Reading Time: 6 minutes

The League of Women Voters of Wisconsin is challenging the state’s law governing voters’ ability to fix missing information on their absentee ballots, alleging that the law violates the Wisconsin Constitution by giving clerks a vast amount of discretion over whether to reject ballots.

The group is asking a Dane County judge to require all clerks to provide voters notice when an absentee ballot certificate is lacking necessary information — such as a signature or the address of a voter or the person who witnessed the ballot’s casting — and give them an opportunity to add that information before rejecting the ballot, a process known as “curing” the ballot.

Right now, the law tells clerks that they “may” return incomplete absentee ballots to voters. That results in some municipal clerks sending voters prompt notice about faulty ballots, while other clerks put those ballots in the rejected pile without informing the voter at all, the lawsuit states. Municipalities also treat absentee ballots differently depending on when they receive them, the lawsuit alleges, and those that arrive closer to Election Day often have a lesser chance of getting cured.

The lawsuit, which names the Wisconsin Elections Commission as the defendant, argues that, without a blanket curing requirement, “mail-in absentee ballots are jeopardized by the lack of mandatory notice and curing opportunities across the state.”

This case, which comes a few months ahead of Wisconsin’s 2026 primary election, is the latest in a long line of lawsuits over what to do when information is missing on absentee ballot certificates. In recent years, courts have allowed clerks to use their discretion to determine what constitutes a proper witness address but taken away their ability to fix missing information on the address form.

“Right now, we have ballots that come in weeks ahead of the election, and they’re being set aside for rejection with no attempt by the clerk to contact the voter,” Debra Cronmiller, executive director of the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin, told Votebeat. 

“If even one clerk is not curing ballots, that’s one clerk too many in a democratic system where voting is an absolute right,” Cronmiller said, adding that the number of clerks who fail to follow the practice could reach into the hundreds.

While the lack of uniformity could create legal issues, clerks say a blanket curing requirement could be difficult to implement if courts maintain the state’s 8 p.m. Election Day deadline for receiving ballots as the deadline to cure those ballots, too. 

In 2024, Milwaukee received about 150 mail ballots just minutes before polls closed. At that late hour, it would have been virtually impossible for officials to notify those voters about any deficiencies with their ballots — much less give them a chance to cure them before the polls closed.

Size and resource disparities between Wisconsin’s many municipalities would also present challenges to a uniform curing system. 

A part-time clerk working from home in a small rural town operates with dramatically fewer resources than election officials in Milwaukee, where thousands of absentee ballots can arrive on Election Day. Resources in both settings would be stretched by a uniform curing requirement, depending on how courts ultimately require it to be implemented. If courts grant the league some version of the relief it is seeking, questions about how the process would work in practice could also be settled in court.

Marathon County Clerk Kim Trueblood, a Republican, said another complicating factor for clerks is that Wisconsin’s voter registration form doesn’t require registrants to provide their email addresses and phone numbers.

Trueblood said she already tells the 60 municipal clerks in the county to try to cure ballots, but that process is harder when voters don’t provide contact information or when ballots are returned on Election Day. Requiring voters to provide their contact information would make a curing requirement a lot easier to comply with, she said.

If such a requirement were imposed ahead of this year’s midterms, Trueblood said, bigger villages and cities would likely have the staff and resources to contact every voter, but for town clerks who work a different full-time job and spend just a few hours working as a clerk on weekends and evenings, “it could be a little more challenging.”

Curing lawsuits play out in Wisconsin and across the nation

Ballot curing practices vary widely across the country. Some states don’t allow curing at all. Others allow voters to cure absentee ballots well after Election Day if they’re missing a date, signature, address or something else. As arguments over voting practices increasingly head to court, lawsuits over ballot curing have played out across the nation. 

In Pennsylvania, for example, ballot curing is neither required nor prohibited under state law. Similar to Wisconsin, different counties have different curing practices — some allow voters to cure their ballots, while others don’t.

In North Carolina, a robust curing process was created as the result of a lawsuit that mirrors the one in Wisconsin. It was brought by the League of Women Voters of North Carolina, among other groups, and relied on a similar allegation: that the lack of a statewide-mandated procedure to cure absentee ballots amounted to a denial of voters’ right to due process under the U.S. Constitution. 

The lawsuit resulted in a settlement that created a curing requirement in every county. Now, voters have up to three days after Election Day to cure issues on their ballot.

The ballot rejection rate has dropped dramatically as a result of the case, said Joselle Torres, a spokesperson for Democracy North Carolina, a voting rights group that joined the state’s league chapter in the case. But she added that state and local funding is crucial to educate poll workers, voters and other election officials about the changes — “and that’s no small fee.”

Marc Meredith, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who researched ballot curing in North Carolina in the wake of the settlement, said he had initially expected under 50% of voters to fix their ballot or vote a new one. But ultimately, about 82% of the 26,000 voters eligible to cure their ballots did so. Many opted to vote a new ballot in person rather than fix their old one, he said.

Curing has potential benefits but also challenges in Wisconsin

The drastic increase in the number of voters curing their ballots in North Carolina may not be replicated in Wisconsin, where many municipalities already have curing notifications and procedures in place.

