Sensitive information about individuals who are judged mentally incapable of voting in Wisconsin is not accessible through the state’s public records laws, according to a 5-2 Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling released Tuesday.
Justice Brian Hagedorn, a frequent swing vote on the court, joined the liberal justices in the majority, which determined that state law shows the Legislature intended to keep Notices of Voting Eligibility closed from public access. The notices are documents the courts send to election officials after a judge concludes a person is found mentally incompetent to cast a ballot.
“Our decision today is rooted in the legislature’s choice to protect the privacy of individuals subject to guardianship proceedings,” Justice Janet Protasiewicz wrote for the majority. “The legislature said, with limited exceptions, ‘court records pertinent to the finding of incompetency are closed.’”
In the same opinion, the majority provided specifics on what the court should consider when someone seeks to compel a public official to release public records, which is known as a “writ of mandamus.” The majority determined that the court “should consider only whether the requester has a right to the records,” which can be done through analyzing whether records exist, if there are statutory exceptions and if “the public policy balancing test weighs toward disclosure.”
Bill Lueders, the president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council, said the court’s decision on mandamus actions “discarded an outdated standard for public records cases and reduced barriers to winning these cases in the future.”
Conservative justices Annette Ziegler and Rebecca Bradley dissented. In her dissent, Ziegler argued that the Notice of Voting Eligibility forms should be released because they are not relevant to incompetency proceedings and are created as “a communication of a finding” after that decision is made.
“The majority’s conclusion fails to recognize this important distinction: A finding of incompetency is distinct from a finding that one has lost the right to vote,” Ziegler wrote. “Instead, it adopts an overbroad and unworkable definition of what records pertain to a finding of incompetency to include NVEs. Holding that NVEs are shielded from the public records law runs counter to the statute’s language, scheme and the presumption of open government.”
The case was originally brought in 2022 by the conservative Wisconsin Voter Alliance. The group filed lawsuits in 13 counties, arguing that having access to information about individuals who have been judged incompetent to vote would show inconsistencies in the state’s voter rolls. The alliance is led by Ron Heuer, who worked on the state’s partisan review of the 2020 presidential election results conducted by former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman. Heuer did not return phone calls or emails from Wisconsin Watch on Tuesday.
Ron Heuer, president of Wisconsin Voter Alliance, filed 13 lawsuits to obtain court records indicating whether someone is adjudicated incompetent to vote. Two district courts ruled against him, saying the law prohibits access to such records. The 4th District Court of Appeals upheld one of those rulings, but the 2nd District Court of Appeals reversed it. (Matthew DeFour / Wisconsin Watch)
At the request of Wisconsin Watch, the Dane County clerk in 2023 conducted a review that found 95 individuals who previously cast ballots despite a court finding them unable to do so. Election officials and state lawmakers have previously called for a legally binding process to track adjudicated incompetent voters, but no bill in recent years has made it through the legislative process.
Disability advocates previously advocated for the information in Notice of Voting Eligibility forms to be kept private over concerns it could make vulnerable individuals more at risk of being scammed or exploited.
Tuesday’s ruling is part of a complicated legal saga stemming from cases from Wisconsin Voter Alliance cases that have made their way through the state’s court system in recent years.
Appeals Court Judge Maria Lazar, who ran for the Wisconsin Supreme Court earlier this year, wrote the 2nd District opinion that supported the Wisconsin Voter Alliance’s position on access to the records. That opinion was released after the 4th District decision was published as precedent, but was revised after the Wisconsin Supreme Court issued a ruling in January 2025.
The high court in that 2025 decision only ruled on the differing Appeals Court opinions but did not reach a decision on whether Notices of Voting Eligibility are public records until Tuesday.
The case also became an attack point in this year’s Wisconsin Supreme Court race. Justice-elect Chris Taylor in a debate before the April election pointed to Lazar’s Appeals Court opinion on access to sensitive records as evidence to claim that Lazar “brought an extreme right-wing political agenda to the bench.”
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This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.
The FBI agents arrived at David Bolter’s Milwaukee home on a cool, cloudy Wednesday morning in late May. They were armed with a list of questions for the 2020 poll worker, who had raised concerns about the way local officials handled the 2020 election, Bolter told Votebeat.
