Denise Jess walked into a Madison polling place on Saturday to vote early in person and encountered a familiar barrier: an absentee ballot envelope with a blank space for writing in her name, birthdate and address.

Jess, who is blind, chuckled along with her wife, who accompanied her to the polls. Who was going to do all that writing?

A poll worker quickly offered help, reminding Jess that she had the right to assistance. Jess, who is executive director of the Wisconsin Council of the Blind & Visually Impaired, knew she had those rights. But the moment still bothered her.

“It’s just a bummer,” she said, comparing voting with other tasks she performs independently, like identifying birds by ear, paying bills online, posting on social media, and grocery shopping. Voting is a constitutional right in Wisconsin and yet, she said, it remains far less accessible. 

Other industries have prioritized accessibility because it benefits their bottom line, she said, but voting systems were not originally designed with accessibility in mind.

“We’re making strides,” she said, “but it’s still always, always about retrofitting and trying to catch up.”

Jess’s experience illustrates a persistent tension in election policy: how to ensure both ballot security and accessibility for all voters. Electronic absentee voting is particularly nettlesome. Disability rights advocates have pushed for this option as a way for people with vision or other disabilities to vote independently, and in private, from home. But cybersecurity experts warn that current technology cannot guarantee that ballots returned electronically will be safe from hacking or manipulation.

Over a dozen other states provide fully electronic absentee voting for people with disabilities. In those states, voters with disabilities can receive a ballot electronically, mark it using a screen reader and return it electronically — similar to signing and returning a document electronically. Wisconsin isn’t one of them. Here, voters with disabilities must cast their votes on a paper ballot, or on an accessible voting machine at a polling place that prints out a paper ballot. 

That means that voters who are visually impaired or unable to write must often rely on others to complete their ballots — undermining ballot secrecy, which is also constitutionally protected. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when many disabled voters were reluctant to visit the polls in person, Wisconsin’s rules presented an even bigger barrier. 

Last year, four voters with disabilities, along with Disability Rights Wisconsin and the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin, filed a lawsuit seeking access to electronic absentee voting. A lower court initially granted some voters that option, but an appeals court paused and eventually reversed that order. The case is now before the Dane County Circuit Court. 

Beyond the roughly dozen states that offer fully electronic voting, a few others, including Vermont, Michigan, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, allow voters with disabilities to fill out ballots electronically, but they have to print out the ballots and return them by mail, drop box, or in person. Verified Voting, a nonpartisan election technology group, promotes this option as a step forward for states wary of fully electronic voting.

That wouldn’t solve the issue for everyone, though. Jess pointed out that many blind voters don’t own printers, meaning they’d still face accessibility hurdles.

Security concerns haven’t been resolved

At a time of heightened concern over election security and integrity, some technology experts say fully electronic voting is still not ready to be used widely.

Between August 2021 and September 2022, the University of California, Berkeley, hosted a working group of election, technology and cybersecurity experts to discuss the feasibility of creating standards to enable safe and secure electronic marking and return technologies. The group found that widespread adoption of electronic return would require technologies that don’t currently exist or haven’t been tested. 

A 2024 report by several federal agencies, including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Election Assistance Commission, found that sending digital copies of ballots to voters is safe and that filling them out electronically is somewhat safe, but that returning them electronically adds significant security risks.

“Sheer force of will doesn’t suffice to solve this problem,” said Mark Lindeman, the policy and strategy director at Verified Voting. “There needs to be extensive technical innovations that we can’t just dial up.”

Lindeman said threats from electronic ballot return include the possibility that somebody hacks into the system and changes votes. One potential safeguard — having voters verify that their selections were received and counted correctly — remains unproven at scale, the UC-Berkeley working group said. 

“That’s the fundamental technical tragedy at this stage of the game,” Lindeman said. “Paper ballots are obviously inconvenient for many voters. They pose real obstacles to voting, but we haven’t found a technical alternative to paper ballots that solves all the problems.”

Denise Jess chooses ‘path of least pain’

In Wisconsin, Jess chooses among three imperfect voting options.

She can vote on Election Day in her polling place, whose layout she has memorized, though it can get too busy for her comfort. She can vote using an accessible machine but still has to hand-sign the poll book, something she typically does with the assistance of a poll worker and a signature guide, a small plastic card with a rectangular cutout that frames the area where she has to sign. 

Alternatively, she can vote absentee in person during the early voting period, but then she has to receive help with paperwork and navigating an unfamiliar polling place. 

Or she can fill out an application online and vote by mail, which she avoids because she can’t fill out a paper ballot without assistance.

“It’s kind of like, what’s the path of least pain?” she said.

For this Wisconsin Supreme Court election, given the potential for bad weather, she opted for early in-person voting at the Hawthorne Public Library, which isn’t her regular polling place. 

“There’s enough consistency here at Hawthorne, but still there are surprises,” she said, sitting at a table at the library on Madison’s east side. “Even the simple navigation of going to the table to get the envelope, getting in line. They’re queuing people to wait behind the blue tape, which, of course, I can’t see.”

She could opt for more hands-on help from poll workers to speed up the process, but she said she sees her voting trips as a chance to learn more about the potential barriers for people with disabilities.

Some voters who are newer to vision loss or have more severe barriers can quickly become demoralized by the extra energy they need to put into casting a ballot, especially if poll workers aren’t trained or ready to help, she said. 

“We’ve had voters say, ‘I’m not going back. I’m just not doing that again, doing that to myself,’ she said. “So then we lose a voter.”

If electronic voting were available, Jess said, she would do it a lot more often than voting in person because she wouldn’t have to depend on transportation or the weather. 

“It would just be absolutely liberating,” she said. “I might still vote in-person at my polling place periodically, because I like my poll workers, and I always like to visit with them and give them kudos. But it would surely ease some stress.”

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.

How one voter navigates Wisconsin’s hurdles for people with disabilities 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.

Absentee voting didn’t used to be popular in Addison, a rural town of 3,300 in southeast Wisconsin. A few days before the last Supreme Court election in 2023, only about 60 residents had cast absentee ballots in person.

This year, at the same point in the election cycle, that number was over 300.

The sharp increase is due partly to Republicans’ recent embrace of absentee voting, especially in the nearly two-week period before Election Day when voters can cast absentee ballots in person. Washington County, where Addison is located, is one of the state’s most Republican counties and one of many Republican-dominated areas across Wisconsin where early voting rates have surged. 

But perhaps a bigger reason is a recent Washington County initiative aimed at making early voting more accessible for voters and more feasible for municipalities. The program compensates municipalities for the costs of extending their hours during the state’s early in-person voting period. It makes up for the gaps in municipal budgets that previously limited early voting opportunities.

“It really comes down to a matter of priorities,” Washington County Executive Josh Schoemann, a former municipal clerk, told Votebeat. “And there’s nothing more fundamental to county government and to government in general, in Wisconsin and America, than the opportunity for people to vote.” 

County absorbs the added costs for municipalities

The county first rolled out the initiative during the November 2024 election as part of a broader funding package approved by the county board. The package included over $150,000 for extended in-person absentee voting hours, voluntary audits and cameras for ballot drop boxes across the county. 

Public funding for such activities is more critical now after voters last year approved a Republican-written constitutional amendment banning private funding for election support, responding to a Republican outcry over private grants to fund election administration, especially in Democratic strongholds.

County Board Chair Jeff Schleif said he was eager to support the proposal because it would ensure that Republicans, who were just coming around to voting early, had the time and opportunity to do it, just as Democrats did in places like Milwaukee. 

“Our board is as conservative as it’s ever been,” he said, adding that extending early voting hours is helpful to everybody.

Moreover, Schleif said, the proposal would authorize and fund election audits that could debunk allegations from people like MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell that some voting machines were being hacked to change votes.

After the November election, about $71,000 of the funds remained unspent. This year, the county signed off on using that money to continue the program into this high-stakes April election.

For this election, the county is compensating municipalities at 150% of the added cost for extending their early voting hours beyond what they were in the April 2023 election. About 90% of the municipalities in the county are participating, Washington County Clerk Ashley Reichert, a Republican, said. The county also mailed voters a schedule of their town’s early voting hours.

Reichert said the initiative aims to provide local residents with voting opportunities comparable to urban areas, including weekend and night voting options. The additional hours benefit many residents who commute to Milwaukee for work and can’t vote during typical business hours, she said.

“We have quite a few very rural communities where the clerks are very part-time, and their budgets are small, and so for them, offering additional time was just not a feasible option,” she said. “Being able to take the funding off the table as a concern really helped quite a few of our municipalities.”

More hours for voting, and more voters showing up

Addison Town Clerk Wendy Fairbanks said early voting hours have expanded significantly due to the county’s support. In 2023, Addison’s early voting was generally open from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Thursday. Now it’s open as early as 7 a.m. and as late as 6 p.m., including Fridays.

“I’m able to bring in election workers to help me with this so I’m not doing it all on my own,” Fairbanks said. “Otherwise, I’d get no other work done.”

The county’s help, she continued, “takes the burden off the town, so that we’re not using money from our tax levy that could go towards road repair or something in the town.”

Another Washington County municipality, the village of Richfield, now offers Saturday hours for early voting thanks to county funding. About 90 residents participated on a recent Saturday, contributing to a total of 1,674 early ballots cast as of Thursday morning  — about double the amount from this time two years ago.

Village Administrator Jim Healy said the initiative was crucial for voters who couldn’t vote during regular hours. “We really felt strongly for these types of elections that have either state or national implications that we ought to try to go the extra mile,” Healy said, expressing hope that other Wisconsin counties might follow Washington County’s example.

In all, as of Thursday morning, Washington County had over 13,400 voters cast absentee ballots in person, nearly triple the number of votes at this point in the 2023 cycle and the fourth most in the state, despite it being only the 10th largest county by voting age population. 

While increased absentee voting means additional ballots to process, local clerks aren’t concerned about significantly longer counting times.

“This is absolutely adding one more thing,” Schoemann said, “but I also know that their biggest pain point is their budgets. They’re really, really tight. So we want to try to hit their biggest pain point where we can help them and get what voters want, and that is more opportunity.”

Other clerks look at the Washington County model

Reichert, the Washington County clerk, said she has heard from a number of county and municipal clerks, along with legislators, interested in replicating this initiative across the state. Right now, though, she said Washington County appears to be the only county offering municipal clerks that compensation. 

That may change soon: At a recent event, Rep. Scott Krug, a legislative leader who formerly chaired the Assembly Elections Committee, said one of his top upcoming legislative priorities was funding early voting so every municipality offers the same availability. He wasn’t available to comment further on Thursday.

Meanwhile, in most counties, early voting hours are uneven from town to town. In neighboring Ozaukee County, municipal clerks are staggering their hours to try to make time for residents seeking to vote early in person, said County Clerk Kellie Kretlow, a Republican. Some municipal election offices are open every day for early voting, while others are only open a few days across the nearly two-week voting period.

Sheboygan County Clerk Jon Dolson, a Republican, told Votebeat he was interested in the proposal but couldn’t see how his fiscally conservative board would approve a $15,000 funding increase, much less a $150,000 package like the one passed in neighboring Washington County. The county board recently cut the number of positions in his office, he said. 