Another difference is that North Carolina has 100 counties running elections, whereas Wisconsin has about 1,850 municipalities doing so. That could complicate implementation, Meredith said, because the same procedures would need to work in places ranging from Milwaukee to towns with 100 residents. 

“In the places that aren’t currently curing,” he added, “I would expect lots of voters would take opportunities to make corrections.”

That issue of municipalities not curing ballots is especially pronounced in rural Wisconsin, Cronmiller said. There, part-time clerks don’t always have the bandwidth to return ballots to voters ahead of Election Day, she said. If courts call for a more stringent curing requirement, Cronmiller added, “it would force all municipalities to give resources sufficient to their clerks so they could do this work.”

A requirement for clerks to tell voters can create practical issues in bigger cities, too, especially those that can receive thousands of ballots on Election Day.

To get every last ballot cured, Wisconsin would likely have to implement a cure deadline after Election Day, Meredith said. 

“You don’t want to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, is my opinion on these things,” Meredith said. “There are going to be some things that will slip through the cracks, but … don’t let the fact that a few might slip through the cracks prevent you from putting that system in that way that would help the rest.”

At the highest level, the League of Women Voters is seeking a declaration that Wisconsin’s discretionary ballot-curing law violates the state constitution, said Nina Beck, a counsel at the Fair Elections Center, which represents the league in Wisconsin and also represented the North Carolina league chapter in its lawsuit to create ballot-curing there. 

What’s required under the due process clause of the Wisconsin Constitution, Beck said, is adequate notice and the ability to cure a defect if clerks are otherwise denying people their fundamental right to vote. Instead, right now, clerks are dealing with curing in many ways and may even be treating voters within the same municipality differently, she said. “That’s fundamentally unfair.”

If the court sides with the league, the group will ask the court to set a uniform procedure for all clerks to follow, Beck said, adding that the current system is “kind of a free-for-all.” 

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

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

Lawsuit seeks to require Wisconsin clerks to let voters fix problems with their absentee ballots is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Reading Time: 2 minutes

A federal judge on Thursday rejected the U.S. Justice Department’s demand for Wisconsin’s unredacted voter list, the latest defeat for President Donald Trump’s administration in its quest to obtain more information about voters around the country.

In his 10-page ruling, U.S. District Judge James D. Peterson said the department’s allegation that the Wisconsin Elections Commission violated the Civil Rights Act by not turning over the state’s voter roll “fails as a matter of law.” 

The Department of Justice has requested voter rolls with unredacted information — including voters’ full birthdates, full or partial Social Security numbers, and driver’s license information — from at least 48 states, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. At least 15 states have provided or said they will provide the data, but most have not, prompting the department to file suit against 30 states plus Washington, D.C. 

Federal judges have so far dismissed those lawsuits in seven other states, including Michigan, Oregon, California, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Arizona. The Department of Justice’s lawsuit against Maine was also dismissed on Thursday. 

The department has so far appealed three of those dismissals, the ones in Michigan, Oregon and California.

The Justice Department has said it is entitled to the voter rolls under federal law and needs the data to enforce requirements in federal statutes. Officials in both Republican- and Democratic-led states have pushed back on the Justice Department’s request for unredacted voter data, saying it could put voters at risk. They also say the department hasn’t provided enough information on how the data would be used. 

The federal government requested Wisconsin’s unredacted voter rolls late last year, and the Wisconsin Elections Commission argued that state law explicitly bans election officials from disclosing information like driver’s license numbers to most people who aren’t election officials. That led to the lawsuit.

The Justice Department didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

“This ruling protects against federal intrusions into Wisconsin’s election system,” said ACLU of Wisconsin legal director Ryan Cox, adding that it “ensures private voter data is safe from abuse and prevents the Trump administration from playing politics with our right to vote.”

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

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

Judge dismisses federal government’s lawsuit over Wisconsin voter records is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Reading Time: 5 minutes

The federal government’s probe into the 2020 election has reached Wisconsin, with several current and former election officials, including multiple people in Milwaukee, confirming they have been interviewed or approached by the FBI.

The exact nature of the investigation remains unclear, though it appears to be at least somewhat centered around the 2020 election. The agency’s election investigations elsewhere in the country have featured subpoenas for ballots and other election records, but legal experts still say it won’t be easy for the federal government to convince a court to give it access to ballots. 

Milwaukee County officials are nonetheless preparing for that possibility, in part because they still retain ballots from the 2020 election, though they declined to discuss those preparations or comment on the record. Those ballots contain identifying information that could, in some cases, allow otherwise unidentifiable absentee ballots to be matched to the voters who cast them. Milwaukee is one of the few jurisdictions in Wisconsin that still has ballots from that election, and the city has long been a target of voter fraud accusations and related attacks from the political right.

Elsewhere in Wisconsin — in communities whose elections have faced less scrutiny and in the vast majority of municipalities where 2020 ballots were destroyed according to the standard retention schedules in state law — election officials are less alarmed and are instead focused on preparing for the midterm elections.

Still, news of the FBI interest has created confusion and some fear on the part of voters and election officials. 

What happened?

So far, the FBI has contacted multiple current and former election officials in Wisconsin. 

