A Waukesha County judge on Friday ordered the Wisconsin Elections Commission to determine whether any noncitizens are registered to vote and to stop accepting voter registrations without verifying that the applicant is a U.S. citizen.
A Pewaukee resident, represented by conservative attorneys, filed a lawsuit last year seeking to require the election commission to verify citizenship of registered voters and applicants. The suit also sought to force the Wisconsin Department of Transportation to compare its citizenship information against voter rolls.
The election commission opposed the initial request, saying that no state law called for requiring documented proof of citizenship. It also argued that the DOT has no obligation to match citizenship data with voter records.
Waukesha County Circuit Court Judge Michael Maxwell rejected the commission’s argument, saying that the agency is failing in its duty to ensure that only lawful voters make it to the voter rolls. He cited several statutes that he said made clear that only citizens could cast a ballot.
Maxwell didn’t specify how the election commission and local clerks should verify citizenship of new registrants, or how the commission should check for noncitizens on the voter rolls. He only called for the parties to figure out a plan, whether that be through matching the DOT’s citizenship data or using “other lawfully available means.” He called for that process to be substantially completed before the next statewide election, which is February.
Currently, applicants for voter registration in Wisconsin and most other states must attest, under penalty of perjury, that they are U.S. citizens who are eligible to vote, but they are not required to present proof of citizenship.
Republicans praised the decision, with state Rep. Amanda Nedweski calling it a “great win for election integrity.”
Democrats and the respondents in the case were largely mum.
Election commission spokesperson Emilee Miklas didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Riley Vetterkind, a spokesperson for the Wisconsin Department of Justice, which represents the commission and the Department of Transportation, declined to say whether the agencies would appeal the decision.
The current plaintiffs, Pewaukee resident Ardis Cerny and Waukesha resident Annette Kuglitsch, sued the election commission, the Department of Transportation and officials in both agencies. They have argued that the election commission is violating their voting rights by not checking for noncitizens already registered to vote and seeking to vote.
Maxwell agreed, saying they “have a clear legal right to not have their votes diluted by a non-citizen casting an unlawful ballot.”
It’s unclear how the commission would verify the citizenship of all of Wisconsin’s registered voters by February. Bryna Godar, a staff attorney at the University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative, said the decision will “definitely be appealed” and that the lower-court decision could be stayed while the appeal goes through the courts.
If the case reaches the Wisconsin Supreme Court, the liberal majority could overturn the order of the conservative-leaning Waukesha County Circuit Court.
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
On a quiet Friday at Mo’s Bar, a lakeside dive where regulars gossip over beer and fried perch, Rep. Scott Krug blended in easily.
He nursed a Miller Lite and gestured out the window toward Big Roche a Cri, one of the lakes that he said had taught him everything he needed to know about surviving the Capitol’s sharpest fights.
“I was the water guy in the Legislature for years and years,” said Krug, an eight-term Republican who represents a region of farms, lakes and rivers stretching south and west from Wisconsin Rapids. Instead of sticking to the party line, he said, he tried to balance the interests of farmers, the tourism industry and clean water — ultimately winning support from both conservation and agricultural groups.
“I don’t give a shit about getting my head kicked in by both sides,” Krug said.
That willingness to buck party orthodoxy has mattered even more in recent years amid Wisconsin’s fierce battles over election administration. As many Republicans leaned into Donald Trump’s false claims about fraud, and the Assembly’s elections committee became a stage for conspiracy theories, Krug carved out a different role: the pragmatist trying to keep the system running.
He took over as chair of the committee in late 2022 after his predecessor’s hard-line tactics cost her influence. This session, Krug has moved up to assistant majority leader, a role that puts him at the center of GOP caucus strategy. That might mean winnowing 18 election ideas down to five bills, huddling with Wisconsin Elections Commission appointees, talking with clerks across the state, or working the halls to find a path for bipartisan proposals long stuck in gridlock.
It has been hard for Krug to overcome the conspiracy theories embraced by a small GOP faction and rally his colleagues behind his proposed election reforms. When Republicans do unite on election policy, their bills usually face Democratic opposition and a veto from Gov. Tony Evers.
Still, Krug has kept pushing for the policies that clerks have long asked for, like allowing absentee ballots to be processed the day before an election.
He said he measures his success not only on whether he can get his proposals enacted, but also on whether he can change the tone of the debate, increase confidence in elections and cool the conspiracy talk on the elections committee and in his party, even as Trump and his allies help fuel it.
“Messaging,” he said, “has become more important than actual policy.”
The era Krug replaced
Krug took over the election committee from Rep. Janel Brandtjen, a Trump loyalist who regularly invited conspiracy theorists to testify. Groups like True the Vote and people like Peter Bernegger, a prolific election litigant, used the committee’s platform to veer into unsubstantiated accusations of malfeasance or outright fraud by election officials.
Brandtjen also routinely exceeded her authority as chair, issuing invalid subpoenas to counties and other election offices.
Brandtjen also embraced former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman’s partisan review of the 2020 election, which floated the idea of an unconstitutional decertification of the election, threatened to jail mayors and ultimately cost taxpayers more than $2 million.
While Trump praised Brandtjen’s loyalty, her standing within her own caucus weakened. Assembly Republicans voted to bar her from closed caucus meetings in 2022, writing to her that past issues “led our caucus to lose trust in you.” Brandtjen dismissed the note as “petty.”
Krug saw an opportunity to restore order and told Assembly Speaker Robin Vos: “Give me the election committee,” he recalled. Vos handed him the gavel that December.
The tone changes, while legislation stalls
The tone shifted immediately.
In one of the committee’s first sessions, Krug held public hearings on bipartisan bills to limit polling place closures and compensate local governments for holding special elections. In the next session, he held a hearing on another bipartisan bill to increase penalties for harming election officials.
He didn’t shy away from giving space to Republican-backed priorities either — including a bill to specially mark noncitizens’ IDs as not valid for voting, and an informational hearing to investigate whether noncitizens were on the state’s voter rolls. The first was vetoed by Evers, and the second didn’t go far after the Department of Transportation declined to turn over the necessary data. (Krug told Votebeat he thought the number was minuscule but still wanted the department to share its data.)
Still, for clerks and legislators across the state, Krug has been a welcome change.
Rock County Clerk Lisa Tollefson, who has been advocating for clerks in the Legislature for about eight years, told Votebeat that Krug was the best chair she’s worked with so far. “He wants to understand the system the most,” she said.
Rep. Lisa Subeck, a Madison Democrat and former member of the election committee, said Krug brought a civility back to the committee that had disappeared after the 2020 election. She also praised some of his ideas, though she questioned the effectiveness of his advocacy, noting many proposals he supported never got Assembly approval.
Rep. Scott Krug is seen during a convening of the Wisconsin Assembly at the State Capitol on Jan. 25, 2020, in Madison, Wis. (Coburn Dukehart / Wisconsin Watch)
Krug said a lot of the obstacles come from the state Senate, which blocked the Monday processing bill last year. The Senate, he said, has more “further-outs” on elections.
Kim Trueblood, the Republican county clerk in Marathon County, called Krug’s leadership “refreshing” but said she doesn’t know what to do to convince some GOP senators “that the bogeyman under the bed is not real.”