So how did such a large spending proposal for election offices get through the fiscally conservative Washington County Board of Supervisors, which represents one of the most staunchly Republican constituencies in the state?

Schoemann, the county executive, said the board prioritized this initiative after years of disciplined budgeting and surplus management.

He said it was important for officials at the county level to take the lead, rather than expecting local clerks to each ask for help.

The proposals together were billed as an “election integrity package” that would enhance election security — a concern that Republicans have repeatedly raised.

Reichert, the county clerk, said it likely helped that the support for extended early voting hours was rolled into a broader package addressing security concerns around drop boxes and audits. Extending early voting hours itself addressed a security concern, she said, since some supervisors questioned whether mailed ballots would arrive too late or get lost in the mail.

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.

How Wisconsin’s Washington County helped its municipalities expand early voting hours 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.

Election officials in Madison are already facing a state and city investigation into the series of errors that resulted in nearly 200 absentee ballots not being counted in last fall’s election. Now officials there face a claim for compensation in an unusual case that aims to emphasize the importance of properly counting all ballots and set a monetary penalty for denying people their vote. 

A liberal election law group called Law Forward served a $34 million claim this month against Madison and Dane County, seeking damages amounting to $175,000 for each Madison voter whose absentee ballot got misplaced. The filing is likely a precursor to a lawsuit, as the group is seeking out other disenfranchised voters to join its case.

“There is going to be a price to pay when you interfere with someone’s right to vote in Wisconsin,” said Scott Thompson, staff counsel for Law Forward.

Cases like this have a history that goes back to the voting rights fights of the late 1800s and 1900s, when officials intentionally sought to bar Black people from voting. But they’re highly unusual today — most voting rights cases seek only to have a challenged right restored, rather than damages — and experts say it’s unlikely that Law Forward’s claim in the Madison case will lead to any damages being paid out.

The threat of a financial cost for errors could add to the pressure on local clerk’s offices, which already deal with the challenges of new laws and court rulings, along with persistent scrutiny from election skeptics and lawmakers. (Madison’s city clerk has been placed on leave while the investigation into her office continues.) Some clerks around the state said they consider the errors in Madison serious, but questioned the move to assign liability.

Melissa Kono, the clerk in the small town of Burnside in western Wisconsin, said that instead of a payout to voters affected by an error, money would be better spent on developing a better system for clerks to manage the increasing number of absentee ballots, which have surged since the COVID-19 pandemic. The uncounted ballots in Madison were all absentee ballots.

Thompson acknowledged the potential impact of his group’s action on clerks. But he said it serves as a broader response to the steady stream of lawsuits filed by conservative groups since 2020 aimed at preventing officials from counting certain ballots because of the way they’re returned or the information they’re missing. In the context of these lawsuits, he said, it’s important to send a message that there should be a cost for disenfranchising people.

“Elections are about exercising the right to vote,” he said. “They’re not about finding ways to kick people off the voter rolls.” 

Legal filing says Madison and Dane County violated constitution

In a statement, Madison spokesperson Dylan Brogan didn’t directly address the Law Forward claim but said every ballot should be counted accurately and that the city is cooperating with ongoing investigations while conducting its own. 

Here’s what investigators have said about the case so far: In all, 193 absentee ballots that were sent to two polling places in the city for tabulation on Election Day went missing, and were not counted, even after they were found. For reasons still unknown, the election workers at those polling places never opened the courier bags containing those ballots. Those ballots then went to the city clerk’s office, but workers didn’t open one of the parcels until Nov. 12 and the other one until Dec. 3. 

The ballots in the bag opened on Nov. 12 could still have been counted — city and county officials have given conflicting accounts on why they weren’t.

The sum total of the oversights, Law Forward alleges in its claim, resulted in the unconstitutional disenfranchisement of the 193 voters. The group appears to be preparing for a class-action lawsuit and is welcoming the other disenfranchised voters to join the case. 

In the claim, the group cites two Wisconsin Supreme Court cases that it says allow it to sue for damages, even if what happened in Madison turns out to be a series of unintentional oversights. 

One of those cases was a judgment from 1866, in which the court ruled that government officers can be found liable for their actions in denying Black Wisconsin residents the right to vote, even if those actions are done without malice. The other is a 1916 finding that because a group of voters was entitled to vote, people depriving them of that right can be held liable for their disenfranchisement.

Claims like these typically move to lawsuits if they’re not resolved, and the city and county are unlikely to accept or negotiate the requested amount, likely prompting Law Forward to file suit this summer.

When voters seek monetary damages 

Why ask for money on behalf of the voters? Thompson said it’s because there’s nothing else to ask for besides money and a finding of the city’s wrongdoing. It was too late, he said, to give the voters back the right they had been deprived of: the right to vote and have their ballots counted in the November 2024 election.

Thompson said attorney-client privilege prevented him from disclosing how the group arrived at the $175,000 figure for each voter. Wisconsin law currently caps damages against government officials at $50,000. Thompson said a secondary goal of the forthcoming lawsuit is to have a court find that law unconstitutional and allow groups to seek larger damages. 

Voter lawsuits seeking monetary damages were never very common, but there were instances in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, typically tied to racial discrimination, said Justin Levitt, an election law professor at Loyola Marymount University and a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s civil rights division. 

The most prominent cases of this kind were in Texas, where between the 1920s and 1940s Black voters who were barred from voting in Democratic primaries because of their race sometimes sued for damages in court, Levitt said.

In those cases, Black voters were designed to be left out of the voting process. In Madison, by contrast, it appears at this point that a series of mistakes — not malice or intent — led to these ballots getting lost initially.

But Thompson cautioned against coming to conclusions about why the Madison ballots didn’t ultimately get counted.

“It is too early for anyone, I think, to say with certainty exactly what happened and why it happened here,” he said. 

Lawsuits seeking damages against government officials face two significant challenges, said Richard Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law: First, courts usually look for something more egregious than negligence, such as malicious intent. Second, he said, a number of legal doctrines usually give government officials a raised level of immunity. 

He said he couldn’t think of any cases of this kind, where voters deprived of their right to vote successfully sued election officials for damages, since the 1960s.

Clerks question monetary penalty for errors

If the city accepts the claim or a court does award damages, it could have a financial impact of millions of dollars and would send a signal across the state.

“It’s not normal for this quantity of ballots to go uncounted, and I think everybody recognizes that that’s not normal,” Levitt said. “If this case succeeded, it would substantially increase the stakes of an error like that.”

But Madison’s errors stand out as unusually serious, said Wood County Clerk Trent Miner, a Republican. He said he thinks that Law Forward’s claim proposes too high a penalty, but that it shouldn’t make clerks fear the prospect of penalties for the far less consequential errors that they encounter from time to time.

“Humans run elections, so errors will happen,” he said. “This, I think, pole vaults over a minor error.”

Kono, the Burnside clerk, pointed out that the initial error of not counting the ballots at the polling sites was at the hands of the poll workers at the Madison polling sites who never opened or processed the 193 ballots.

“If you’re relying on unpaid or low-paid, glorified volunteers, essentially, what is the liability?” she said.

Even if the court doesn’t ultimately award monetary damages, the discovery phase of the expected lawsuit — where the two sides must share evidence — could significantly increase transparency around Madison’s ballot-counting errors, Thompson said. This process would likely place additional pressure on Madison and Dane County to fully disclose information beyond what has already emerged from ongoing city and state investigations.

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.

Madison’s missing-ballot mess leads to an unusual claim for monetary damages 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.

In 2022, the Wisconsin Supreme Court, then dominated by conservatives, banned the ballot drop boxes that had been used for decades but became especially popular during the pandemic. Then, in 2024, after an election shifted its majority to liberals, the court reversed itself and made drop boxes legal again.

Yet the number of drop boxes available to voters around the state has dwindled. The flip-flopping rulings from a court that’s supposed to serve as the last word on Wisconsin law made many election administrators wary of offering drop boxes at all. So a state that once had nearly 600 drop boxes now has just a few dozen, largely clustered around Madison and Milwaukee.

It’s an example of how ideological swings on Wisconsin’s highest court and an influx of lawsuits in all Wisconsin courts are roiling parts of the state’s election law and complicating the work of local election administrators, with a real impact on voters. 

The court also reversed itself in 2023, when under liberal control it ruled that legislative maps chosen by the court in 2022, then under conservative control, were unconstitutional. That forced county clerks across the state to redraw their districts just months before an election.

And in a recent opinion about the tenure of political employees, liberal justices were explicit about their willingness to overturn more precedent-setting cases.

As a swing state with routinely close elections, Wisconsin was already a key battleground for fights over election law issues, but because of the state’s divided, gridlocked government — Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and the Republican-controlled Legislature have been at loggerheads since 2019 — more of those fights are ending up in court, with some high-profile cases before the Wisconsin Supreme Court.  

The court only rarely revisits past decisions, but those few instances have emboldened activists to initiate still more legal challenges. A case currently before the Wisconsin Supreme Court seeks to undo a law that gutted collective bargaining for most public employees — a law the court previously upheld under a conservative majority.

With another Supreme Court election approaching April 1, the court’s balance of power is once again at stake. That means its positions on voting rights and political appointments could shift yet again from where they were just a few months earlier. 

How legal experts view the court’s instability

Law experts say that the high court doesn’t often reverse itself on cases involving election administration and that some shifting is natural in a state where voters choose Supreme Court justices. 

Stability is a critical value in the law, said Chad Oldfather, a constitutional law professor at Marquette University. But there are other values that conflict with stability, he said, such as — in the case of redistricting — ensuring laws are constitutional.

But the recent instances, the experts say, reflect the increasing number of election issues being settled by the courts.

“This is a national problem, but we experience it disproportionately in Wisconsin because our elections are so close,” said Jeff Mandell, founder of the liberal law firm Law Forward and one of the state’s most prominent election attorneys.

Ultimately, the more intense fights over election law are a sign of changing political tactics, said Michael Kang, a law professor at Northwestern University. Political parties that once focused more on messaging and mobilization have gotten better at identifying how different voting rules can affect their turnout, so “election law generally has become more partisan.” 

“What’s more, I think judges have become more partisan, in terms of the spread between them ideologically and the way that they’ve applied their kind of philosophy to election rules,” he said. 

Clerks and election workers feel the impact

For election officials, the growing volume of lawsuits often makes the job harder. Courts take time to rule on cases, but once they rule, clerks have to move quickly to ensure compliance with new rules in time for the coming election. 

In the past that has meant clerks — many of whom have part-time positions and whose roles extend far beyond just running elections — had only a few weeks before an election to remove drop boxes and change procedures to stop filling in missing information on voters’ absentee ballot envelopes.

It’s especially challenging in a state like Wisconsin, where elections are run at the municipal level, said Sun Prairie Clerk Elena Hilby. “It’s not like you can tell this core group of 50 people, ‘This is how the law changed.’ You have to tell a core group of 1,850 people that it’s changed, and they need to change their ways.”

Hilby says she and other clerks hear the frustration from voters.

“They’re like, ‘What are you guys doing?’ And we’re like, ‘Well, it’s not us,’” she said. “And most of them know that, but just as it’s confusing for the voters, it’s confusing for us.”