The FBI interviewed Wisconsin Elections Commission deputy administrator Robert Kehoe within the last few weeks. The news of the interview was first reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The interview focused on the 2020 election, with agents asking Kehoe to explain how Wisconsin elections operate.

The agency has also attempted to contact Milwaukee County Election Director Michelle Hawley. An agent left a business card at Hawley’s home when she was not there. Milwaukee County Clerk George Christensen criticized the agency for approaching Hawley at her home rather than through the county.

“While we cooperate with all legitimate law enforcement actions, we will defend against any attack on our democracy and will defend the rights of voters of Milwaukee County,” Christensen said in a statement.

Agents also left a card for, called and texted a former Milwaukee election official, who confirmed the contact to Votebeat but requested anonymity because of personal safety concerns. That official declined to say whether they responded to the FBI.

Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson confirmed the FBI has reached out to city employees about the probe.

“The president for whatever reason cannot seem to let it go that he lost an election,” Johnson told a WISN 12 reporter.

Wisconsin Elections Commission spokeswoman Emilee Miklas declined to comment for this story. Other officials declined to speak on the record, and an FBI spokesperson didn’t answer Votebeat questions about the probe.

David Becker, the executive director of the nonpartisan nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research and a former Justice Department voting section attorney, said the federal government’s actions appeared more to be aimed at intimidating election officials than producing actionable criminal cases.

He pointed to FBI Director Kash Patel’s public statements in April suggesting arrests related to the 2020 election were coming, as well as federal officials discussing potential cases on social media before they’re brought before courts.

“If you think you’re going to bring charges and prosecute individuals, you don’t do anything that the federal government has done over the last few months,” he said.

Becker also noted that any potential federal crimes connected to the 2020 election are “well beyond the statute of limitations for any potential federal jurisdiction or crimes,” adding, “This is a problem for any investigation relating to 2020.”

Even so, Becker said election officials’ worries were justified. He said the Election Official Legal Defense Network, which he leads, has received more requests for legal assistance from election officials than ever before “even though all of these efforts indicate that the federal government knows it’s got nothing.”

How do the events in Wisconsin relate to probes elsewhere?

It’s unclear how the FBI interviews in Wisconsin relate to the agency’s scrutiny of the 2020 election in other states. 

In January the FBI raided a Fulton County, Georgia, election office seeking records tied to the 2020 election. About a month later, the agency subpoenaed records related to the audit of the 2020 election in Maricopa County, Arizona, which includes Phoenix.

Separately, the U.S. Justice Department has sought access to 2024 ballots in Wayne County, Michigan, home to Detroit.

Those jurisdictions share several characteristics with Milwaukee County.  All are located in highly competitive swing states won by former President Joe Biden in 2020, and all became central targets of President Donald Trump, who repeatedly challenged the election results despite court rulings, audits and reviews repeatedly reaffirming his loss.

Fulton, Wayne, Maricopa, and Milwaukee County are the largest and most heavily scrutinized election jurisdictions in their respective states. Each has been the subject of persistent conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, many of which remain prevalent on social media, even after extensive investigations found no evidence of widespread fraud. 

“What’s really disconcerting,” said former longtime Wisconsin election chief Kevin Kennedy, “is the fact that there is a clear pattern here to try and continue to stir up issues that were resolved in every single opportunity there was to review them, whether it was a court case, an independent audit or the actual certification and review process that exists.”

What comes next?

The short answer is that nobody really knows.

Officials have been considering the possibility that the federal government may seize the city’s 2020 ballots, which contain personally identifiable information.

Kennedy said recent actions by the Trump administration offer “no reason to think that information that should be protected is going to be protected.”

Kennedy said Wisconsin’s decentralized election system was intentionally designed to distribute authority among local jurisdictions — both to keep election administration accountable at the community level and to limit the amount of sensitive voter information concentrated in any one place.

“You put that at the national level,” he said, “and it only takes one bad actor — and we’ve got evidence there’s more than one of those already in the federal government — to totally disrupt the process when you consolidate that kind of information that’s protected through the various state and local laws and practices.”

Becker said it will be an uphill battle for the federal government to successfully obtain Milwaukee’s ballots. But he said the mere possibility that federal officials could theoretically identify how individual people voted is deeply troubling. 

“That is not the way a democratic society works,” he said. “Now, I don’t think they’re likely going to be able to do that. I think that’s going to be incredibly difficult. It’s not impossible, but the fact that they seem to engender this fear is troubling enough.”

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

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

The FBI is contacting Wisconsin election officials. Here’s what we know. is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Reading Time: 5 minutes

The Wisconsin Elections Commission is facing criticism from local officials and a lawsuit filed Wednesday after it ordered Madison not to count 23 absentee ballots that arrived late to the polls in the state’s recent Supreme Court race, a delay city officials say was caused by election administrator error. City officials also say the commission initially offered little guidance but later faulted them for making the wrong decision.

As Madison officials discussed what to do with the late-arriving ballots the day after Election Day, Madison City Attorney Mike Haas reached out to Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe for advice. Wolfe sent the relevant statute the following day and told Madison officials to “decide, within their statutory discretion” whether the 23 ballots should be counted. Madison decided to count them.

Three weeks later, WEC’s commissioners decided Madison made the wrong choice, ordering them to remove the 23 affected ballots from the count. The commissioners didn’t mince words. Chair Ann Jacobs, a Democrat, said Madison committed an “absurd error,” and GOP commissioner Don Millis called it an “epic failure.”

