether the partisan battles of split government continue depends on where Wisconsin voters take the state during the 2026 elections later this year. Evers’ departure leaves an open governor’s race. New legislative maps and Democratic gains in both chambers in 2024 set up real competition for control of the Legislature in 2026.
A unified government with one-party control of the executive and legislative branches could bring a burst of new laws starting in 2027, Burden said.
But more split government conflicts are also possible, and none of the candidates for governor appears as interested in bipartisan negotiations as Evers, Burden said. Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany cleared the GOP primary field in January. Seven major Democrats are running for governor, including Roys, former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, former Department of Administration Secretary Joel Brennan, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, Madison state Rep. Francesca Hong, former Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. CEO Missy Hughes and Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez.
“He has a more conciliatory tone, I think, than Democrats would like to see,” Burden said. “So if we get divided government again next year in some form, whether it’s a Tiffany governorship or a Democratic governorship and the Legislature at least partly divided, I think the kind of stalemate that we’ve seen will continue and the option to go to the courts or to use constitutional amendments to get around the governor will still be a popular method.”
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
The Lyndon Baines Johnson Department of Education Building in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 25, 2024. (Photo by Shauneen Miranda/States Newsroom)
WASHINGTON — U.S. House Democrats on Wednesday rebuked ongoing efforts from President Donald Trump’s administration to dismantle the Department of Education, including moves to shift some of its core functions to other agencies.
Rep. Bobby Scott of Virginia — who hosted a spotlight forum alongside several colleagues — said “over and over again, the administration has circumvented the law to hamstring the future of public education without the consent of Congress or the American people.”
Scott, the top Democrat on the House Committee on Education and Workforce, brought in education advocates and legal voices pushing back against the administration’s ongoing attempts to axe the agency.
The lawmakers and witnesses expressed particular alarm over the administration’s six interagency agreements, or IAAs, announced with four other departments in November 2025 that transfer several of its responsibilities to those Cabinet-level agencies.
‘Illegal’ transfers
Ashley Harrington, senior policy counsel at the Legal Defense Fund, said that “while these agencies all provide important services for our nation, none of them are adequately prepared to take on the massive portfolio of programs that these interagency agreements strip from (the Education Department).”
Harrington, who previously served as a senior adviser at the department, pointed to a “lack” of institutional knowledge at the four departments compared with career employees at the Education Department who have gained expertise from spending decades running the affected programs.
Rachel Homer, director of Democracy 2025 and senior attorney at Democracy Forward, the legal advocacy group that is leading the ongoing case challenging the department’s dismantling efforts in federal court, pointed out that Congress creates and decides which agencies exist.
“Congress charges those agencies with performing certain functions, Congress determines the mission of those agencies, and the executive branch’s obligation is to carry that out, is to implement those laws faithfully,” said Homer, who previously served as chief of staff of the Office of the General Counsel at the department.
The advocacy group is representing a broad coalition in a legal challenge against the administration’s attempts to gut the agency.
That challenge, consolidated with a similar suit brought by Democratic attorneys general, was expanded in November in the wake of the interagency agreement announcement to include objections to those restructuring efforts.
“These transfers through the IAAs, they’re illegal,” Homer added. “That’s not what Congress has set up — that’s not how Congress has instructed the agencies to function.”
Mass layoffs, downsizing
Meanwhile, the administration’s attempts to wind down the department have also included mass layoffs initiated in March 2025 and a plan to dramatically downsize the agency ordered that same month. The U.S. Supreme Court temporarily greenlit these efforts in July.
Trump has sought to end the 46-year-old agency as part of his quest to send education “back to the states.” This effort comes while much of the oversight and funding of schools already occurs at the state and local levels.
“I know I don’t just speak for myself when I say I can’t believe we’re here having to actually defend the existence of the Department of Education,” said Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, ranking member of the House Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education.
“As Education committee members, we came here to work on improving education and opening doors of opportunity and addressing the civil rights disparities, but here we are having to defend the actual existence of the Department of Education,” the Oregon Democrat said.
Civil rights in the spotlight
Employees at the Office for Civil Rights — tasked with investigating civil rights complaints from students and families — were targeted in March as part of a broader Reduction in Force, or RIF, effort and put on paid administrative leave while legal challenges against the administration unfolded.
Though the agency moved to rescind the RIF against the OCR employees in early January while legal challenges proceeded, a Government Accountability Office report released earlier in February found that the Education Department spent between roughly $28.5 million and $38 million on the salaries and benefits of the hundreds of OCR employees who were not working between March and December 2025.
The government watchdog also found that despite the department resolving more than 7,000 of the over 9,000 discrimination complaints it received between March and September, roughly 90% of the resolved complaints were due to the department dismissing the complaint.
“We’re extremely concerned of what this means for OCR to actually uphold its statutorily defined duty of protecting the civil rights of students in schools, including the rights of Black students, other students of color, girls, women, students with disabilities and members that identify with the LGBTQI+ communities,” said Ray Li, a policy counsel at the Legal Defense Fund.
Li, who previously served as an attorney for OCR, called on Congress to ensure that the unit “remains in a functioning Department of Education” and not transferred to the Department of Justice or another agency.
He also urged Congress to provide “adequate funding for OCR” and to “play an important role in transparency, sending oversight request letters to get information on the quantity of complaints that are being received, the types of discrimination that they allege, how OCR is processing those complaints and what the basis of dismissals are.”
The Education Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
An absentee ballot drop box with updated signage in Madison following the Wisconsin Supreme Court's decision to allow the use of ballot drop boxes. (Wisconsin Examiner photo)
A Dane County judge on Monday denied a motion from the city of Madison to dismiss a lawsuit against the city over its loss of nearly 200 absentee ballots during the 2024 election.
Since misplacing and failing to count the ballots, Madison has been subjected to penalties from the Wisconsin Elections Commission and has hired a new city clerk. The lawsuit against the city was brought by a group of the voters whose ballots were not counted. The voters are represented by the voting rights focused firm Law Forward.
Madison’s defense against the lawsuit has sparked criticism from voting advocates across the state for diminishing the importance of the right to vote. The city had argued it could not be sued for losing the ballots because absentee voting is a “privilege” and not a constitutional right. A legislative policy statement adopted in 1985 states that “voting is a constitutional right,” but that “voting by absentee ballot is a privilege exercised wholly outside the traditional safeguards of the polling place.”
The lawsuit comes as Wisconsin election officials and Democrats have been defending absentee voting rights from Republican attacks for years. The argument by Madison officials drew criticism from a number of Democrats, including Gov. Tony Evers.
Dane County Judge David Conway wrote in his order denying Madison’s motion to dismiss that it wouldn’t make sense if the constitutional right to vote did not extend to absentee voting.
“Just because the absentee voting process is a privilege does not mean that those who legally utilize it do not exercise their constitutional right to vote,” he wrote. “Of course they do. Once a voter casts a valid absentee ballot that complies with the Legislature’s rules for utilizing the absentee process, the voter has exercised the same constitutional right to vote as someone who casts a valid in-person ballot at a polling place. And that right to vote would be a hollow protection if it did not also include the right to have one’s vote counted.”
Wisconsin’s Public Service Commission typically operates far from the spotlight, quietly regulating the utilities most residents only notice when the lights go out. But a wave of proposed energy-intensive data centers in Wisconsin is fueling wider public interest in the agency’s work.
“These are the three most important people in state government that nobody has ever heard of,” said Tom Content, executive director of the state Citizens Utility Board. “They are setting the state’s policy for its energy future.”
With six new data centers planned or under construction in Wisconsin, the commission must now decide how — or whether — Wisconsinites should pay to keep them running.
Balancing utility and ratepayer interests
The agency — more than a century old and among the first of its kind in the country — oversees Wisconsin’s utilities, both public and investor-owned. It balances two sometimes conflicting goals: the financial stability of utilities, without which the state’s grid could fall into disrepair, and fair treatment of utility customers. The commission’s roughly $39 million budget for the 2027 fiscal year primarily comes from fees paid by utilities, which pass those costs on to their customers.
The PSC isn’t always the decision maker on energy policy. State lawmakers can write rules for utilities for the PSC to enforce. But when state law leaves room for interpretation, the PSC is left to decide.
Most utilities under the PSC’s authority are municipal water and sewer services — the Milwaukee Water Works, for instance.
But many of the PSC’s highest-stakes decisions center on investor-owned utilities. Private gas and electrical utilities don’t compete for customers. As “regulated monopolies,” each is the sole provider in its portion of the state. The PSC acts as the regulator, approving rate hikes, bond issues and major construction projects.
The PSC also approves utilities’ “return on equity” — a profit margin factored into ratepayers’ bills. In Wisconsin, that rate typically runs around 10%.
Powering the data center boom
The PSC lacks a direct say in data center construction. But because data centers demand vast amounts of electricity, it decides how to distribute the costs of new infrastructure needed to power data centers.
The commission approved the construction of We Energies natural gas plants in Oak Creek in Milwaukee County and the town of Paris in Kenosha County in May 2025.
Both plants are part of We Energies’ more than $2 billion plan to expand its natural gas generation capacity to meet surging electricity demand largely driven by data centers. Planned data centers in Mount Pleasant and Port Washington alone are projected to expand service area electricity demand by 40% between 2026 and 2030.
Wisconsin has no precedent for handling such a surge in demand for electricity.
Now the commission is considering a We Energies proposal for a new payment structure for “very large customers” that could set the standard for allocating the costs of building and operating power plants needed to meet data center demands.
“Our proposed data center rate is considered by many people to be the gold standard, and one that could be a model for what others across the country use,” We Energies spokesperson Brendan Conway wrote in an email to Wisconsin Watch.
Barbed wire fence surrounds the former site of the We Energies Power Plant on Nov. 13, 2025, in Pleasant Prairie, Wis. It’s among several obsolete power plants Wisconsin ratepayers are still paying for, making some skeptical about a planned generation build out to meet expect energy demands of a data center boom. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
The Sierra Club is among several advocacy groups involved in the We Energies case as an “intervenor,” meaning it can question the utility and provide expert witnesses.