Krug said he’ll keep trying, and his record suggests he won’t shy away from intraparty disagreements.
He tried to calm down the rhetoric after 2024 U.S. Senate candidate Eric Hovde delayed conceding for two weeks, blaming his loss in part on “improbable” absentee ballot totals in Milwaukee. Krug recalled Hovde raising the issue again in a phone call during this year’s Supreme Court election. Krug, who was observing Milwaukee’s absentee ballot counting facility, said he told Hovde: “I’m telling you, it’s not the issue here.”
Hovde said he couldn’t recall the exchange. He told Votebeat that while he does not blame his loss on central count, his skepticism of the process remains.
Other states, meanwhile, are still battling the ghosts of 2020 in their legislative committees. In neighboring Michigan, Republicans rebranded their House’s Elections Committee into the Election Integrity Committee and placed it in the hands of a legislator who believes the 2020 election was stolen, regularly inviting the type of firebrands Brandtjen once welcomed. In Georgia and Arizona, hearings on election-related legislation regularly erupt into partisan shouting matches.
Vos, the Assembly speaker, said Krug has treated election concerns as “a problem to be solved,” rather than “milked.” He praised Krug for being practical with legislation rather than holding out until he found perfection.
“I think he’s really done a good job of bringing people together,” Vos continued. “He’s been an incredible leader to try to showcase that it doesn’t have to always be partisan.”
Walking the GOP tightrope on election policy
Krug stepped down as committee chair this session, shifting to vice chair and taking on a new role as the Assembly’s assistant majority leader, where he’ll help rally Republican votes. He said he hopes to bring the same spirit of compromise to his leadership role.
The new role means he can write his own bills for the election committee, which he was unable to do last session, as committee chairs generally are not allowed to preside over their own legislation.
Krug said one of his biggest hurdles this session is dealing with election conspiracy theorists — a faction he argues has lost influence in Wisconsin but remains disruptive.
Krug has tried to give where he can, incorporating some provisions of a Trump executive order on elections into draft legislation.
But his tone changed when Trump posted on social media that he wanted to ban mail-in voting and criticized voting machines. “My whole goal is to get results quicker,” he said, “not to go back to hand-counting and wait for results until the Friday after the election.”
Usually, when his constituents or other Assembly members come to him espousing these ideas, he can calm them down with “truth and data,” a strategy he says works until another press release comes from the Trump administration.
“And that’s our struggle,” he said. “You see this ebb and flow, and it’s all based on what comes out of Washington. So we put the fire out. He stokes it, then I put the fire out, he stokes it.”
Krug, a real estate agent, parent of six, and grandparent, said he’ll stay busy even if his tactics make him politically unpopular. If his constituents force him out for telling the truth, he said, he’ll just go sell more houses — and keep adding to his bobblehead collection, a running competition with Evers.
Krug sees promising signs in his party
At Mo’s Bar, where workers and patrons greet him like a neighbor, it’s clear his independence hasn’t yet cost him local support. Despite the headwinds, he insists the atmosphere around elections has changed.
“I feel it when I talk to everybody,” he said. “It used to be my first conversation when I walked in here: ‘What are you gonna do about the goddamn election?’ It’s over. People don’t do that.”
Buoyed by that shift, Krug is scheduled to introduce several election-related bills on Wednesday, telling Votebeat he expects most to win bipartisan support. The measures would let clerks process ballots the day before an election, add new auditing requirements, regulate the use of drop boxes, and repeal a law critics say puts ballot privacy at risk.
He also sees promising signs of improvement from within his own party.
In April — when Hovde and U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson were still criticizing Milwaukee’s election operation — losing Republican Supreme Court candidate Brad Schimel conceded defeat without caveat or complaint.
As some supporters booed him, Schimel said, “You’ve gotta accept the results.”
Krug said he hoped the concession would be a sign to other GOP candidates that the “shine has worn off” of holding radical election positions.
“I’ll never find a way to fix it entirely,” he said, but he has to keep at it because the effort will shape how Wisconsinites view the Legislature on all other issues.
“Everything starts from elections,” he said.
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
Wisconsin’s controversial practice of randomly removing ballots to resolve discrepancies between the number of ballots and the number of voters would be prohibited under new draft legislation that requires meticulous audits in every county.
The draft proposal, obtained by Votebeat from Republican Rep. Scott Krug, will be formally released this week. Krug said the proposed ban on removing random ballots, known as drawdowns, was inspired largely by a Votebeat investigation highlighting election officials’ reluctance to use the practice and questions about its constitutionality.
“That practice undermines public trust,” Krug said, calling drawdowns “outdated.”
Wisconsin’s law allowing drawdowns is almost as old as the state, and it appears to be used most often in recounts. Other states have had similar laws, but most have repealed them.
Drawdowns occur when records show more ballots cast than the number of voters who cast ballots. These discrepancies usually stem from minor recordkeeping errors or process mistakes.
For example, if poll workers discover an absentee ballot envelope was improperly filled out but had already been separated from its ballot, the ballot still counts, leaving more ballots than valid voters. Because ballots are generally unidentifiable, the law would call for election officials to remove one ballot at random.
Multiple Wisconsin clerks have told Votebeat that they loathe the practice, and national election experts have been flabbergasted that it exists.
A legislative study committee in 2005 questioned the practice’s constitutionality without resolving the issue. Courts have similarly scrutinized its use. The Wisconsin Elections Commission has said a drawdown should be reserved as a last resort “when you cannot explain why you have more ballots than voters.”
Sam Liebert, Wisconsin state director of the group All Voting Is Local and a former clerk, said he once had to conduct a drawdown. He called it “one of the most gut-wrenching things I think I’ve ever done.”
“Every one of those ballots — it’s an American citizen’s hopes and dreams of the candidate or candidates that they want to represent them,” he said.
Although drawdowns are rare and usually limited to recounts, they’ve drawn national attention.
When President Donald Trump tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Wisconsin, his team invoked the law to seek a drawdown of 220,000 absentee ballots in Dane and Milwaukee counties, calling the practice “the only legally available remedy” to account for what it alleged were unlawfully cast ballots. The Wisconsin Supreme Court narrowly rejected the effort.
Other states typically require officials to explain discrepancies rather than resolve them by discarding ballots. Krug’s legislation would require exactly that — for election officials to document the discrepancy and record the number and type of excess ballots.
Proposal would require risk-limiting audits
The bill also requires risk-limiting audits, a kind of post-election review designed to give statistical confidence that votes are accurately tallied.
In these audits, workers review a statistically significant sample of ballots that should mirror the vote totals. If the sample doesn’t align with official results within the allowed margin of error, officials review more ballots until it does. The number of selected ballots varies from election to election, depending on how close a race is and how many ballots were cast.
The math behind risk-limiting audits is complex, but election experts and officials have long supported the practice.
Jennifer Morrell, CEO of The Elections Group, a consulting firm, said she has long promoted risk-limiting audits because they can include more ballots than other reviews. They can be laborious in close races but less burdensome in lopsided ones.
Morrell said jurisdictions that have implemented risk-limiting audits have become better at accounting for their ballots and reconciling vote totals, knowing that any issues would become obvious during an audit.
