Protesters filled the Wisconsin Capitol in 2011 to protest the legislation that ultimately past as Wisconsin Act 10, eliminating most union rights for most public employees. (Photo by Emily Mills. Used by permission)

A Dane County judge on Monday struck down the core parts of the landmark state law that eviscerated most union rights for most public employees in Wisconsin.

Judge Jacob Frost ruled that Act 10, passed by the state Legislature’s Republican majority in 2011 and signed by former Republican Gov. Scott Walker in his first year in office, was unconstitutional in making some public safety workers exempt from the law’s limits on unions but excluding other workers with similar jobs from those protections.

The ruling essentially confirmed Frost’s ruling on July 3, 2024, when he rejected motions by the state Legislature’s Republican leaders to dismiss the 2023 lawsuit challenging Act 10.

In that ruling, Frost declared that state Capitol Police, University of Wisconsin Police, and state conservation wardens were “treated unequally with no rational basis for that difference” because they were not included in the exemption that Act 10 had created for other law enforcement and public safety employees.

For that reason, the law’s categories of general and public safety employees, and its public safety employee exemption, were unconstitutional, Frost wrote then.

Frost reiterated that ruling Monday. “Act 10 as written by the Legislature specifically and narrowly defines ‘public safety employee,’” Frost wrote. “It is that definition which is unconstitutional.”

In addition, the judge rejected the suggestion that Act 10 could remain in effect without the law’s public safety employee carve-out, and that either the courts or the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission could resolve a constitutionally acceptable definition in the future.

“The Legislature cites no precedent for this bold argument that I should simply strike the unlawful definition but leave it to an agency and the courts to later define as they see fit,” Frost wrote. “Interpreting ‘public safety employee’ after striking the legislated definition would be an exercise in the absurd.”

Advocates, lawmakers react

Opponents of the law, including plaintiffs in the lawsuit, cheered Monday’s ruling, while Act 10’s backers attacked it and vowed to see it through the appeals process.

The lawsuit was brought on behalf of a group of local and state unions and public employees by the progressive nonprofit law firm Law Forward along with Bredhoff & Kaiser.

“This historic decision means that teachers, nurses, librarians and other public-sector workers across the state will once again have a voice in the workplace,” said Jeff Mandell, Law Forward president and general counsel. “Every Wisconsin family deserves the chance to build a better future through democratic participation in a union. As an organization dedicated to protecting and strengthening democracy, Law Forward is proud to have been a part of this important case.”

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester), dismissed Monday’s ruling. Through its Republican leaders, the Legislature was among the defendants in the lawsuit.

“This lawsuit came more than a decade after Act 10 became law and after many courts rejected the same meritless legal challenges,” Vos said in a statement. “Act 10 has saved Wisconsin taxpayers more than $16 billion. We look forward to presenting our arguments on appeal.”

Gov. Tony Evers, who has sought to repeal Act 10 since he took office in 2019, applauded the ruling.

“This is great news,” Evers, a Democrat, said in a social media post on BlueSky and on X. “I’ve always believed workers should have a seat at the table in decisions that affect their daily lives and livelihoods. It’s about treating workers with dignity and respect and making sure no worker is treated differently because of their profession.”

Evers sought to repeal the law in each of the three state budgets he has submitted since taking office, but the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee Republicans stripped those provisions each time.

Ben Gruber, a conservation warden and union leader, called the ruling “personal for me and my coworkers.” Gruber is one of the named plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

“As a conservation warden, having full collective bargaining rights means we will again have a voice on the job to improve our workplace and make sure that Wisconsin is a safe place for everyone,” he said in a statement distributed by the Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC).

Member local unions of WEAC were among the plaintiffs.

“The lawsuit was filed because of the dire situation that exists in Wisconsin’s public service institutions since workers’ freedoms were unconstitutionally taken away,” WEAC stated. “The state’s education workforce is in crisis as 40 percent of teachers leave the profession in the first six years because of low wages and unequal pay systems; the conservation warden program is fraught with unfair and disparate treatment of workers; and there is a 32 percent staff vacancy rate for corrections officers.”

Also joining in the lawsuit was the union representing University of Wisconsin  graduate students who work as teaching assistants, TAA Local 3220.