“What the PSC requires them to do will likely influence future decisions on large customer rates, which is why it’s so important that we get this right this time around,” said Cassie Steiner, a senior campaign coordinator with the Sierra Club’s Wisconsin chapter.
The PSC is also weighing an Alliant Energy proposal to establish a payment structure for Meta’s planned data center in Beaver Dam. Some critics argue Alliant Energy should propose a framework covering all data center customers rather than a one-off agreement.
At the heart of the debate: Should Wisconsin’s residential and industrial customers cover any of the costs of powering new data centers?
To answer that question, the PSC holds proceedings in which utilities and intervenors trade questions and answers about the risks and rewards of a utility’s proposal. The commission collects up to $542,000 from utilities to help intervenors pay attorneys and expert witnesses; utilities cover their own expenses. Utility customers ultimately pay for both sides through their electricity bills.
Not all intervenors are critics. Microsoft and data center developer Vantage have intervened in the We Energies case. The proposed payment structure reflects negotiations between the three companies that took place before We Energies filed its case before the PSC.
Utilities generally work closely with data center developers. Four of Wisconsin’s investor-owned utilities, including We Energies’ parent company, are founding members of the state’s Data Center Coalition, which says it aims “to ensure our state’s significant growth in data center development translates into sustainable economic benefits.” A data center boom is good business for utilities because they earn a return on any new infrastructure they build.
High-demand customers like Microsoft can also intervene and provide key data to inform PSC decisions.
In the We Energies case, details about Microsoft’s projected energy use for its southeast Wisconsin facilities are protected by an order that limits access to the PSC and other parties in the case.
The PSC needs the data to judge whether proposed arrangements — like granting data centers 100 megawatts of free electricity if they exceed the supply agreed to in their contracts — properly balance the interests of utilities and the public. Microsoft successfully moved to shield that information from public disclosure on the grounds that it could give competitors a window into their operations.
“Load forecasts are sensitive because they give competitors information about our business outlook and investment decisions,” a Microsoft spokesperson told Wisconsin Watch.
The sun sets as construction continues at Microsoft’s data center project on Nov. 13, 2025, in Mount Pleasant, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Alliant’s one-off payment structure case is subject to even greater access restrictions: Entire pages of the proposed contract between Alliant subsidiary Wisconsin Power and Light and Meta are redacted.
As the PSC considers the two cases, customers are still being billed in the same manner as large industrial customers — a payment structure not built for such high electricity demands. Critics of the We Energies proposal agree some alternative is needed.
“They would be better off recognizing that there are some potential harms to other customers even with the proposal they have out there,” said Brett Korte, a staff attorney with the advocacy group Clean Wisconsin.
In written testimony, We Energies Vice President and Treasurer Tony Reese wrote that the new payment structure must leave non-data center customers “no worse off” than under the status quo.
Parties that disagree with a PSC outcome can appeal in court. One such challenge reached the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2005, when the justices upheld the commission’s approval of a coal plant expansion in Oak Creek.
The commissioners
Unlike state Supreme Court justices, PSC commissioners are not elected. Governors appoint them to staggered six-year terms, subject to Senate confirmation. Gov. Tony Evers appointed all three current commissioners. Chairwoman Summer Strand has served on the commission since 2023; commissioners Kristy Nieto and Marcus Hawkins took their seats in 2024.
The commissioners are supported by a full-time staff of researchers, auditors, attorneys, accountants and a range of other specialists to inform their decisions. Nieto and Hawkins previously worked on the PSC’s staff.
Former commissioners occasionally land jobs with the utilities they once regulated. Six months after stepping down from the PSC in February 2024, commissioner Rebecca Valcq took a job with Alliant Energy — the parent company of Wisconsin Power and Light, which provides electricity for much of central and southern Wisconsin. She became the company’s president in 2025.
Moves like Valcq’s have drawn concerns from watchdogs about utilities’ influence over the agency built to regulate them. Wisconsin law bars ex-commissioners from testifying before the PSC for a year after leaving. State Rep. Amanda Nedweski, R-Pleasant Prairie, wants to extend that window, proposing a three-year “cooling off period” before ex-commissioners can take executive roles with utilities, enforced by the Wisconsin Ethics Commission.
“Historically, good-government reforms that rein in the influence of special interests tend to draw bipartisan support,” Nedweski wrote in an email — though she said she hasn’t yet secured any Democratic co-sponsors.
What’s next?
The PSC is set to hold its next hearing in the We Energies case on Tuesday, with room for residents and interest groups to weigh in.
Hanging over the finer details of the proposal is a larger question: What risks will ratepayers bear if the data center boom later goes bust?
“Of course no company is too big to fail,” Reese wrote last month. “But in the very unlikely event that a customer as massive and financially stable as Microsoft becomes unable to meet its financial obligations,” his company’s proposal promises “adequate protection” to the utility and customers.
“Making sure our customers aren’t stuck paying data centers’ costs is at the foundation of our customer protection plan,” We Energies spokesman Conway told Wisconsin Watch.
Considering that Wisconsin ratepayers still owe nearly $1 billion on “stranded assets” — power plants that have been shut down due to obsolescence — critics of the data center proposals are skeptical.
Will the utility’s proposed guardrails hold up in a worst case scenario? That’s now up to the PSC.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
SUPREME COSTS: This is a follow-up to a series of articles about how Wisconsin chooses its judges. Read the rest of the series here.
Click here to read highlights from the story
There have been two Appeals Court races since 2020 that cost more than $1 million, both in District 2, which covers counties in southeast Wisconsin outside of Milwaukee.
This year was shaping up to be another costly race, but one of the candidates filed improper paperwork and was kicked off the ballot.
The increased spending by outside groups and political parties is part of the same trend that has fueled record spending on the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
The Wisconsin Court of Appeals may be the least visible layer of the state judiciary.
Almost all of its work is behind the scenes. It doesn’t conduct the dramatic trials that can grab headlines in circuit courts. Its rulings in high-stakes cases are usually appealed to the state Supreme Court — if those cases don’t bypass the appellate court altogether.
But Wisconsin’s intermediate court does have one thing in common with the high court: increasingly expensive campaigns.
In recent years, spending on two Court of Appeals campaigns in the Waukesha-based District 2 exceeded the million-dollar mark — far short of the national record $144.5 million spent on the 2025 Supreme Court race, yet almost certainly unprecedented for Wisconsin appellate elections.
Now another seat is open in that same district, with the upcoming retirement of Presiding Judge Lisa Neubauer, the lone liberal among the district’s four jurists.
The race to replace Neubauer effectively ended Jan. 13, when the Wisconsin Elections Commission disqualified candidate Christine Hansen, an administrative law judge for the state Department of Corrections. Barring a write-in campaign, attorney Anthony LoCoco — known for his work with the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty and Institute for Reforming Government — will be unopposed in the officially nonpartisan April 7 election.
Hansen’s husband notarized her declaration of candidacy, which is against state law. On the recommendation of its staff, the bipartisan commission voted 5-1 to block her from the ballot.
A screenshot from Christine Hansen’s website for her candidacy for the Wisconsin Court of Appeals. She announced that she is formally ending her campaign because of an issue with her candidate filing. (hansenforjudge.com/)
Before Hansen was knocked out of the race, LoCoco was gearing up for a contest that could have reached the previous spending heights of 2021 and 2022. He raised $209,603 by Dec. 31, his campaign finance report shows.
Anthony LoCoco, a candidate for District 2 Appeals Court (Courtesy of LoCoco for Judge)
That’s four times as much as fellow conservative Maria Lazar raised by this point in her successful 2022 bid for another seat in the same district — and even more than Lazar raised last year in her current campaign for Supreme Court.
Of the 10 candidates in five contested Court of Appeals elections in the last decade, only Neubauer posted a bigger total on a January report: $231,264 for a 2020 reelection race that followed her narrow loss for Supreme Court in 2019.
In comparison, Hansen raised $50,000, all from her own pocket.
Lazar is facing liberal District 4 Appeals Court Judge Chris Taylor in the Supreme Court race to succeed conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley, who is not seeking reelection. If Lazar wins, conservatives would retain their three-justice minority on the seven-member high court — but Democratic Gov. Tony Evers could name a liberal to replace Lazar in District 2, maintaining its current 3-1 conservative-liberal split.
That district has become Wisconsin’s top appellate court battleground. Statewide, 44 of 53 appellate races were uncontested from 2008 through 2025, along with all three this spring. But five of the nine contested races were in District 2, and total spending in four of those contests topped half a million dollars each, including the two million-dollar campaigns. Spending was under $300,000 in the other five races, including one in which the two candidates spent less than $25,000 total.
Like the Supreme Court, the rising cost of some appellate court campaigns appears to be part of a nationwide trend, and for some of the same reasons: growing involvement of political parties and special interests, driven by hot-button issues and national polarization and fueled by Wisconsin’s narrow ideological divide and lax campaign finance laws.
But it also reflects a dynamic in which each of the four Court of Appeals districts has evolved into liberal or conservative turf, triggering a challenge whenever a governor fills a vacancy with a judge from the other side.
Quiet but powerful
The Court of Appeals didn’t exist for Wisconsin’s first 130 years. Until 1978, all appeals from trial courts went directly to the state Supreme Court, unlike the three-level federal system. Eight sparsely populated states still don’t have appellate courts.
Now, after a 1977 state constitutional amendment created the Court of Appeals, 16 appeals judges are elected for six-year terms, on a staggered schedule. Five judges sit in Madison-based District 4 — which covers 24 central and western counties and originally heard virtually all challenges to state laws — with four each in District 1 (consisting of Milwaukee County only) and District 2 (covering the other 12 counties in southeastern and east-central Wisconsin) and just three in the 35-county northern District 3, based in Wausau.