President Donald Trump relied on Bolter’s claims in an unsuccessful 2020 lawsuit that sought to throw out more than 220,000 votes. That would have been more than enough to move Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes from Democrat Joe Biden, who won the state, to Trump. Though courts, several election reviews and many audits rejected Trump’s claims, the Republican never stopped believing that he was cheated out of the presidency in 2020.
That appears to be why, last month, the FBI sent agents back to Milwaukee to question Bolter as part of an expanding national effort by the second Trump administration to investigate long-debunked claims of fraud in the 2020 election.
The investigation into the 2020 election appears to be relying on already disproven allegations from people like Bolter. Bolter declined to divulge more about his conversation with the FBI, which has not been previously reported, but allegations from Bolter’s 2020 affidavit were central to some conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. For example, he alleged that somebody in Milwaukee’s absentee ballot counting facility announced around midnight on Election Day that a “huge truckload of ballots” was going to be delivered — an accusation for which there has so far appeared to be no additional evidence.
Around the same time Bolter says he talked to the FBI, two plainclothes agents with FBI badges showed up at the apartment of a former Milwaukee resident and 2020 poll worker about an affidavit she submitted, according to the former poll worker, who asked to be identified only by her first name, Christine, to give her the freedom to discuss an ongoing investigation.
Christine had also submitted an affidavit about the 2020 election, saying election workers had been told that all votes were counted, but she then saw workers continuing to count ballots around midnight. That affidavit was the focus of the agents’ questions, Christine told Votebeat.
“I suspected wrongdoing, but I’m not saying that it actually happened,” she said. “I’m just one lowly person that was working there.”
During the interview, she added, an agent showed her a photograph of Claire Woodall, the former Milwaukee election chief, asking her if she recognized the former election official who has been central to false allegations about the 2020 election. She identified her by name. Woodall didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Caroline Clancy, a spokesperson for the FBI’s Milwaukee office, declined to comment.
Claire Woodall-Vogg, executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission, works at the presidential recount at the Wisconsin Center convention center in Milwaukee on Nov. 25, 2020. (Sara Stathas for Wisconsin Watch)
While investigators seem mainly focused on the 2020 vote, some elections experts believe the Trump administration’s wide-ranging probe is actually designed to create more doubts among Americans about future elections, as Republicans face strong political headwinds that could cost them control of Congress later this year.
“This isn’t about the 2020 election, this is about the 2026 and 2028 elections,” said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan, nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research. “This is about intimidating election officials. This is about creating a stream of disinformation designed to delegitimize an election the president may believe he’s going to lose. This is designed by the president’s underlings to satisfy the unrealistic expectations of a president that still cannot comprehend that he lost an election that he definitely lost, and it’s incredibly destabilizing.”
Wisconsin is the latest known target of the Trump administration’s 2020 investigation. The FBI is looking to interview elections officials and Milwaukee police officers in what some worry could be a precursor to an effort to seize ballots from the 2020 presidential race, as it already has in Georgia.
The Trump administration is revisiting allegations of election fraud that have been repeatedly scrutinized
In January, federal investigators seized 600 boxes of ballots from the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia. The heavily Democratic county, home to Atlanta, was key to Biden’s narrow 2020 victory in the state.
As in Wisconsin, the FBI in Georgia has built its investigation on allegations that have already been repeatedly scrutinized by audits, investigations, and courts without unearthing any evidence of fraud or tampering that could have overturned the results.
The Georgia search represented an unprecedented intervention by the federal government into local administration. Even more unusually, Tulsi Gabbard, who will step down at end of this month as director of national intelligence, personally oversaw the seizure and arranged for Trump to speak directly to the FBI agents via cell phone after they carried out the operation.
The Trump administration investigations stretch from Arizona, where federal officials subpoenaed computerized records of a partisan review state lawmakers conducted of Maricopa County’s 2020 election, to Puerto Rico, where the Office of the Director of National Intelligence procured voting machines to examine for potential security risks.
The administration’s investigations aren’t entirely limited to 2020. The U.S. Department of Justice sent a letter in April to Wayne County, Michigan — home to Detroit — demanding all ballots cast in the 2024 election, which Trump won. But even in that case, to support the request, the Justice Department cited accusations of fraud made after the 2020 election, including a lawsuit that was quickly dismissed after a judge wrote that “plaintiffs’ interpretation of events is incorrect and not credible.” Wayne County never handed over the ballots, because it doesn’t have possession of them.