Litigation can sometimes clarify murky election laws, Rock County Clerk Lisa Tollefson told Votebeat, but the frequency of lawsuits makes coordination difficult. It is her responsibility to communicate changes in the law to all of the county’s 29 clerks. Those municipal clerks then have to relay those changes to their election inspectors — some of whom work part time every few years. 

How the court cast a cloud over drop boxes

The drop box cases illustrate how the court’s inconsistency can undermine the effect of its rulings.

Drop boxes had been used widely across the state for decades, but their use grew significantly during the 2020 election, as voters sought a safer method for returning ballots amid the peak of COVID-19.

After the then-conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court banned drop boxes in July 2022 — ruling that voters had to return their ballots directly to the clerk — clerks had to adjust to the ruling quickly. A lower court had already ruled drop boxes illegal in January 2022, just weeks before a primary election, but the high court ruling made clear to clerks that their drop boxes couldn’t be used for ballots anytime soon. 

But it wasn’t as simple as removing or sealing off the drop boxes. Some Wisconsin municipalities used the same boxes for utility payments, which they wanted to continue collecting that way. So they had to put new instructions on the boxes that superseded the instructions included with the ballot.

Still, in some cases, voters kept returning their ballots to those drop boxes. Sometimes, clerks would return those ballots to the voter, only to have the voter hand it right back. In other cases, the ballot didn’t count at all. Voters who might have followed the procedure they had used in previous elections suddenly stood to lose their vote.

After liberals gained control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, a lawsuit successfully challenged the ban, leading to the reinstatement of drop boxes in 2024 — again, in July, just weeks before a primary election. Municipalities had to move quickly to make decisions about whether and how to make them available for the August and November elections. 

Some municipalities decided not to use drop boxes due to cost concerns and a belief that they were mainly useful during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In other places, the drop boxes returned, but with evidence of lingering suspicions from the legal arguments that led to the 2022 ban. Clerks had to take extra steps to reassure voters that the drop boxes were secure and not vulnerable to fraud. There would be fewer of them, and access would be limited. In Wausau, Mayor Doug Diny unilaterally removed the drop box against legal advice, leading to an ongoing local ethics probe and state criminal investigation into his conduct.

Despite being reversed, the court’s ban of drop boxes in 2022 has contributed to a persistent narrative that drop boxes aren’t an acceptable way to return ballots, said Bryna Godar, a staff attorney at the University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative.

Court opens the door to more challenges

The Wisconsin Supreme Court’s position on the state’s legislative maps has also swung back and forth, creating problems for election officials and voters and contributing to the perception that the court’s position is driven by partisanship.

In 2022, after the governor and Legislature couldn’t agree on a set of legislative district maps, the court chose boundaries that all but ensured significant GOP majorities in the statehouse.  After liberals took control in 2023, the justices struck down the Republican-drawn maps as unconstitutional, ordering the creation of new politically neutral maps. 

After those new maps were enacted in February 2024, six months ahead of the August legislative primary, clerks had to rearrange their voters, again, into new wards and districts — work that typically takes place once a decade. Mistakes were rare but consequential: In a couple of cases, clerks initially drew some voters into the wrong legislative districts, and in the northern town of Summit, voters showed up during the August 2024 primary to find that their ballots had the candidates for the wrong Assembly district. Ultimately, 188 voters were unable to vote for the candidates who would represent them. 

Under liberal control, the court has also expressed a willingness to reverse more of its previous rulings. 

In allowing Wisconsin’s chief election official, Meagan Wolfe, to remain in office past her term, the justices relied on a 2022 ruling by the then-conservative-led court that permitted other political appointees to stay on after their terms expired. But liberal Justice Jill Karofsky, in a concurring opinion joined by two other liberals, said “it may behoove” the court to overturn that same decision. That comment prompted conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley to suggest that the liberal majority didn’t respect precedent.

Such an apparent invitation to overturn precedent is somewhat common in the U.S. Supreme Court but far rarer in the Wisconsin Supreme Court, Mandell of Law Forward said.

Mandell sees the potential risks of that pattern but said the volume of election litigation is unlikely to ease anytime soon. He is one of the state’s most prolific election lawyers, frequently arguing before all sorts of state courts and the Wisconsin Elections Commission on behalf of clients seeking to expand voting access.

“I get it, I’m part of the problem. We would be better off with less of this election litigation,” he said. But if people advocating for wider voting access stop fighting these cases, he said, the other side will have the unilateral ability to shift policies. 

“It’s not quite clear what the path out of this is,” he said, “or where we’re going to get some kind of rational, deliberative process that tries to fill these holes and bring our election code up to speed.”

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.

Why more of Wisconsin’s election law disputes are ending up in court 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.

Madison Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl has been placed on administrative leave at least through the April 1 election, as city and state officials continue to investigate how she and her staff lost track of nearly 200 ballots on Election Day last fall, the city announced Wednesday. 

Mike Haas, Madison’s city attorney, will take over her duties in the interim. Municipalities typically prefer not to make changes to election oversight so close to an election, but Haas, a former administrator of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, is widely considered one of the state’s foremost experts on election law. It’s not clear when — or whether — Witzel-Behl will return to her post.

“Given the nature of the issues being investigated, we felt this was a necessary step to maintain public confidence in the operations of our clerk’s office,” Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said.

The scrutiny of Witzel-Behl follows a series of oversights that contributed to the mishandling of ballots during the 2024 election.

In its probe, the Wisconsin Elections Commission found that mistakes began well before Election Day. One involved the poll books showing the list of registered voters in each ward. For the two polling locations where 193 ballots went missing, Witzel-Behl’s office printed the poll books on Oct. 23, nearly two weeks before Election Day, despite commission guidance urging election officials to print poll books as close to the election as possible. 

If the poll books had been printed later, they would have automatically marked certain absentee voters’ ballots as having been returned, making it clearer to poll workers on Election Day that some ballots had been received but not counted. Instead, poll workers manually highlighted the poll books to indicate returned ballots — a method that Wisconsin Elections Commission staff warned could have made it less clear to city and county officials reviewing the election results that some ballots were still outstanding. 

“I am genuinely troubled by the number of profoundly bad decisions that are recited in these materials leading up to Election Day,” commission Chair Ann Jacobs, a Democrat, said in a meeting last week.

In that commission meeting, Jacobs also highlighted what she called an “absolutely shocking set of dates post-election, where every opportunity to fix this is ignored.”

In a statement to Votebeat, Jacobs said she wasn’t surprised by Witzel-Behl being placed on leave.

“We cannot have elections where properly cast ballots are not counted due to administrative errors,” she said. “City Attorney Michael Haas is to be commended for stepping in to manage the upcoming April 1 election with less than three weeks to prepare … I have every confidence he will do everything he can to restore trust in Madison’s elections.”

Clerk’s staff found the first batch of ballots — 68 in total — in a previously unopened courier bag in the clerk’s office on Nov. 12, while Dane County was in the middle of certifying the election. 

There are conflicting accounts of what happened next: An unidentified Madison election worker claimed that the county was informed about the ballots that day, but Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell has vehemently denied this. Either way, Witzel-Behl, who told Votebeat she was on vacation for much of the time following Election Day, didn’t follow up with the county, and those ballots were never counted. She also failed to immediately notify state or city officials outside the clerk’s office.

A second batch of 125 ballots was discovered in the clerk’s office on Dec. 3. However, staff didn’t relay that information to the Wisconsin Elections Commission until Dec. 18 — well after the state certified the election. The commission then notified Haas about the error, and Haas relayed the news to the mayor’s office — which is when both learned of the problem for the first time.

While Witzel-Behl has sought to address some of the issues, her office remains under scrutiny from the Madison mayor’s office, the state and now a civil claim seeking damages for the ballots that went uncounted. She has proposed procedural changes, including requiring clerk’s staff to verify all election materials received on Election Night and ensuring that each polling place receives a list of the absentee-ballot courier bags it handles to prevent any from being overlooked.

The April 1 election that Haas will oversee for Madison includes a pair of high-profile contests: a race for a pivotal Wisconsin Supreme Court seat and a ballot question on whether the state’s photo ID requirement for voting should be enshrined in the constitution. Supreme Court elections typically draw a high turnout, especially in Madison. 

Haas said he expected a smooth election, despite the investigation.

“I am completely confident in the ability of the highly trained, incredibly competent professional staff at the Clerk’s Office to continue the operations of the office without interruption, including conducting the upcoming spring primary election,” Haas said. “I look forward to working with them to ensure a secure, transparent, and safe election.”  

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.

Madison puts city clerk on leave amid investigation into missing November 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.

With years of continued gridlock between the Republican-controlled Legislature and Democratic governor, the Wisconsin Supreme Court has become the arbiter over some of the most heated election rule debates — from redistricting and drop boxes to the status of the state’s top election official. 

That’s what makes April’s Supreme Court election a race to watch. It features two candidates with a stark ideological divide, competing for the seat of a retiring liberal justice and the chance to secure a majority in the current 4-3 liberal court. And it could determine how voters cast ballots in elections for years to come.

Conservative Brad Schimel is a Waukesha County judge and former Republican attorney general. Liberal Susan Crawford is a Dane County judge and former assistant attorney general under a Democratic administration. While the court is technically nonpartisan, both candidates are running with the support of their respective state parties, with partisan politicians providing endorsements on both sides.

“We don’t know what cases are going to come forward or what the facts or the arguments would be,” said Barry Burden, a UW-Madison political science professor and founder of the Elections Research Center. “But Crawford versus Schimel being on the court does send it in a different ideological direction.”

There are several election-related disputes the new justice may help settle. Fights over electronic voting, Wisconsin’s membership in the multistate Electronic Registration Information Center, and election officials’ ability to access citizenship data are brewing in lower courts. 

More lawsuits may yet be filed if conservatives retake control of the court. Since liberals gained a majority in 2023, they have overseen a case that led the Legislature and governor to redraw the state’s previous Republican-drawn legislative maps in a way that didn’t give either party a built-in advantage. They also legalized drop boxes, which the conservative court banned in 2022.

A victory for Crawford would probably give liberals the final say on election issues for the next two years. That’s because the next two seats up for grabs — one in 2026 and one in 2027 — are both currently held by conservatives.

A Schimel victory would give conservatives the majority, but not as much security. One of the justices providing that majority would be Justice Brian Hagedorn, a sometimes swing voter whom Burden called “the least predictable justice.”

So a court with Schimel wouldn’t be “as reliably conservative as a 4-3 liberal majority would be reliably liberal,” Burden said.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court could have an outsized role in the coming years given the apparent willingness of President Donald Trump’s administration to defy some federal court orders, said Eileen Newcomer, voter education manager at the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin. That dynamic could send more issues to state instead of federal court, Newcomer said.

One of the most crucial roles the winning candidate may have during his or her tenure is participating if the court settles disputes over election results. In 2020, the then-conservative court narrowly rejected Trump’s lawsuit to overturn that year’s presidential election, which he lost.

Two candidates diverge on election law

The clearest difference between the candidates on election law is their stance on requiring photo IDs for voting. Crawford was among the lawyers to represent the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin Education Network in its challenge to the requirement soon after it became law in 2011. She later called the law “draconian.” 