Those judges work in three-member panels for about three-quarters of their cases. Single judges handle the least complex appeals, such as small claims, misdemeanors and violations of traffic laws or municipal ordinances.
Contributing to the court’s low profile, appellate judges hear oral arguments in only about 1% of cases. More often, the judges focus on attorneys’ written briefs and lower court trial transcripts.
But in its quiet way, the Court of Appeals holds the final word on nearly all everyday cases. In 2024, civil litigants and criminal defendants filed 2,529 appeals in the appellate courts. They appealed 561 of the appellate judges’ decisions to the Supreme Court. However, the high court agreed to hear just 17 appeals, typically only those posing significant constitutional questions. In another six cases, the justices allowed the parties to bypass the appellate court altogether. That means more than 99% of cases appealed from circuit courts ended at the Court of Appeals.
With so few cases going to the high court, the stakes are rising in appellate court elections, former Supreme Court Justice Janine Geske said.
A bench divided
Running in nonpartisan elections, many Court of Appeals candidates were traditionally not viewed as liberal or conservative. But that has changed in recent years, mirroring the highly public divisions on the Supreme Court.
Of the 16 current Court of Appeals judges, eight were appointed to the appellate or circuit bench by Democratic governors, ran for the Supreme Court as liberals or ran for or won partisan office as Democrats. Another six were either former GOP Gov. Scott Walker’s appointees, ran for the appeals court as conservatives or held partisan office as Republicans.
Retiring Chief Judge Maxine White and Deputy Chief Judge Joe Donald were appointed to Milwaukee County Circuit Court by former GOP Gov. Tommy Thompson and to the District 2 bench by Evers, while District 4 Judge Jennifer Nashold held appointed offices under both Walker and former Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle. However, all are considered liberals. That means all judges in Districts 1 and 4 are liberals, while conservatives hold all District 3 seats. Only District 2 is ideologically split.
A pair of million-dollar Appeals Court races waged in suburban district
Total money spent for each competitive election by district, 2008 – 2026
District 1
District 2
District 3
District 4
$1.5 (million)
Total Spending (million dollars)
1
0.5
$0
2023
2008
2010
2020
2021
2022
2015
2021
2010
Source: Wisconsin Ethics Commission and OpenSecrets
Graphic by Hongyu Liu/Wisconsin Watch
A pair of million-dollar Appeals Court races waged in suburban district
Total money spent for each competitive election by district, 2008 – 2026
District
1
2
3
4
$1.5 (million)
Total Spending (million dollars)
1
0.5
$0
2008
2010
2021
2022
2015
2021
2010
2023
2020
Source: Wisconsin Ethics Commission and OpenSecrets
Graphic by Hongyu Liu/Wisconsin Watch
That distribution reflects the political composition of the districts, former Supreme Court Justice Dan Kelly said. All District 2 counties voted for Republicans in the 2024 presidential and 2022 gubernatorial elections, but liberals carried Kenosha and Winnebago counties in the last two Supreme Court races, plus Racine County in 2025.
While the divide among District 2 judges isn’t new, it didn’t initially draw political attention. After Doyle appointed Neubauer to fill a vacancy in 2008, ideology didn’t play a major role in her campaign for a full term later that year. She won that $641,259 contest against attorney William Gleisner, then was unopposed for reelection in 2014.
District 2 Presiding Judge Lisa Neubauer (Facebook.com)
It was only after Neubauer ran a liberal Supreme Court campaign against conservative District 2 colleague Brian Hagedorn in 2019 that she became a target of the right. She fended off a 2020 challenge from conservative Waukesha County Judge Paul Bugenhagen Jr. in a $589,037 campaign.
Challenges to another Democratic governor’s appointees soon followed. In 2021, Shelley Grogan, a Bradley aide and Muskego municipal judge, attacked her opponent, then-incumbent Jeff Davis, as a liberal appointed by Evers in 2019 — even though Davis had strong Republican ties and was endorsed by conservative Justice Annette Ziegler and former conservative justices Patience Roggensack and David Prosser.
Grogan — who was backed by Walker, Bradley, Kelly and Republican billionaires Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein and Diane Hendricks — defeated Davis in a $1.56 million campaign. Although the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign doesn’t track appellate court campaign spending the way it does Supreme Court races, the 2021 District 2 contest was likely the state’s most expensive.
In 2022, Lazar took down then-incumbent Lori Kornblum, who had been appointed by Evers earlier that year, in a $1.05 million contest.
Conversely, former Democratic Assembly candidate Sara Geenen scored a 2023 victory in a $299,717 District 1 campaign to unseat then-incumbent William Brash, a 2015 Walker appointee who had been unopposed for a full term in 2017. Geenen won by 37 percentage points, the widest margin of victory in the last nine contested races.
Originally positioning himself to challenge Neubauer, LoCoco’s campaign website leaves no doubt where he stands. On his homepage, he labels himself “a proven conservative fighter who will keep our communities safe and the bureaucracy out of our lives.” Elsewhere, he rails against “activist judges who have … given in to woke ideology,” and he blames “progressive politics” for “putting our kids and families in danger.”
LoCoco is endorsed by an array of Republican politicians — including Walker and Fond du Lac County District Attorney Eric Toney, now running for attorney general — and conservative jurists, including Bradley, Ziegler, Kelly, Lazar, Grogan and District 2 Judge Mark Gundrum. LoCoco’s top donors include former GOP Senate candidate Eric Hovde and the Uihleins.
LoCoco’s approach differs from that of most judicial candidates, who traditionally have tried to play down their ideological leanings, regardless of who has endorsed or donated to them, particularly in the lower courts. Only in recent years have Supreme Court candidates publicly stated their views on controversial issues like abortion, public employee collective bargaining rights and legislative redistricting. Campaign websites for Lazar and Taylor portray them as independent and impartial.
Following the money
However, state and local arms of the two major parties have been increasingly involved in recent Court of Appeals races, although their spending started years later and at a much lower level than in Supreme Court races.
District 2 accounted for all three of the races with Republican cash: $34,054 to Grogan, $19,140 to Bugenhagen and $10,856 to Lazar. It was also home to three of the five contests with Democratic money: $189,272 to Davis, $66,777 to Kornblum and $14,146 to Neubauer. Democrats gave another $14,126 combined to Geenen and losing 2021 District 3 candidate Rick Cveykus.
All told, the parties have spent $348,372 on appellate races since 2020, with Democrats outspending Republicans more than 4 to 1. The combined $223,326 of party spending in the 2021 Grogan-Davis race was the most for any Court of Appeals campaign.
District 2 was also the focus of another relatively new development in appellate elections: independent spending by special interests that advertise separately from candidates’ campaigns, though at much lower levels than in Supreme Court races. Lazar was backed by $250,000 in outside spending by Fair Courts America — funded by Richard Uihlein to back conservative judicial candidates — and Grogan benefited from $56,173 spent by the Republican State Leadership Committee, a national organization.
The Uihlein group spent more than Lazar’s own campaign, the only time that has happened in a Court of Appeals race. Together, the $306,173 in independent expenditures by conservative groups was more than 27 times the combined total of $11,134 that liberal groups spent in support of Davis, Neubauer and former Dane County District Attorney Brian Blanchard, who won a District 4 seat in 2010.
Nationally, million-dollar campaigns for intermediate appellate courts remain uncommon, according to Douglas Keith, deputy director of the judiciary program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. The Brennan Center compiles campaign spending figures for state Supreme Court races but not lower court contests.
However, Wisconsin’s top two Court of Appeals campaigns weren’t the country’s most expensive. In 2004, a Georgia candidate reportedly spent more than $3 million of his own money on a losing bid for an appellate judgeship. And 2023 spending by four candidates seeking two Pennsylvania appellate court seats totaled more than $2.6 million.
As with Supreme Court campaigns, wealthy individuals can donate heavily to influence lower court contests, Keith noted. Before billionaire Elon Musk spent $55.9 million on Wisconsin’s 2025 high court election, he gave a total of $3 million to two political action committees active in multiple 2024 Texas judicial races.
For now, most appellate court campaigns are “still very much under the radar,” Keith said. But that could change “as we’re seeing greater recognition of just how important these courts are,” he added.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.
When President Donald Trump pressured state and local officials to intervene in his behalf in the 2020 election, it wasn’t a matter of abstract constitutional theory for the people running elections. It was armed protests outside offices, threats against their families, subpoenas for voter data, and months of uncertainty about whether doing their jobs would land them in legal jeopardy.
Now, Trump says he wants Republicans to “nationalize the voting” and “take over the voting in at least 15 places,” language that evokes the pressure campaigns he and allies mounted during that contentious 2020 period.
Trump’s 2020 effort ultimately stalled when even some Republicans refused to take steps they believed were unlawful. And his call to nationalize voting this week prompted pushback from some GOP members of Congress and other Republican figures.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Trump’s proposal raised constitutional concerns, and he warned that nationalizing elections could make them more susceptible to cybersecurity attacks. Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska was more blunt, saying he has long opposed federal control of elections. “I’ll oppose this now as well,” he wrote on X.
On Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump’s comments referred to his support for federal legislation commonly called the SAVE Act.
Election officials say the lesson of 2020 was not that the system is invulnerable, but that it can be strained in ways that cause lasting damage long before courts step in. While it’s unclear whether Trump’s latest demands — and possible future actions— would lead to the same level of disruption, legal experts say some of the backstops that ultimately stopped him last time are now weaker, leaving election officials to absorb even more pressure.
Memories of 2020 shape the response
Kathy Bernier, a Republican former Wisconsin lawmaker and Chippewa County clerk, was the chair of the state Senate’s election committee following the 2020 election and repeatedly pushed back on Trump’s claims of widespread fraud. As Republicans launched a prolonged review of the results, Bernier criticized the effort publicly, saying Wisconsin’s elections were secure and that “no one should falsely accuse election officials of cheating.”