Liebert, from All Voting is Local, called risk-limiting audits “an effective way to ensure a correct count and detect any statistical anomalies,” while boosting voter confidence.
Closer races require larger samples, and in very tight contests, such audits may require a full hand count. Rock County Clerk Lisa Tollefson said that could happen often, as races across the county tend to be quite close.
Krug’s proposal calls for county clerks to perform a risk-limiting audit for the contest garnering the most votes at each general or spring election before they certify the election results. It also calls for an additional audit of a random contest in those elections that the Wisconsin Elections Commission selects.
A pilot program would begin in 2026, with full implementation in 2027.
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.
Some of the 193 Madison voters whose ballots mistakenly didn’t get counted in the 2024 presidential election filed a lawsuit on Thursday seeking class-action status, arguing that the city unconstitutionally deprived them of their right to vote.
The lawsuit stands out because it seeks monetary damages for alleged violations of voting rights — a remedy that has become increasingly rare. According to election experts, that type of claim is unlikely to succeed.
“These voters deserved better,” Scott Thompson, an attorney for the plaintiffs with the firm Law Forward, said in a statement. ”In Wisconsin, we value the right to vote, and there will be consequences when that right is denied.”
What’s the dispute?
During the November 2024 election, Madison election officials made a series of errors that kept 193 absentee ballots from being counted on Election Day. Officials waited so long to report the ballots to the county and state that they couldn’t be added before the election results got certified.
The named plaintiffs are some of the 193 voters whose ballots didn’t get counted in the 2024 election: Precious Ayodabo, Cary Bloodworth, Benjamin Jones, Sara Browne, Jenna Innab, Amira Pierotti, Miriam Sham, and Johannes Wolter. They’re represented by attorneys at Law Forward, a liberal election law group, and Holwell Shuster & Goldberg LLP.
They’re suing the city of Madison, the city’s clerk office, former Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl, and current Deputy Clerk Jim Verbick, seeking monetary damages for the city’s failure to count the voters’ ballots. The complaint doesn’t specify the amount, but in a claim filed in March, the group representing the plaintiffs requested $34 million, or $175,000 for each disenfranchised voter.
Madison’s interim City Clerk and City Attorney Mike Haas declined to comment on the lawsuit.
Why does it matter?
This lawsuit aims to emphasize the importance of properly counting all ballots and set a monetary penalty for denying a person their vote. Election law experts note that claims for such remedies were common in voting rights battles of the late 1800s and 1900s — particularly when officials deliberately worked to disenfranchise Black voters — but are now rarely pursued and unlikely to succeed.
Although election officials around the state have repeatedly emphasized the severity of Madison’s errors, some told Votebeat that seeking monetary compensation for election mistakes would add unnecessary pressure on them.
Thompson, the Law Forward attorney, told Votebeat that he understands how clerks feel but wants there to be a clear penalty for disenfranchising voters, especially as some conservative groups in the past have sought to prohibit clerks from counting certain ballots.
What happens now?
The lawsuit will likely play out for months or longer. Madison has already hired a new clerk, Lydia McComas, who is set to start in late September.
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
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Wisconsin Republicans are reviving a plan to let poll workers process absentee ballots on the Monday before an election, a change long sought by election officials, but blocked by a small but influential group of conservative lawmakers.
This time, the proposal is tied to measures conservatives want, including regulations for ballot drop boxes and an explicit ban on clerks fixing, or curing, errors on ballots. By bundling the measures together, GOP leaders hope to finally unite their party on a plan that would shorten the wait for election results, reduce the opportunity for election misinformation and avoid a veto by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers.
The proposal, which Votebeat obtained in draft form from Republican Rep. Scott Krug, is set to be publicly released next week. Krug, former chair of the Assembly Elections Committee and now assistant majority leader in the Assembly, said he “will use every little ounce of political capital effort I created on elections to get Monday processing done, because that’s 90% of our problem in the state: perception.”
Early processing of absentee ballots has had support from Democrats and many Republicans, but proposals to allow it have repeatedly stalled in the past due to concerns over whether Milwaukee, a Democratic stronghold that has been a target of election conspiracy theories in the past, could be trusted with the head start on processing ballots.
Krug said he is “confident” that this measure will pass.
“I think the right-leaning voters of the state will appreciate that we’re codifying the court decision that (clerks) can’t cure ballots anymore,” said Krug. “I think the middle and the left-leaning people are going to be able to appreciate the Monday processing, and I think everybody’s going to be able to appreciate that there’s standards for drop boxes — they’re not going away.”
Monday processing proposals have stalled in the past
Most states allow some early processing of absentee ballots, but in Wisconsin, local clerks in Wisconsin cannot begin until the morning of Election Day. That process includes verifying voters’ information, checking for complete witness information and running the ballots through a tabulator. This proposal would allow everything to begin on Monday, except tallying the results.
In Milwaukee, where absentee ballots numbering between 50,000 and well over 100,000 in general elections are counted in a central location, counting often stretches into the early hours of Wednesday. As those ballots get tabulated in batches overnight, they can swing who is ahead in the vote tallies broadcast by the media, fueling false claims of fraudulent “ballot dumps.”
Election workers count ballots on Election Day on Nov. 5, 2024, at the central count facility at the Baird Center in Milwaukee. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Democrats have long asked for a bill that includes only the Monday processing proposal, but Krug told Votebeat it’s unlikely that enough Republicans would get behind such a measure for it to pass. Evers himself has proposed “clean” versions of the Monday processing bill in past state budgets, but ran into Republican opposition.
In 2023, the Assembly quickly approved a version of a Monday processing bill, only for it to stall in the Senate after Republican Rep. Janel Brandtjen, a former elections committee chair who has spread election conspiracy theories, testified against it.
“Why would we give bad actors an extra day to cheat?” Brandtjen said in a statement in 2022 criticizing the transparency of Milwaukee’s election operation. (Claims of widespread voter fraud have never been substantiated.)
What’s included in the current Monday processing proposal
The current proposal is similar to past versions and includes previously proposed measures to create a centralized database of Wisconsin residents deemed incompetent to vote and to eliminate an obsolete practice of counting absentee ballots.
This version also proposes eliminating a law to record unique ID numbers on the back of absentee ballots at central counting facilities — a requirement that election workers say can risk ballot secrecy and creates needless work. It also includes a provision that would standardize witness address requirements on absentee ballot envelopes.
The proposal would require municipalities that count absentee ballots at a central location to begin processing them on Monday; it would allow municipalities that count them at polling places — such as Madison and the vast majority of other municipalities — to start on Monday, too, as long as they pass an ordinance allowing it.
An extra day to process ballots would allow election officials to work shorter shifts and get the job done more efficiently, said Rock County Clerk Lisa Tollefson, a Democrat.
It could also give election observers, some of whom are skeptical of the voting process, more opportunity to observe both ballot casting and counting, she said.
Tollefson said she was “hopeful” that the bill will finally cross the finish line this session.
“I really would like to have a large municipality have the option to use this, especially for your April and your November elections,” she said. “Those are really long days.”
Why Monday processing could break through this year
Krug said the proposal is one of his top priorities this session. And enough elements might have lined up for it to finally head to the governor’s desk.