Schimel, on the other hand, said the requirement kept Wisconsin elections secure, crediting the law for President Donald Trump’s 2016 victory in the state. Schimel’s campaign has pointed out Crawford’s past opposition to the law.

Whoever wins may have a chance to weigh in on the photo ID issue.

The April ballot also has a question that could put the photo ID requirement in the state constitution.

If voters approve the question — which is likely given widespread support for the law and a muted campaign against the ballot measure — overturning the requirement would be all but impossible. Still, experts say, the court or Legislature may still be able to provide some exceptions to the requirement. That means the Supreme Court’s majority could decide just how broad those exceptions could be.

If voters elect Schimel and approve the measure, Burden said, the requirement would be secure. But if voters reject the proposal and elect Crawford, he added, “it’s very likely that some group brings a challenge to the voter ID law.”

Cases that the justices may weigh in on

One lawsuit that appears headed to the Wisconsin Supreme Court is over whether voters with disabilities should be allowed to receive, mark and return ballots electronically. Currently, that privilege is reserved for military and overseas voters. Voters with disabilities in Wisconsin allege that their lack of access to electronic voting violates their rights. 

Another issue that could come before the court is the legality of ballot drop boxes. The court under a conservative majority banned them in 2022, but liberals lifted the ban after they took over the court. A conservative group could bring a case seeking to ban them again if Schimel wins, Burden said.

“They seem very willing to entertain new arguments about the same issue,” Burden said.

Newcomer, from the League of Women Voters, said revisiting settled issues and reversing precedent a third time would “undermine people’s confidence in the court.”

Still more battles are taking place over noncitizen voting, an issue that Republicans are seeking to draw attention to, despite scant evidence that it actually happens in any widespread manner. As part of their campaign, Republicans have been seeking access to Department of Transportation data showing the citizenship status of registered voters. Much of the department’s information is outdated, but some conservatives have sued for access nonetheless to understand the scale of noncitizen voting in the battleground state.

“If that’s what conservatives want, they’re going to be dissatisfied,” Burden said. “But they might still go to the court and try to get some kind of relief or action if they feel like a bunch of officials around the state are not doing all they can to weed out noncitizens from the voting rolls.”

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.

How the Wisconsin Supreme Court race could decide future of election law 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.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court unanimously ruled Friday that the state’s chief election official, Meagan Wolfe, can stay in her job even though her term has expired, heading off a yearslong effort by some Republicans to oust her.

The court found that although Wolfe’s term expired in 2023, the Wisconsin Elections Commission had no duty to reappoint or replace her because her position isn’t vacant. The decision relied largely on a 2022 precedent that continues to bitterly divide justices.

“I am thrilled because Meagan Wolfe is an outstanding administrator and we are lucky to have her at the helm of the agency,” said Ann Jacobs, the chair of the election commission and a Democrat.

After the ruling, Wolfe said she was “excited to continue to work with elections officials around the state” and praised clerks for the work they do.

What was the dispute?

Wolfe became the Wisconsin Elections Commission’s administrator in 2018 after working for the agency and its predecessor in other roles and has been a holdover appointee since the summer of 2023. She is considered one of the most respected — and scrutinized — election officials nationwide, but she became a Republican target after President Donald Trump lost Wisconsin in the 2020 election and took heat for the commission’s decisions in administering that election. 

The case focuses not on Wolfe’s performance as administrator, but rather on the legality of appointees staying on after their terms expire. 

Wolfe’s four-year term expired in July 2023, and the Republican-led state Senate appeared poised to reject her confirmation if the Wisconsin Elections Commission had voted to reappoint her. All three Republicans on the commission voted to reappoint Wolfe, but the Democratic commissioners abstained from the vote. They cited a 2022 Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling stating that appointees can stay in their roles past the end of their terms. That meant Wolfe wasn’t formally reappointed and therefore not subject to another Senate confirmation proceeding. Still, Senate leaders took a vote to fire her.

Who were the plaintiffs and defendants? 

After the Senate voted to fire her, Wolfe and the Wisconsin Elections Commission sued Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu, a Republican who pushed for the ouster. The lawsuit, first filed in Dane County Circuit Court, also names former Senate President Chris Kapenga and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, both Republicans, as defendants.

What were they asking for? 

Wolfe and the commission asked the court to declare that she was properly continuing in her role and that the commission didn’t have to appoint an administrator just because her term had expired. Republicans asked the Wisconsin Supreme Court to require the commission to appoint an administrator, a move that could have led to Wolfe’s ouster. 

“WEC does not have a duty to appoint a new administrator to replace Wolfe simply because her term has ended,” conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court Chief Justice Annette Ziegler said.

What happens now? 

The decision means Wolfe can stay on until the commission chooses to reappoint her or appoint somebody else, or until she chooses to leave.

After the 2024 election, Wolfe told Votebeat that she has “no immediate plans to leave” if she wins this case and continues having commissioners’ approval. She said she would reconsider that if her position makes it harder for the commission to operate or receive state financial support in the upcoming budget.

In a concurring opinion Friday, three liberal Supreme Court justices signaled that they’re open to reviewing the 2022 case that was the basis for the ruling. In that case, the court had a conservative majority and ruled that appointees can legally stay in office past the expiration of their terms until the state Senate confirms a successor. At that time, the court’s liberal justices dissented.

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.

Meagan Wolfe can stay on as Wisconsin’s top election official, state Supreme Court rules 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.

Of the nearly 200 uncounted ballots that Madison city clerk’s staff discovered after Election Day, about 70 might have gotten counted if the staff members had promptly alerted the county. 

The clerk’s office staff didn’t find 125 of the uncounted ballots until Dec. 3 — after the state already certified the election. But the staff found 68 of them well before that, on Nov. 12, the same day Dane County certified the election. If the clerk’s office had reported the missing votes to the county within a few days, the county election board could have petitioned the Wisconsin Elections Commission to amend its results to include those ballots.

Kevin Kennedy, formerly the state election chief for over 30 years and a chief inspector at a Madison polling site not associated with the errors, said the county canvass, or official count, could have been reopened at that point if officials had known about the problem. 

“From my perspective, you find the ballots, you tell the city attorney. The city attorney is going to advise you to tell the mayor and to reach out to the county board of canvassers,” Kennedy said. “That’s what should have happened once they were discovered.”

Informing the city attorney in this case could have been especially helpful: Madison’s city attorney, Mike Haas, was formerly the administrator of the Wisconsin Elections Commission and is regarded by some as one of the state’s top election lawyers.

In a letter to the state election commission, obtained by Votebeat, Madison Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl claimed she “believes” somebody from her office did, in fact, tell the Dane County Clerk’s Office about the ballots on Nov. 12.

On that day, Witzel-Behl said, an employee identified as “employee F” “believes he spoke to the Dane County Clerk in his office but cannot remember what the Dane County Clerk said,” though he was “certain” the conversation had taken place. The office was left with “a general sense that the County would not want” the ballots that had been discovered that day.

Witzel-Behl didn’t supply additional information substantiating that interaction and through a spokesperson said she had nothing to add to the information she shared with the elections commission.

But Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell said he “strongly disagrees” with the city’s claims.

“Prior to the information being released publicly, my office and the Dane County Board of Canvassers had no communication with the Madison City Clerk’s Office regarding the discovery of unopened absentee ballots,” he said.

“I find the claim that a conversation took place, without providing details about what was said, difficult to understand,” he continued. “If I had been told about 60 or more uncounted ballots, I would have advised that they talk to their city attorney, who is an election expert.”

“The frustrating part of this whole situation is that a fix allowing some of the ballots to be counted was pretty simple,” he said. “An error of this size is extremely unfortunate, and I worry it will make it difficult for voters to trust their ability to cast an absentee ballot in future elections. I will work to do whatever I can on my part to help ensure our municipal partners know what to do if a similar situation occurs in the future.”

State law outlines what Madison could have done

Under state law, if the Dane County Board of Canvassers — the entity that certifies elections on the county level — becomes aware of a mistake, it can ask the Wisconsin Elections Commission for permission to amend the county results. The window for such a correction stays open until the commission receives every other county’s certification, which in this case didn’t happen until Nov. 18, several days after Madison staff found the 68 ballots. 

Other provisions may also allow the election commission to require the county to correct its canvass, said Bree Grossi Wilde, executive director of the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School. Wisconsin law appears to allow for the “ability to make a correction” if the county board of canvassers or the Wisconsin Elections Commission becomes aware of an error, she said.

Instead, the 68 Madison ballots went uncounted and unreported for weeks. City election staff were under the impression that the ballots couldn’t be counted unless there was a recount, Witzel-Behl said in December.

“They should have asked someone,” said Ann Jacobs, a Democratic member on the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

Staff in the city clerk’s office apparently didn’t report the ballot discovery to non-election city staff or any external election agency until Dec. 18, when they told the Wisconsin Elections Commission. The commission told city staff, and the mayor’s office soon after disclosed the oversight to the public. By that point, the window to make any of those ballots count toward the election had all but closed. The 193 ballots weren’t tallied until a Jan. 10 city election board meeting, though none of those ballots counted toward any official election results. Madison voters cast over 174,000 ballots in the November election, and the 193 votes wouldn’t have changed any election outcome. 

At that meeting, Witzel-Behl addressed the lack of city processes that likely contributed to the ballots going missing on Election Day and said there would be new procedures for city election staff and poll workers to prevent a recurrence. 

But at that meeting, Witzel-Behl didn’t explain why her office didn’t communicate with city staff or the county immediately after the ballots were discovered, or identify policies to communicate future errors quicker.

She told Votebeat on Jan. 14 that she’s still developing specific policies.

Kennedy, the former state election chief, said having clear instructions in place from the state would have made a difference. The election commission “needs to lay out some expectations so that everybody in the state, every municipal clerk and county clerk knows, ‘If you have a problem, this is what we expect you to do,” he said. 

Lapse raises doubts for voters

Here’s what we know so far about what happened:

At a polling site in Ward 56, just west of downtown, election officials didn’t open two large carrier envelopes used to transport absentee ballots from the clerk’s office to polling sites, where they are tabulated. Those two envelopes contained a total of 125 ballots, which were discovered on Dec. 3. 

At another site, poll workers at Ward 65 didn’t open a carrier envelope carrying 68 absentee ballots, including one ballot that should have been sent to a different polling place. That batch was found on Nov. 12, and it’s not clear what steps the clerk’s office took after the discovery.

There are two clear issues that arose from the uncounted ballots, Kennedy said. One is the matter of process and communications. Poll workers didn’t count the ballots, and city staff took a long time to find them, but still didn’t report having found them. 

The other is the impact on the voters who cast these ballots. “It’s still personal to them” that their votes didn’t get counted, Kennedy said, even if they wouldn’t have changed any election outcomes.

Among those voters was Carol Troyer-Shank, who received an apology letter from the city about the error. 

“It’s so funny, because I have been a reluctant early voter simply because I imagined such a thing happening,” she said. “It’s too bad this had to happen, but it’s not a big enough deal to lose sleep over. I’m glad the city is apologizing, and I’m glad the city is taking steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

Troyer-Shank said she may still vote early in the future. But she added that there remain outstanding questions about what led to 193 ballots, including hers, going uncounted on Election Day.

