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Businesspeople rarely join lawsuits about reforming and improving our election system. We and our fellow Wisconsin Business Leaders for Democracy are doing precisely that via an amicus brief filed last month in a case that every Wisconsinite should know about.

We’re supporting the lawsuit filed by the fledgling United Wisconsin party (and several voters from across the political spectrum) seeking to overturn the state’s long-standing ban on fusion voting. 

The ban, which has been in effect for more than 100 years, prevents candidates from being nominated by more than one party, consigning minor parties to irrelevance and reinforcing the two-party duopoly. 

So why change now? Because Wisconsin’s fusion ban reduces competition, making elected officials less accountable and less responsive to the issues that matter most to voters and businesses.

Coming from the private sector, we both know how important competition is for keeping us on our toes and doing our best to deliver for customers. Colluding with our top rival to lock every other competitor out of the market might be nice for our bottom lines, but no one would stand for it. Yet Wisconsin politics remain an industry dominated by two entrenched parties that no third party has successfully challenged in well more than a century. 

That’s not because the two parties are widely loved. It’s the rules the major parties set, and they don’t want competition. That lack of competition allows the two major parties to ignore or brush aside many ideas, even those with widespread popular support. We are being forced to buy a product we don’t want and doesn’t meet our needs.

In a properly functioning market, voters would build and support new parties to elevate neglected ideas and issues. Those new parties would then vie with the major parties for support. But this competition is absent today because the ban on parties cross-nominating (or “fusing” with) candidates hobbles minor parties, forcing them to run their own candidates who have little shot of winning. This discourages people from creating new parties and voters from supporting them. The ban’s result? No real challenge to the two major parties in the political marketplace.

If minor parties had more options to compete — if they could choose when to run their own candidates and when to fuse with others to advance shared goals while building their own public profiles and increasing their leverage — our politics might more closely resemble an efficient marketplace. Fusion voting would encourage new entrants, enhance competition, promote voter choice and incentivize innovation.

Letting the two major parties monopolize the political arena has fueled intense partisan polarization that is damaging Wisconsin and the nation. Our current political system has proven unable to identify solutions for the challenges we face, much less implement them. It’s no coincidence that Americans are more unhappy with their government than citizens in almost every other democracy, according to Gallup. On issue after issue — from the cost of living to health care, education to environmental protection, immigration reform to our tax system — our government officials in Washington and Madison alike have struggled to deliver lasting solutions. 

Even where specific policy ideas have broad, bipartisan support, they too often get caught up in hyperpartisan warfare and gridlock.

All of this has practical consequences for business and for individuals. Political stability and predictability are essential conditions for a thriving economy and business environment. As a Brookings Institution study recently noted, entrenched hyper-partisanship and “the uncertainty associated with an erosion of democratic values can generate volatility as well as higher costs of capital, for business as well as for municipal sovereign borrowers.” 

Putting it plainly: The two-party duopoly hobbles our democracy but also risks short- and long-term harm to the state’s economy.

For Wisconsin’s economy to thrive, we all need our democracy to thrive. This is why we’re urging the court to engage with United Wisconsin’s constitutional claims, to strike down the state’s statutory ban on fusion voting and to reinvigorate our proud tradition of innovative, coalitional and competitive politics. Wisconsin can show the nation a better path.

Anoop Prakash is CEO of FR Conversions. Tom Florsheim Jr. is chairman and CEO of Weyco Group Inc. Both are members of Wisconsin Business Leaders for Democracy,  a nonpartisan coalition of business leaders advocating for free, fair, transparent, and nonpartisan elections in Wisconsin.

Guest opinion: End Wisconsin’s ban on fusion voting to expand political choice 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.

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Imagine a parent who gets public help in finding an apartment. Rent takes most of the paycheck, leaving little for groceries. Meanwhile, child care remains out of reach. The family has a home, but keeping it remains uncertain. That family’s situation raises a question Wisconsin should ask more often: Do people receive enough help, soon enough, to avoid serious and foreseeable harm?

Wisconsin government is good at counting what programs do — dollars awarded, contracts executed, people served, rides scheduled and referrals issued. Those numbers matter, but they cannot answer a more important question: Did people receive help they could actually use?

The state’s 2025 Interagency Council on Homelessness report shows why. The Emergency Solutions, Housing Assistance and Homelessness Prevention program executed 26 contracts worth $6 million. Homeless Case Management Services served 1,476 people — seemingly impressive outputs. Meanwhile, Wisconsin’s January 2025 point-in-time count found 5,225 people in emergency shelters, transitional housing, safe havens or unsheltered locations — the highest total since 2016. Public schools served 20,195 students experiencing homelessness in 2023-24, the most since the 2013-14 school year. 