Krug’s new leadership role could help. As assistant majority leader, he brokers support within the GOP caucus, which can only afford four defections in the 99-seat Assembly. He said he’s been trading support for colleagues’ priorities to build votes for Monday processing. He also is no longer chair of the elections committee, freeing him to author bills and advance them directly.
Ballot drop boxes may prove to be a key bargaining chip. The conservative-led state Supreme Court banned them in 2022; the liberal-led court reinstated them in 2024 but left them unregulated in statute.
Krug said he helped work on a poll in April that found 76% of Wisconsinites support the Monday processing proposal and 80% support standardized rules for absentee ballot drop boxes.
He decided to put the provisions together, proposing requirements for drop boxes, including where to place them, how to secure them, how to collect ballots, and how to keep records of when they’re emptied. He also proposed a requirement for the drop box to be under a continuous, livestreamed video feed.
Some members of the Republican caucus, Krug said, still want to get rid of drop boxes entirely. So “we had to kind of beef up the requirements for drop boxes to meet their hurdle. We’re not allowing them, we’re codifying them.”
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.
The federal government’s demands that states turn over their voter rolls and related information highlights long-standing conflicts over how to ensure that only eligible voters are registered without endangering voting rights.
The U.S. Justice Department has sent letters to several states — and plans to send many more — asking them for copies of their voter lists and for detailed information about how they maintain them. The department has said it’s seeking to enforce requirements in federal law that President Donald Trump has ordered it to prioritize.
It has already sued North Carolina, alleging that the state has not been properly verifying voter identity, and sued Orange County, California, for refusing to provide full records for 17 people who have been removed from the rolls in connection with a probe of potential noncitizen voting. And it has threatened to sue or withhold federal funding from other states if they do not comply with their requests for information.
Everyone agrees that a “clean” voter list — cleared of people who have died or moved out of the jurisdiction, or who otherwise aren’t eligible to vote — is good practice. But they differ on how aggressively election officials should move to remove potentially ineligible voters, what exactly federal law requires election officials to do, and how to balance election security with the risk of wrongly removing and disenfranchising eligible voters.
Rhetoric and false claims can make the debate harder to follow. Here’s a guide to understanding the issues and arguments.
What does the law require?
There are two key federal laws that govern the maintenance of voter rolls.
The National Voter Registration Act requires election officials to make a “reasonable effort” to remove voters who become ineligible to vote because they move or die, a process known as list maintenance. The Help America Vote Act, enacted about a decade later, requires states to use a computerized statewide list of every registered voter and assign them a unique identification number. It also requires them to remove duplicated names.
Beyond that, it’s up to state and local governments to set their own policies for how and when to perform list maintenance, and it’s up to federal courts to decide what is “reasonable.” That term isn’t defined in the law, and it’s often where voting rights groups and advocates for stricter list maintenance disagree.
In a recent case in Michigan, for example, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that the state’s actions to remove the names of thousands of dead voters from the rolls were sufficient, even though the plaintiff, the Public Interest Legal Foundation, claimed to have identified thousands more on the rolls.
Logan Churchwell, research director at the foundation, said in an interview that the court’s decision amounted to giving Michigan an “E for effort.” He said his organization believes there should be a higher standard that would reduce the risk of fraud and administrative error.
For her part, Lata Nott, director of voting rights policy for Campaign Legal Center, said the National Voter Registration Act’s requirement for a “reasonable effort” at maintaining lists is designed to set a floor, but it doesn’t prevent states from creating extreme policies that lead to eligible voters being mistakenly removed.
What is the central issue in the debate?
The main disagreement is over how aggressive list maintenance should be. A recent congressional hearing highlighted the differences between Democrats and Republicans on this question.
House Republicans claimed dirty voter rolls enable fraud and said ensuring that only eligible voters are on the list increases election security and voter confidence. They dismissed the idea that their efforts are meant to purge certain types of eligible voters from the rolls, such as people of color.
“This is not and should never be a partisan issue,” said Rep. Laurel Lee, a Florida Republican and former secretary of state. “Maintaining accurate voter rolls is fundamental to election security and public trust.”
House Democrats made it clear that they, too, don’t want ineligible voters, such as dead people or noncitizens, on the list. But they questioned why Republicans would want to take any actions that could potentially disenfranchise eligible people, citing recentincidents of state list maintenance actions that led to eligible voters being removed.
“What we do want is every eligible voter gets the chance to vote and their constitutional rights are not infringed upon,” said Rep. Julie Johnson, a Texas Democrat. “And that seems to be a huge distinction.”
Why is it hard to keep voter rolls updated?
It is difficult partly because of the decentralized nature of voting.
The U.S. doesn’t have a national database of eligible voters or citizens. Under federal law, states maintain their own lists. They assign voters the ID number that’s required under the Help America Vote Act, but that number doesn’t have to be connected to any existing federal identification, such as a Social Security number.
To remove voters who were eligible, but aren’t anymore, election officials must have ways to find out when a voter dies, moves to another state, is convicted of a felony, or otherwise becomes ineligible to cast a ballot.
Many election officials get data on address changes from their state’s motor vehicle department and the U.S. Postal Service and get death reports from state and federal agencies. Some states allow or mandate the use of other sources, such as obituaries and responses to jury duty summonses.
But there are potential gaps and time lags in these systems. When people move, for example, they don’t often tell the election office for their old address to remove them from the rolls.
It’s fairly easy for officials to track in-state moves because people carry the same state-assigned voter ID number when they go to register in a new location in the state. But it’s harder for officials to find out when someone moves out of state. That requires coordination between states, or more detailed searches through government records.
Many states are members of the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, a consortium that collects state voter roll data and alerts its members to potentially duplicate registrations across state lines. But two of the largest states, California and New York, are not members. And several Republican states have withdrawn from ERIC in recent years, citing concernsabout the program, including about how the organization shares some of its data with researchers.
Do some states have more registered voters than residents?
Statistics like this are often used to back up claims of voter fraud or poor state practices. But there’s a legitimate explanation for this that’s tied to federal and state laws.
In some instances, state laws allow election officials to remove voters from the rolls quickly, such as when they die, or if they respond to a jury duty summons by saying they are not a U.S. citizen.
But when a state finds out a voter may have moved, federal law requires election officials to send a confirmation mailing before removing that person from the rolls. If the voter doesn’t respond, they remain on the roll of registered voters, but are moved to the “inactive” list, and their names must stay there for two federal election cycles before they are removed, unless the state hears from them.
That four-year wait, and a large number of voters on the inactive list, can make the voter roll appear bloated at any given time.
But another reason for the disparity is that population estimates themselves are imprecise, said Chris Fowler, a professor of geography and demography at Penn State University who studies voter rolls and census data.
The U.S. Census Bureau’s American Communities Survey is currently our best measure of population changes from year to year, Fowler said. But the uncertainty in the national population count is about 10 million residents, he said — roughly equal to the population of Michigan.
Some use the disparities between the numbers to cast doubt on the accuracy of elections and raise alarm about voter fraud, such as Elon Musk with his misleading claim that Michigan had “more registered voters than eligible citizens.” His numbers included inactive voters as if they were eligible voters. But before those voters could cast a ballot, they would have to correct their voting record to prove eligibility, most commonly by showing documentation proving they still live in the jurisdiction.