She faced extensive backlash, including calls for her resignation, and Bernier said the dispute escalated to the point that she carried a gun for protection. She ultimately left the Legislature, a decision that she said wasn’t politically motivated.
Then-state Sen. Kathy Bernier, R-Chippewa Falls, speaks during a media briefing on growing threats to election professionals in Wisconsin, held at the Wisconsin State Capitol on Dec. 13, 2021. (Coburn Dukehart / Wisconsin Watch)
A key takeaway from the 2020 election for election officials, Bernier told Votebeat, was the importance of radical transparency — not just following the rules, but showing people, in real time, that the rules are being followed “to a T.”
“When there’s a paper jam,” she said, “announce it.”
Still, she said, officials also learned the limits of that approach. After she tried to boost election confidence across Wisconsin, she came to a blunt conclusion: “There’s nothing you can do with ‘I don’t believe you.’”
In the years that followed, Bernier said, a bigger danger than Trump himself were the “charlatans” who took his words and turned them into a business model, spreading conspiracy theories for profit. The misinformation and disinformation those people spread, Bernier said, continue to resonate among the conspiratorial segments of the GOP.
Stephen Richer, a Republican who became recorder in Maricopa County, Arizona, shortly after the 2020 election, had similar advice: Follow the law, tell the truth and consult attorneys, national associations and state associations before making key decisions because “the likelihood that they are dealing with your jurisdiction alone is limited.”
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is among the Republicans who prominently resisted Trump’s calls to overturn the 2020 election. He and his wife received death threats and were assigned a protective team by the state. He declined an interview with Votebeat, but in a statement this week, he urged lawmakers to improve state election administration “rather than rehashing the same outdated claims or worse — moving to federalize a core function of state government.”
Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt, another Republican who pushed back on Trump’s baseless allegations of widespread fraud following the 2020 election and faced similar retaliation, told Votebeat that the state’s elections are freer and fairer than ever before and that the Constitution stops Trump from unilaterally nationalizing elections.
The Michigan Department of State, similarly, said this was a settled constitutional matter.
On the other hand, Michigan Republicans have asked the U.S. Justice Department for increased federal involvement in elections in the state, calling for monitors — not atypical in American elections — as well as “oversight,” although GOP leaders didn’t elaborate on what that would mean.
Richer, who lost his reelection bid for recorder in 2024 to another Republican, said Trump’s comments, combined with similar calls for federal involvement, suggest the Republican Party is drifting from its traditional commitment to federalism and local control. He also pointed to increased legislation at the federal level seeking to standardize elections, which has received little pushback from the Republican Party. That’s despite Republicans criticizing an earlier Democratic legislative effort as federal overreach.
“Clearly the federal government is going to do things that it’s never done before,” he said. “The FBI going in and taking materials from an election that happened over five years ago is unprecedented, so maybe we’re destined for additional unprecedented actions.”
Election officials and courts the most significant ‘line of defense’
One of the key reasons that Trump failed in his efforts to delay and then overturn the 2020 election was the “men and women of principle” in his administration, said David Becker, an election lawyer who leads the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation & Research. Becker, a former Justice Department official, said the experience offered an uncomfortable lesson: Those internal guardrails existed because individuals chose to enforce them — and there is less reason to assume they would be there again.
“That line of defense is largely gone,” Becker said, because “the primary and perhaps only qualification for being hired by this administration — particularly in those key roles in the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security — is loyalty to this man.”
With fewer internal checks, Becker said, the second and most important line of defense this election cycle is courts and state and local election officials. Courts have already stymied many of the election policies Trump has tried to carry out via executive order, and “election officials are holding firm.” But he cautioned that court challenges take time — time in which “untold damage” can be done to erode public trust and to the officials caught in the middle.
That gap between what Trump can say and what he can actually do is where the risk now lies, said Justin Levitt, an election law professor at Loyola Marymount University who advised President Joe Biden’s administration on democracy and voting rights. Levitt said Trump does not have the legal or operational authority to unilaterally nationalize elections, even if he were inclined to cross legal boundaries.
He contrasted the president’s ability to control elections with ICE’s use of force in Democratic-run cities. In immigration enforcement, Levitt said, Congress has given the executive branch authority that can be exercised aggressively or improperly, even when courts later find those actions unlawful. In those cases, Levitt said, the president has “his finger on a switch” — the practical ability to act first and answer questions later. “No such switch exists” in elections, said Levitt.
But with fewer administration officials pushing back on Trump’s claims compared with his first term, Levitt said election officials can expect Trump’s messaging to get “much, much, much worse this year,” and for those claims to be given more oxygen by the rest of the federal government.
“It’s up to us to choose to believe him or not,” he added. Obedience in advance isn’t required, and treating Trump’s claims as commands would grant him authority he does not have, Levitt said, adding, “We have agency in this.”
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Votebeat staff contributed to this story. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.
President Trump's statements that Republicans should take over and run elections in many states, the domestic deployment of armed agents who are shooting people in nearby cities, along with Wisconsin's long struggle over fair voting rules, makes for a tense election season. But voters still have the power to defend their rights. | Photo of an anti-gerrymandering sign in the Wisconsin State Capitol by the Wisconsin Examiner
Wisconsin was almost certainly on President Donald Trump’s mind when he said this week, “We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many — 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”
Our swing state was Ground Zero for the fake electors plot to overturn the results of the 2020 election after Trump narrowly lost here. Wisconsin U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson’s office was involved in the effort to pass off fraudulent Electoral College ballots cast by state Republicans for Trump. Our state Legislature hosted countless hearings spotlighting election deniers and wasted $2.5 million in taxpayer dollars on a fruitless “investigation” of the 2020 presidential results, led by disgraced former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, who threatened to arrest the mayors of Madison and Green Bay.
So how worried should we be about Trump’s election takeover threats?
“I wouldn’t be overly concerned that the president could get anything done that’s directly contrary to the Constitution,” says John Vaudreuil, a former U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Wisconsin and a member of the nonpartisan group Keep Our Republic, which works to promote trust in elections.
Not only does Article I of the U.S. Constitution expressly delegate elections administration to the states, Wisconsin has one of the most decentralized elections systems in the country, with about 1,800 local clerks running elections in counties, municipalities and townships throughout the state. “And they are Republicans, they are Democrats, they are independent,” Vaudreuil says. “Most fundamentally, they’re our neighbors, they’re our friends.”
Trump’s threats of a federal takeover would be both legally and practically hard to pull off in Wisconsin.
But there is still reason to worry. Sowing distrust in elections takes a toll on clerks and poll workers, who have become less willing to put up with the threats and hostility generated by Trump’s attacks. Vaudreuil urges people to support their local elections officials and poll workers and spread the word that the work they do is important and that elections are secure.
Then there’s the danger that Trump could use his own false claims about election fraud to send federal immigration agents to the polls on the pretext that it’s necessary to address the nonexistent problem of noncitizen voting.
Doug Poland, director of litigation at the voting rights focused firm Law Forward, has been involved in election-related litigation in Wisconsin for years, including a lawsuit to block the Trump administration from forcing the state to turn over sensitive voter information.
Poland sees Trump’s threats to “nationalize” elections as part of a pivot from Republican efforts to make in-person voting harder — on the dubious theory that there’s a huge problem with voter impersonation at the polls — to a new focus on stopping absentee voting after many people began using mail-in ballots during the pandemic. But really, it’s all about trying to make sure fewer people vote.
Under former Republican Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Wisconsin passed a strict voter ID law, which one Republican former staffer testified made Republican legislators “giddy” as they discussed how it would make it more difficult for students and people of color to vote.
Like Vaudreuil, Poland sees the current threat from the Trump administration not as an actual takeover of election administration by the federal government, but as an escalation of intimidation tactics.
“Noncitizens generally don’t vote. So it’s a lie,” Poland says. “But it’s, of course, the lie that they’re going to use as a premise to send, whether it’s ICE or whomever it may be, to polling places, probably in locations with Black and brown populations, and that is purely for the purpose of intimidation. And at the same time, they’re pushing back very hard on absentee voting by mail.”
If the Trump administration is preparing to send armed federal agents to the polls to intimidate voters, absentee voting will be more important than ever in the upcoming elections.
Yet, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson recently told constituents that while he doesn’t think the federal government should take over elections administration, “I think we need to tighten up the requirements for absentee voting. I’m opposed to mail in register or mail in balloting.”
And as Erik Gunn reports, Wisconsin U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil’s Make Elections Great Again Act would restrict absentee voting, along with adding new layers of citizen verification steps while threatening to defund elections administrators who fail to comply with the bill’s onerous requirements.
“They’re going to do everything they can to try to make it harder to vote absentee by mail, to make it harder to vote absentee in person,” Poland says, adding, “They’re going to try to do it so they can put ICE agents around polling places and just try to intimidate people, to keep them away.”
So what can be done?
Voter intimidation is a crime, and specific instances can be addressed through lawsuits, Poland says. Still, he acknowledges (and Law Forward has argued in court) that once someone is deprived of the right to cast a ballot, there’s no remedy that can adequately compensate for that loss. That’s why it was so appalling when the city of Madison asserted that absentee voting is a “privilege” in response to a lawsuit brought by Poland’s organization over 200 lost ballots in the 2024 election.
Of course, in addition to worries about possible violations of individuals’ right to vote, there’s the fear that Trump could manage to subvert elections through heavy-handed tactics like the recent FBI raid to seize 2020 ballots from Fulton County. Both Vaudreuil and Poland think judges would step in to prevent such a seizure in the middle of an election, before the ballots were counted.
Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, absentee voting remains legal and many municipalities are using secure ballot drop boxes. We need to keep on making use of our right (not our privilege) to vote, using all the tools we have in place.
As for the intimidating effect of armed ICE agents at polling places, local officials and perhaps local law enforcement could have a role in protecting the polls and reassuring voters it’s safe to cast their ballots. Neighbors who have been organizing to warn people of ICE raids, bring food to immigrants who are afraid to leave their homes, and form a protective shield around schools could become self-appointed polling place protectors.