What do the 2020 elections mean for 2026?
The FBI faces challenges in pursuing cases tied to the 2020 election since the five-year statute of limitations that applies to most of the likely charges expired last year. Law enforcement veterans said it is possible that the Justice Department could pursue broader conspiracy charges in the case, but the prospect remains unclear.
John Keller, a former acting head of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section who resigned in 2025 after refusing the Trump administration’s demands to drop corruption charges against then-New York City Mayor Eric Adams, said the administration appeared to be trying to normalize federal investigations of state elections to pave the way for future intervention.
“They are using enforcement directed at the 2020 election as a test run for what they can get away with on Election Day this year, or after, to try and delay certification or invalidate an election” if the results don’t go their way, he said.
Injecting federal law enforcement officials into an ongoing election is a more extreme and serious action than investigating a past one, and it could face stiffer opposition. But it’s clear, at least, that the administration is scrutinizing current elections closely.
Any effort to seize ballots in an ongoing election would create unprecedented new issues, such as a breach in the chain of custody over cast ballots, that could prevent election officials from declaring a winner and throw results into uncertainty.
Catherine Engelbrecht, co-founder of the Texas-based conservative group True the Vote, which has promoted debunked theories about the 2020 election, said she understands Trump’s intentions but believes the 2020 election questions should have been resolved “in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election.”
“This is not necessarily the way I would have recommended that it would be handled,” she said. “The fact that it wasn’t addressed has left this lingering void.”
In most cases, however, Trump’s claims of voter fraud were addressed in the wake of the 2020 election. Time and again, courts, state investigations, and even the Justice Department concluded that there was no evidence of problems or fraud that would have changed the results.
Engelbrecht said she views the Trump administration’s ongoing investigations as an effort to dig into long-standing concerns about the voting process it wants to address for future elections.
“The past is prologue,” she said. “If we don’t understand what happened, we are doomed to repeat it.”
Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.
Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.
This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.
Ahead of the Wisconsin Supreme Court election in April, Green Bay election officials accidentally sent duplicate ballots to 150 voters, prompting an administrative complaint before the Wisconsin Elections Commission and conspiracy theories online.
In a slightly different example from this year, some voters in Maryland initially received primary ballots for the wrong party. Election officials then intentionally issued new ballots for the correct party to all voters who had requested a mail ballot, and the original ballots were voided. Nonetheless, President Donald Trump falsely suggested that nobody knew what was happening with the original ballots and that “any Republican running in Maryland doesn’t have a chance” because voters who received them, who were disproportionately Democrats, would be allowed to vote twice.
Despite the heightened attention, election officials accidentally sending duplicate ballots — or sending out an erroneous batch before intentionally sending corrected ballots to the same voters — is a rare but well-understood mistake nationwide that hardly ever results in the type of double voting Trump has warned of.
“Once any ballot is received and accepted, it locks down that voter’s record, so that a second ballot could not be accepted for that same voter,” said Tammy Patrick, chief programs officer of the National Association of Election Officials. “That’s the way it works everywhere.”
Two primary mechanisms keep these accidental duplicate ballots from getting counted: proper record keeping and deterrence, said David Levine, an election security expert and the election director in Richmond, Virginia. Generally, that record keeping is done by putting unique barcodes on absentee ballot envelopes, which prevent people from voting more than once.
“It’s usually not an issue because, one, election officials are pretty good about contingency planning and having procedures in place, so if something like this happens, they know how to either void ballots or segregate them appropriately, so that they’re not going to be counted,” Levine said.
Second, he added, most voters understand that double voting is a crime, and it’s not a practice they want to engage in. A study of 2012 election results found that, at most, one in 4,000 votes cast could be a double vote, but that clerical errors in marking turnout records — not actual double voting — may account for most if not all of that number.
Some of the attention on these mistakes comes from people who are genuinely unaware of the protections that keep double votes from being counted, Levine said. But, he said, there’s also scrutiny from people who are familiar or should be familiar with those safeguards but “choose to try and make a lot of hay out of something that’s largely much ado about nothing.”
Why do duplicate ballots get sent out?
Simply put, election season is an extraordinarily busy time for clerks and the vendors that print their ballots. Sometimes amid their multitasking, they mistakenly send two batches of absentee ballots to the same group of voters, or send an incorrect batch and have to send a second, correct one.