The dispute has exposed a breakdown between state and local election officials with consequences beyond the 23 ballots at issue. Madison officials say they followed guidance from the commission when they chose to count the votes, only to be publicly rebuked and overruled weeks later. Now, a lawsuit argues that not counting the votes would disenfranchise voters whose ballots were delayed by election officials — and local clerks warn the episode could make them less likely to act decisively when problems arise in future elections.

Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell, a Democrat, said the turnaround from the commission was puzzling and could demoralize clerks.

“Why would anybody ask WEC for an opinion about how to handle a situation?” he said. “Here they are attacking clerks for having to make a decision because they couldn’t get advice.”

Wolfe said that the agency was limited in how much advice it can provide for local election officials, but said the commission remains “dedicated to supporting their efforts within the scope of our administrative role.”

Lawsuit alleges removing the 23 votes would be unconstitutional 

The liberal law firm Law Forward’s lawsuit in Dane County Circuit Court alleges that the commission illegally ordered Madison not to count 23 absentee ballots that arrived at the polls after 8 p.m. 

The group says the two voters it’s representing — Margaret and Robert Honig — along with the other voters, would be unconstitutionally disenfranchised “through no fault of their own” and asks the court to strike down the WEC order not to count the ballots. 

The lawsuit references several past rulings in the state as establishing a precedent that voters can’t be deprived of their constitutional voting rights due to election officials’ errors.

This is the second recent Law Forward lawsuit involving Madison’s failure to count ballots due to administrative error. The legal group sued the city for disenfranchising 193 voters in the 2024 presidential election for a separate series of failures. 

It remains unclear why there was such a delay between the ballots’ arrival at the elections office and their delivery to the precincts for counting. State law requires they be “delivered to the polling place no later than 8 p.m.” in order to be tallied. 

Dane County authorized a separate lawsuit on Tuesday, and then filed it Wednesday early evening, as county election officials said they want clarity in the future on whether late-arriving ballots can count if they were only delayed because of election official error.

That same day, Madison complied with WEC’s demand to remove the ballots from the count, but instead of removing the specific ballots at issue, the city selected 20 ballots at random and removed those. Called a “drawdown,” the controversial practice was necessary because poll workers apparently failed to follow Madison Clerk Lydia McComas’ instructions to clearly mark the late-arriving ballots so they could be identified if necessary. Only three were appropriately marked. 

Officials criticize the election commission for lack of direction 

Local election officials say the Wisconsin Elections Commission has become less willing to provide clear guidance in difficult situations — a practice that commissioners and staff say reflects the limits of the agency’s role.

Haas, the Madison city attorney, has firsthand experience on the commission: He preceded Wolfe as the commission’s administrator. Her initial response to the city’s request for advice on how to handle the late-arriving ballots — which provided little direction — was in line with the commission’s tendency in recent years to “intentionally avoid giving definitive responses to specific questions,” Haas wrote in a May 6 letter to the commission obtained by Votebeat.

“This has caused local clerks and their legal counsel to feel frustrated that the WEC is abdicating its responsibility under the Statutes to administer the election laws and provide guidance and advice to local election officials,” he continued.

Haas also questioned why Wolfe’s response and the commissioners’ eventual order were so out of step with one another. The city relied on Wolfe’s initial guidance, Haas said, only to have the commission “contradict its Administrator without even an acknowledgment of her guidance.”

That dynamic, he added, discourages local election officials from being transparent with the agency and damages the commission’s credibility.

He also said that the commissioners were contradicting themselves. In its investigation into the 193 ballots that went missing in Madison until several days after the November 2024 election, the commission concluded that the missing ballots never arrived at the polling places but still could have been counted. 

Haas said it was “difficult to sustain” the commission’s conclusions that “a municipality should count ballots that are discovered in the Clerk’s Office days after the election but not ballots that were delivered minutes after the 8:00 p.m. deadline.”

To McDonell, the Democratic Dane County clerk, the commission’s “real reticence to give advice” is undermining election officials’ trust in the state election agency.

McDonell said that in the past he used to get specific advice from the commission, but now “we get a game of ‘gotcha’ instead.”

In a statement, Wolfe told Votebeat that the commission provides guidance to clerks when the issues are clear. But when state law is ambiguous or unprecedented situations arise, she said, “it’s been our long-established policy to direct clerks to their respective legal counsel for interpretation.”

The Wisconsin Elections Commission has six commissioners, three Democrats and three Republicans. Decisions must be made by a majority of the commission, needing at minimum a 4-2 vote. Although Wolfe — whose role as administrator is nonpartisan — is often referred to as Wisconsin’s top election official, she does not have a vote.

Wolfe added that the commission can exercise its authority to issue determinations on election matters and that it’s her role to adhere to those directives, “even when I don’t always agree with those decisions.”

Jacobs, the commission chair, said the commission provides clerks plenty of help, from designing election manuals and creating administrative rules to adjudicating administrative complaints. 

“We are doing everything we can to provide guidance to clerks on how to do things right,” she said. “We are not their 1-800-GET-HELP number for individual clerks’ every single legal need.”