How ‘dirty’ are the voter rolls?
Some of the most cited data available on this comes from more than a decade ago and has helped inspire efforts at improvement since then. But those efforts have run into challenges.
In 2012, a research study by the Pew Center on the States found that more than 2.75 million people were registered to vote in more than one state, and there were more than 1.8 million dead people whose names were still on the voter rolls. These and other findings “underscore the need for states to improve accuracy, cost-effectiveness, and efficiency,” Pew said.
There have been multiple attempts to create systems allowing states to share data to help with voter list maintenance. That’s a difficult task because any such effort must comply with state and federal laws governing data use and privacy. Officials must also cross-check data from various sources, using enough different data points to ensure that the matches are accurate and that a person with the same name as another isn’t mistakenly removed as a duplicate.
One prior program, the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, was ultimately shut down under a court settlement because it did not do enough to protect sensitive voter data. It was also found to be highly inaccurate, often incorrectly identifying registrations as duplicates because of poor matching techniques.
After Pew’s study, the nonprofit provided funding to help launch ERIC, to try to screen out duplicate voter registrations across state lines. Since then, ERIC has helped states identify hundreds of thousands of voters each year who have moved across state lines, and tens of thousands of voters who died. But in part because some Republican states have left the program, only half of states now participate, leaving a lot of gaps.
Some states use more data sources and perform checks more frequently than others. In the latest federal survey of election officials, for example, about 30% of states said they do not use National Change of Address reports from the U.S. Postal Service or data from motor vehicle agencies to identify potentially ineligible voters.
Do poorly maintained voter rolls allow for more fraud?
Generally speaking, removing voters who have moved prevents them from wrongly voting in their old voting jurisdiction, and removing a voter who has died prevents another person from fraudulently casting a ballot in their name.
That said, prosecutions for double voting and voting for others are rare, and Votebeat could not find any studies showing that states that do a better job of cleaning voter rolls have less voter fraud.
The Heritage Foundation’s database of voter fraud across all states since 1982 includes 174 convictions for duplicate voting, 99 cases of noncitizen voting, and two cases of someone voting under a dead person’s name.
But Churchwell, of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, said the number of prosecutions does not properly measure how much fraud occurs. Rather, he said, it indicates the state’s propensity to prosecute. “I doubt you’ll find research showing where a state is simultaneously terrible at list maintenance yet zealous with prosecutions,” he said.
Are there noncitizens on the voter rolls?
Yes, but states that have looked have not found them in large numbers.
Audits in multiple states have found small numbers of noncitizens on the rolls, few of whom had actually cast ballots, and there are no known instances of noncitizens voting in large enough numbers to influence the outcome of an election.
The threat of noncitizen voting has become a prominent talking point for Republicans, driving their efforts to pass proof-of-citizenship requirements for voters. But even in Republican-led states, officials who have recently tried to find noncitizens on the rolls have reported only small numbers.
In an audit last year, for example, the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office found 20 noncitizens out of 8.2 million registered voters. Nine of them had voted in prior elections, the office found. In Ohio, only one of the 641 cases of noncitizen voting that Secretary of State Frank LaRose referred for prosecution resulted in a voter fraud charge.
In Texas, which has more than 18.6 million registered voters, the Secretary of State’s Office identified 581 noncitizens from 2021 to August of 2024. The state referred 33 potential noncitizens who voted in the 2024 election to the attorney general for investigation. The state also is investigating potential cases from the 2020 and 2022 election cycles.
In Arizona, which requires proof of citizenship to vote in state and local elections, Jesse Richman, a political science professor at Old Dominion University, identified at least 2,331 registered voters who he believes are highly likely to be noncitizens. He studied the state’s voter rolls as an expert defense witness for a case challenging the state’s proof of citizenship laws. Richman said those people could have become naturalized citizens since last updating their license, but the ID they used when registering to vote or updating their registration was a noncitizen ID.
On Aug. 28, the U.S. Justice Department announced the indictment of a Canadian citizen charged with registering to vote and voting in federal elections in North Carolina in 2022 and 2024.
Are there dead people on the voter rolls?
Yes, there are voters who have died but whose names are still on the rolls.
But claims about the number of such voters often turn out to be inaccurate.
In 2012, for example, South Carolina’s State Election Commission reviewed 207 cases that the South Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles had referred to as potential cases of ballots being cast in the names of dead voters. Of those, the commission was able to conclude that 197 did not involve dead voters — instead, they were either clerical errors or identified through bad matches. There wasn’t enough information on the remaining 10 cases to make any determination.
States that are members of ERIC receive reports about voters who may have died while out of state, and the service has identified about 644,000 voters who died over the last 13 years and whose names needed to be removed from the list. But some state laws may limit how states use that information.
Pennsylvania, for example, is an ERIC member, but state law allows officials to remove the names of dead voters only if they learn of it through the state’s health agency or an obituary. Election officials in the state, including Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt, have advocated for that to change.
Can list maintenance measures lead to eligible voters being purged?
Yes. In Texas, some of the people removed from the rolls last year were eligible citizens who did not respond to a mailed notice seeking more information about their status, an investigation by Votebeat, The Texas Tribune and ProPublica found.
And that’s the concern that voting rights advocates have about states that take aggressive steps to clean their lists, especially close to an election. Two of the most recent cases were in Alabama and Virginia, just before the November 2024 election.
This is why federal law has safeguards on when states can remove potentially ineligible voters, such as the rule that election officials cannot conduct systematic voter removals within 90 days of an election, Nott with Campaign Legal Center said.
“The more aggressive your list maintenance laws are,” she said, “the more likely you are probably going to be purging people who are eligible to vote.”
Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen at jfifield@votebeat.org.
Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.
Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for Votebeat‘s newsletters here.
Seizing on that assertion — despite there being no credible evidence to support it — Trump promised on Truth Social to “lead a movement” to phase out mail‑in ballots and voting machines and promote “watermark paper.” He suggested he would implement these changes with an executive order ahead of the 2026 midterms.
The post contains many other false, misleading or unsubstantiated statements about the use of mail ballots, including claims Trump and his allies have made before — even as more Republican officials have tried to encourage voting by mail.
His claims notwithstanding, courts have repeatedly rejected allegations of widespread fraud tied to mail ballots, and many democracies around the world use them. And under the Constitution, he has no explicit authority over the “time, place and manner” of elections. Experts say that an executive order like the one Trump describes in his post would be immediately challenged in court and unlikely to take effect.
Beyond that, any major change to voting by mail before the 2026 midterms would be a logistical nightmare for election administrators, and it would disproportionately affect voters who rely on it most, including overseas service members, veterans and people with disabilities.
Here’s a fact check of some of the key claims in his post.
What Trump said:
“States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them.”
Fact:
Trump’s claim that states are “merely an agent” of the federal government in elections is false, and contrary to decades of Republican orthodoxy on this point.
Meanwhile, Republicans for decades have framed states’ rights as a fundamental principle. This stretches back to Barry Goldwater in the 1960s, through Ronald Reagan’s emphasis on “federalism,” and into recent decades where GOP leaders have framed decentralization of power as protection against “big government.”
Voting has been a primary example for that very point.
