Three candidates running for Wisconsin secretary of state in 2026 are seeking an office with duties that have been whittled away over the last several decades.

The Democratic Party candidate, JoCasta Zamarripa, and the Green Party candidate, Pete Karas, both focus on how they would do the work that’s still part of the office.

But the third candidate, Republican Jay Schroeder, has centered his campaign on taking back a power that hasn’t been part of the secretary of state’s job for more than half a century — running Wisconsin’s elections.

JoCasta Zamarripa: Not just ‘ceremonial’

Former Democratic state Assembly member JoCasta Zamarripa seeks to return to state government after having served as a member of the Milwaukee Common Council. Elected to the Assembly in 2010, Zamarripa served five terms, stepping down to run for Milwaukee alder in 2020. She’s now halfway through her second term in that position.

As she’s traveled the state, Zamarripa says, she’s heard from some voters that the secretary of state is a “largely ceremonial” job, but she strongly differs with that assessment.

The role as a member of the Board of Commissioners of Public Lands, which raises revenue from timber sales that go to public school libraries, is important, she says, because “our schools depend on that funding.” The board also provides competitive economic development and public project loans to local communities.

The office provides important services such as authenticating documents for overseas actions, from foreign adoptions to international business deals, Zamarripa says.

As an alder who has had to assist the community members she represents in a variety of contexts, “these are important constituent services that I’m well positioned to take on,” Zamarripa says.

She also favors adding staff and funds to the office.

Zamarripa says she decided to run for secretary of state after learning Gov. Tony Evers would not seek a third term and seeing that “there was going to be some movement” in the Democratic upper echelons of state government.

As the first Latina in the state Legislature and on the Milwaukee Common Council, Zamarripa said she “felt this was an opportunity for me to throw my hat in for a statewide run to galvanize and capture the Latino vote.” She said she believes her presence on the ticket could help curb the drop-off in voting by Latino voters in Wisconsin in the midterms.

“It’s very important that we retain this office in Democratic hands,” Zamarripa says.

Pete Karas: ‘People want more choices’

Long-time Wisconsin Green Party member and activist Pete Karas says he’s joined the race for secretary of state because he believes neither Democrats nor Republicans should have a political monopoly in Wisconsin.

“People are just sick and tired over the same two parties,” Karas says. “People want more choices.”

Karas says he’d actually like to see the job become a nonpartisan office, with its election in the spring along with local county board and common council races.

In the office itself, he favors modernization, noting that the incumbent, Sarah Godlewski, has taken steps to make state records more accessible to the public.

To that end, Karas says he’d support some additional funding, as well as partnerships with libraries, universities and nonprofit organizations who could “step up and help us modernize the records.”

Karas says he opposes a maneuver in the 2025-27 state budget that made an exception for  Milwaukee County from a longstanding state provision requiring counties to pay most of their traffic fine and forfeiture revenue into the Common School Fund, overseen by the Board of Commissioners of Public Lands.

The budget allows the county to use those funds to pay local prosecutors and district attorneys. The provision is now the subject of a lawsuit.

“I would have pushed the Board of Commissioners of Public Lands to file a lawsuit” against the funding carve-out, Karas says.

While Zamarripa says she’s confident she can overcome two opponents in the election, she acknowledges she’s concerned that Karas could pull enough votes that would otherwise go to her, thus enabling Republican Schroeder to get the most votes of the three.

Karas rejects that concern.

“I’m not running to take votes away from anybody,” he says. “The Democrats do not own people’s votes.”

Jay Schroeder: Replace the elections commission

Jay Schroeder won the Republican nomination with a vow to eliminate the Wisconsin Elections Commission and move election administration into the secretary of state’s office — as it is in 37 states.

In the August primary, he got more votes than the candidate who had the party’s endorsement. “I was focused completely on cleaning up the election system — which needs to be done, and that’s why I won,” Schroeder says.

Current and former state elections officials and the other candidates have all rejected the premise of Schroeder’s campaign.

“Those criticisms are more political than anything else,” says Kevin Kennedy, who  served as executive director for two previous Wisconsin election administration agencies before the Republican-led Wisconsin Legislature created the elections commission.

Election administration was separated from the secretary of state’s office in 1974 and handed over to the State Elections Board, an independent agency that operated until 2007, followed by the Government Accountability Board, which the Wisconsin Elections Commission replaced in 2016.

Zamarripa finds Schroeder’s campaign message troubling. “I’m very worried,” she says, predicting that if Schroeder wins, “he will be emboldened and the Republican Party will be emboldened to give him as much latitude as possible” to carry out his agenda.

Karas calls Schroeder’s goal “a ludicrous proposal” — but says he doesn’t think it has any chance of taking effect. “There’s so many holes in what he’s proposing, I cannot believe any Legislature or any governor would sign on to that,” he says.

Schroeder, however, says that if he wins, he expects to make the case to whoever wins the race for governor on the grounds that “my crystal clear platform” focused on taking over election administration delivered his victory.

In that scenario, he doesn’t expect the putative next governor to ignore him. ” I think that’d be kind of hard for them to do that,” he says.