“Graduate workers look forward to claiming our seat at the table to ensure our teaching and research, which helps make UW-Madison a world-class university, are supported and compensated fairly,” said TAA’s co-president, Daniel Levitin. “The winds of change are blowing in our direction and we urge the university to take note and voluntarily recognize the TAA as the union of graduate workers and be prepared to meet us at the bargaining table.”

TAA is affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers. “Workers must have the right to partner with their employer and negotiate fair wages, benefits, and working conditions,” said AFT-Wisconsin President Kim Kohlhaas.

Appeals expected

WEAC’s statement cautioned that the ruling’s impact would be delayed by appeals. “The plaintiffs acknowledge that while this decision is a major win for Wisconsin’s working families, it is likely that the case will remain in the courts for some time before a final victory is reached and pledge to continue fighting until the freedoms of all workers in Wisconsin are respected and protected,” the teachers union said.

Sen. Dianne Hesselbein (D-Middleton) was first elected to the Legislature the year after the law was passed and now leads the Democratic minority in the state Senate.

“This is a crucial step to recognize and restore the rights of hard-working public employees doing the people’s work in every corner of Wisconsin,” Hesselbein said in a statement. “There are likely further hurdles ahead and I applaud the resolve of those who have kept up the effort to restore the right to collectively bargain in the state.”

State Rep. Ryan Clancy (D-Milwaukee) was a Milwaukee Public Schools teacher when the law was enacted.

“I saw firsthand the negative impact that the lack of collective bargaining had not only on our profession of teaching but also the schools, students, and our communities,” Clancy said in a statement. He called Monday’s ruling “a crucial step to ensuring that every Wisconsin worker has access to fair and equitable working conditions.”

Sen. Rachael Cabral-Guevera (R-Fox Crossing), was among the GOP lawmakers decrying the decision, declaring that the law had saved taxpayers $30 billion — nearly twice the figure Vos asserted.

“Today, an activist Dane County judge overstepped his role and unilaterally struck down Act 10 because it didn’t align with his politics,” she said in a statement. “One judge, appointed by the current governor, acting like a super-legislature is about to bankrupt local governments and school districts across Wisconsin.”

Kurt Bauer, president of Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, the state’s largest business lobby and among the groups that had championed the legislation, called the ruling “wrong on its face and … inconsistent with the law” in a statement Monday that called Act 10 “a critical tool for policymakers and elected officials to balance budgets and find taxpayer savings.”

He said the business lobby’s members “hope this ruling will be appealed and that Act 10 will be reinstated as quickly as possible.”

This story has been updated with reactions to the ruling. 

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Flanked by Sam Liebert, left, and Scott Thompson, center, Nick Ramos of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign addresses reporters Thursday outside a Wisconsin state office building. The three criticized Republican Senate candidate Eric Hovde for not conceding after vote tallies reported that Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin finished the election with 29,000 more votes than Hovde. (Wisconsin Examiner photo)

Voting rights advocates joined the calls Thursday for Republican Senate candidate Eric Hovde to back away from accusations he made earlier this week that something went wrong with vote-counting in the election Hovde lost to Sen. Tammy Baldwin.

“This is a direct attempt to cast doubt on our free and fair elections. And this is not only disappointing, it’s unnecessary,” said Sam Liebert, Wisconsin state director for All Voting is Local at a news conference Thursday morning. The nonpartisan, nonprofit organization advocates for policies to ensure voting access, particularly for voters of color and other marginalized groups.

“The rhetoric of questioning our democracy is more than just words, but it contributes to chaos and confusion, which undermines public trust in our elections and the officials who administer them,” Liebert said.

The news conference, held outside the state office building that houses the Wisconsin Elections Commission, was organized by the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, a nonpartisan voting rights and campaign finance reform advocacy group.

Speakers emphasized Wisconsin’s history of ticket-splitting and the near equal division of Republican and Democratic voters. For that reason, they said, victories last week by Republican Donald Trump in the presidential race and Baldwin, a Democrat, in the Senate race shouldn’t be viewed as remarkable or suspicious.

“Donald Trump won, Tammy Baldwin won, Kamala Harris lost, and Erik Hovde lost,” said Scott Thompson, an attorney with the nonprofit voting rights and democracy law firm Law Forward. “The people of Wisconsin know it, and I think Eric Hovde knows it too.”

“What you’re doing is creating divisions, and that cannot be accepted here in Wisconsin,” said Nick Ramos, executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.