“We still don’t know what went wrong,” she said. “We still don’t know why they were uncounted at the sites.”

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.

Some missing Madison ballots could have been counted — if clerk’s staff had acted in time 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.

Wisconsin has long had a photo ID requirement for voting on its books — one of the strictest in the nation. This year, voters will decide whether to make it harder to weaken that requirement.

The April 1 ballot contains a proposal that would enshrine the photo ID requirement in the state’s constitution. Republican lawmakers backed the proposed constitutional amendment in an effort to prevent the ID policy, passed in 2011, from being gutted in court. 

Approval of the amendment wouldn’t affect the current ID requirement, experts say; rather, it would prevent or at least complicate future efforts to undo it.

The ballot question coming before voters on April 1 will ask whether the Wisconsin Constitution should be amended to “require that voters present valid photographic identification verifying their identity in order to vote in any election, subject to exceptions which may be established by law.”

The amendment would state, in part: “No qualified elector may cast a ballot in any election unless the elector presents valid photographic identification that verifies the elector’s identity.”

Voters can vote “yes” if they want the proposal in the constitution and “no” if they don’t. Whichever way the amendment goes, Wisconsin would continue to have a photo ID requirement for voting because it’s already state law. 

The amendment appears likely to pass. Most constitutional amendment proposals in Wisconsin pass when they come before voters, and 74% of Wisconsin residents polled in 2021 supported the photo ID requirement. The Assembly and the Senate both passed the amendment proposal in January on party line votes, with Republicans in favor and Democrats against.

Making the policy a constitutional requirement, and not just a state law, makes it far less likely that a court could strike it down, said Bree Grossi Wilde, executive director of the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School. It also means a future Legislature can’t remove the requirement by simply repealing the statute, she said, though it would allow lawmakers to modify the requirement to some extent by creating exceptions.

It’s unclear how far those exceptions could go before they would effectively “gut the requirement” in violation of the constitution, Wilde said. Some states, for example, allow people without photo IDs to cast a ballot if they sign a legal statement affirming their identity. 

“Maybe there is still wiggle room on the part of the Legislature to provide relief from the requirement in certain circumstances,” she said. “Whether you could say, ‘If you don’t have an ID, you don’t have to provide it,’ that might be too far. A court might not protect that.”

What’s the history behind photo IDs for voting?

The law that the amendment would enshrine was enacted in 2011 but faced court challenges that limited its implementation for several years. Republican proponents said it would make elections more secure by protecting against voter impersonation, something that research has shown is rare. Opponents of the law filed lawsuits alleging that the policy made it too hard to vote. 

Its first use in a presidential election was in 2016, and the requirement has remained in place ever since. 

The law requires voters to present their photo ID when they vote. If they can’t show ID, they can cast a provisional ballot and would have to present their photo ID afterward to have that ballot count.. Acceptable photo IDs include  driver’s licenses, military IDs, IDs issued by federally recognized Native American tribes, U.S. passports, some university IDs, free voting IDs issued by the Wisconsin Department of Transportation, and some other types.

Wisconsin is among nine states that have “strict photo ID” laws, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. In these states, voters must have a photo ID when they vote, or have to vote via provisional ballot and then provide photo ID later — either to poll workers on Election Day or to the local election clerk within days of the election — for their ballots to count. Other states either have strict non-photo ID laws, less stringent ID requirements or no ID requirement at all.

Researchers have found that Wisconsin’s law had a disenfranchising effect.

In the 2016 presidential election, an estimated 4,000 to 11,000 eligible people in Dane and Milwaukee counties didn’t vote mainly because they lacked an eligible photo ID, a study concluded, based on survey responses from nearly 300 registered nonvoters. The study, by then-University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor Ken Mayer, estimated that for 8,000 to 17,000 people in those heavily Democratic counties, lack of photo ID was one of many reasons they didn’t vote.

People who were Black, who earned lower incomes and who had less formal education were less likely to have eligible photo IDs, the study states. 

Republicans widely criticized the study over its sample size and methodology. Republicans have also criticized Democrats for simultaneously arguing that photo IDs are too hard for some people to get while also saying, in their effort to encourage voting, that free voter IDs are easy to get.

The IDs are indeed free, but getting to a Division of Motor Vehicles office to obtain one isn’t, said Lauren Kunis, CEO and executive director of VoteRiders, which helps voters obtain the identification they need to vote.

“Convenience matters when we’re talking about voting,” she said. “Some of us think about voting all day, every day, and we’ll make it a priority to get your ducks in a row and get everything you need well in advance of any deadlines. But that is not the case for the average eligible voter in the United States, and we need to design policies and systems that think about that voter.”

The law’s specifications about which IDs are acceptable make it more complicated, said Jake Spence, VoteRiders’ Wisconsin coordinator. 

For example, standard IDs issued by some big state universities, including UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee, aren’t suitable for voting. The state’s strict criteria for student ID used for voting requires including the date the card was issued, the student’s signature and an expiration date no later than two years after its issuance. The standard student IDs issued at those universities don’t meet those requirements, though students can ask for compliant IDs.

Across Wisconsin, Kunis said, VoteRiders staff and volunteers have encountered not only people who couldn’t vote because they didn’t have an appropriate ID but also people who had appropriate IDs but didn’t vote because they were confused by the law, sometimes unaware that their ID met the requirements.

What should I know about the proposed amendment?

Republican proponents say they want to put the law in the constitution to keep the liberal-majority Wisconsin Supreme Court from striking down the photo ID requirement, especially if liberal candidate Susan Crawford, who argued against the ID rule in court, wins a seat on the high court in April’s election.

“I cannot say for certain how (the) Wisconsin Supreme Court would rule on voter ID laws, but I’m also not willing to risk the Wisconsin Supreme Court, unburdened by precedent and the Wisconsin Constitution, declaring voter ID laws unconstitutional,” Republican Sen. Van Wanggaard said at a hearing on the proposal.

Democratic legislators and Democratic Gov. Tony Evers ardently opposed the proposed amendment, saying it has a disenfranchising effect. 

“This is about voter suppression,” said Rep. Christine Sinicki, a Milwaukee Democrat, adding that there were people in her neighborhood who can’t get a photo ID to vote. 

The measure passed nonetheless in the GOP-majority Legislature. Evers doesn’t have the power to veto constitutional amendment proposals, which must pass two successive legislatures before they can appear on the ballot.

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’s voter ID ballot question: Here’s what you need to 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.

It’s a known risk for the municipal clerks who run Wisconsin elections: Starting at 7 a.m. on Election Day, they have around 16 hours to finish counting every vote, or they may start facing accusations of a fraudulent late-night “ballot dump.”

Those baseless allegations, which sometimes go viral, have plagued election officials across the state but especially in Milwaukee, where counting often finishes in the early morning hours after Election Day. Republican candidates have repeatedly cast suspicion on the timing of results in the largely Democratic city to explain away their statewide losses.

Currently, there’s little election officials can do to finish counting ballots sooner. Under state law, clerks must wait until the morning of Election Day to begin processing ballots and counting votes, even if they received those ballots weeks earlier. 

Election officials are considering two strategies to change that. Both would require approval in the majority-Republican Legislature. At least one of them is highly likely to get signed into law in 2025. 

One proposed measure would significantly simplify early in-person voting procedures. Currently, people who vote early in person receive and fill out absentee ballots, which get set aside in envelopes and aren’t processed or tabulated until Election Day. The proposal clerks are considering, which is similar to a measure that received some legislative support several years ago, would allow early voters instead to put their ballots right into a tabulator.

The other measure, which has been repeatedly pitched and then rejected in one or both legislative chambers, would allow election officials to get a one-day head start and begin processing absentee ballots on the Monday before the election. This past session, the proposal passed the Assembly but stalled in the Senate.

Early voting, without the envelopes

The direct early voting measure appears unlikely to pass the Legislature in its current form. But experts say it would make elections more efficient and reduce the number of errors that the more complex process of casting and processing absentee ballots causes voters and election officials to make.

Currently, 47 states offer some form of early in-person voting, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Thirteen states, including Wisconsin, have in-person absentee voting, seven states have primarily mail voting with some early voting options, and 27 states have early in-person voting.

In Wisconsin, voters cast early in-person ballots at polling sites, but under state law, each ballot goes in an absentee ballot envelope that has to be signed by the voter and filled out with a witness’ address and signature, almost as if they were voting by mail. The envelopes and ballots can’t be processed until Election Day, when poll workers have to verify that each ballot is properly signed and witnessed before counting it. 

Processing these ballots as absentee ballots is time-consuming and invites errors, said Joshua Douglas, an election law professor at the University of Kentucky College of Law, who advocates for reducing the number of steps involved for voters and election officials.

The complications of the current early voting system became evident this year, when delays in the system used to print labels on absentee ballot envelopes, typically before voters fill out their ballot, forced voters to wait in long lines. That problem wouldn’t have come up if the early voting system had not relied on absentee ballot procedures. 

But even when it moves smoothly, the early voting system with absentee ballots requires extra work. For example, election workers typically serve as witnesses for absentee voters, signing and filling out their information for each voter. That requires an additional worker in many voting precincts.

Municipal clerks are discussing a proposal that would allow voters to cast ballots in person at their clerks’ offices as early as two weeks before the election, but to skip most of the absentee process — no witnesses, no signatures, no envelopes. Those voters would have to apply for an absentee ballot at the clerk’s office, but otherwise the process would be similar to voting on Election Day.

The ballots would be scanned by tabulators used specifically for early in-person voting, said Janesville Clerk Lorena Stottler, who’s also a co-chair of the Wisconsin Municipal Clerks Association’s legislative committee. Officials would wait until Election Day to generate the total number of votes from those ballots.

The proposal would reduce costs on multiple levels, Stottler said, since there wouldn’t be any absentee ballot envelopes, and fewer staff would be required in the early voting period and on Election Day to process absentee ballots. It would also lower the administrative costs of sorting absentee envelopes alphabetically and by ward, she said.

To ensure a high level of security, the proposal would require municipalities opting into the program to maintain a chain of custody, put cameras on the voting machines, and ensure that the tabulator saves an image of every ballot it scans, Stottler said.

Milwaukee, the state’s biggest city and typically among the last municipalities to finish counting votes, lobbied for such a proposal last year. Similar legislation came up in 2020, passing the Assembly but not the Senate.

Rep. Scott Krug, the former chair and current vice chair of the Assembly Elections Committee, said he could support some version of an early voting expansion, as long as all Wisconsin municipalities participated.

“My issue is finding a way to have availability in rural areas like mine,” said Krug, who lives in Nekoosa, a city of 2,500 in central Wisconsin. “So many towns have clerks with other full-time obligations. I’d only support an expansion of early voting if access were equal across the board.”

That would include set hours, set days and funding for smaller communities, he said, adding that he was willing to negotiate with advocates of the measure. In the past, funding election offices has been a tough sell in the Legislature.

Claire Woodall, former executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission and a current senior adviser at the election reform group Issue One, said the early voting proposal could help election officials, especially if every municipality had the same early voting program.

And to reduce confusion and the potential for errors, Woodall said, it would be better to roll out such a program over multiple years, rather than in one go.