If we are going to defend the core tenets of our democracy against an administration that has demonstrated over and over again its contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law, it’s going to take massive public resistance and a flat refusal to give up our rights.
“What is it that will make them stand down from what they’re doing to break the law?” asks Poland. “I think the people of Minnesota have answered that for us better than anybody else can, which is that you have to stand up, you have to exercise your rights, First Amendment rights, the right to vote.”
Exercising our rights is the only way to make sure they are not taken away. Courage and collective action are the best protection we’ve got.
The Wisconsin Elections Commission, filing its first ever friend-of-the-court brief, challenged Madison’s controversial legal argument that it should not be financially liable for 193 uncounted ballots in the 2024 presidential election because of a state law that calls absentee voting a privilege, not a right.
The argument presented by city officials misunderstands what “privilege” means in the context of absentee voting and “enjoys no support in the constitution or case law,” the commission wrote in its filing Tuesday, echoing a similar rebuke by Gov. Tony Evers last month.
“Once an elector has complied with the statutory process, whether absentee or in-person, she has a constitutional right to have her vote counted,” the commission said.
That both the commission and the governor felt it was necessary to intervene in the case should underscore “both the wrongness and the dangerousness of such a claim,” commission Chair Ann Jacobs, a Democrat, told Votebeat.
The dispute over the city’s legal defense stems from a lawsuit filed in September by the liberal election law firm Law Forward in Dane County Circuit Court against the city of Madison and the clerk’s office, along with former clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl and Deputy Clerk Jim Verbick in their personal capacities. It seeks monetary damages on behalf of the voters whose absentee ballots were never counted in the 2024 presidential election, alleging that their constitutional rights were violated.
Attorneys for Witzel-Behl — and later the city — argued that by choosing to vote absentee, the disenfranchised voters “exercised a privilege,” citing a 1985 state law that describes absentee voting as a privilege exercised outside the safeguards of the polling place.
Law Forward called the argument a “shocking proposition,” and Evers filed his own friend-of-the-court brief last month, warning that the city’s position could lead to “absurd results.”
Some legal experts said the argument could run afoul of the federal Constitution.
Matthew W. O’Neill, an attorney representing Witzel-Behl, declined to comment.
No statute can override the constitutional right to vote, the commission stated, adding that the Wisconsin Supreme Court decided in 2024 that state law the defendants invoked does not allow for a “skeptical view” of absentee voting.
The argument has also drawn negative reactions from a range of political voices.
On Wednesday, six Wisconsin voting groups — Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, League of Women Voters of Wisconsin, Common Cause Wisconsin, ACLU of Wisconsin, All in Wisconsin Fund, and All Voting is Local — released a scathing statement saying they were “deeply alarmed” by the city’s argument.
“We call on the City of Madison to immediately abandon this dangerous legal argument, take responsibility for disenfranchising voters, and work toward a remedy that respects voters’ constitutional rights,” the statement said.
Meanwhile, Rick Esenberg, the founder of the conservative group Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty — which cited the same 1985 law in its 2021 effort to ban ballot drop boxes — said on social media that Madison’s legal argument was likely going too far.
“Madison is correct in noting that absentee voting is a privilege and not a right in the sense that the legislature has no obligation to permit it at all,” Esenberg said. “BUT if it does and people choose to cast their ballot in the way specified by law, it doesn’t seem crazy to say that Madison has a constitutional obligation to count their legally cast vote.”
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.
In 2022, a student-led voting advocacy organization sued in Dane County to clarify which parts of a witness’ address must appear on an absentee ballot envelope. What was accepted differed from city to city.
The 4th District Court of Appeals, in an opinion written by Judge Chris Taylor, affirmed a lower court ruling that a witness only needs to provide an address where that person can “be communicated with.” The Legislature, which had appealed, argued a precise, multipart address is necessary to prevent election fraud.
“The legislature could have required such specificity for the absentee ballot witness address requirement when it initially adopted the witness address requirement in 1966 or in subsequent modifications of the absentee voting statutes,” wrote Taylor, a liberal candidate running for the Wisconsin Supreme Court in April.
Taylor’s campaign shared that decision as a prime example of the kind of justice she would be on the high court. The campaign for her opponent, conservative appeals court Judge Maria Lazar, shared that exact same decision as a prime example of why Taylor shouldn’t be on the high court.
As Wisconsinites head to the polls in just two months to elect another state Supreme Court justice, Wisconsin Watch asked the Lazar and Taylor campaigns separately to provide examples of rulings in past cases that show how they might serve as a justice and decisions from their opponents that warrant criticism.
That both campaigns shared the otherwise mundane witness address case speaks to the deep ideological divide that persists in the state judiciary. Campaigns can point to the outcomes of politically charged cases, such as those related to voting rights, gun rights or abortion, as a way to point voters to what their views are, legal experts said.
Court of Appeals Judge Chris Taylor. (Matt Roth)
Court of Appeals Judge Maria Lazar (Courtesy of Wisconsin Court of Appeals)
“To me, those are very subtle signals as to their constituency that the impact of this decision, one way or another, is consistent with your views,” said Janine Geske, who served on the Wisconsin Supreme Court from 1993 to 1998.
A spokesperson for Taylor’s campaign said the case demonstrates how Taylor protected Democratic rights and “fairly” and “impartially” applies the law.
“This decision balanced protecting each Wisconsinite’s right to vote with establishing a fair, uniform procedure for our local clerks,” Taylor campaign spokesman Sam Roecker said. “As indicative of the strength of this decision, no party involved in the case appealed Judge Taylor’s decision.”
Lazar’s campaign said Taylor failed to consider the intent of the Legislature.
“Judge Taylor’s opinion, on the merits, indicates how far an activist judge who legislates from the bench will go to alter procedures for election integrity,” Lazar campaign spokesman Nathan Conrad said of the witness address case. “Every common sense citizen in Wisconsin knows that an address consists of a street name, number and municipality.”
Other significant cases from the judges
The other judicial rulings the candidates’ campaigns shared with Wisconsin Watch also showcase the candidates’ contrasting judicial philosophies.
In addition to the voting rights case, Taylor’s campaign highlighted rulings that favored utility consumers and reproductive health. In one decision the court determined the Public Service Commission did not follow proper rulemaking procedures when it prohibited activities companies use to incentivize lower energy use. In the other opinion Taylor wrote that a woman could continue seeking legal action against a physician she claimed did not inform her of a recommendation to another doctor to remove her ovaries during a colon surgery. The Wisconsin Supreme Court last May affirmed that decision with Justice Brian Hagedorn joining the liberal justices in the majority.
The different political focuses between the candidates is no surprise given their different professional and political paths prior to their time on the bench. Lazar, a conservative, was an assistant attorney general under Republican Attorney General JB Van Hollen before her election to the Waukesha County Circuit Court in 2015. Taylor worked as a policy director for Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin and served five terms as a Democrat in the Assembly before Gov. Tony Evers appointed her to the Dane County Circuit Court in 2020.
The judicial rulings they highlighted as reflecting poorly on their opponent are nothing like those featured in the multimillion-dollar Supreme Court campaigns of recent years, when both sides sought to paint the other as lax on crime and public safety.
While there are still two months to go, it’s possible the race will stay muted because the stakes are different with no Supreme Court majority on the line, said Howard Schweber, a professor emeritus of political science and legal studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Neither outcome will change liberal control of the court, though because the winner will replace retiring conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley, it could extend guaranteed liberal control until at least 2030.
The quiet nature of the race is “bizarre” given the increasingly political direction Wisconsin Supreme Court elections have gone in the past, Schweber said.
“There is not invective. There is not screaming accusations,” Schweber said. “This may all change over the course of the election, but at least at the moment, we’re not seeing over-the-top ads making hysterical accusations, and it appears that at least part of the reason for that might be that neither campaign can find anything particularly embarrassing that the opposing candidate has done.”
Some criticisms from each campaign are still there and could grow stronger as Election Day nears. In a recent social media post seeking campaign contributions, Lazar’s campaign described Taylor not as a judge, but a “radical left-wing legislator.” Taylor’s campaign in a post following the release of January campaign finance reports described Lazar as “our extreme opponent.”
Lazar and Taylor will face each other in a March 25 debate hosted by WISN-TV at the Lubar Center at Marquette University’s Law School.
Which cases did the campaigns share?
Taylor’s campaign shared the following cases with Wisconsin Watch as examples of how Taylor would serve as a justice:
Midwest Renewable Energy Association v. Public Service Commission of Wisconsin (the utility case). (Read the opinion here.)
Rise Inc. v. Wisconsin Elections Commission (the absentee ballot case). (Read the opinion here.)
Melissa A. Hubbard v. Carol J. Neuman, M.D. (the ovary removal case). (Read the opinion here.)
The campaign criticized a 2024 appellate opinion written by Lazar that contradicted a ruling from another appeals court branch on whether a conservative group questioning the 2020 election results could access health information about individuals who were judged incapable of voting. Lazar and another judge on the 2nd District Court of Appeals released an opinion that said the group had a right to the information after the 4th District’s opposite ruling was published as precedent.
The opinion shows Lazar “is an extremist who uses our courts to protect special interests and push her right-wing agenda,” Roecker said.
“Lazar completely ignored recent precedent that private voter data could not be released to the public,” Roecker said. “That should alarm anyone who believes in protecting our democracy and fair elections.”
Lazar’s campaign in response to that criticism said the dual appeals court opinions were about “issues of procedure” when two districts disagree. The 2nd District revised the opinion at the request of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which then accepted the case, Conrad said. It is scheduled for oral arguments before the high court in April.
Lazar’s campaign shared the following cases as examples of how Lazar would serve as a justice:
Saybrook Tax Exemptors, LLC. v. Lac Du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, et. al.: Lazar concluded that certain agreements and documents between a financial company and the Lake Superior Chippewa tribe about plans for a casino were void. (Read the decision here.)