During the campaign, Hovde “said all the right things — he talked about how he would honor the election results, talked about … there’s no time for us to continue these types of conspiracies and lies,” Ramos said. But since the election, he added, Hovde has shifted his attitude.

Hovde so far has declined to concede the U.S. Senate election, although The Associated Press called the race for Baldwin, the Democratic two-term incumbent, early Wednesday, Nov. 6. With 99% of the vote counted, Baldwin had a 29,000-vote lead over Hovde, a margin of slightly less than 1%. She declared victory after the AP call.

Hovde’s first public statement came a week after Election Day. In a video posted on social media Tuesday, he said he was waiting for the vote canvass to be completed before he would comment on the outcome.

“Once the final information is available and all options are reviewed, I will announce my decision on how I will proceed,” Hovde said.

Nevertheless, Hovde questioned the vote totals that were reported from Milwaukee’s central count facility, where the city’s absentee ballots are consolidated and tallied.

About 108,000 absentee and provisional ballots were counted in the early hours last Wednesday, with Baldwin garnering 82% of those votes, according to the Milwaukee Election Commission. In Milwaukee ballots cast in-person Tuesday, Baldwin won 75% of the vote.

Both Republican and Democratic analysts have pointed out that Democrats have disproportionately voted absentee over the last several elections and that the outcome Milwaukee reported last week was in line with those trends.

In his video, however, Hovde highlighted the late-counted ballots. He falsely called Baldwin’s lead in that tally “nearly 90%,” claiming that was “statistically improbable” in comparison with the in-person vote count.

Hovde said that because of “inconsistencies” in the data, “Many people have reached out and urged me to contest the election.”

Ramos pointed out Thursday that Wisconsin lawmakers had introduced a bill with bipartisan support that would have allowed election clerks to begin counting absentee ballots the day before Election Day — ending the late-night tally change  from absentee votes that have become a regular feature in Milwaukee.

The legislation passed the Assembly but died in the state Senate. “We have folks in the state Legislature that would rather play political games and would rather see moments like this than actually fix the problem,” Ramos said.

While Hovde spoke skeptically about the vote count in his video, in a talk radio interview after it was posted he described the election outcome as a “loss.”

Hovde is “talking out of both sides of his mouth right now,” Ramos said. “And so, on the one hand, we get to hear him say things like, you know, ‘It’s going to take me a while to get over this loss,’ and then we get to watch a video that gets broadly disseminated across X and Facebook and Instagram, where … he’s literally talking about how he does not believe what happened in Milwaukee and how the numbers shifted [in the ballot counting] aren’t accurate.”

In his video Hovde said that “asking for a recount is a serious decision that requires careful consideration.”

Counties must send their final vote canvass reports to the Wisconsin Elections Commission by Tuesday, Nov. 19. Candidates then have three days to make a recount request.

State law allows candidates to seek a recount if they lose by a margin of less than 1%, but it requires the candidate to pay the cost if the margin is more than 0.25%.

“He certainly can pursue a recount, although it looks like he’s going to have to pay for it himself,” said Thompson. “[But] Eric Hovde does not have the right to baselessly spread false claims and election lies.”

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Voters at the Wilmar Neighborhood Center on Madison's East side cast their ballots. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

On the ballot in Wisconsin this fall, voters will decide on a referendum asking to change one word in the state constitution to prevent non-U.S. citizens from voting in any local, state or federal elections. The effort is the Republican Legislature’s fifth attempt to amend the state constitution this year. 

Republicans point to a handful of municipalities across the country that have allowed non-citizens to vote in municipal elections like school board races and say the amendment would prevent any Wisconsin communities from doing the same. 

“Addressing this issue now will ensure votes are not diluted in the future,” Sen. Julian Bradley (R-Franklin) told Votebeat. “It’s best for the government to address this concern before it becomes a problem.”

Democrats and voting rights advocates say that non-citizen voting isn’t a real problem and that Republicans have shown no proof it is but continue to complain about it as part of their general anti-immigration push in this election. Plus, they say making changes like this by trying to amend the constitution makes an end run around the normal legislative process and Gov. Tony Evers’ potential veto, while making the state vulnerable to future efforts to make it harder for legal voters to cast a ballot. 

“First and foremost, we have a system that works, and I think this is a solution in search for problems,” T.R. Edwards, staff attorney at the voting rights focused Law Forward, says. “Secondarily, it shifts the burden to the voter. … But then third, I think it’s yet another vestige of our gerrymandered Legislature and an escape to actually go through the legislative process to do things that have an actual debate about what works for our state.” 