Michigan recently implemented a similar measure, allowing voters to cast ballots early in person and insert them directly into a tabulator. The Michigan early voting program runs for a minimum of nine consecutive days, but municipalities can offer the option for as many as 28 days total before an election. The change helped speed up election results in 2024 without leading to any notable issues.

Pre-processing ballots on Monday before election

The so-called Monday processing proposal appears likely to garner more support in the Legislature than it has in the past. For years, election officials have been lobbying for the proposal to allow election officials to begin processing ballots the Monday before an election. Resistance from Republican lawmakers appears to be withering.

The proposal, election officials say, would speed up election results that have taken longer to report as more voters choose absentee voting. And critically, the earlier results could stave off false allegations about fraudulent late-night ballot dumps, like the ones then-President Donald Trump made about Milwaukee after his 2020 loss.

The Monday processing proposal, along with the early voting one, would help election officials finish counting ballots earlier, Woodall said.

Wisconsin’s most recently proposed early processing measure would have allowed election officials to start checking absentee ballot envelopes for voters’ identity and eligibility, open the envelopes, take out the ballots, and scan them through tabulators — but not tally them until Election Day.

But despite growing Republican support, the measure has faced GOP headwinds in the Legislature. In 2020, the proposal received public hearings in both chambers but never passed out of committee. In 2022, it passed the Senate but not the Assembly. This past session, it passed the Assembly but not the Senate.

The most significant opposition in the Senate this past session came from Sen. Dan Knodl, the Republican chair of the chamber’s election committee. He said that he didn’t trust Milwaukee enough to support the bill and that he was concerned about the chain of custody for ballots. Other Republicans worried that there weren’t enough GOP election observers in Milwaukee to watch the Monday and Tuesday processes. Knodl’s opposition stalled the proposal. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, a Republican, criticized the Senate’s inaction.

This upcoming session, Knodl is in the Assembly, and he’s not leading the election committee. One of the Senate’s top Republican leaders, Sen. Mary Felzkowski, said in December that she supports the proposal.

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.

Two changes that could speed up Wisconsin election results — and stave off conspiracy theories 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.

For the first time in nearly two decades, the Wisconsin Senate doesn’t have a dedicated election committee — at least, not in name — even though Democrats and Republicans have multiple legislative priorities for election administration in the coming legislative session.

That doesn’t mean election-related proposals will languish in some legislative limbo. It does mean, however, that they’re likely not all going to a single committee for hearings and formal votes, which typically take place before the full chamber hears and votes on a measure.

“Given the broad range of topics included under the general ‘elections’ category, bills will be referred to committee on a case-by-case basis,” said Cameil Bowler, a spokesperson for Republican Senate President Mary Felzkowski, who’s in charge of referring bills to committees.

Rep. Scott Krug, formerly the chair and currently the vice chair of the Assembly Elections Committee, said the Senate’s opting out of a designated election committee was “not my favorite idea.” 

He said that he’d prefer election legislation going to just one committee, but added that he’ll deal with the Senate dynamic the best that he can.

In every legislative session since 2009, there has been a Senate committee formally dedicated to elections, though some of them also incorporated urban affairs, ethics, utilities, and rural issues. Last session, election bills went to a Senate committee that oversaw elections along with two other policy areas: shared revenue and consumer protection. 

This time, it’s not so clear which Senate committee election bills will go to. Could it be the Government Operations, Labor, and Economic Development committee? Transportation and Local Government? Or Licensing, Regulatory Reform, State and Federal Affairs? 

Republican Senate leaders either wouldn’t say or didn’t appear to know Monday which committees might generally handle election legislation. 

The first election-related legislation, which would enshrine the state’s photo ID requirement for voters in the constitution, got referred to the Senate Judiciary and Public Safety committee, whose chair wrote the proposal. That constitutional amendment proposal was the first legislation to get a public hearing  in the two-year session. After approval in the Senate, it would head to the Assembly for a public hearing and then likely pass in the majority-GOP chamber before heading to voters on the April 1 ballot, along with the Wisconsin Supreme Court election. 

Sen. Mark Spreitzer, a Democrat on the government operations committee who has long worked on election administration issues, said he was surprised there was no designated Senate election committee.

“Right now, it is not clear where appointments to the Wisconsin Elections Commission or critical election bills will be sent,” he said. “There is important work to be done to improve our electoral systems with reforms like Monday processing of absentee ballots to speed up election night returns. The people of Wisconsin deserve to know where that work will be done.”

He also questioned why the voter ID measure was moving through the Legislature so soon, especially “if Republicans don’t think election topics matter enough to have a committee.”

For its part, the Wisconsin Municipal Clerks Association appeared willing to deal with the change. Janesville Clerk Lorena Stottler, who’s a co-chair of the clerks association’s legislative committee, said the group tracks election bills in other ways besides keeping up with a single legislative committee. 

Republican senators didn’t say much about their decision to forgo a formal election committee.

Brian Radday, a spokesperson for GOP Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu, didn’t explain why there wasn’t any specific election committee. Bowler, Felzkowski’s spokesperson, didn’t say to which specific committees certain election legislation would go, adding that Felzkowski doesn’t create committees. 

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 Senate won’t have a dedicated election committee 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.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission unanimously authorized an investigation Thursday into Madison’s mishandling of nearly 200 absentee ballots that were never counted from the November 2024 election.

It’s the first such investigation that the bipartisan commission has authorized since becoming an agency in 2016. The review will allow the agency to probe whether Madison Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl violated the law or abused her discretion.

Ahead of the vote, Democratic Commissioner Ann Jacobs told Votebeat that her priority wasn’t “punishment” but to figure out “what on earth went wrong here.”

“Our lack of knowledge, information that wasn’t given to us in a timely fashion, I think we need to do something more formal,” Jacobs said at the meeting.

The late discovery that 193 absentee ballots from voters in the state capital weren’t counted appears to have resulted from mistakes at two polling locations and the lack of a comprehensive system for poll workers to track whether they’ve counted every absentee ballot. 

At a polling site in Ward 56, just west of downtown, Witzel-Behl said election workers didn’t open two large carrier envelopes — used to transport absentee ballots from city offices to neighborhood polling places for counting — that contained a total of 125 ballots. At another site in the Regent neighborhood, poll workers at Ward 65 didn’t open an envelope carrying 68 absentee ballots, including one ballot that should have instead been sent to a different polling place for counting.

It’s unclear whether the uncounted ballots were checked in when they were sorted at the Madison clerk’s office. If they had been, a discrepancy between the number of recorded voters and ballots would likely have been apparent on Election Day. 

The city’s election results were certified without any acknowledgment of the 193 missing ballots. Some of the missing ballots were discovered on Nov. 12, as the county canvass was still going on, though most weren’t found until nearly a month after Election Day.

When the initial batch was discovered on Nov. 12, Witzel-Behl told Votebeat, “Staff was under the impression that it was too late for these ballots to be counted, unless we had a recount.”

The oversight wasn’t reported to the commission until Dec. 18, about six weeks after the Nov. 5 election and after the commission had already certified the results. Madison officials outside the clerk’s office, including the city attorney and the mayor’s office, didn’t know about the error until the commission told City Attorney Mike Haas about it on Dec. 19.

“There’s been zero transparency on this,” Jacobs said.

Witzel-Behl said she was largely out of the office on vacation during that period and “was not aware of the magnitude of this situation.” 

Last week, Witzel-Behl told Votebeat that she still doesn’t know why the three carrier envelopes containing 193 absentee ballots were overlooked on Election Day.

“My issue is not with the magnitude,” GOP Commissioner Don Millis said. “While the magnitude is significant, the issue is why was this not determined or caught by the time of either the local canvass or county canvass.”

“My assumption,” he continued, “is either there was a failure to follow procedures, or our procedures aren’t good and we have to correct them.”

Marge Bostelmann, a Republican commissioner and former clerk, said the WEC can provide guidance to prevent similar mistakes, but she said, “unless we find out how it happened, I don’t know that we can give that guidance.”

Jacobs pointed out the spring primary elections are scheduled for Feb. 18, adding urgency to the investigation.

“We have about six weeks until our next election, so the more information we can learn about what went wrong — even if we’re only able to send out a quickie clerks memo saying, ‘Hey, there’s a step here. Don’t forget about it,’ as we work on more formal guidance — I think we want to do that,” Jacobs 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 Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Wisconsin Elections Commission launches investigation into uncounted 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.

On Election Day in Madison, nearly 200 absentee ballots slipped through the cracks. They weren’t processed or counted. Most of them weren’t even discovered until almost a month later. 

And nobody seems to know exactly how the oversight occurred. Some city officials are questioning why it took so long for the error to come to light. It’s a mystery that the dozens of voters in the state capital would certainly like to see solved.

The critical disenfranchisement of 193 Madison voters on Nov. 5 resulted from mistakes at two different polling locations and the lack of a comprehensive system for poll workers to track whether they’ve counted every absentee ballot

At a polling site in Ward 56, just west of downtown, election officials didn’t open two large carrier envelopes, used to transport absentee ballots, that contained a total of 125 ballots, Madison Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl said. At another site in a neighborhood slightly further west called Regent, poll workers at Ward 65 didn’t open another carrier envelope, carrying 68 absentee ballots, including one that should have been sent to a different polling place.

Normally, Witzel-Behl said, poll workers at each location “triple check” that all absentee votes have been processed before running results on the tabulator.

“We do not know why these carrier envelopes were overlooked at the polls on Election Day,” she said.

The oversight became public seven weeks after the election. Until just over a week ago, neither the Wisconsin Elections Commission nor the Madison mayor’s office knew about it.

On Dec. 26, Madison’s mayor and clerk outlined in separate statements how the ballots made it to two polling places but were somehow left unopened. 

“While the discovery of these unprocessed absentee ballots did not impact the results of any election or referendum, a discrepancy of this magnitude is unacceptable,” Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said. “This oversight is a significant departure from the high standard our residents expect and must be addressed and avoided in future elections.”  

The statements left significant questions unanswered: Exactly how and when did the ballots go missing? Who was responsible for the error? Why was the news coming out over seven weeks after Election Day?

Rhodes-Conway, for one, made clear the long delay wasn’t on her account.

“Unfortunately, Clerk’s Office staff were apparently aware of the oversight for some time and the Mayor’s Office was not notified of the unprocessed ballots until December 20,” she said in a statement.

In fact, Witzel-Behl didn’t alert the mayor’s office first about the missing ballots. The clerk’s office told the Wisconsin Elections Commission about it on Dec. 18. The agency then relayed the news to the city attorney, who told the mayor’s office about it.

The commission found out about the missing ballots through a process that clerks must follow if there’s a discrepancy at the polls between the number of voters and number of ballots. The clerk’s office told the commission about the discrepancy two days before the deadline for reconciling those numbers, Witzel-Behl said. Prior to that, Witzel-Behl told Votebeat she was largely out of office.

“I personally was trying to burn through vacation time after the election, and was not aware of the magnitude of this situation,” she said. “In retrospect, I should have just cut back to standard work weeks after the election.”

Madison has decentralized absentee processing

Unlike some of Wisconsin’s bigger cities, where all absentee ballots are processed and counted at a single location, in Madison absentee ballots are sent to the polling sites corresponding to where the voters would cast in-person ballots. At those sites, poll workers typically process the absentee ballot envelopes, containing witness and voter information, before counting the ballots.