One of the other reasons the commission can’t provide specific legal advice, Jacobs said, is that the commission acts as a judicial body that could ultimately evaluate whether election officials comply with the law.

“If you’ve got a court case, a personal injury lawsuit on a car accident, you don’t get to call the judge up and say, ‘Hey, am I doing this right?’” she said. “It cannot be our job to do their jobs for them.”

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

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

Wisconsin Elections Commission faces lawsuit, criticism over order not to count late-arriving Madison ballots is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers on Wednesday signed a bill bringing Wisconsin in line with a federal law seeking to prevent the kind of post-election chaos that President Donald Trump and his allies sowed after the 2020 election.

The Democrat also vetoed a Republican-authored bill that would have required the state election commission to hear administrative complaints against itself alleging violations of the federal Help America Vote Act, in line with a U.S. Justice Department demand for the state. That vetoed bill also would have required the state’s Legislative Audit Bureau to conduct audits for potential noncitizen voters.

The bill Evers signed updates Wisconsin’s deadlines for certifying presidential election results and casting electoral votes to match federal timelines set by Congress in 2022, after President Donald Trump claimed to have won the 2020 election and hundreds of individuals stormed the U.S. Capitol to prevent certification of President Joe Biden’s victory.

The mismatch led to a lawsuit in the 2024 presidential election, when the state’s Republican electors were uncertain which day to cast their Electoral College votes because state and federal law set the dates one day apart. The new law resolves that discrepancy.

The measure passed the Senate last session but stalled in the Assembly. With its passage, Wisconsin is among more than 20 states to update their laws to align with the Electoral Count Reform Act.

Vetoed bill would have imposed U.S. DOJ demand

The HAVA bill that Evers vetoed followed a U.S. Justice Department letter sent to the Wisconsin Elections Commission last year. It claimed the WEC was violating the law by declining to hear complaints filed against it.

Under HAVA, a 2002 law that overhauled voter registration and election administration, any state receiving federal election funding must also establish an administrative process for complaints about alleged violations of the law. If a violation is found, the state must provide a remedy; if not, it can dismiss the complaint.

In recent years, however, the WEC has dismissed HAVA complaints related to its own actions, citing a Wisconsin Supreme Court opinion saying it would be “nonsensical” for the agency to adjudicate a complaint against itself.

For example, the commission dismissed a complaint against the agency filed by a Democratic voter seeking to bar Trump from the ballot and has repeatedly dismissed complaints filed by election conspiracy theorist Peter Bernegger that allege various kinds of election mismanagement.

“If a person has a complaint about the legality of the conduct of the commission, that person should file suit in court,” Evers said in his veto message Wednesday.

The vetoed bill also would have required the state to undertake audits of its voter registration list to identify potential noncitizen voters.

Evers said he objected to the “additional burden that could be placed on citizens to provide documentary proof of citizenship after they have already been lawfully registered to vote.”

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

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

New Wisconsin law seeks to prevent certification disaster is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Reading Time: 6 minutes

Months before becoming one of the nearly 200 Madison voters in 2024 whose absentee ballots were never counted, Nathan Haimowitz did what he thought he was supposed to do.

As a journalist living in Spain and out of the habit of voting, the 26-year-old former poll worker said he wanted the 2024 presidential election to “be the thing that would spur me to vote more consistently.” To make sure everything was in order, he emailed Madison officials to confirm they had received his absentee ballot application. They told him they had, so he filled out his ballot, sent it in and assumed his vote would be counted.

It wasn’t. 

The mistake that disenfranchised Haimowitz and nearly 200 other voters set off a chain of consequences: The longtime city clerk resigned, state and local officials launched investigations, a lawsuit was filed, and the city began overhauling its voting procedures.

Haimowitz hasn’t cast a ballot since.

“It was definitely a deterrence,” he said. “I didn’t know why my vote hadn’t been counted.”

Early signs suggest the error is already reshaping how many of the disenfranchised voters engage with elections — pushing some away from absentee voting and, in some cases, out of the electorate altogether. Interviews with affected voters also reveal a broader disconnect: Many say they are dissatisfied both with how the city handled the mistake and with the high-profile lawsuit filed in its wake to seek damages for the disenfranchised voters. The city, they say, has not been appropriately responsive, and the lawsuit does not reflect their values. 

Until now, the public conversation has largely reflected the perspectives of the eight voters who joined the lawsuit as named plaintiffs. But others Votebeat spoke with described a different perspective — one that questions whether financial compensation is the right remedy at all.

Mark Ediger, a recently retired chemistry professor at UW-Madison, for example, said he found the lawsuit “pretty bewildering,” adding that as a Madison taxpayer, it would be people like him footing the bill. 

The 193 voters range from dozens of students who are only in Madison for a few years to some of their professors and other longtime city residents. Their responses to the error are just as varied. 

Some, like Haimowitz, stopped voting entirely. Others, like Ediger, say the incident was a one-off mistake that hasn’t impacted their voting behavior. Notably, Ediger is the only voter among the disenfranchised group who has voted absentee in both of the two elections following the error, according to election data obtained by Votebeat.

“The incident has not diminished my trust in elections,” Ediger told Votebeat, adding that he’s satisfied the city has appropriately addressed its cause. “I don’t see how this should change my voting behavior moving forward.”