Currently the state Constitution says that “every United States citizen age 18 or older” can vote. If approved, the “every” would be changed to “only.” 

“Shall section 1 of article III of the constitution, which deals with suffrage, be amended to provide that only a United States citizen age 18 or older who resides in an election district may vote in an election for national, state, or local office or at a statewide or local referendum?” the referendum asks. 

Opponents to the referendum say it could lead to discrimination against Hispanic voters, who could be harassed and forced to prove that they belong in their communities. They also worry that changing the constitution could lead to future legislative attempts to require anyone registering to vote to prove they’re a citizen, which they say could disenfranchise legal voters who don’t have access to documents such as a birth certificate.

Edwards points to a recent Brennan Center study that found more than 21 million people across the country, 9% of voting age Americans, don’t have access to documents that would prove their citizenship. 

“That number of people, including people like my grandmother when she first moved to the state, [would lose] one of our few things that I think makes us unique as a state, our ability to have same day registration, and we’ll put that in jeopardy,” Edwards says. 

Recently, Republicans have moved across the country to warn about large-scale non-citizen voting in ways that would swing elections. Similar to other Republican claims about the election system, there is no proof that is happening. Studies of the voting system across dozens of communities involving millions of votes have found just a handful of cases of non-citizens casting ballots. 

Earlier this year, Congress was unable to pass a federal budget over disagreements about a bill that would require citizens to prove their citizenship to register to vote. 

State and local officials already have systems in place that determine if someone registering to vote is a citizen. In Wisconsin, people registering to vote must affirm they’re U.S. citizens. Lying about this when filling out the voter registration form is a felony that includes the penalty of deportation. 

“We have so many checks and balances in this state, the people that are non-citizens, you think they would actually risk — like if they’re DACA recipients — do you think they would risk their status and get thrown in jail or even be deported just to go cast a ballot?” Nick Ramos, executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, says. “Like, think about how absurd that is.” 

A 2017 report from the Brennan Center for Justice analyzed votes cast in 42 jurisdictions accounting for 23.5 million votes. That report found that in the 2016 presidential election, after which President Donald Trump first raised claims of massive numbers of illegal votes, 30 incidents of non-citizens voting were referred to prosecutors — accounting for 0.0001% of the 2016 votes. 

The Republican attempts to amend the constitution this year have had mixed results. This spring, two proposed amendments to limit who can work on and provide funding for election administration in the state were approved. But in the August election — after Democrats and advocacy groups in the state waged a public-education campaign  to oppose two more amendments — voters denied an attempt to remove powers from the governor allowing him to spend federal emergency dollars.

Voters in Grand Rapids, Mich., cast their ballots during the state’s August primary

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Some voters are already casting early ballots in the first presidential election since the global pandemic ended and former President Donald Trump refused to accept his defeat.

This year’s presidential election won’t be decided by a margin of millions of votes, but likely by thousands in the seven tightly contested states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

How legislatures, courts and election boards have reshaped ballot access in those states in the past four years could make a difference. Some of those states, especially Michigan, cemented the temporary pandemic-era measures that allowed for more mail-in and early voting. But other battleground states have passed laws that may keep some registered voters from casting ballots.

Trump and his allies have continued to spread lies about the 2020 results, claiming without evidence that widespread voter fraud stole the election from him. That has spurred many Republican lawmakers in states such as Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina to reel back access to early and mail-in voting and add new identification requirements to vote. And in Pennsylvania, statewide appellate courts are toggling between rulings.

“The last four years have been a long, strange trip,” said Hannah Fried, co-founder and executive director of All Voting is Local, a multistate voting rights organization.

“Rollbacks were almost to an instance tied to the ‘big lie,’” she added, referring to Trump’s election conspiracy theories. “And there have been many, many positive reforms for voters in the last few years that have gone beyond what we saw in the COVID era.”

The volume of election-related legislation and court cases that emerged over the past four years has been staggering.

Nationally, the Voting Rights Lab, a nonpartisan group that researches election law changes, tracked 6,450 bills across the country that were introduced since 2021 that sought to alter the voting process. Hundreds of those bills were enacted.

Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, cautioned that incremental tweaks to election law — especially last-minute changes made by the courts — not only confuse voters, but also put a strain on local election officials who must comply with changes to statute as they prepare for another highly scrutinized voting process.