For example, after the contentious 2000 presidential election, Republicans fiercely defended Florida’s right to set its own recount rules. GOP leaders and state attorneys general argued in the Supreme Court case Shelby County v. Holder (2013) that federal oversight of state election laws was unconstitutional. Over the last decade, Republicans in Congress have opposed Democratic efforts to pass federal voting-rights legislation like the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, arguing they represented “federal takeovers” of elections. Then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in 2019 called the legislation “a one-size-fits-all partisan rewrite by one side here in Washington.”
In 2020, when Democrats proposed federal requirements to expand mail voting due to COVID-19, Republicans fought them off. And when Trump floated the idea of delaying the November election, Republican senators like McConnell, Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio reminded him that Congress and the states control election timing and procedures.
What Trump said:
“We are now the only Country in the World that uses Mail-In Voting. All others gave it up because of the MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD ENCOUNTERED”
Fact:
Many democracies use mail voting, including Germany, Switzerland, Canada, and Australia. Some use it more extensively than the U.S. No country has “given it up” because of widespread fraud. Fraud is rare in countries that use vote by mail, as it is here.
Germany has been using vote by mail since the 1950s; in its 2021 federal election, about half of German voters cast their ballots through the mail. In Switzerland, nearly all voters receive their ballots by mail, and more than 70% of voters return them in the same way. The United Kingdom allows any voters to request a mailed ballot, and about 20% of voters take advantage of the policy. The vast majority of European countries allow at least some form of mail voting, especially for citizens living abroad or for those with disabilities.
What Trump said:
Voting machines are “Highly ‘Inaccurate,’ Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial” and “cost Ten Times more than accurate and sophisticated Watermark Paper, which is faster, and leaves NO DOUBT, at the end of the evening, as to who WON, and who LOST, the Election.”
Fact:
Paper ballots still have to be counted — either by hand (which is slow and error-prone) or by machine. That’s why nearly every state that uses paper ballots still relies on scanners to tally them quickly and accurately.
Existing federal law also requires the use of at least one voting machine in every single precinct in the country, for use by voters who have disabilities that make casting a paper ballot difficult. Trump cannot invalidate federal law through an executive order, so voting machines aren’t going anywhere.
Watermarks are not a standard or proven safeguard, though some states do have them (or something like them). The places that use them still use machines to count these ballots.
What Trump said:
“Democrats are virtually Unelectable without using this completely disproven Mail-In SCAM. ELECTIONS CAN NEVER BE HONEST WITH MAIL IN BALLOTS/VOTING, and everybody, IN PARTICULAR THE DEMOCRATS, KNOWS THIS.”
Fact:
There is no evidence that one party “cheats” with mail ballots. Voting by mail is used by Republicans and Democrats alike, and in jurisdictions led by Republicans and Democrats. In fact, Republican voters are often more likely to use mail voting, especially in states like Arizona and Florida, where Republicans championed the practice until recently. In fact, there’s no evidence that vote by mail benefits either party over the other — multipleacademicstudies have reached this conclusion.
What Trump said:
“ELECTIONS CAN NEVER BE HONEST WITH MAIL IN BALLOTS/VOTING.”
Fact:
Mail‑in voting has consistently been shown to operate extremely securely due to robust safeguards. In states like Pennsylvania, counties that offer ballot curing — the ability to correct errors like missing signatures — report significantly lower rejection rates, demonstrating that the system isn’t rigged, but rather is responsive and adaptable.
Votebeat’s coverage highlights what research studies have shown repeatedly: Instances of fraud in mail-in voting remain exceedingly rare. Even when ballots get rejected, that’s typically due to procedural mistakes — not attempts at manipulation or deceit. Election administrators across the country work under strict, bipartisan protocols, including signature checks and secure handling procedures, to protect integrity. Courts and election officials routinely affirm the reliability of mail ballots when these protocols are followed. In both routine practice and under close scrutiny, mail-in voting stands out as both secure and trustworthy.
What Trump said:
“I am going to lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS…by signing an EXECUTIVE ORDER to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections.”
Fact:
Courts have ruled that Trump does not have the authority to unilaterally change federal election rules, as they consider several lawsuits challenging his March executive order.
In halting some provisions of that executive order, for example, a federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia wrote in April that “our Constitution entrusts Congress and the States — not the President — with the authority to regulate federal elections.” That ruling blocked Trump’s direction to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to take steps to require voters to prove citizenship when registering to vote.
A federal judge in Massachusetts later blocked the same provision of the order, writing that Trump exceeded his authority. That judge also blocked parts of the order telling the U.S. Justice Department to enforce a ballot receipt deadline of Election Day.
Nothing stops Trump from leading an informal movement, however. He’s arguably been doing that for years already, and while it has had some impact on policy, voters haven’t really changed their habits much.
Jen Fifield contributed reporting.
Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.
Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for Votebeat‘s newsletters here.
The Wisconsin Elections Commission ordered Madison election officials to follow several specific election procedures to ensure that ballots don’t go missing again in the capital city, rejecting arguments by the interim clerk that the orders may exceed the agency’s legal authority.
The commission’s 5-1 vote Friday came a month after it withheld a first set of proposed orders amid pushback from Madison and Dane County officials and asked the city to propose its own remedies. Madison interim Clerk Mike Haas said the specificity of the commission’s original proposed orders “would set a troubling precedent.”
The city did submit its proposals, but the commission rejected them as overly broad and finalized orders that were largely similar to the ones it proposed in July, with some minor revisions, including citations of the legal basis for each order.
The orders require Madison officials to create an internal plan detailing which election task is assigned to which employee; print pollbooks no earlier than the Tuesday before each election; develop a detailed record to track absentee ballots; and search through election materials for missing ballots before the city’s election canvassing board meets to finalize results.
The WEC action responds to lapses by the Madison clerk’s office, then headed by Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl, after the November 2024 presidential election, when staffers lost track of 193 ballots and did not report finding them until well past the state deadline for counting. The commission launched its investigation into the matter in January.
Clerk’s cookie baking factored into commissioners’ discussion
During discussions ahead of the vote, Commissioner Don Millis, a Republican, cited Votebeat’s reporting that Witzel-Behl spent a long post-election vacation at home — not on an out-of-state trip, as he had believed — baking thousands of cookies when some lost ballots were discovered. That, he said, factored into his vote for stricter orders.
“She couldn’t be bothered to turn off the oven, to come to the office to figure out if the Ward 65 ballots could be counted,” he said. “The failure to mention that the clerk was readily available to address this issue, along with the fact that none of the city officials we depose felt it was their job to get the ballots counted, makes me even more determined that the Commission must impose the directions in our order.”
Similarly, commission Chair Ann Jacobs, a Democrat, said it was “peculiar” that clerk’s office staff never told commissioners during their monthslong investigation that they rented cars on city time to deliver cookies after the ballot discovery.
Those deposed “were all part of the cookie crew,” she said ahead of her vote. “Why didn’t they tell us about that? Why didn’t the city of Madison ever mention this? Why did nobody bring this up?”
In a memo circulated ahead of the meeting, commission staff said the scope of the error “warrants a detailed order from the Commission correcting (Witzel-Behl’s) office’s policies and procedures, and ensuring those issues are actually fixed before the next statewide election.”