State v. Scherer: Lazar ruled that law enforcement’s seizure of a man’s cellphone that possessed child pornography was too broad and violated his privacy rights, despite the “egregious” potential crime. (Read the decision here.)
State v. Heinz: Lazar denied a request to modify the sentence of a woman who was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder after she was charged with first-degree reckless homicide. (Read the decision here.)
Hartland Sportsman Club v. City of Delafield (the gun range case). (Read the decision here.)
Pewaukee Land County, LLC. v. Soo Line Railroad: Lazar ruled that a company could not claim ownership of property in Pewaukee that belonged to the Canadian Pacific railroad, but did not block the company’s current use of the property. (Read the decision here.)
Craig, et. al. v. Village of West Bend: Lazar dismissed a case about the transfer of cemetery property that already had been decided in an earlier case. (Read the decision here.)
Lazar’s campaign shared two cases as criticism of Taylor’s judicial opinions:
Rise Inc. v. Wisconsin Elections Commission (the absentee ballot case). (Read the opinion here.)
State v. Kruckenberg Anderson: In an opinion written by Taylor, the 4th District Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court ruling that suppressed certain statements a teenager made to law enforcement prior to being charged with killing his newborn child. The Wisconsin Supreme Court denied a petition to review the case in 2024. (Read the Court of Appeals opinion here.)
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
Minimum-wage workers in 19 states saw their paychecks increase this year. But Wisconsin hasn’t changed its minimum wage — just $7.25 per hour — for 17 years, shrinking the buying power of the lowest-earning workers.
Wisconsin ties its minimum wage to the federal level, which hasn’t budged for its longest stretch in history. Had Congress indexed the wage to inflation in 2009, it would have risen to $10.88 in 2025. That’s a difference of $145.20 over a 40-hour workweek.
Elsewhere, 34 states, territories and districts have set minimum wages above $7.25.
Neighboring Minnesota raised its minimum wage from $11.13 to $11.41 this year, while Michigan’s leaped from $12.48 to $13.73. Illinois kept its threshold at $15, the highest level among noncoastal states.
In 2024, about 1% of the Wisconsin workforce earned at or below the state’s minimum wage. Those people generally worked as salespeople, automotive service technicians or food preparation workers, U.S. Census data show.
Wisconsin’s tipped workers have an even lower minimum wage of $2.33 per hour, slightly higher than the $2.13 federal minimum, which has not changed since 1991.
Meanwhile, the average living wage for a single adult with no children in Wisconsin in 2025 is $20.96, according to MIT’s living wage calculator, with higher costs in metropolitan areas — including $22.18 in Madison and $21.07 in Milwaukee and Waukesha. The living wage is significantly higher for adults who raise children and lower for people living with a working partner.
New York campaign sparked ‘Fight for $15’
Campaigns to raise the minimum wage have regularly drawn national headlines. In 2012, fast-food workers and their supporters began calling for a $15-per-hour minimum wage in New York City. Their victory inspired a broader ‘Fight for $15’ movement, including in Wisconsin, as Wisconsin Watch previously reported.
This year, The Living Wage Coalition — a group of labor and progressive organizations — launched a campaign to raise Wisconsin’s minimum wage to $20 per hour, calling the status quo far below a reasonable standard of living for the lowest-wage workers.
An increase to $15 per hour would be politically popular and directly or indirectly raise the wages of 231,800 (18%) women workers, 36,200 (25.6%) Black workers and 50,200 (26.6%) Hispanic workers in Wisconsin — narrowing gender and racial wealth and income gaps that are some of the largest in the nation, according to a 2025 High Road Strategy Center report. The University of Wisconsin-Madison-based “think-and-do tank” focuses on solutions to social problems — including those related to the environment, opportunity and democratic institutions.
Still, multiple bills to raise Wisconsin’s minimum wage — largely proposed by Democrats — have stalled in the Legislature. Republican lawmakers have cited concerns about burdening small businesses.
Higher wage ‘has to come from somewhere’
Minimum-wage hikes — depending on the size — can bring a mix of positive and negative economic consequences, according to Callie Freitag, assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Social Work.
“The good thing is that earnings would go up for workers. Employers would raise wages and be able to pay workers more,” Freitag said. “But the money to pay workers more has to come from somewhere.”
Economists worry that dramatic minimum-wage hikes could lead to higher consumer costs — or prompt businesses to cut worker hours or eliminate their jobs entirely, Freitag added.
The key would be an increase that benefits the lowest-paid workers without significantly affecting the broader economy. But it’s unclear what that sweet spot is.
Conditions of the labor market — the supply and demand for workers — shape wages across most of the economy. Wages typically increase when there are more openings than workers, and they decrease when there are few openings for available workers.
Setting the minimum wage close to or below an equilibrium wage — where the demand for labor matches the supply — only minimally affects wages across the market, economists suggest.
States that hiked minimum wages saw slightly higher gains across the lowest-tier wages (the bottom 10%) between 2019 and 2024, but not enough to claim a correlation, an analysis by the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute (EPI) found. A range of factors could have shaped the wage increases, which also played out in the Midwest.
Wisconsin has seen slightly faster growth in bottom-tier wages than its neighbors — even without increasing the minimum wage. The state’s bottom-tier wages increased from $10.92 hourly in 2009 to $14.58, Wisconsin Watch found by analyzing EPI’s data.
Bigger hikes strain employers
While basic economic principles suggest that a 10% increase in the minimum wage would decrease the hiring of unskilled workers by 1 to 2%, recent studies suggest an even smaller shift, or no effect at all.
Most minimum-wage studies published between 2004 and 2024 have shown little or no job loss, Ben Zipperer, an EPI senior economist, found.
Researchers tend to focus most on cities and states that have significantly increased their minimum wage. Seattle, Washington, which has hiked its threshold annually since 2015, has among the highest in the country at $21.30 this year.
A sign is seen during a Wisconsin State Capitol press conference about raising Wisconsin’s minimum wage, June 17, 2021. (Isaac Wasserman / Wisconsin Watch)
In a 2022 study, University of Washington researchers found that Seattle’s minimum wage increase to $11 hourly in 2015 “had an insignificant effect on employment,” but a spike to $13 in 2016 “resulted in a large drop in employment.”
But the findings might not directly apply to other places, the researchers found, because industries and the makeup of the labor force might look and act differently elsewhere.
A separate University of Washington study found that a minimum-wage increase to $15 hourly affected most child care businesses, which commonly responded by raising tuition and reducing staff hours or total number of staff — potentially harming staff and lower-wage customers.
What work is worth
“Minimum wage legislation commonly has two stated objectives: the reduction of employer control of wages; and the abolition of poverty,” George Stiegler, a leader of the Chicago school of economics, wrote in 1946 — an era when Congress was debating bigger increases to the minimum wage in the policy’s early years.
But Stiegler was pessimistic about the prospect that minimum-wage hikes were the best way to eliminate poverty. He instead called for lawmakers to grant lower-income families other forms of relief, including tax cuts and credits.
That spirit was reflected in the “no tax on tips” bill, which the Wisconsin Assembly passed this month to benefit tipped workers.
Still, Laura Dresser, associate director of the High Road Strategy Center, views the minimum wage as an important floor to benefit workers at the margins and signal “work is worth this.”
“People who are working full time should be able to afford life,” she said. “At $7.25 per hour, there’s almost nothing you can afford, and it feels far below what a wage floor really should function as.”
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
A misleading claim that Wisconsin has more registered voters than people eligible to vote is gaining traction on social media, including in posts shared this week by President Donald Trump.
It’s just the latest in a long-running series of claims that misinterpret basic data about voter rolls to create alarm about the risk of voter fraud.
The posts circulating this week cite a video asserting that Wisconsin’s voter rolls contain more than 7 million names — far more than the state’s voting age population — and are overlaid with text reading, “This Is Not a Glitch — This Is Election Fraud Waiting To Happen.”
The video features Peter Bernegger, an entrepreneur who has been convicted of mail fraud and bank fraud. Bernegger has repeatedly promoted false theories about the 2020 election in Wisconsin legislative hearings and repeatedly filed unsuccessful lawsuits against election officials in search of proof for his claims.
But his claim conflates two datasets in Wisconsin’s voter registration system: the Wisconsin voter list and active registered voters.
Peter Bernegger is seen on Feb. 9, 2022, at the Capitol in Madison, Wis. (Mark Hoffman / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)
As of July 2025, the state had about 8.3 million names on its list — in line with the number Bernegger cites. But of them, only 3.7 million were active registered voters. The remaining roughly 4.6 million are inactive voters. Inactive records include people who previously registered to vote but later moved out of state, died, lost eligibility because of a felony conviction, or were ruled incompetent to vote by a court. Those individuals haven’t been removed from the voter list, but because of their inactive status, they cannot vote unless they re-register, which requires proof of residency and a photo ID.
Bernegger claims in his video that the list of voters generally grows every day, going down only once every four years, when voters who haven’t cast a ballot in four years are sent postcards asking whether they want to remain registered and then removed from the active list if they don’t respond.
Part of that claim is true: Wisconsin never deletes voter records, so the total database of active and inactive registrations only grows. But the active voter roll, which includes only voters currently eligible to cast a ballot, can shrink.
By email, Bernegger disputed Votebeat’s characterization of his claims but provided no further proof for them.
The confusion stems from a common misunderstanding about Wisconsin’s voter system, Wisconsin Elections Commission Chair Ann Jacobs, a Democrat, told Votebeat. The pollbooks used to check voters’ eligibility on Election Day contain only active voters, while the broader voter database also retains inactive records.
The inactive records also detail why a voter was deactivated. Wisconsin state law allows for several reasons for a voter’s registration status to be changed from eligible to ineligible, but there’s no state law calling for the destruction of voter registration records, not even for a voter who has died.