“Any voter that is affected unnecessarily is too many in my book,” he said.

New restrictions

In many ways, the 2020 presidential election is still being litigated four years later.

Swing states have been the focus of legal challenges and new laws spun from a false narrative that questioned election integrity. The 2021 state legislative sessions, many begun in the days following the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, brought myriad legislative changes that have made it more difficult to vote and altered how ballots are counted and rejected.

The highest profile measure over the past four years came out of Georgia.

Under a 2021 law, Georgia residents now have less time to ask for mail-in ballots and must put their driver’s license or state ID information on those requests. The number of drop boxes has been limited. And neither election officials nor nonprofits may send unsolicited mail-in ballot applications to voters.

Republican Gov. Brian Kemp said when signing the measure that it would ensure free and fair elections in the state, but voting rights groups lambasted the law as voter suppression.

That law also gave Georgia’s State Election Board more authority to interfere in the makeup of local election boards. The state board[AS1]  has made recent headlines for paving the way for counties to potentially refuse to certify the upcoming election. This comes on top of a wave of voter registration challenges from conservative activists.

In North Carolina, the Republican-led legislature last year overrode Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto to enact measures that shortened the time to turn in mail-in ballots; required local election officials to reject ballots if voters who register to vote on Election Day do not later verify their home address; and required identification to vote by mail.

This will also be the first general election that North Carolinians will have to comply with a 2018 voter ID measure that was caught up in the court system until the state Supreme Court reinstated the law last year.

And in Arizona, the Republican-led legislature pushed through a measure[AS2]  that shortened the time voters have to correct missing or mismatched signatures on their absentee ballot envelopes. Then-Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, signed the measure.

“Look, sometimes the complexity is the point,” said Fried, of All Voting is Local. “If you are passing a law that makes it this complicated for somebody to vote or to register to vote, what’s your endgame here? What are you trying to do?”

Laws avoided major overhauls

But the restrictions could have gone much further.

That’s partly because Democratic governors, such as Arizona’s Katie Hobbs, who took office in 2023, have vetoed many of the Republican-backed bills. But it’s also because of how popular early voting methods have become.

Arizonans, for example, have been able to vote by mail for more than three decades. More than 75% of Arizonan voters requested mail-in ballots in 2022, and 90% of voters in 2020 cast their ballots by mail.

This year, a bill that would have scrapped no-excuse absentee voting passed the state House but failed to clear a Republican-controlled Senate committee.

Bridget Augustine, a high school English teacher in Glendale, Arizona, and a registered independent, has been a consistent early voter since 2020. She said the first time she voted in Arizona was by absentee ballot while she was a college student in New Jersey, and she has no concerns “whatsoever” about the safety of early voting in Arizona.

“I just feel like so much of this rhetoric was drummed up as a way to make it easier to lie about the election and undermine people’s confidence,” she said.

Vanessa Jiminez, the security manager for a Phoenix high school district, a registered independent and an early voter, said she is confident in the safety of her ballot.

“I track my ballot every step of the way,” she said.

Ben Ginsberg, a longtime Republican election lawyer and Volker Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the think tank Hoover Institution, said that while these laws may add new hurdles, he doesn’t expect them to change vote totals.

“The bottom line is I don’t think that the final result in any election is going to be impacted by a law that’s been passed,” he said on a recent call with reporters organized by the Knight Foundation, a Miami-based nonprofit that provides grants to support democracy and journalism.

Major expansions

No state has seen a bigger expansion to ballot access over the past four years than Michigan.

Republicans tried to curtail access to absentee voting, introducing 39 bills in 2021, when the party still was in charge of both legislative chambers.

Two GOP bills passed, but Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer vetoed them.

The next year, Michigan voters approved ballot measures that added nine days of early voting. The measures also allowed voters to request mail-in ballots online; created a permanent vote-by-mail list; provided prepaid postage on absentee ballot applications and ballots; increased ballot drop boxes; and allowed voters to correct missing or mismatched signatures on mail-in ballot envelopes.

“When you take it to the people and actually ask them about it, it turns out most people want more voting access,” said Melinda Billingsley, communications manager for Voters Not Politicians, a Lansing, Michigan-based voting rights advocacy group.

“The ballot access expansions happened in spite of an anti-democratic, Republican-led push to restrict ballot access,” she said.