In the Green Bay instance, City Clerk Celestine Jeffreys said election officials were scrambling because a mid-March blizzard closed much of the city, and her staff faced a time crunch to send ballots out on time. The city sent notices to the 152 affected voters before Election Day. Ultimately, just one voter returned two ballots, and both were voided after Green Bay officials alerted the voter about it.
In Maryland, the State Board of Elections said the initial batch of ballots was erroneous because of a coding error with the board’s mail ballot vendor. Since the vendor couldn’t identify which voters received the wrong ballots, the board decided to send new ballots to everyone who had requested a mail ballot in that election and void the old ones in the state’s registration database, so they wouldn’t count even if voters returned them.
What keeps those erroneous ballots from getting counted?
One of the best tools election officials in Wisconsin and elsewhere have at their disposal are unique barcodes printed on the absentee ballot certificates that voters receive.
Those barcodes in Wisconsin connect to the statewide voter registration database and are unique to each voter. Other states have similar systems, with unique identifiers tying an absentee ballot to each voter. If an election official scans a duplicate ballot, the system shows that the voter already returned one, and one of the ballots is rejected.
That’s a “very, very established process,” Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe said after the Green Bay incident.
In examples like Racine, when voters receive a ballot missing a race or containing another error that can be corrected before Election Day, officials will intentionally send another, correct ballot to the voter. The first ballot becomes known as the “A” ballot, and the second one is known as the “B” ballot.
If a voter returns just one ballot, that vote will count — including only valid votes from the erroneous ballot, if that’s the one submitted. If a voter returns both ballots, officials will scrap the “A” ballot and count the “B” since the latter is the correct form.
That’s different from Maryland, where election officials voided all of the original ballots and reissued new ones.
How specific instances of duplicate ballots get resolved — whether that’s canceling out all the original ballots or planning for “A” and “B” ballots like in Racine — can depend on state laws, officials’ discretion and court rulings, Patrick said. How close the error is to election day and the jurisdiction’s budget can also influence how election officials handle duplicate ballots, she added.
Patrick also drew a distinction between officials sending out duplicate absentee ballots and the rare but occasional instances of double voting.
“More often than not, the rare instances where we see it, it’s an individual voting in two different jurisdictions or two different states,” she said. “It’s not so much that a single person is voting in the same election, in the same jurisdiction, under the same name.”
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
Wisconsin will likely face limited immediate impact at both the legislative and congressional level from the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that narrowed how the Voting Rights Act can be used to challenge political maps. But it may make it easier for people to challenge school board and city council maps in court.
The ruling in Louisiana v. Callais raises the bar for voting rights challenges by requiring stronger evidence that race, rather than political considerations, drove how districts were drawn, and making it easier for states to defend maps on nonracial grounds.
Dan Lennington, the managing vice president and deputy counsel at the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, said the boundaries that could be most easily struck down as a result of the Wednesday ruling are those that were drawn explicitly for racial reasons. Some examples, he said, are the boundaries for Milwaukee city council districts and certain school districts.
Race is a common factor in drawing Milwaukee city council districts, though campaigns to add additional majority-minority districts haven’t always succeeded.
For example, departing Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett in December 2021 vetoed a proposed city council map because it didn’t include a third Latino-majority district, only for Mayor Cavalier Johnson to sign that same map several weeks later.
Lennington also pointed to state laws that use race as a factor to determine school district boundaries. One of those laws explicitly mentions “racial composition of the pupils” as a factor for drawing boundaries — a law that he said is now implicated by the Callais decision.
“If a plaintiff comes to us and says that they live in a district that’s been racially gerrymandered, we would take a very close look at that case,” he said.
Less likely impact on legislative and congressional level
There likely won’t be much impact in Wisconsin at the congressional district level because there’s just one majority-minority district in the state, UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden said ahead of the ruling. The 4th Congressional District, represented by Rep. Gwen Moore, D-Milwaukee, comprises much of Milwaukee and the surrounding suburbs in Milwaukee County.
Even if Section 2 of the VRA did not apply, he said, the district would likely stay much the same given the general principle of keeping communities intact.
A decision like the one handed down, he said, “would open the door if line drawers wanted to break up that county or city in some way, but I think it would probably be challenged on other grounds.”