And Jacobs said there’s a good reason for that: Keeping these inactive records indefinitely helps prevent fraud: If somebody tries to register using the identity of a dead voter, for example, clerks can flag that application because the prior record — including the reason it was deactivated — is still on file.
“It’s actually pro-list-hygiene to have access to that information immediately,” she said.
Interstate databases also play a role in maintaining accurate voter rolls. One such organization, the Electronic Registration Information Center, has helped states including Wisconsin identify hundreds of thousands of voters each year who have moved across state lines and tens of thousands of voters who died. But the system has gaps. Some Republican-led states have left the program, leaving just 25 states and Washington, D.C., participating.
Experts say voter fraud is extremely rare, but Republicans have long argued that dirty voter rolls could enable fraud and reduce confidence.
Similar misleading claims about voter rolls have circulated in other states, including Michigan, amplified by right-wing figures such as Elon Musk.
Democrats and many election officials typically support regular voter roll maintenance but warn that aggressive cleanup efforts may risk disenfranchising lawful, active voters.
Wisconsin’s own data shows how infrequently fraud occurs. In its latest report, which covers five elections, the WEC identified just 18 potential instances of fraud. One relates to a voter seeking to vote in two states. Most involved voting after a felony conviction or double-voting by casting an absentee and in-person vote in the same election.
Correction: This story was updated to reflect the number of names on the state’s voter list was 8.3 million.
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
In less than 200 days, fall primary voters will head to the polls to choose the candidates they hope can win control of the governor’s office.
For those who decide to vote in the Democratic primary, there are plenty of options, with a range of political experience, gender and racial backgrounds, and left-wing to left-of-center political views. But recent campaign finance reports and candidate performances at a small business forum in Milwaukee show no clear front-runner yet.
The Democratic race is reminiscent of the party’s 2018 primary field, when 10 candidates (two dropped out before the primary) ran to unseat former Republican Gov. Scott Walker in another favorable year for Democrats during President Donald Trump’s first term. Tony Evers, the relatively moderate, soft-spoken, aw-shucks, occasionally cussing, thrice elected to statewide office, old white guy from the Sheboygan area, won the primary with 42% of the vote and eventually two terms as governor.
The major candidates in the Democratic field this time include (in alphabetical order) former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, former Department of Administration Secretary Joel Brennan, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, Madison state Rep. Francesca Hong, former Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. CEO Missy Hughes, Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez and Madison state Sen. Kelda Roys, who also ran in 2018.
Rep. Francesca Hong, D-Madison, third from left, speaks to the audience during the year’s first Democratic gubernatorial candidate forum Jan. 21, 2026, hosted by Main Street Action at The Cooperage in Milwaukee. The candidates are, from left, Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez; Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley; Hong; Sen. Kelda Roys, D-Madison; former WEDC director Missy Hughes; former DOA Secretary Joel Brennan and former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
In the Republican primary, Washington County Executive Josh Schoemann and U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany are the only major candidates at this time.
Barnes, who lost the 2022 U.S. Senate race against Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson by just over 26,000 votes, has been considered the initial front-runner due to the name recognition that comes from running in a major statewide election. But campaign fundraising reports from the second half of 2025 released in mid-January show no person out significantly in front of the pack. Crowley topped the group with almost $800,000 in fundraising, reports show.
The next Marquette University Law School poll that will gauge how voters feel about candidates in the governor’s race is expected to be released on Feb. 25. The October poll, released before Barnes and Brennan joined the race, showed 81% of Democratic primary voters hadn’t made up their minds.
The Republican campaigns are watching how far to the left the Democrats go, said Bill McCoshen, a lobbyist and Republican strategist who previously worked for former Gov. Tommy Thompson.
“They want the top tier to get sort of sucked into that discussion of progressive policies and to say things that make them more liberal than moderate,” McCoshen said.
Elements of this already appeared at a Democratic gubernatorial forum organized by Main Street Action in Milwaukee last week. At times candidates tried to one-up each other on questions about supporting a public option for BadgerCare, taxing the rich and protecting civil rights from federal overreach in the wake of immigration enforcement in Minnesota.
Asked whether they would increase taxes on the wealthiest, Hughes said her priority would be growing the economy “because my fear is if we simply increase taxes on the wealthy, the next team will get elected and come back in and take that away.” Brennan said Democrats need to build more trust in how elected leaders spend public money. Barnes pledged to “do bold things” including taxing the wealthy.
“The wealthy have gotten away without paying their fair share for far too long,” Barnes said.
Rep. Francesca Hong, D-Madison, third from left, speaks to the audience alongside Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, from left, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, and Sen. Kelda Roys, D-Madison, during the year’s first Democratic gubernatorial candidate forum, Jan. 21, 2026, hosted by Main Street Action at The Cooperage in Milwaukee. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Former DOA Secretary Joel Brennan, second from left, speaks to the audience alongside former WEDC director Missy Hughes, left, and former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, third from left, during the year’s first Democratic gubernatorial candidate forum Jan. 21, 2026, hosted by Main Street Action at The Cooperage in Milwaukee. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Rodriguez, Crowley, Roys and Hong all agreed the state needs a public option for BadgerCare. Rodriguez added she supports extending Medicaid to 12 months postpartum, which has bipartisan support in the Legislature. Crowley said the state needs to figure out how to plug the holes left by the expiration of Obamacare subsidies. Hong and Roys both said a public option is not enough.
“Health care should be a right, not a privilege that we ration based on your wealth or your job,” Roys said.
In 2018, Wisconsin Democrats were “hungry for a win” after two terms of the Walker administration, and Evers’ statewide election success as superintendent of public instruction appealed to Democratic voters, said Anthony Chergosky, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse.
Without Walker to run against in 2026, there are multiple factors that could play a role in pushing one of the Democrats out in front, Chergosky said. It could be electability, like Evers in 2018, a compelling biographical story, unique political experience or signature policy issues.
Just this month, several candidates released major policy proposals. Rodriguez shared an immigration response plan requiring a judicial warrant for federal agents to enter sensitive locations. Hughes announced an economic development plan that includes building 200,000 homes by the end of her first term. Barnes released a proposal to lower the cost of groceries by providing grants for opening grocery stores in food deserts. Hong called for a moratorium on data center construction in Wisconsin and directing any sales and use tax exemptions from data centers into green energy infrastructure.
The candidates recognize there’s “a ton of folks” running, as Hughes said. Barnes, Crowley and Hughes, speaking to reporters after the Main Street Action forum, emphasized some of the factors that could make their candidacy stand out to primary voters.
For Barnes, it’s his experience as lieutenant governor during the COVID-19 pandemic and his “bold vision” for Wisconsin. Hughes pointed to her private sector experience and the fact that she hails from outside Madison and Milwaukee. Crowley highlighted his Milwaukee County executive experience working with both Republican and Democratic leaders.
By the August primary, some candidates may drop out and endorse others. Whoever wins may only have to secure a thin slice of the Democratic primary vote, setting up potential divisions within the party heading into the general election, Chergosky said.
“It’s plausible that someone could win the nomination with 25 to 30% of the vote,” Chergosky said. “And at that point, the question becomes, if that nominee truly represents the will of the party.”
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
At least four major data center projects in Wisconsin were developed after local community leaders signed a nondisclosure agreement (NDA) with the companies. In Beaver Dam, Meta used two shell companies to develop its project in secret.
In one community without a data center NDA, DeForest, the village president offered misleading comments to the public about how long officials knew about the proposal.
Several states, including Wisconsin, have legislative proposals to ban data center NDAs. Data center advocates say NDAs are necessary to ensure private companies continue to invest in local communities.
How did a $1 billion, 520-acre data center proposed by one of the world’s richest companies go unnoticed in tiny Beaver Dam, Wisconsin?
A key reason: In a city that lists “communication matters” atop its core values, officials took steps to keep the project hidden for more than a year.
Now Meta, the trillion-dollar company that owns Facebook and Instagram, is building a complex as big as 12 football fields in a city with a population of 16,000, enough to fill only a fifth of Lambeau Field.
It’s one of seven major data center projects pending in Wisconsin that combined are worth more than $57 billion.
In four of them, including Beaver Dam, local government officials kept the massive projects under wraps through confidential nondisclosure agreements (NDAs), a Wisconsin Watch investigation has found.
Secrecy also occurred in the three communities without NDAs.
In one, the Madison suburb of DeForest, officials worked behind the scenes for months before publicly announcing a proposed $12 billion data center, which residents are fighting.
The lack of public disclosure, while relatively common for typical development proposals in the planning stages, raises questions about how much time the public should have to digest projects that dramatically affect the economy, land use, energy, taxes, the environment and more.
“As soon as community leadership is contemplating, even entertaining it, I think they need to make the public aware,” said retired tech executive Prescott Balch, who is advising residents around Wisconsin where data centers are proposed.
“Even if it makes it harder, that’s the right way to do it. And nobody is doing it that way.”
Blowback from residents who have been kept in the dark has spurred a new legislative proposal that would ban data center NDAs statewide.
How Beaver Dam did it
Wisconsin has some 40 data centers, stretching from Kenosha to Eau Claire. But most are tiny compared with the big seven: three under construction in Beaver Dam, Mount Pleasant and Port Washington; and four proposed in DeForest, Janesville, Kenosha and Menomonie.
Besides storing and processing data, data centers are vital to advancing the use of artificial intelligence (AI).
A case study in how projects each worth $1 billion or more are kept quiet is Beaver Dam, the Dodge County burg an hour northeast of Madison, where Meta’s data center is expected to open in 2027.
Construction is ongoing at the 350-plus-acre Beaver Dam Commerce Park where a new Meta data center is being built, photographed on Jan. 20, 2026, in Beaver Dam, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
The Beaver Dam Area Development Corp., a quasi-government nonprofit that functions as the city’s economic development arm, signed an NDA on Dec. 1, 2023, not with Meta, but with a shell company no one had ever heard of, Balloonist LLC.
The agreement referred only to a “project,” making no mention of a data center or Meta.