In 2021, then-Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak, a Democrat, signed into law a measure that transitioned the state into a universal vote-by-mail system. Every registered voter would be sent a ballot in the mail before an election, unless they opt out. The bill made permanent a temporary expansion of mail-in voting that the state put in place during the pandemic.

Nevada voters have embraced the system, data shows.

In February’s presidential preference primary, 78% of ballots cast were ballots by mail or in a ballot drop box, according to the Nevada secretary of state’s office. In June’s nonpresidential primary, 65% of ballots were mail-in ballots. And in the 2022 general election, 51% of ballots cast were mail ballots.

Last-minute court decisions

Drop boxes weren’t controversial in Wisconsin until Trump became fixated on them as an avenue for alleged voter fraud, said Jeff Mandell, general counsel and co-founder of Law Forward, a Madison-based nonprofit legal organization.

For half of a century, Wisconsinites could return their absentee ballots in the same drop boxes that counties and municipalities used for water bills and property taxes, he said. But when the pandemic hit and local election officials expected higher volumes of absentee ballots, they installed larger boxes.

After Trump lost the state by fewer than 21,000 votes in 2020, drop boxes became a flashpoint. Republican leaders claimed drop boxes were not secure, and that nefarious people could tamper with the ballots. In 2022, the Wisconsin Supreme Court, then led by a conservative majority, banned drop boxes.

But that ruling would only last two years. In July, the new liberal majority in the state’s high court reversed the ruling and said localities could determine whether to use drop boxes. It was a victory for voters, Mandell said.

With U.S. Postal Service delays stemming from the agency’s restructuring, drop boxes provide a faster method of returning a ballot without having to worry about it showing up late, he said. Ballots must get in by 8 p.m. on Election Day. The boxes are especially convenient for rural voters, who may have a clerk’s office or post office with shorter hours, he added.

“Every way that you make it easy for people to vote safely and securely is good,” Mandell said.

‘A case of crying wolf again’: Election experts say Wisconsin is prepared to avoid conspiracies

After the high court’s ruling, local officials had to make a swift decision about whether to reinstall drop boxes.

Milwaukee city employees were quickly dispatched throughout the city to remove the leather bags that covered the drop boxes for two years, cleaned them all and repaired several, said Paulina Gutierrez, executive director of the City of Milwaukee Election Commission.

“There’s an all-hands-on-deck mentality here at the city,” she said, adding that there are cameras pointed at each drop box.

Although it used a drop box in 2020, Marinette, a community on the western shore of Green Bay, opted not to use them for the August primary and asked voters to hand the ballots to clerk staff. Lana Bero, the city clerk, said the city may revisit that decision before November.

New Berlin Clerk Rubina Medina said her community, a city of about 40,000 on the outskirts of Milwaukee, had some security concerns about potentially tampering or destruction of ballots within drop boxes, and therefore decided not to use the boxes this year.

Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell, who serves the state capital of Madison and its surrounding area, has been encouraging local clerks in his county to have a camera on their drop boxes and save the videos in case residents have fraud concerns.

A risk of confusing voters

Many local election officials in Wisconsin say they worry that court decisions, made mere months before the November election, could create confusion for voters and more work for clerks.

“These decisions are last-second, over and over again,” McDonell said. “You’re killing us when you do that.”

Arizonans and Pennsylvanians now know that late-in-the-game scramble too.

In August, the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated part of a 2022 Arizona law that requires documented proof of citizenship to register on state forms, potentially impacting tens of thousands of voters, disproportionately affecting young and Native voters.

Whether Pennsylvania election officials should count mail ballots returned with errors has been a subject of litigation in every election since 2020. State courts continue to grapple with the question, and neither voting rights groups nor national Republicans show signs of giving up.

Former Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar, who is now president of Athena Strategies and working on voting rights and election security issues across the country, said voters simply need to ignore the noise of litigation and closely follow the instructions with their mail ballots.

“Litigation is confusing,” Boockvar said. “The legislature won’t fix it by legislation. Voter education is the key thing here, and the instructions on the envelopes need to be as clear and simple as possible.”

To avoid confusion, voters can make a plan for how and when they will vote by going to vote.gov, a federally run site where voters can check to make sure they are properly registered and to answer questions in more than a dozen languages about methods for casting a ballot.

Arizona Mirror’s Caitlin Sievers and Jim Small, Nevada Current’s April Corbin Girnus and Pennsylvania Capital-Star’s Peter Hall contributed reporting.

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