Workers at each polling location have a process for checking which voters submitted absentee ballots. They typically use an orange highlighter to mark names of voters in a poll book of city residents who were issued an absentee ballot, Witzel-Behl said, and a pink highlighter to mark those who returned their ballots. Each polling place has documents outlining the number of ballots that were returned to be counted as of the Sunday prior to Election Day, she said.

Each absentee carrier envelope has a unique identification number on the seal closing it for security reasons. Madison polling sites didn’t receive a list of seal numbers for each carrier envelope that was transported to them, but the clerk’s office stated they would provide such a list in the future. There was only a handwritten log of the seal numbers in the clerk’s office.

Despite the two polling places having a large number of absentee ballots outstanding on Election Day, the missing votes weren’t discovered until after the Municipal Board of Canvassers met on Nov. 8 to certify the election, Witzel-Behl said.

By the time one batch of uncounted ballots was discovered on Nov. 12, she said, “Staff was under the impression that it was too late for these ballots to be counted, unless we had a recount.”

Madison voters cast over 174,000 ballots in the November election. 

What we know about the missing ballots

There weren’t any apparent issues with sorting or delivering the correct ballots to the polling location near downtown. But at some point after Election Day, Witzel-Behl said, an hourly employee noticed there were a lot of outstanding absentee ballots.

On Dec. 3, she said, the employee looked through materials returned from that polling location on Election Day, she said. The employee found two sealed carrier envelopes containing absentee ballots. They contained 125 unprocessed ballots.

The 68 ballots at the Regent neighborhood polling site, including the one ballot sorted and delivered to the wrong station, were contained in a sealed carrier envelope of absentee ballots. 

It’s not entirely clear where that carrier envelope was throughout Election Day, but election workers later discovered it inside of a chamber of a vote tabulating machine where ballots typically go after they’re counted. Madison election officials often use that compartment to transport absentee ballots to polling sites.

At the end of the night, poll workers put secure ballot bags and other materials into the tabulators, Witzel-Behl said. 

Madison clerk, mayor vow to prevent future oversights 

In its letter to the election commission, the clerk’s office outlined its plans to “debrief these incidents and implement better processes” to make sure all absentee carrier envelopes are accounted for and processed on Election Day.

Rhodes-Conway also said she plans to conduct a review of the city’s election policies. Additionally, she said, the city will send letters to the affected voters to notify them of the error and apologize.

“My office is committed to taking whatever corrective action is necessary to maintain a high standard of election integrity in Madison, and to provide ongoing transparency into that process,” she 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 Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Nearly 200 Madison ballots went uncounted. Officials don’t know exactly how. 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.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

Shortly after former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman commenced his error-ridden and fruitless investigation into the state’s 2020 election, he raised eyebrows when he derided chief election official Meagan Wolfe’s clothing choices.

“Black dress, white pearls — I’ve seen the act, I’ve seen the show,” he said on a conservative radio program in spring 2022.

Not long after that comment, Wolfe was scheduled to appear at a county clerk conference, and a county clerk bought fake pearl necklaces for everyone in the room, according to Wood County Clerk Trent Miner, a Republican.

“Every one of us, men, women … were wearing those pearl necklaces to show support for her,” he said. “There’s nothing but support from the county clerks for Meagan and the job that she does.”

In contrast with that virtually unanimous support from clerks, he said, most of the criticism she’s received is based on false conspiracy theories or from people who don’t know her or understand her role on the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

Since becoming the commission’s nonpartisan administrator six years ago, Wolfe has faced death threats, repeated efforts to oust her, opposition from President-elect Donald Trump, and more lawsuits than you can count on two hands.

It’s the kind of intense pressure that has caused many election officials to leave their roles in recent years. But in the eyes of other election officials, Wolfe has thrived. Many of her peers say she is a nonpartisan and clear-headed model for navigating the world of election administration at a time when election officials are under ever-increasing scrutiny.

For Wolfe, that pressure was just a din of mostly political noise seeping into the already-complicated work of election administration. Even before the 2020 election, she learned how to cope with a level of stress that has now become the norm.

“I cannot imagine what it would be like to be in a position or an environment where we’re not constantly putting out fires,” Wolfe told Votebeat. “I’ve come to really like and appreciate those challenges. Where a challenge comes up, we have to figure out how to overcome it, how to accomplish this thing that’s never been done before.”

Politics inherent to the job for Wolfe

Wolfe, who has degrees in strategic communications and English writing, came into her administrative job with a long election background. That stands out from the many election chiefs across the country who start their roles with little or no election experience.

When Wolfe was hired at the commission’s predecessor, the Government Accountability Board in 2011, her role was to help implement and train clerks and voters about the state’s new voter ID law. The law, which was the target of litigation, was “very divisive,” Wolfe said.

In her training sessions, she said, “I’d start everything by saying, ‘I’m not here to talk about if this is a good law or this is a bad law. I’m just here to tell you what the law is and what we all need to know to be able to navigate it.’”

Those experiences, along with the continuing political and legal battles she faces, she said, have given her an ability “to separate the noise that’s intended to distract us, intended to sway us from what the important things are that actually deserve our resources and our attention.”

“If you don’t have that experience and perspective,” she said, “then it’s really easy to fall into the trap of, here’s this really loud voice or this really loud claim that’s being made, let’s shift all of our resources and our time and everything over to dealing with that, and then it allows other things to fall by the wayside.”

Wolfe moved into IT and leadership roles before becoming administrator in 2018. Some of her work has been groundbreaking across the country.

For example, Wolfe oversaw the in-house development of the statewide registration system and made Wisconsin among the first states to deploy multi-factor authentication for election officials to access that type of system — a crucial cybersecurity tool.

Wisconsin seems like an “unlikely candidate” to develop those complex systems, Wolfe said, but the state has the most decentralized election system in the nation, which means there are few ready-made programs that it could easily implement.

“We’re used to having to just sort of trailblaze,” she said.

Both of those systems became models for other states, including Rhode Island, whose former election director Rob Rock called Wolfe when the state was trying to develop its own custom-built system.

“I really had no idea how to do this, and so to have someone who kind of helped me out through this process was really instrumental,” said Rock, who is now Rhode Island’s deputy secretary of state. “We certainly wouldn’t have the system we have today if it wasn’t for folks like Meagan and her insight into how they did it in Wisconsin.”

Added Rock, “Meagan is one of the best election administrators in this country. I say that without hesitation at all.”

Wolfe’s accomplishments led to her taking leadership roles in national organizations, such as the Electronic Registration Information Center and National Association of State Election Directors.

Last year, the latter organization gave Wisconsin an award for developing a set of videos outlining how elections work.

Clerks recall Wolfe being there in times of need

A significant portion of Wolfe’s job is to be a conduit between state and local election officials.

She appears at clerk conferences to update local election officials on changing laws and oversees programs to train an ever-evolving cast of full- and part-time county and municipal clerks.

Marathon County Clerk Kim Trueblood, a Republican, said she has come to lean on Wolfe, sometimes for emotional support and other times for advice.

This past election cycle, Trueblood faced a contentious primary from an opponent who, she said, accused her of corruption and targeted her over an outstanding speeding ticket, calling her a fugitive from justice and saying she was unfit to serve.

As the attacks wore on, Trueblood said, Wolfe gave her a call to see how she was doing.

“She was not taking any sides,” Trueblood said. “She wasn’t involving herself politically at all. She was just checking in on a fellow human.”

“That says a lot about a person’s character,” Trueblood added.

Another local election official, Douglas County Clerk Kaci Jo Lundgren, a Democrat, recalled Wolfe being there for her when she was in a pinch.

Ahead of the August election this year, Lundgren mistakenly assigned the wrong Assembly district on every ballot in a small town. After catching the error on election day, Lundgren said, one of her first moves was to call Wolfe for advice.

There wasn’t much the commission could do, Lundgren recalled, but Wolfe offered her templates to communicate the error to the town’s voters. Additionally, Lundgren said Wolfe provided emotional support.

“I felt like one mistake ruined everything for me. And she affirmed that I was here because I’m doing a good job, and I’m upset because I care,” Lundgren said. “She knows what it’s like to deal with difficult situations in elections, and because it was my first time having to deal with something so difficult, it was just nice to have her as a resource.”

One figure in national elections, Carolina Lopez, the executive director of the Partnership for Large Election Jurisdictions, recalled a particularly volatile time in Wisconsin elections around 2022, when courts were flip-flopping on the legality of drop boxes.

During that time, she said, the elections commission sent rapid updates to make local election officials aware of the recent changes.

“That’s probably the biggest thing you could do for … your counties and the people that you partner with – it’s prompt communication, clear communication.”

For all the credit that clerks give Wolfe, the state’s top election official said she has it easy compared to them.

“If we don’t have them and we don’t have people that are resilient and resourceful and compassionate and tough in each of our communities, then this doesn’t work, right?” Wolfe said. “And so my job is really just to support them.”

Wolfe becomes GOP target after 2020 election

After the 2020 election, a multitude of prominent Republicans, including Trump, blamed Wolfe for Trump’s loss in that year’s election. They baselessly alleged fraud and called for investigations and her ouster, blaming her for a slew of decisions by election commissioners that she had no vote on, like bypassing a state law that ordinarily requires sending election officials to conduct elections in nursing homes.

Calls for a new administrator haven’t entirely ceased. But now, over four years after Wolfe became a target, scores of people in the election community — and even many Republican leaders — are ready to move on.

The Legislature’s top Republican, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, was recently asked on WISN 12 if the Assembly would move to impeach Wolfe. Vos, who had authorized Gableman’s investigation, called it unlikely, adding, “I really want 2020 to be in the rearview mirror.”

Trueblood, the Marathon County clerk, said there’s a sense of camaraderie between local election officials and Wolfe, especially after she became targeted in the wake of the 2020 election.

“For a while, she wasn’t going anywhere by herself for fear of her own safety,” Trueblood said. “I don’t care what your political feelings about somebody are, things like that just aren’t okay. And I think we all developed a really close bond with her.”

If that vitriol gets under Wolfe’s skin, she’s not expressing it.

“I’ve always felt really strongly that we cannot allow people threatening us, harassing us, bullying us, whatever you want to call it – we cannot allow that to sway how we behave or, in my position, to stop me from going out and talking to the public about how elections work,” Wolfe said. “Because in some ways I view that as almost giving in to partisan pressure … and I’m just not going to do that.”

Smooth 2024 election sign that Wolfe should continue, former chief says

Despite efforts to move forward, the fight to target and oust Wolfe has continued into 2024, past the November election, which for the most part went off without a hitch.

After 2020, the commission received thousands of calls and emails replete with election conspiracy theories and false claims, she said. Since the 2024 election, she said, conspiracy theory-laden calls and emails number in the single digits.

At least one significant hurdle awaits, though.

As Wolfe’s term expired in the summer of 2023, the election commission deadlocked on her reappointment. She remained in her role as a holdover appointee and, along with the commission, filed a lawsuit against GOP legislative leaders who sought to oust her.

That case is pending before the Wisconsin Supreme Court. In November’s oral arguments, a majority of justices appeared skeptical of the argument against her.