Focus on voter lists

This is Schroeder’s second try for the job as the GOP nominee. He lost the general election in 2018 to long-time Democratic incumbent Doug La Follette. He also ran for the Republican nomination in 2022 but didn’t advance.

Schroeder’s campaign’s central premise is that the Wisconsin Elections Commission is a failed agency, beset by problems that have sowed public mistrust.

The elections commission’s defenders say that’s an unwarranted claim. In 2024, the commission’s executive director, Meagan Wolfe, received awards from two national organizations for public service and for improving its operations.

Schroeder’s criticism emphasizes the state’s practice of preserving the records of people who have been removed from the list of active registered voters.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission maintains a statewide electronic voting database. About 1,850 local clerks across the state register voters and enter their information in the database. When voters die, move away, are found incompetent by a court or are convicted of a felony (preventing them from voting until their sentence is completed), local clerks record that information, too.

Wisconsin law doesn’t allow the elections commission to delete the records of people removed from the active registered list. Instead, their records are switched to “inactive.”

Inactive voters are not included in the lists of registered voters sent to each polling place before Election Day, according to the elections commission.

Inactive voters who qualify — for example, a person who moves out of state and then later returns to Wisconsin — must register again, said Emilee Miklas, the elections commission communications director.

The elections commission staff sends local clerks “Registration Alerts” identifying deceased people, potential duplicate records, and the names of convicted felons to be checked against local registration rolls. The alerts draw on Wisconsin Department of Health Services’ monthly death reports and Wisconsin Department of Corrections daily updates on felony convictions.

The state also gets data from the national Electronic Registration Information Center, which collects it from other states and from federal agencies, including the Social Security Administration. The elections commission staff most recently reported their findings at the commission’s October quarterly meeting.

Records retention suspicion

Wisconsin’s retention of records for inactive voters has been a source of conspiracy claims of widespread voter fraud by some activists. But the elections commission says the practice enables clerks to cross-check a registration against inactive voters — preventing a person registering from impersonating a dead person, for example.

“Basically, you have one database with 7 million records, and there’s a very good reason why we keep records of inactive voter records, deceased voters, because if you got rid of those, you would lose one of your best tools to combat election fraud,” said Don Millis, the commission’s Republican chair, at the Oct. 1 meeting.

Schroeder says he doesn’t see any need to keep the records of people no longer registered.

“There’s more deceased people on the voting rolls than there are alive,” he said in an interview, conflating the records of active voters with the inactive voters whose records are kept separate from the active list. “They don’t need to be in the system.”

Federal laws require all states to retain some records of people struck from the voting rolls, according to Sam Liebert, Wisconsin state director for All Voting Is Local.

Nevertheless, Schroeder says numerous other states are able to produce “clean lists” regularly and that Wisconsin should, too.

“When you’re deceased, you should have nothing to do with any voting system, any recording or anything,” Schroeder says. He calls the idea of using “historical reasons” to maintain a list of inactive voters “a bunch of baloney.”

He suggests that the state could “interface that with Social Security, so when someone’s benefits stop, their name would go off the voting rolls.”

The elections commission already uses Social Security data to identify people who have died and to remove them from the active voter lists, according to the agency.

Schroeder says he first decided to run for secretary of state after reading about Wisconsin’s practice of keeping the records of people no longer registered, then looking up the record for his deceased father and seeing him still listed as registered.

Schroeder says he did not try to contact either the local clerk where his father had lived or the Wisconsin Elections Commission to correct his father’s status, however. 

“I’m like, ‘wait a minute, that’s not right,’” he says, and it triggered his decision to run for secretary of state. Eventually when he looked again for his deceased father’s name, he was no longer listed as an active registered voter.

“All my goal is, why I’m running for this office, is to increase confidence in elections,” he says. “And anything that gets in the way of that in my opinion needs to be changed.”

Incidents including duplicate ballots being sent by the Green Bay clerk to voters two elections in a row and a thumb drive at Milwaukee’s central count in August that had the wrong database loaded on it have convinced him that the system is flawed, Schroeder says.

Both incidents were the subjects of elections commission investigations, and audit logs in the Milwaukee case showed no evidence of tampering, Votebeat reported.   

When Schroeder ran in the Republican primary in 2022 for the office, he told a crowd that he would not have signed “a sheet of paper for the election,” apparently a reference to the certification of electoral votes for Joe Biden, who won Wisconsin in the 2020 presidential election, Bill Lueders reported in a commentary for the Wisconsin Examiner.

In an interview last week, Schroeder didn’t deny the comment but waved it away.

“I think there was other things that maybe could have been checked into,” Schroeder said. “But generally speaking, the system works. Joe Biden [was] the president. I’m not living in the past.”

Before the primary, Schroeder held himself out as an “authentic MAGA activist” and a “MAGA aligned candidate on election integrity.”

Asked Monday about his alignment with the “MAGA” movement associated with President Donald Trump, Schroeder said, “I don’t know that I would. I would try to do what’s right.”