The NDA was signed “very early, almost in the introductory period of that project,” the development corporation’s leader, Trent Campbell, told Wisconsin Watch. All major development projects have “different levels of confidentiality for different purposes. And this entity believed it to be necessary at the onset of the conversations.”
The NDA meant that the Beaver Dam Area Development Corp. could not reveal its discussions with Balloonist, or even disclose “the existence of the project.”
The NDA also put the wheels in motion.
For more than a year, the city quietly took official actions to make the data center a reality, including:
July 2024: The city council voted 12-0 to approve a predevelopment agreement with another shell company, Degas LLC, that only later was identified with the data center. The agenda and the minutes of the meeting don’t mention a data center.
November 2024: The city council created a tax incremental finance (TIF) district for the data center to help fund development. The agenda and the minutes for that meeting do not mention a data center, though the agreement itself does.
Beaver Dam city and economic development officials worked with two shell companies as they developed a $1 billion, 520-acre data center. Meta announced its involvement in December 2025. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Not until February 2025 — 14 months after the NDA was signed — did the Beaver Dam Area Development Corp. announce that it and the city were working with a company — then still unidentified — on a “potential data center project.”
Campbell noted to Wisconsin Watch that Gov. Tony Evers and other officials had identified the site for a major development as far back as 2019. For months after the NDA was signed, it wasn’t known whether the data center would come to fruition, he added.
“I know the opponents currently disagree, but I think the city acted in as transparent a way as they could,” Campbell said.
Eventually, a news report in April 2025 identified Meta, which declined comment for this story, as the company likely behind the data center.
Meta confirmed its involvement eight months later, saying on Facebook: “We’re proud to call Beaver Dam home. We are honored to have joined such an incredible community in 2025.”
The first reply to that post was from a Beaver Dam resident, who wrote: “We would have been honored to have the opportunity to decline this.”
Secrecy without an NDA
NDAs also helped keep the public in the dark about data centers under consideration in the three other cities that used them.
Menomonie signed its NDA with Balloonist LLC in February 2024 — more than a year before the city in northwest Wisconsin announced a $1.6 billion data center proposal in July 2025. Two months after the NDA, the city council unanimously helped pave the way for a data center by changing a land use ordinance. The change gave, for the first time, a definition of the ordinance’s reference to “warehousing,” saying warehousing includes data centers. The city’s mayor put the proposed data center on hold in September 2025. In January 2026, the city council adopted a zoning ordinance for data centers that reversed the warehousing definition. “Based upon feedback from the community and elected officials, it is clear that additional discussion should occur regarding the appropriate level of regulation of data centers,” the city’s public works director told the council and the mayor.
Kenosha signed its NDA, with Microsoft, in May 2024, six months before news reports surfaced saying the NDA kept the proposed data center operator’s name confidential. It was later announced that Microsoft had purchased 240 acres in the neighboring town of Paris, which the city annexed in December 2024. No dollar amount for the proposal has been announced.
Janesville announced in July 2025 it was approached by developers about a data center and put out a request for proposal. The city signed its NDA two months later and is now in negotiations with Viridian Acquisitions, a Colorado developer, for an $8 billion data center.
The sun sets as construction continues at Microsoft’s data center project Nov. 13, 2025, in Mount Pleasant, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Port Washington in Ozaukee County and Mount Pleasant in Racine County responded to records requests from Wisconsin Watch saying they had not signed NDAs for their data centers.
In Port Washington, where three people were arrested during a city council meeting on the data center in December, residents are trying to recall Mayor Ted Neitzke, saying he has been secretive about the $15 billion data center from OpenAI, Oracle and Vantage Data Centers.
In Mount Pleasant, Microsoft this month announced plans to add 15 data centers, worth $13 billion, to the $7 billion complex under construction there.
NDAs are described by economic development officials as necessary and criticized by data center opponents as against the public interest.
NDAs and other steps to protect confidentiality are crucial at the early stages of a development proposal, said Tricia Braun, executive director of the Wisconsin Data Center Coalition.
“If I’m a company considering making strategic investments, regardless of industry, I don’t want my competition to know where I’m going, what I’m doing, what pace I’m doing it at,” said Braun, a former executive at the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. “You want to make sure everything is buttoned up and bow tied before that type of information is put into the public realm.”
Questions have swirled around transparency even in communities where local government officials did not sign NDAs.
That includes DeForest, which lists “communicate clearly” among its core values.
The DeForest data center, proposed by Virginia-based QTS Data Centers, is controversial, in part, because the village board would have to annex 1,600 acres in the neighboring town of Vienna.
DeForest Village President Jane Cahill Wolfgram looks on during a village board meeting at DeForest Village Hall in DeForest, Wis., on Jan. 20, 2026. As negotiations between QTS and the village of DeForest continue, members of the public attended a village board meeting to speak in support and opposition to the proposed development. (Kayla Wolf for Wisconsin Watch)
At one DeForest Village Board meeting about the project, Village President Jane Cahill Wolfgram said that based on emails she had been receiving from residents, there was “just one thing I think we need to clear up.”
“And you can ask any one of these board members. They will tell you, they just learned about this project in the last couple of weeks.”
That was Nov. 18, 2025.
But Village Board trustees had been offered one-on-one meetings with the developer some 10 weeks earlier, trustee Jan Steffenhagen-Hahn said in an email to Vienna resident Shawn Haney.
“Because of the scale of this project,” that’s when residents should have been notified, said Haney, a leader of a group that opposes the data center.
Other emails obtained by the group show that DeForest staff were strategizing with QTS representatives and Alliant Energy as early as March 2025 — seven months before announcing the proposal last October.
Members of the public attend a village board meeting at DeForest Village Hall in DeForest, Wis., on Jan. 20, 2026. (Kayla Wolf for Wisconsin Watch)
In one email, the village planner discussed with QTS representatives when to seek various village approvals, including annexation, while acknowledging that doing so without disclosing “any details of the project or operations will be difficult.”
Cahill Wolfgram told Wisconsin Watch she in fact had met with QTS on Oct. 1, three weeks before the public announcement. She expressed frustration that many residents are urging trustees to stop the data center.
“They’ve been brought in from the very early moments of this discussion and they have continued to be front and center of everything we’ve done,” Cahill Wolfgram said. “As village president, I know of nothing that has been done behind the scenes.”
A public hearing on the annexation is scheduled for Feb. 9.
Lydia Reid returns to her seat after speaking in opposition to the QTS data center development during a village board meeting at DeForest Village Hall in DeForest, Wis., on Jan. 20, 2026. Reid is concerned about the process that the village is using to allow the data center development. (Kayla Wolf for Wisconsin Watch)
Sheri Stach hands out stickers in opposition to the QTS data center development prior to a village board meeting at DeForest Village Hall in DeForest, Wis., on Jan. 20, 2026. (Kayla Wolf for Wisconsin Watch)
The state Department of Administration, which reviews annexation proposals and issues advisory opinions, concluded the DeForest annexation is not in the public interest because of concerns over how the village would provide water and sewer services for the annexed area.
The Clean Economy Coalition of Wisconsin has called for state leaders to pause consideration of any data centers until a comprehensive strategy on them is adopted. In part, the coalition said comprehensive planning is needed to avoid more “stranded assets.”
Wisconsin Watch reported in December that Wisconsin utility ratepayers owe nearly $1 billion for stranded assets — coal power plants that have been or soon will be shut down. A push to provide new energy capacity for data centers poses the risk of creating more stranded assets.
Some states targeting NDAs
Microsoft on Jan. 13 announced new standards aimed at being a “good neighbor in the communities where we build, own and operate our data centers.” It mentioned transparency five times.
But University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee researchers called Microsoft’s initial Mount Pleasant data center a “microcosm of a larger problem with secrecy and lack of transparency about water and electricity demands” of data centers throughout the country. That, they wrote, “harms the public’s ability to determine whether hosting a data center is in their best interest.”
The sun sets as construction continues at Microsoft’s data center project on Nov. 13, 2025, in Mount Pleasant, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Mount Pleasant has wanted a major development where the data center is now under construction because a massive development signed with Foxconn in 2017 largely fell through.
Local government use of NDAs and other methods to keep data center development secret is widespread across the U.S.
In Minnesota, local elected officials were aware of data center proposals for months or even years before disclosing them. In Virginia, 25 out of 31 data center projects had NDAs. In one New Mexico county, county staff negotiated for a $165 billion data center with an NDA that kept elected officials in the dark.
Several states are targeting NDAs.
At least three — Florida, Michigan and New Jersey — are considering legislation to prohibit governments from signing data center NDAs. A Georgia bill would prohibit NDAs that hide information about data center electricity or water usage. New York is considering a bill to limit NDAs for economic development proposals generally.
Now, similar legislation is pending in Wisconsin.
Wisconsin state Rep. Clint Moses, R-Menomonie, is photographed during a press conference on Nov. 14, 2023, in the Wisconsin State Capitol building in Madison, Wis. (Drake White-Bergey / Wisconsin Watch)
Last week, state Rep. Clint Moses, R-Menomonie, citing questions about transparency over the Menomonie proposal, introduced legislation to prohibit NDAs for data center proposals in Wisconsin.
“I’ve never seen such overwhelming opposition from all sides of the aisle,” he told Wisconsin Watch, describing constituents’ feelings about data centers and secrecy surrounding them.
Moses said he understands the need for confidentiality in economic development generally, but because data centers have such widespread impact, public notice is paramount.
“The earlier the better,” he said.
Braun, the data center coalition leader, said the public should be notified when a data center proposal is ready to be considered for approvals by elected officials — after municipal staff do due diligence to determine whether things such as zoning, utility capacity, water and sewer would make a proposal potentially viable.
Balch, who helped defeat a proposed data center in the Racine County village of Caledonia, where he lives, said the public should be alerted well before local elected officials consider such votes.
“You have to use your judgment,” he said. “But at some point, you need to realize this is not a normal thing and we need to look out for the residents.”
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