Haas, who was formerly the commission administrator, disagreed with the original proposed orders. He said the commission’s authority “does not extend to requiring the future implementation of specific procedures in excess of those required in the statutes.”
But commission staff pushed back, calling it “unreasonable and absurd” to read state law as barring the commission from ordering specific remedies.
In some cases, the commissioners made the requirements more stringent than what Madison proposed, but more lenient than the commission’s originally proposed orders.
For example, one order the commission initially proposed would have required Madison to print pollbooks no sooner than the Thursday before Election Day, despite state law calling on officials only to have the “most current official registration list.” Haas requested an order more in line with what state law outlines, printing the ballots as close to Election Day as possible.
The final order sets the deadline for printing pollbooks on the Tuesday before Election Day — two days earlier than first proposed — and requires that they be delivered no later than the Friday before the election.
Witzel-Behl’s office printed pollbooks for the two wards that lost ballots on Oct. 23, nearly two weeks before Election Day. The commission said printing that early made it harder for officials to track absentee ballots returned before Election Day and harder for poll workers to see how many ballots went uncounted.
Interim clerk’s objections to the commission’s order
Haas, who took over as interim clerk after Witzel-Behl was suspended in March, told Votebeat on the Tuesday ahead of the meeting that it was “way too early” to think about whether Madison would appeal the commission’s orders in court. In a statement after Friday’s vote, he said he was grateful that the commission altered some orders after the city’s feedback.
“The question is which level of government is best suited and authorized to determine specific procedures that work for the municipality in going above and beyond what the statutes require,” he told Votebeat. “We look forward to working with the Commission to ensure compliance with state law.”
Mark Thomsen, a Democratic commissioner, said he wasn’t comfortable with the agency beating up on Madison over mistakes made under a former clerk when a new permanent clerk hasn’t yet been hired.
At the meeting, Thomsen said he was uncomfortable imposing burdens on a new clerk that “no one else has to follow.”
“This order seems spiteful, and I don’t want to go there,” he said, before casting the lone dissent. Republicans Millis, Bob Spindell and Marge Bostelmann joined Democrats Carrie Riepl and Jacobs in approving the orders.
State law allows the commission to “require any election official to conform his or her conduct to the law, restrain an official from taking any action inconsistent with the law or require an official to correct any action or decision inconsistent with the law.”
Many of the orders, such as assigning specific staff to each election task, are not explicitly mentioned in statute.
Addressing claims that the orders were too detailed, commission staff attorney Angela O’Brien Sharpe said, “If the Legislature intended for the commission to only be able to issue general orders, they would have written a law to say just that.”
In a statement following the vote, Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said the city is reorganizing the office to improve efficiency and accountability.
“We appreciate the Wisconsin Elections Commission considering our input and amending its orders to reflect that feedback,” she said. “I hope the WEC’s investigation can help inform best practices for election clerks around the state.”
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
Members of the Wisconsin Elections Commission expressed alarm Thursday at how much time former Madison Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl spent on vacation while a crisis was erupting in her office: the discovery of 193 missing ballots from the November 2024 election that never got counted.
In its 400-page investigative report, finalized at a meeting by a 5-1 vote, the commission said that Witzel-Behl began her vacation in mid-November, days after the election, “and then had little to do with the supervision of her office until almost a month later.” No staffers took responsibility during the extended absence, the commission chair, Democrat Ann Jacobs, complained before the vote. The missing ballots were not reported to the commission until mid-December.
Records obtained by Votebeat provide some clarity into what Witzel-Behl was doing around the time: baking thousands of cookies and calling on her staff to help deliver them.
Most of that activity began after Dec. 2, when the second batch of uncounted ballots was found.
These records have not been publicly reported and were not included in the investigative report finalized Thursday.
“This is remarkable,” Republican Commissioner Don Millis said when Votebeat showed him some of the findings. “None of the witnesses we deposed disclosed her cookie staycation.”
After approving the report, the commission voted 4-2 to delay action on proposed corrective orders after city and county officials argued that the requirements were overly specific and exceeded state law. The city now has until Aug. 7 to provide a more complete response to the recommendations, and a follow-up meeting has been scheduled for Aug. 15.
Witzel-Behl didn’t respond to a request for comment.
‘Cookie extravaganza’ featuring ‘100 different types’
Emails show that Witzel-Behl took time off for all or part of 17 days between Nov. 11 and Dec. 6 and said, according to an event invite, that part of it was for “devoting a staycation to baking.”
According to the commission, Witzel-Behl knew about the first batch of ballots on Nov. 12. That was well before the cookie event.
The second batch of uncounted ballots was discovered on Dec. 2 by office staff. Witzel-Behl was out of the office that day and for the rest of that week. She told the commission she learned of the second batch of ballots on Dec. 10. “While on vacation, she did not inquire of her staff whether there were absentee ballots in the bag,” the report reads.
On Dec. 10, she sent an email to three staffers, including Deputy Clerk Jim Verbick, saying she’d reserved three cars for cookie deliveries. “Maybe each of you can make at least one cookie delivery to a library,” she wrote.
She also arranged additional deliveries and rented more cars for later the following week, an email sent Dec. 13 shows. “We still have several packages of cookies, so feel free to pick a few agencies for another delivery,” she suggested to 16 staffers across her office and other city departments the same day.
“I had assumed — obviously erroneously — the clerk was vacationing in some faraway place,” Millis told Votebeat, denouncing Witzel-Behl for not personally managing the discovery of the uncounted ballots.
The clerk’s staff didn’t tell the commission about the missing ballots until Dec. 18. By that point, the state had already certified the election and the missing ballots couldn’t have counted.
‘She worked her ass off’ — on the cookies
Jacobs said before the vote that she was surprised by Witzel-Behl’s “complete lack of action” during the relevant time period. Marge Bostelmann, a Republican appointee on the commission and the former longtime Green Lake County clerk, said that even if she had been on vacation in such a situation as a county clerk, she would have remained accessible if urgent questions arose.
Commissioner Bob Spindell, a Republican, was the lone dissenter on the vote to approve the report, saying he didn’t want Witzel-Behl to be “crucified.”
One person close to the Madison Clerk’s Office, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, told Votebeat that the task of making thousands of cookies and arranging deliveries “became all-consuming” for Witzel-Behl. “You could see how she was not focused on getting through reconciliation or whatever.”
“For some people, baking is calming,” that person continued. “It seemed like she needed a break. But then she worked her ass off (on the cookies). It was a huge operation.”
Between early and mid-December, city employees from a variety of departments thanked Witzel-Behl for her cookies. It’s not clear how many cookies she ultimately made.
On Dec. 16, one person in the city’s transportation department sent a clerk’s office staffer an email asking, “Are these cookies for the entire first floor? The entire building? The entire universe?”
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
A federal appeals court ruled Monday against a Wisconsin town that disavowed electronic voting machines, siding with the U.S. Justice Department’s argument that this would unfairly harm voters with disabilities.
What’s the dispute?
Leaders of Thornapple, a town of 700 people in northern Wisconsin’s Rusk County, voted in 2023 to stop using electronic voting machines, in favor of allowing only hand-marked ballots. They did without the machines for two elections in a row, in April and August 2024.