But other voters said their experience will change how they vote in future elections. “I’m definitely going to prioritize in-person voting,” Joanne Fairbotham, one of the disenfranchised voters, told Votebeat.

“There’s growing evidence that when someone tries to vote and they are prevented from doing so for one reason or another, it makes them less likely to vote in the future, and it can change their behavior,” said Kevin Morris, a senior research fellow and voting policy scholar with the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program. “You can lose a lot of trust very easily, and it can be very difficult to build that trust.”

All of the disenfranchised voters cast absentee ballots in the 2024 presidential election. But, among the 22 who cast ballots in the February 2025 primary for state superintendent of public instruction and city council, nearly all did so in person. Two months later, two-thirds of the 132 who voted in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race did so at the polls, a share similar to how the same group voted in previous April elections. 

Disenfranchised voters question city follow-up 

Shortly after learning that her ballot hadn’t been counted, Fairbotham — a 35-year-old medical coder who lives in Madison — wrote to City Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl, saying the error was “beyond devastating as an American who prides herself in voting in every election.”

“This is how people lose faith in their government that their rights will be protected,” she said in the letter, calling on Witzel-Behl to resign. 

Fairbotham said she never received a response from Witzel-Behl, who has since resigned — or anyone else employed by the city. 

“Not hearing a peep,” she said, is the most frustrating part. Fairbotham’s vote in the 2024 presidential election was the first time she cast an absentee ballot since the peak of the pandemic in 2020. She has only cast in-person votes since and said the incident still makes her angry.

Madison City Attorney Mike Haas disputed the characterization that the city didn’t communicate the seriousness of the error, pointing to a city and state investigation and a public apology from the mayor.

Still, some voters said the city’s outreach fell short after such a significant error. Haimowitz, for example, didn’t hear from the city when most of the voters did — a separate oversight by city officials meant overseas voters did not receive the same notice as those living locally. Until speaking with Votebeat, Haimowitz said, he didn’t know whether the mistake that kept his ballot from being counted was his or the city’s, nor what steps officials had taken to prevent it from happening again.

Election administration experts say direct, proactive communication can be critical in rebuilding trust. After a mistake like the one in Madison, jurisdictions should reach out to affected voters, review what went wrong and clearly explain how it will be prevented in the future, said Jennifer Morrell, CEO of The Elections Group and a former Colorado election administrator.

The city has completed the first two steps, Morrell said, but it did not fully follow through on the third.

After sending an initial notice telling voters they could reach out with questions, the city held no further public hearings, said Haas, a longtime election lawyer and former administrator of the Wisconsin Elections Commission. Few of the disenfranchised voters followed up, he added.

Some disenfranchised voters find lawsuit bewildering

The divide among disenfranchised voters extends to the lawsuit filed in the aftermath of the error.

In March 2025, the liberal group Law Forward filed a claim seeking $34 million from the city and Dane County over the error, later turning it into a lawsuit. In February, a circuit court judge ruled that the city could be held liable for monetary damages.

A small group of affected voters has joined the case, arguing it’s one of the only ways to hold the city accountable for failing to count their ballots.

But others see it differently. “In an era where the reliability of elections is being challenged by some groups in completely spurious ways, it seems to me that this lawsuit just adds to that noise,” Ediger said.

Lawsuits seeking monetary damages for disenfranchisement are now rare, but were more common in the late 1800s and 1900s, when Black voters were intentionally and repeatedly disenfranchised by election workers. Then, the fines forced the government to think twice, said Ediger. But there’s no similar pattern of errors or intentionality here in Madison, he added, which makes him doubt the lawsuit’s purpose. 

Haimowitz said he also opposed the lawsuit, despite how much it has shaken his confidence.

“I’m not sure that the city should pay such a heavy price for this,” Haimowitz said, adding that at a time when some Republicans are peddling “Stop the Steal” narratives and casting doubt on election integrity, especially in battleground states like Wisconsin, the Law Forward letter unnerved him.

“That kind of money could be debilitating to a city elections board that is already under immense scrutiny and pressure to get it all right,” he said.

Law Forward staff attorney Scott Thompson pushed back on comparisons between the case and post-2020 lawsuits filed by Republicans, including one that sought to throw out over 200,000 absentee ballots in Wisconsin.

“That cavalier attitude towards votes that we saw in 2020 is simply unacceptable, and not compatible with democracy,” he said. “And so what do we do with that? Well, I can tell you what we will not do: We will not stand idly by if hundreds of people in a community lose the right to vote because their ballot simply wasn’t counted.”

He said that lawsuits often make people uneasy, but that their perspective may change when a fundamental right is taken away. He declined to directly comment on some of the disenfranchised voters’ issues with the case.

For some disenfranchised voters, financial damages are part of accountability. Precious Ayodabo, a named plaintiff, wrote in a Cap Times column that her disenfranchised absentee vote “is worth enough” to warrant compensation.

“It’s worth enough that I waited for hours in line to cast it. It’s worth enough that politicians spend millions of dollars to receive it. It’s worth enough that people have put their lives on the line and died to protect it,” she wrote.

Thompson declined to make Ayodabo and the other plaintiffs available for interviews. Of the 193 voters, eight are plaintiffs in the case, he said.