Both of Wolfe’s predecessors expressed support for her to stay in her job.

Mike Haas, who was administrator at the accountability board and later became the commission’s first administrator, said the smooth administration of the 2024 election “is evidence that the right person is in the job and should continue in it.”

Added Haas, “It would be nice in Wisconsin if we could get to a position of people supporting election officials, rather than being focused on creating imaginary conspiracy theories.”

Kevin Kennedy, who was Wisconsin’s chief election official for over 30 years, said both he and Haas were replaceable — and Wolfe is too.

But Kennedy wondered why people would want to replace “someone who’s really good.”

“I think it’s best for Wisconsin if she stays,” he said.

For her part, Wolfe said she has “no immediate plans to leave” if she wins that case and continues to receive the election commissioners’ approval. She has many ongoing projects, but also wants to gauge what next year looks like, she said.

Wolfe also questioned whether she may get in the way of her agency’s functions, like budget negotiations. If there’s ever a time “where me being in this role seems like it’s not productive to the needs of our agency or the state,” she said, then she may reevaluate staying at the commission, “because this isn’t about me. It’s much bigger and more important than me.”

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.

How Meagan Wolfe navigates intense scrutiny to make elections and her peers stronger 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.

Update, Dec. 12, 2024: A federal judge dismissed the Republican Party of Wisconsin lawsuit on Thursday, saying there’s no controversy over the main issue in the case. Both the GOP and the defendants agree they should cast electoral votes for President-elect Donald Trump on Dec. 17, in compliance with a federal law, not the Dec. 16 date dictated under a state law.

Original story: The Republican Party of Wisconsin filed a lawsuit Friday to resolve a discrepancy between state and federal law directing when appointed presidential electors must meet to cast Electoral College votes.

State law requires presidential electors to meet on Dec. 16 this year, but a federal law passed two years ago calls for them to meet on Dec. 17. The state GOP is calling on a U.S. District Court of Western Wisconsin judge to enforce the federal requirement and strike the state one.

“The presidential electors cannot comply with both requirements,” the lawsuit states.

Resolving the current conflict is key to avoiding the state’s electoral votes getting challenged or contested in Congress, the state GOP states.

The lawsuit highlights the Legislature’s failure to pass a bill that would have brought Wisconsin in line with the new federal law. That inaction, the state GOP says, “led to the current conflict between the federal and state statutes.”

The lawsuit is filed against Gov. Tony Evers, Attorney General Josh Kaul and Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe.

The GOP is asking for the federal court to declare the current state law requirement — for the electors to meet on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December, as opposed to the federal law’s requirement to meet on the first Tuesday following the second Wednesday — unconstitutional and unenforceable. Given the tight timeline, it’s seeking a hearing “as soon as the Court’s calendar allows.”

Spokespeople for the Wisconsin Elections Commission and Evers declined to comment for this story. 

Generally, federal law supersedes state law if there’s a conflict between the two, said Bryna Godar, a staff attorney at the University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative. Under the current, conflicting laws, electors this year definitely have to meet on Dec. 17, but it’s less clear what they should do on Dec. 16, she told Votebeat in May.

The new designated day arose as a result of the new federal law, commonly called the Electoral Count Reform Act. Congress designed the law in 2022 to prevent the post-election chaos that then-President Donald Trump and his allies created after the 2020 election, which culminated in efforts to send fake electoral votes to Congress, block certification of legitimate electoral votes and then storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. 

The new federal law sets specific schedules for certifying election results and casting electoral votes. It cleared up ambiguities contained in the previous version of the law, which was enacted in 1887 but never updated until two years ago. 

As of mid-October, 15 states had updated their laws to comply with the Electoral Count Reform Act, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. A Wisconsin proposal to bring the state in line with the new federal law passed the Senate nearly unanimously in February. But it never received a vote in the Assembly. 

“It would have been beneficial if Wisconsin had also done that,” Godar said.

Scott Thompson, a staff attorney at the liberal-leaning legal group Law Forward, said the Legislature knew about this problem for over a year but chose not to resolve it with a simple fix.

“This eleventh hour lawsuit merely confirms that our state Legislature needs to stop peddling election conspiracy theories and start taking the business of election administration seriously,” he said.

Wisconsin Republicans were among those who sent documents to Congress in December 2020 falsely claiming Trump won the state. Trump won the state in 2024. The Wisconsin fake electors were subject to a civil lawsuit, and there’s an ongoing criminal case against their attorneys.

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.

UPDATE: Parties agree on date Trump’s electors are supposed to cast their votes 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.

In the early morning following Election Day in 2020, Claire Woodall, then Milwaukee’s elections chief, mistakenly left behind a USB stick carrying vote totals at the city’s central absentee ballot counting facility. Election conspiracy theorists quickly seized on the mistake, accusing Woodall of rigging the election. 

Their claims were baseless, but the mistake increased scrutiny on the city’s election staff and led Woodall to create a checklist to make sure workers at central count didn’t overlook any critical steps in the future.

This year, despite the checklist, Milwaukee election staff at central count made another procedural mistake — and once again left the door open to conspiracy theorists. 

Somebody — city officials haven’t said who — overlooked the second step outlined on the checklist and failed to lock and seal the hatch covers on the facility’s 13 tabulators before workers began tabulating ballots. For hours, while counting proceeded, the machines’ on-off switches and USB ports were left exposed. 

After election officials discovered the lapse, city officials decided to count 31,000 absentee ballots all over again, a choice that led to delays in reporting results.  

Results from the large and heavily Democratic city ultimately came in at 4 a.m. on Wednesday, only a few hours later than expected, but a time that conspiracy theorists implied was a suspicious hour for vote totals to change. Their posts echoed claims from 2020 that used sensationalized language like “late-night ballot dumps” to describe the reality that in big cities, absentee ballots take time — yes, sometimes late into the night — to collect, deliver, verify and count accurately.

In fact, the results in Milwaukee couldn’t have arrived much sooner. Under state law, election officials can’t start processing the hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots until the morning of Election Day. This year, they got a late start because of delays in getting workers settled, but were still expecting to be done around 2 or 3 a.m. Then it became clear the midday decision to redo the count would add more time to the process. 

But those explanations have done little to curb the false conspiracy theories that have been proliferating on the right, including from losing U.S. Senate candidate Eric Hovde.

Election officials have for years known that the slightest mistakes, or even perceived errors, can trigger false claims. In this instance, the failure to follow a critical security step occurred in the state’s most scrutinized election facility, despite new procedures meant to reduce such errors.

For people with a conspiratorial mindset, such an oversight can’t be explained away as just a mistake, said Mert Bayar, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public. The errors can provide conspiracy theorists a feeling of validation because those errors make a “conspiracy theory more realistic … more believable.”

For those people, he said, election errors are instead perceived as “part of a plot to steal an election.” 

Instead of considering the 2024 Milwaukee mistake a simple oversight, Bayar said, conspiracy theorists may think that the tabulator doors “cannot be left unlocked unless they’re trying something tricky, something stealth.”

Genya Coulter, senior director of stakeholder relations at the Open Source Election Technology Institute, said Milwaukee can still fine-tune its processes and checklists. 

“I don’t think anybody needs to be demonized,” she said, “but I do think that there needs to be some retraining. That would be helpful.”

Milwaukee error initially drew complaints, but not suspicion 

It was an election observer who first noticed the open tabulator doors and alerted election officials. Around 2 p.m., Milwaukee’s current election chief, Paulina Gutiérrez, went from tabulator to tabulator, monitored by Democratic and Republican representatives, to lock all of the doors. Two hours later, she made the call to rerun all ballots through the tabulators.

The tabulators had been in full view of partisan observers and the media, but behind a barrier that only election officials and some designated observers, like representatives for both political parties who accompany election officials during some election processes, can enter. Any tampering would have been evident, Gutiérrez said, and there was no sign of that.

For that reason, some Republicans at central count opposed recounting all the ballots and risking a delay. U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, who went to central count on Election Day to learn more about the error, said he didn’t think anything nefarious happened, though he said the election operation there was “grossly incompetent.”

Coulter said the decision to start the counting over again was “the right call for transparency’s sake.”

Hovde, who lost his Senate race in a state that Donald Trump carried, invoked conspiratorial language to describe what happened. 

“The results from election night were disappointing, particularly in light of the last minute absentee ballots that were dropped in Milwaukee at 4 a.m. flipping the outcome,” he said Monday in his concession speech. “There are many troubling issues around these absentee ballots.”

In an earlier video, Hovde criticized Milwaukee’s election operation and spread false claims about the proportion of votes that his opponent, U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, received from absentee ballots. That led to a skyrocketing number of posts baselessly alleging election fraud in Wisconsin.

One prominent conservative social media account questioned whether the tabulator doors being left open was a case of sabotage. 

In a statement, the Milwaukee Election Commission said it “unequivocally refutes Eric Hovde’s baseless claims regarding the integrity of our election process.”

Why Milwaukee’s results were late

There’s no proof of fraud or malfeasance in Milwaukee or anywhere else in Wisconsin on Election Day. But a few key factors combined to delay Milwaukee’s results until 4 a.m.

First, Milwaukee central count workers started processing and tabulating ballots around 9 a.m., long after the 7 a.m. start time allowed under state law. The delay was a matter of getting dozens of central count workers organized and at the right station in the large facility.

The more high-profile one was the failure to close the tabulators, which prompted the decision to count 31,000 absentee ballots all over again. 

But both of those slowdowns could have been less consequential had Wisconsin election officials been able to process absentee ballots on the Monday before Election Day, as some other states allow. Such a change could have allowed election officials to review absentee ballot envelopes, verify and check in absentee voters but not count votes. An effort to allow election officials to do so stalled in the state Senate this year.

Checklist change could ‘improve transparency’

Milwaukee election officials may have avoided the situation entirely — and could avoid similar situations in the future — by modifying their central count checklist, said Coulter, from the Open Source Election Technology Institute.

Currently, the checklist states that at the start of Election Day, the tabulator doors should be locked and sealed. It’s not clear why that step was skipped. Gutiérrez didn’t respond to questions for comment about who was in charge of the process or whether that person faced disciplinary action. 

But the step likely wouldn’t have been overlooked, Coulter said, if the checklist required the official in charge of locking the tabulators to be accompanied by a representative from each major political party.

“That’s a relatively painless change that … I think it would improve transparency,” Coulter said.

“There needs to be an emphasis on having two people from different political affiliations performing all duties that involve the tabulator,” she said.

Another pre-processing step on the checklist calls for people working at the tabulators to make sure the numbered seals pasted over the tabulator doors are intact. It doesn’t call for checking that the tabulator doors are locked.

To avoid a repeat situation, Coulter said, “they should also check to make sure that the door to the power button is properly locked, and what to do if it isn’t.”

Election officials recognize the scrutiny they face over errors, Coulter said, and they sometimes focus more on avoiding mistakes than running election operations.

“It’s like a racecar driver … If you focus on the wall, you’re going to wind up hitting that wall,” she said. “You have to train your mind to think about the curve and not the wall, but unfortunately, it’s really hard for election officials to do that, especially in high-pressure jurisdictions.”

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.

How Milwaukee’s Election Day mistake left the door open to more misinformation 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.