To be sure, those figures don’t prove the programs failed. Need may simply have outpaced available assistance, and many people may be safer because the programs existed. But they show why contracts, referrals and clients served cannot tell us whether people ultimately found stable housing. The same report offers a better model: Wisconsin’s Recovery Voucher Program tracked clients who moved into permanent housing, not just those issued vouchers. 

Process measures show effort. Outcome measures show progress.

We see a similar story with child care assistance. In June 2026, Wisconsin Shares reported issuing $44.75 million in subsidies to 40,678 children. Yet the Department of Children and Families’ 2026 Market Rate Survey found that the maximum Wisconsin Shares rate covered the full price of just 60% of the state’s child care slots — below the state and federal benchmark of 75%. Program spending and enrollment can increase while many families still cannot afford available care.

DCF notes that “affordable” here means the maximum subsidy rate meets or exceeds the provider’s price, not that families themselves can afford child care. Like every program measure, it reveals one piece of the picture — not whether the underlying need has been met.   

Wisconsin should judge programs by a simple standard: Did they help people avoid serious, foreseeable harm and live a minimally healthy, safe and functional life? A need is met only when support is adequate, safe, affordable, reachable, timely, reliable and usable.

Those standards should have practical meaning. Adequate means the amount and quality fit the need. Reachable means hours, distance, transportation, language, disability access and paperwork do not make a service functionally unavailable. Timely means help arrives before delays predictably worsen risk. Reliable and usable mean support lasts and fits people’s real circumstances.

Start small. 

When someone leaves a publicly funded housing program, ask what support they actually received, what is still missing and what could put their housing at risk. Then check back after 30 and 90 days to see what worked — and what didn’t.

Keep the questions short. Let people decline follow-up. Explain how their answers will be used. Share the overall results by county and program without identifying individuals.

If paperwork blocks access, make it easier. If there are no affordable apartments, name that problem clearly. We cannot refer someone into housing that does not exist.

Wisconsin already has pieces of the needed machinery. The Department of Workforce Development’s Self-Sufficiency Standard estimates the income needed to meet basic needs by county and household type for more than 700 family types. Agencies already report performance data. What’s missing is a common way to determine whether those services actually meet basic needs.

Referrals don’t guarantee access. Program activities don’t guarantee needs are met. Until Wisconsin measures that gap, it cannot know whether its programs truly succeed.

Reed Lokken is a Madison resident developing practical public policy tools focused on health span, basic needs and access to support.

Guest opinion: Wisconsin should measure whether service programs meet basic needs 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.

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When I first entered Wisconsin’s prison system in 2013, I did not understand how much of the punishment extended outside the walls. One part can trap people long after release: extended supervision and the rule that erases progress when supervision is revoked.

Under Wisconsin’s truth-in-sentencing law, a judge sets an initial confinement term and a separate term of extended supervision, which requires following at least 18 standard rules, including regular reports to a supervision agent and blanket consent to searches. You serve the confinement. Then you serve the supervision. If your supervision is revoked, you return to prison with no credit for the years you spent. People call that lost “street time.”

Here is the math in plain terms. Say someone gets 10 years of initial confinement and 10 years of extended supervision. They get out, stay incident-free for eight years, then get revoked for a supervision violation or after being charged with a new charge. Those eight years do not count as sentencing credit. They go back to prison, and they can still walk out facing the same years of supervision they already lived. Progress on the street does not count the way many people assume it should.

I lived a version of that trap. After opioid addiction and drug charges in my early 20s, I left prison on strict extended supervision. A relapse put me on a hold. An administrative process, not the original sentencing judge, determined whether to revoke my supervision. I went back behind bars. Freedom on paper felt temporary because one slip could restart the clock on my extended supervision.

Thousands of people are revoked from post-prison supervision in Wisconsin each year. At the end of 2024, Wisconsin had 22,240 adults on parole or other forms of post-prison supervision, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics — 473 people per 100,000 adults, compared with 250 nationally. During 2024, 5,770 people exited post-prison supervision in Wisconsin. Of those, 1,720 — nearly 30% — returned to prison after having their supervision revoked, compared with 18.5% nationally. The BJS data doesn’t show why each revocation occurred. It does show how many people move through the system. 