Challenges to Wisconsin’s congressional maps have often had more to do with partisan than racial line-drawing. Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, said he wasn’t surprised by the federal decision but reiterated his call for new congressional maps, which he said unfairly gave Republicans a 6-2 seat advantage in a swing state.
But two recent court decisions in Wisconsin rejected challenges to the state’s congressional maps on the basis that they constitute an unconstitutional “anti-competitive” gerrymander. Those rulings focused not on race, but on whether courts can take up claims based on partisan advantage.
Doug Poland, co-founder of the liberal law firm Law Forward, said this ruling could empower lawmakers to pursue partisan goals while making racial challenges harder to prove.
But because of Wisconsin’s demographics — a largely white state, with the most significant minority populations concentrated around the Milwaukee area — the state has run into Section 2 challenges far less often than southern states, he said.
“As a practical matter, this decision doesn’t have a big impact on Wisconsin at the moment,” he said. “That could change.”
There’s more at play among state legislative districts, Burden said. The state has nine majority-minority legislative districts, where a single minority group makes up over half of the population: seven in the Assembly and two in the Senate. Two other districts — one in each chamber — are minority influence districts, where combined minority populations make up a majority.
Democrats in Wisconsin have generally steered clear of breaking up minority districts to avoid violating the VRA, Burden said, but packing minority voters in one district sometimes costs them adjacent districts where they might have been competitive if the minority population was more evenly distributed. For that reason, there’s a history of Republicans supporting majority-minority districts in the state.
But while Evers argued this addition was necessary to comply with the Voting Rights Act, it drew criticism from both sides of the aisle. A Black Democratic legislator criticized the move as diluting Black voices, while Republicans appealed the maps to the U.S. Supreme Court, which sided with the GOP and ordered the Wisconsin Supreme Court to select a different map.
If any of the districts are found to be out of compliance with the U.S. Constitution under the ruling via some additional challenge, Burden said, Wisconsin may draw new districts sooner than later.
“I don’t know who that advantages,” he said. “It probably depends who’s drawing the lines.”
Lennington also pointed out President Donald Trump’s success with Black and Latino voters relative to past GOP candidates, adding that splitting majority-minority legislative districts wouldn’t necessarily give either party an advantage here.
What he did predict, though, is that splitting such districts “might polarize us even more” if they were replaced with districts drawn on partisan as opposed to racial lines.
“It just might make the red more red and the blue more blue,” he said.
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court was scheduled to hear oral arguments Tuesday in a case brought by a conservative group that could determine whether sensitive information about people judged mentally incapable of voting is a public record.
It’s the second time justices are hearing arguments in this case, which previously had been caught up in conflicting opinions issued by two of the state’s appeals court districts. It also became an attack point used by liberal Appeals Court Judge Chris Taylor in the most recent Wisconsin Supreme Court election, which she won by 20 points. Her opponent, Appeals Court Judge Maria Lazar, wrote an opinion supportive of the conservative group’s position, which was unusual because it contradicted another appeals court ruling in a separate case on the same issue.
The key question before justices on Tuesday is whether the information in Notices of Voting Eligibility should be publicly accessible. Courts send those forms to election officials after a judge in a guardianship case determines someone is not competent to cast a ballot. State law says “the fact that an individual has been found incompetent … is accessible to any person who demonstrates to the custodian of the records a need for that information.”.
The Wisconsin Voter Alliance is a conservative group led by Ron Heuer, who worked on the state’s partisan review of the 2020 presidential election results conducted by former Justice Michael Gableman. The alliance filed lawsuits in 13 counties arguing that access to the information about voters who have been judged incompetent would show inconsistencies with the state’s voter rolls. Gableman’s investigation ended ignominiously, and he’s now facing a three-year suspension of his law license for his unprofessional conduct.
Heuer said he “never expected” the high court to take the case back on appeal.
“We are well within our bounds here to have access to that data,” he said.
Ron Heuer, president of Wisconsin Voter Alliance, is seen at a Sept. 29, 2022, Thomas More Society fundraiser in Okauchee, Wis. (Matthew DeFour / Wisconsin Watch)
In 2023, a review conducted by the Dane County clerk at the request of Wisconsin Watch found 95 individuals who previously cast ballots despite a court declaring them unable to do so, though administrative error and people moving to different municipalities explained many of those cases, rather than any kind of intentional voter fraud. Election officials and state lawmakers previously identified a need for a legally binding process to track adjudicated incompetent voters, though no bill has passed to fix the holes in the system.