The DOJ, under the Biden administration, sued the town in September 2024, arguing that its decision violated the Help America Vote Act, which requires every “voting system” to be accessible for voters with disabilities. Accessible voting machines allow voters with disabilities to hear the options on the ballot and use a touch-sensitive device to mark it.
The town argued that it wasn’t subject to the federal law’s accessibility provision because its use of paper ballots didn’t constitute a “voting system.”
A district court judge rejected the town’s argument last September and ordered it to use electronic voting machines for the November presidential election. The town appealed that order, but did use a machine in November.
On Monday, a three-judge panel in the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the lower-court order, finding that “individuals with disabilities would lack the opportunity to vote privately and independently if they only had access to a paper ballot.”
The court based that finding partially on Thornapple Chief Inspector Suzanne Pinnow’s testimony about a blind woman who relied on her daughter’s assistance to fill out a ballot, and a man who had a stroke and who needed Pinnow to guide his hand so he could mark a ballot.
Who are the parties?
The DOJ had sued two northern Wisconsin towns and their officials in September after both decided not to use electronic voting equipment for at least one federal election. One of the towns, Lawrence, immediately settled with the Justice Department, vowing to use accessible voting machines in the future.
Thornapple officials decided to fight the case. They’re currently represented by an attorney with the America First Policy Institute, a group aligned with President Donald Trump.
Why does it matter?
The case reaffirms what has long been election practice in Wisconsin: Every polling place must have an electronic voting machine that anybody can use but is especially beneficial for voters with disabilities.
Distrust of voting machines, which has grown on the right following misinformation about the 2020 election, has led to a movement to ban them across Wisconsin. But the Thornapple case shows that for now, municipalities still have obligations under federal law to allow voters to cast ballots on electronic machines.
The case is relevant nationally, too. Since Trump took office in January, the U.S. Justice Department has withdrawn from multiple voting-related cases. But the Justice Department forged ahead in this lawsuit, signaling that, at least for now, it is not backing the movement to forgo electronic voting equipment entirely.
What happens now?
Thornapple is “considering our options,” said Nick Wanic of the America First Policy Institute. The case could get appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court or proceed in the lower federal court.
Although the order that required Thornapple to use accessible voting machines applied only to the November 2024 election, at this point, two federal courts in this case have ruled that towns must have accessible voting machines for people with disabilities.
“Voters with disabilities already face many barriers in the electoral process, and making sure they have access to a voting system which allows for basic voting rights to be met is a minimum — and legal — standard that they should not be worried about when exercising their right to vote,” said Lisa Hassenstab, public policy manager at Disability Rights Wisconsin.
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
Former Madison Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl violated multiple state laws when her office failed to count nearly 200 absentee ballots in the 2024 presidential election, according to a draft report released Wednesday by the Wisconsin Elections Commission.
The commission cited a lack of leadership in the clerk’s office, referring both to Witzel-Behl and the deputy clerk who assumed control during her vacation shortly after the election.
Witzel-Behl, who was put on leave by the city after the error and then resigned, broke state law by failing to supervise absentee ballot handling, neglecting post-election processes, and by not training poll workers to check the bags used to transport ballots, the commission concluded.
“There is no evidence that the City Clerk took any steps to investigate the uncounted ballots once they were brought to her attention,” the commission wrote. “The evidence demonstrates that the City Clerk began her vacation on November 13 and then had little to do with the supervision of her office until almost a month later.”
The draft report follows a months-long investigation into the 193 ballots that went missing on Election Day. The ballots were found over the next several weeks — some of them before final certification of results — but were never counted. Commission Chair Ann Jacobs, a Democrat, jointly led the investigation alongside Republican commissioner and former Chair Don Millis.
For months, Madison election officials have been saying that the ballots that went uncounted were delivered to two polling sites but weren’t unopened. But the commission found no evidence the ballot bags were ever delivered. A chief inspector at one site testified he was confident there was no unopened bag in the supply cart sent to his ward.
The errors have already prompted significant changes in Madison’s election processes. Officials have overhauled ballot tracking procedures, which Madison and Dane County leaders say should prevent a repeat of the 2024 mistake.
Still, the commission emphasized “it is essential that the public understands what has occurred, so that municipalities throughout the state can review their own processes and make certain that they too do not find themselves in this very unfortunate situation.”
The commission’s sharp criticism extended beyond Witzel-Behl, noting that “the staff of the City Clerk’s office failed to take any action regarding those ballots.”
Deputy Clerk Jim Verbick said that his post-election involvement was “minimal” and that he didn’t think it was his job to do anything about the missing ballots, the commission’s findings state.
“However, he did not attempt to speak to the City Clerk about the matter,” the review continues. “There was nobody who took responsibility for these ballots. It was always someone else’s job.”
Madison Interim Clerk Mike Haas said in a statement that the city is reviewing WEC’s report and that he hopes that it can provide lessons that prevent similar errors in the future. He did not respond to a request for further comment.
Former clerk violated laws, gave contradictory statements
The report focused on lapses in training by the clerk’s office. For example, it said, Witzel-Behl stored absentee ballots in green courier bags, but didn’t mention that in poll worker training, and the bags weren’t labeled as carrying absentee ballots. She also failed to train poll workers that absentee ballots could also be stored in red security carts, which the commission said contributed to the ballots going uncounted. That lack of training broke state law, the commission stated.
The commission also found that Witzel-Behl violated a law requiring her to supervise absentee ballot handling. In her deposition, she “could not answer basic questions about absentee ballot handling procedures in her office.”
The commission’s report highlights contradictions between Witzel-Behl’s actions in office and deposition testimony. Although she claimed not to know about the uncounted ballots until December, the commission said she messaged an election worker in late November with instructions on how to handle the first batch of uncounted ballots.
Upon learning of the missing ballots in November, the commission said, Witzel-Behl should have alerted the city attorney, the County Board of Canvassers and the commission and immediately investigated her office’s procedures — but she didn’t.
The commission also alleged she violated laws by printing pollbooks too early, failing to oversee poll workers and inadequately preparing for the city’s review of election results.
Draft findings include several orders for Madison compliance
The report lists draft recommendations that the commissioners will vote on at their July 17 meeting. These include requiring the Madison Clerk’s Office to create a plan detailing which employee oversees which task; printing pollbooks no earlier than the Thursday before each election; clearly labeling and tracking the bags carrying absentee ballots; checking all ballot bags and drop boxes before the city finalizes election results; and explaining how it’s going to comply with each of the orders.
Witzel-Behl’s office printed pollbooks for the two affected wards on Oct. 23 — nearly two weeks before Election Day — despite state guidance to print them as close to the election as possible.
Had they been printed later, absentee voters whose ballots had already been returned would have been marked automatically, alerting poll workers that those ballots were in hand but not yet counted.
But printing pollbooks no earlier than the Thursday before an election could be challenging, said Claire Woodall, who was formerly Milwaukee’s top election official. Cities like Madison and Milwaukee must print tens of thousands of pollbook pages, often using private printers, and distribute them to chief inspectors.
“It seems like you’re rushing a process” with the Thursday requirement, Woodall said. “The last thing you want is for voters to show up at 7 a.m. and discover you don’t have the correct pollbook.”
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
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