Wisconsin’s Department of Corrections has said it wants fewer revocations for technical violations. That goal matters. So did Gov. Tony Evers’s August 2025 veto of Assembly Bill 85, which would have required the DOC to recommend revocation for people charged with a new crime. The Legislative Reference Bureau estimated that the bill would have sent thousands of people back into prison each year at a projected cost of more than $330 million in the first two years, with hundreds of millions in additional ongoing annual costs. While the veto kept agents’ discretion intact, it did not fix street-time forfeiture.

And revocation is only part of the picture. A federally funded Wisconsin data snapshot found that people released from prison in 2020 after serving time for violent offenses had spent an average of 6.3 years incarcerated, compared with 5 years nationally. That excludes later returns on the same sentence. We should know how much prison time a judgment of conviction actually produces from beginning to end.

Other states handle street time differently. Minnesota cuts one month from active supervision for every two compliant months, subject to its rules and a public-safety review. Michigan counts time on parole as time serving the sentence, except for certain violation periods. Both systems distinguish between time spent following the rules in the community and time connected to a violation.

A fairer rule is not soft on crime. It is honest about time already served in the community without a new conviction. Wisconsin should credit street time on revocation for technical violations, and it should require a clear, public accounting when street time is stripped after a new conviction. Agents should keep their discretion. Lawmakers should stop proposing automatic-revocation shortcuts that fill prison cells without making neighborhoods safer.

Wisconsin once led on rehabilitation: early parole, the Huber Law and belief that people could return as neighbors. Street-time erasure pulls the other way. It turns supervision into a revolving door with a disappearing calendar. If the state wants successful reentry after prison, it must stop erasing the years people already spent trying to rebuild their lives.

Andrew Drasen is the author of “A Vision of Hope: A Story of Redemption and Purpose” and the founder of ReturnPath, a reentry curriculum. He lives in Franklin.

Guest opinion: Wisconsin should stop erasing ‘street time’ after prison 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.

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Whoever wins the Nov. 3 election to become Wisconsin’s next governor — whether it be Republican Tom Tiffany or Democrat David Crowley — will inherit a state whose long tradition of open government is replete with opportunities for improvement. 

With that in mind, the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council last month sent questionnaires about government transparency to both candidates. Crowley answered our questions while Tiffany did not. 

Here’s a roundup of where the candidates stand when it comes to your right to know, drawn from Crowley’s responses and from what he and Tiffany have said on the campaign trail.

Let’s begin with common ground. Both Crowley and Tiffany say they support ending a legal loophole that exempts state legislators from record retention rules that are in place for all other state and local government officials. This loophole presently allows elected members of the state Assembly and Senate to delete emails and other files at will to prevent their release, absent a pending records request.

Crowley and Tiffany also say they oppose nondisclosure agreements between data center developers and local governments.

In his response to our questionnaire, Crowley said his administration would post commonly requested information online, monitor records processes across agencies and review records request procedures at least annually. He would also require that appointees receive training on the public records and open meetings laws and “make sure the agencies responsible for public records and open meetings compliance have the funding and staffing they need to do that work well.”

Asked about potential changes to the public records and open meetings laws, Crowley said he supports increasing the location fee threshold — a provision in the law allowing custodians to charge location fees only when they are $50 or more — which has not been updated since 1981.

Although Tiffany did not respond to the council’s questionnaire, he has made several campaign promises related to government transparency. Tiffany said he would improve a state data portal to “make it easier for taxpayers to search and understand state spending.” He promised to create agency dashboards that would show “taxpayers where their money is going, what services agencies are providing, and the results taxpayers are receiving.” Tiffany’s spokesperson also said that Tiffany, if elected, would “set clear response-time standards for open records requests.”

As a state senator, Tiffany in 2015 voted for a proposal that would have made it easier for lawmakers, the governor and other agencies to withhold records from the public. The measure was rescinded after intense public outcry. (Tiffany later apologized for his vote, saying “Quite honestly, I am embarrassed by the event.”)

Beyond the public records and open meetings laws, Crowley supports legislation targeting strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs), used to retaliate against individuals and news outlets for engaging in protected activities. The state Assembly in February passed an anti-SLAPP bill, but it died in the Senate. Wisconsin is one of just 10 states without such protection.

Crowley also supports spending taxpayer dollars on WisconsinEye, a public affairs network like C-SPAN, as it works to find a sustainable funding model. “Having served in the State Legislature and now as County Executive, I’ve seen firsthand how important it is for Wisconsinites to have direct access to their government — it strengthens both transparency and public participation,” Crowley said.

Tiffany did not answer our questions on these topics.

Like government transparency, the values of press freedom and free expression are pillars of the broader project of representative democracy. On Sept. 24, Tiffany’s staff blocked two Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporters from a campaign event alleging bias in coverage. Afterward, he insisted, “I’ve always had an open policy in regards to the media.”