The Wisconsin Elections Commission also conducted a review of adjudicated incompetent voters, which was completed in 2023, and communicated with local register in probate offices to make sure records were accurate ahead of the 2024 elections, said spokesperson Emilee Miklas.
Miklas declined to comment on the Wisconsin Voter Alliance case, but noted the commission has previously asked for legislative changes to better track those voters.
Republicans this session proposed a bill that would have required circuit courts to notify the Wisconsin Elections Commission by email about a determination of voter incompetency and then the commission would have had three business days to update that person’s voter status and notify a local clerk. The bill passed the Assembly in November, but died after it did not receive a hearing in the Senate. Gov. Tony Evers vetoed a bill with similar language and other provisions during the 2023 legislative session because other elements in the bill could cause ballots with minor errors to be discarded.
Disability advocates remain concerned that the details on Notices of Voting Eligibility forms, if made public, can put already vulnerable populations at risk of exploitations or scams. The forms sought by the WVA can include a person’s name, address and date of birth.
“We already know more about them from the fact that they’ve been found incompetent than you know about the average person you pass on the street,” said Polly Shoemaker, an attorney with the Wisconsin Guardianship Support Center. “So there’s that, and then there’s the fact that it’s these folks who can be very easily taken advantage of.”
How we got here
The high court last held oral arguments in September 2024 following conflicting opinions issued in separate but similar cases in the Madison-based 4th District Court of Appeals and the Waukesha-based 2nd District.
Justices in January 2025 only reached an opinion on the 2nd District’s decision, which was released after the 4th District’s ruling was published as precedent. The high court did not rule last year on whether the Notices of Voting Eligibility are accessible as public records.
The 4th District in November 2023 affirmed a Juneau County decision that the sensitive information about those voters is not open for public disclosure. A judicial committee on Dec. 21, 2023, published the 4th District’s opinion as precedent.
Then, on Dec. 27, 2023, the 2nd District ruled that the WVA had a right to the records, overturning a Walworth County court’s decision and clashing with the precedent set in the 4th District case. Lazar and Appeals Court Judge Shelley Grogan made up the majority with liberal Judge Lisa Neubauer dissenting.
The 2nd District revised the appeals decision in March 2025 after the state Supreme Court’s opinion, and the WVA petitioned for justices to hear the case again.
But the 2nd District opinion, written by Lazar, became a point of attack in the 2026 Wisconsin Supreme Court race. In the only debate ahead of the election, Taylor used the case to support her claim that Lazar “brought an extreme right-wing agenda to the bench.”
“She has refused to follow precedent,” Taylor said. “She ruled to release personal, private voting information to a right-wing group that tried to overturn our election. Thank goodness she was reversed by the state Supreme Court.”
In addition to the Wisconsin Voter Alliance case, the high court was also hearing oral arguments on Tuesday in another case on whether a child who was injured during birth has the right to pursue legal action against a doctor.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
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.
If that comes as news, it could be because the top race is a relatively low-key Wisconsin Supreme Court contest between Appeals Court judges Maria Lazar, backed by Republicans, and Chris Taylor, backed by Democrats. They are running for an officially nonpartisan open seat on the court after conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley chose not to run for another term.
While the state Supreme Court race will appear at the top of the ballot, there are other local municipal and judicial elections and school referendum questions for voters to decide.
As of Monday, the Wisconsin Elections Commission reported 317,000 people voted early in-person or by mail. In 2025, more than 693,000 people voted early ahead of the spring election.
The polls will be open from 7 a.m. until 8 p.m. on Tuesday. You can find out what’s on your ballot, the location of your polling place and more at myvote.wi.gov. Voters can register at the polls on Election Day.
Andrew Gunem casts a ballot during the spring election at Lapham Elementary School, April 7, 2026, in Madison, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Wisconsin Supreme Court
The 2026 Wisconsin Supreme Court election is a quieter race with fewer fireworks and significantly less overall spending than the two recent contests in 2023 and 2025, which the liberal candidate won by 10 points.