Others who support the lawsuit say it’s less about personal payment and more about forcing systemic change. Fairbotham said she’s grateful the case is pushing the city to take the error seriously, particularly after the Wisconsin Elections Commission found the city violated state law.

Thompson said the lawsuit isn’t about making sure the government knows “every single jot and tittle” of absentee voting procedure, but to ensure election officials count every vote, which he defined as “the absolute most basic obligation.”

Still, some election experts warn the case could have unintended consequences. Morrell said the lawsuit could become one of many elements that dissuade election officials from staying in administrative roles.

“If we’re setting an unrealistic expectation that any mistake made by an election administrator opens you up to a lawsuit, that feels like an impossible situation to be in,” she said. “Election administrators take this so seriously and do everything they can to ensure mistakes don’t happen,” she added, “but they do.”

For Haimowitz — a voter who has helped others register to vote and served as a poll worker — the question isn’t just whether the city fixes the problem. It’s whether he can move past having his ballot go uncounted.

“It was something that made me think it’s clearly not that easy to vote,” he said.

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

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

Disenfranchised Madison voters sound off on city, lawsuit is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Reading Time: 2 minutes

A jury convicted a Wisconsin man of election fraud and identity theft for requesting the ballots of Republican state Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and Democratic Racine Mayor Cory Mason without their consent.

Jurors in Racine County on Tuesday found Harry Wait guilty of two misdemeanor election fraud charges and one felony identity theft charge following a two-day trial. He was acquitted of a second count of identity theft.

Wait leads a group that makes false election claims, including that Wisconsin’s elections are riddled with fraud and that President Donald Trump won the 2020 election. Trump lost Wisconsin in 2020 by about 21,000 votes.

Wait admitted in 2022 that he requested Vos’ and Mason’s ballots to try to prove that the state’s voter registration system is vulnerable to fraud. Wait told The Associated Press at the time that he wasn’t surprised he was charged.

“You got to expect to pay some costs sometimes when you are trying to work for the public good,” he said.

His efforts drew praise from Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson in 2022, who called Wait a “white hat hacker.”

After the verdict, Wait told WTMJ that he “would do it again.”

“I tested the system and the system failed,” he said.

A sentencing date has not been set. Wait’s attorney Joe Bugni did not respond to an email Wednesday asking whether he would appeal.

Wait, 71, faces up to six years in prison on the felony conviction and up to a year in jail on each of the misdemeanor convictions.

His conviction comes after a jury in 2024 found a former Milwaukee election official guilty of misconduct in office after she obtained three military absentee ballots using fake names and Social Security numbers in 2022. Like Wait, Kimberly Zapata argued that she was trying to expose vulnerabilities in the state’s election system.

Zapata was fined $3,000 and sentenced to one year probation.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup. This story is published in partnership with The Associated Press.

Wisconsin man who ordered ballots without consent found guilty of fraud and identity theft is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Reading Time: 2 minutes

A conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court justice first elected in 2007 announced Monday that she will not seek a third 10-year term next year, giving liberals another chance to expand their majority as cases affecting redistricting, union rights, school funding and other hot button issues await.

Justice Annette Ziegler, 62, becomes the second conservative justice in as many years to decide against seeking reelection after liberals took majority control of Wisconsin’s highest court in 2023. Liberals held onto their majority last year in a race that broke national spending records and saw billionaire Elon Musk traveling to the state to hand out $1 million checks to conservative voters.

There’s another election on April 7 for the open seat caused by conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley’s decision not to run for reelection. The liberal candidate, Appeals Court Judge Chris Taylor, has outraised her conservative opponent, fellow Appeals Court Judge Maria Lazar, allowing her to spend more on television ads in what so far has been a low-profile race given that the court’s majority is not on the line.

Liberals are seeking to win their fourth Supreme Court race in a row dating back to 2020 and solidify their hold on the court.

Ziegler’s decision to step down means there will be another open race next year. If liberals win this year, their majority would increase to 5-2, and in 2027 they could grow it to 6-1. If the conservative candidate wins this year, the liberal majority would remain 4-3, and next year the best conservatives could do would be to keep it at 4-3.

Ziegler consistently sided with fellow conservatives justices, including in 2020 when the court fell one vote short of overturning President Donald Trump’s election loss that year. Ziegler was in the minority after a conservative swing justice sided with liberals.

Cases expected to come before the court in coming years include challenges to congressional district maps, the future of a state law that effectively ended collective bargaining for most public workers and an effort to increase spending on public schools.

Liberals have struck down a state abortion ban law and ordered new legislative maps since taking control of the court, fueling Democrats’ hopes of capturing a majority this November.

Ziegler, who was chief justice between 2021 and 2025, previously served as a circuit court judge in Washington County for 10 years.

“Now is the right time for me to step away to spend more time with my husband, kids and grandkids,” she said in a statement.

“I am incredibly proud that in all my elections I had support from a broad spectrum of legal, civic, law enforcement and political leaders — both Democrats and Republicans — who believed in my commitment to fairness, ethics and the rule of law,” Ziegler said.

The election to replace Ziegler is April 6, 2027.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup. This story is published in partnership with The Associated Press.

Conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Annette Ziegler won’t seek reelection is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Reading Time: 4 minutes

When this legislative session began, Wisconsin Senate leaders made the unusual decision not to create a committee dedicated to election policy for the first time in nearly two decades. That choice has had a measurable consequence: The Senate has taken up far fewer election bills than the Assembly, and several measures that cleared the lower chamber are now stalled with no clear path forward.

Of the 19 election bills that Votebeat has tracked this legislative session, 18 have gotten at least a public committee hearing in the Assembly, compared with nine in the Senate. Fourteen of those bills passed the Assembly, compared with six in the Senate. 

Even in a session when the Senate has generally moved more slowly than the Assembly on many issues — as of Feb. 25, the Assembly had passed 439 bills since the start of the current two-year session, while the Senate passed 276 — the disparity is especially stark on elections.

Both chambers’ election activity is down compared to last session. With a dedicated election committee in the Senate, about 30 election bills received a committee hearing, compared with about 45 in the Assembly. Republicans have controlled both chambers for more than a decade.

“The lack of the dedicated committee has definitely changed things,” said Sen. Mark Spreitzer, a Democratic member of the local government and government operations committees. Without a clear Republican point person on election policy in the Senate, he said, the chamber is allowing the Assembly to drive most of the legislative action.

Some of the bills that have moved through the Assembly but haven’t passed the Senate include proposals to expand early voting hours and to bring the state in line with a 2022 federal law regarding the timing of casting electoral votes and certifying election results in presidential elections, designed to prevent the kind of post-election chaos that President Donald Trump and his allies sowed after the 2020 election. 

Two other bills — one that would require ballots to include plain-language explanations of proposed constitutional amendments and another requiring early in-person voting hours in every municipality — have gotten a public hearing in the Senate but have since stalled.

Clerks have told Votebeat that some of the stalled bills would significantly improve their efficiency  — including an omnibus proposal to create a system tracking voters adjudicated incompetent and also send voters text notifications on the status of their absentee ballots, said Rock County Clerk Lisa Tollefson, a Democrat. That proposal passed through the Assembly in November, but hasn’t been heard in the Senate.

Given the absence of a dedicated Senate election committee, Tollefson added, the Assembly has been doing the heavy lifting. But even with ready-made bills, the Senate does not appear to be eager to pass election legislation.

In every legislative session since 2009, there has been a Senate committee formally tasked with covering election legislation. Committee chairs typically serve as the go-to experts on their panels’ subject areas. They consult with lobbying groups, schedule public hearings and set up committee votes — giving them the power to advance or stall legislation.

But when election bills are scattered across multiple committees, there’s no clear point person in the Senate to guide them through the process.

In the absence of a dedicated election committee in this session, several committee leaders declined to explain whether or when the stalled election bills might move. And some voting groups say it has made it harder to know who to consult with in the chamber to discuss election legislation.

At a WisPolitics event in Madison on Feb. 12, Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu said that the absence of a Senate committee “doesn’t make it hard to pass election bills.” He added that there are “definitely avenues where election bills can run in the Senate,” including the Senate Committee on Government Operations, Labor and Economic Development and the Senate Committee on Transportation and Local Government.

LeMahieu, a Republican, didn’t respond to Votebeat’s request for comment. Sen. Dan Feyen, the chair of the government operations committee, didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. Sen. Cory Tomczyk, who chairs the local government committee, also didn’t respond to a request for comment.

But even some of their fellow Republicans are seeing the effects. For example, Sen. Rachael Cabral-Guevara is the author of two of the bills languishing in the Senate, which would require and fund a certain number of early in-person voting hours in every municipality. Those reforms, she said, are “crucial to restoring confidence in our election process.” 

She said in the Assembly, municipalities and clerks are working on a few details before the bills receive a final Senate vote, though both proposals passed the Assembly in November. The proposal to require the in-person hours got a Senate hearing in late January but has seen no activity since, while the bill to fund it hasn’t gotten a hearing at all. 

There could still be a late flurry of committee activity. On Feb. 27, the Senate government operations committee approved the proposal to bring the state in line with new federal laws regulating presidential elections. But the next presidential race is two years away, and most of the bills that would affect all elections — not just presidential ones — remain stalled. Another bill to require the Wisconsin Elections Commission to hear complaints against itself was scheduled for a March 3 hearing.

With the legislative session entering its final stretch, though, the stalled bills face increasingly long odds. The last general floor session period of the biennium ends on March 19, and the Assembly is effectively finished for the session. That means the Senate only has a few weeks left to consider election bills that already cleared the lower chamber, and if the Senate modifies any of them, the Assembly is unlikely to return to approve the changes. 

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

This coverage is made possible through Votebeat, a nonpartisan news organization covering local election administration and voting access. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Without a dedicated election committee, Wisconsin Senate lags on election policy is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Reading Time: 3 minutes

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 Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.

This coverage is made possible through Votebeat, a nonpartisan news organization covering local election administration and voting access. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Madison appeals ruling allowing lawsuits in 2024 ballot-counting case is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Reading Time: 7 minutes

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. 

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. 

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.

This coverage is made possible through Votebeat, a nonpartisan news organization covering local election administration and voting access. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Who will run the next election in small-town Wisconsin? No one knows is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.