The sleepier race is likely due to there being no majority on the line in 2026. A Lazar victory would maintain 4-3 liberal control. A Taylor win would grow the liberal majority to five out of the seven seats on the court and guarantee liberal control through at least 2030.
Lazar and Taylor represent contrasting judicial philosophies on political issues that come before the court, including reproductive health care, redistricting, criminal justice and the power balance between government and business.
A person walks down the sidewalk alongside voting signs at Lapham Elementary School during the spring election, April 7, 2026, in Madison, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
The candidates have taken starkly different paths to the bench. Lazar served as an assistant attorney general under former Republican Attorney General JB Van Hollen after starting her career in private practice. She was elected to the Waukesha County Circuit Court in 2015 and 2021 and then to the Court of Appeals in 2022.
Taylor also began her career in private practice but then worked as the policy and political director for Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin. She won a special election in 2011 as a Democrat to represent a Madison-focused district in the Assembly. Gov. Tony Evers appointed Taylor to the Dane County Circuit Court in 2020, and she ran unopposed in 2023 for her seat on the Madison-based 4th District Court of Appeals.
Taylor has maintained a significant fundraising and spending advantage over Lazar throughout the campaign. The Marquette University Law School Poll in the weeks leading up to Election Day found a large percentage of undecided voters.
In the last poll conducted before the April 7 election, 30% of likely voters said they supported Taylor, 22% favored Lazar and 46% said they were undecided.
School district referendums
Seventy-two Wisconsin school districts are asking voters in their communities to approve tax increases totaling $1 billion to borrow money for construction projects or to pay for operations, such as educational programs, technology or transportation services.
The districts are turning to voters at a challenging time for referendum approvals. Referendum approval rates have declined since 2018, according to the Wisconsin Policy Forum.
Sixty-two of the school districts are seeking operating referendums. The remaining districts are asking for capital referendums, or approval of construction projects. Two districts, Howard-Suamico and Sauk Prairie, are asking for both operating and construction referendums.
Carrie Devitt casts a ballot during the spring election at Warner Park Community Recreation Center, April 7, 2026, in Madison, Wis.(Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Volunteer election workers Anne Ketz, left, and David Gebhardt, cast absentee ballots at Lapham Elementary School during the spring election April 7, 2026, in Madison, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Appeals and circuit court races
There are appeals court and circuit court races on the ballot in multiple counties across the state, but most of these are uncontested elections. Candidates elected to county circuit courts and the Court of Appeals are elected to six-year terms.
The appeals court races in the Milwaukee-based 1st District, the Waukesha-based 2nd District and Madison-based 4th District are uncontested. The unopposed candidates include incumbent Judge Joe Donald in the 1st District, conservative attorney Anthony LoCoco in the 2nd District and incumbent Judge Rachel Graham in the 4th District.
Twenty-six circuit court district seats are on ballots across the state, but only six — Dane, Marathon, Washburn, Washington, Wood, and a shared seat in Florence and Forest counties — feature contested races.
Voters in Marathon and Florence and Forest counties will select new circuit court judges after the incumbents in those seats did not seek reelection. Evers-appointed judicial incumbents are running against challengers in circuit court branch races in Dane, Washburn, Washington and Wood counties.
A person walks into Warner Park Community Recreation Center during the spring election, April 7, 2026, in Madison, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Other local elections
Voters on Tuesday can also make decisions on who represents them on school boards, as county supervisors and as city mayors and alderpersons.
What is on the ballot in these local races will differ from community to community. To find out more about specific local races on your ballot, visit myvote.wi.gov.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
Betting on an election one is voting in is illegal in Wisconsin.
Politics betting has become popular on platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket. Just this year, people have placed lucrative bets on the capture of the Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and on the war with Iran, among other events.
On Kalshi, people have placed bets worth tens of thousands of dollars on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election on April 7 and the governor’s primary election on Aug. 11.
Ann Jacobs, Wisconsin’s Elections Commission chair, noted on X that voters’ ballots can be disqualified and thrown out if they were found to have bet on the election.
Wisconsin Statute 6.03(2) specifies that no one is allowed to vote in any election in which the person has placed “any bet or wager depending upon the result of the election.” The idea behind the law has existed since 1849.
This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.
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 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.
Nathan Haimowitz (Courtesy of Nathan Haimowitz)
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.”
“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.
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