Read Crowley’s full response to WISFOIC’s questionnaire here.

Your Right to Know is a monthly column distributed by the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council (wisfoic.org), a group dedicated to open government. Jonathan Anderson is the organization’s treasurer. 

Your Right to Know: Contenders for governor weigh in on open government 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.

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Wisconsin is preparing for a massive expansion of data centers. Billions of dollars are flowing into new facilities, which could sharply increase the state’s electricity demand. At the same time, families across Wisconsin are struggling to afford something much more basic: child care.

Child care costs in Wisconsin have climbed beyond what many families can afford. In 2026, full-time infant care at a center costs an average of $17,400 a year — equal to 22% of Wisconsin’s median household income and more than a year of in-state tuition at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The problem extends beyond cost. Wisconsin’s child care workforce declined by more than 26% between 2010 and 2022. Child care workers in 2022 earned a median annual wage of $26,333, ranking 13th lowest among 546 occupations, according to a 2023 Forward Analytics report. 

This is not just a problem for parents. It’s a drag on the economy. When families cannot find reliable care, parents may reduce their hours, turn down jobs or leave the workforce. When providers cannot afford to retain workers, classrooms close and families lose options.

Wisconsin has already seen what targeted investment can accomplish. Child Care Counts supported 5,762 programs, 75,740 educators and more than 430,000 children. It also helped the early childhood workforce grow by roughly 17%, according to the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association’s Center for Policy, Research, and Engagement.

But that funding was temporary, and about one-quarter of providers could close or significantly reduce services without continued support.

We cannot keep treating child care as a temporary crisis. Like roads, power lines and broadband, child care is infrastructure that allows the economy to function. 

That is why Wisconsin needs a Wisconsin Public Child Care Act to create a permanent child care trust fund that would make care more affordable and stabilize providers while supporting private, nonprofit, family-based, tribal and in-home programs. Regional child care councils would help tailor investments to local needs.

A permanent program also needs a permanent funding source. Wisconsin’s growing data center industry provides an opportunity.

A 2026 UW-Madison Extension analysis identified more than 4,500 megawatts of potential electricity demand from major current and planned data center projects across the state. The Public Service Commission projects Wisconsin’s peak electricity demand could rise from 14.2 gigawatts in 2026 to approximately 20 gigawatts by 2032, a roughly 40% increase. 

Wisconsin already offers significant tax incentives to attract data centers. The Legislative Fiscal Bureau estimates the state’s data center sales and use tax exemption could result in more than $2 billion in forgone tax revenue from data centers that come to the state.

If Wisconsin is willing to invest billions to attract these projects, it should also ask them to invest in the workforce they rely on.

Rather than treating data centers and child care as competing priorities, Wisconsin should connect them. The largest facilities could pay a modest assessment based on electricity demands. At an illustrative $50,000 per megawatt, 2,000 megawatts of demand could generate approximately $100 million annually for child care. That revenue would increase as more data centers go online. 

This is not an anti-business proposal. Data centers depend on Wisconsin’s roads, energy systems, communities and workforce. That workforce depends on child care.

Wisconsin should welcome economic development while ensuring the public shares its benefits. A small contribution from the state’s largest data centers could help families afford care, stabilize providers, improve child care worker compensation and expand access in communities facing shortages.

Wisconsin should not have to choose between technological investment and working families. We can build the data centers of the future while investing in the child care system that allows Wisconsin’s economy to function.

Child care is essential infrastructure. Wisconsin should fund it accordingly.

Connie Acuahuitl is a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee student. She recently completed a fellowship with the Roosevelt Institute, which “champions new ideas and new leaders to make our economy and democracy work for the many, not the few.” She also interned at Caring Across Generations, whose mission is to “change our culture and policies in America to value and support caregiving.”

Guest opinion: Wisconsin should tax data centers to fund child care 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.

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Requesting public records in Wisconsin can sometimes mean waiting weeks, months and even longer for government officials and agencies to respond. What could help speed things along?

At the state Department of Justice, which has recently come under scrutiny for its own delays in releasing records, Attorney General Josh Kaul says the agency he leads needs more money.

“Additional resources could help the DOJ reduce response times to public records requests,” Kaul told the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council, in advance of the Nov. 3 election for attorney general. The council sent questionnaires about government transparency to Kaul, the Democratic incumbent seeking a third term, and his Republican challenger, Fond du Lac County District Attorney Eric Toney, who narrowly lost his previous bid to unseat Kaul in 2022.

Kaul answered our questions; Toney did not, despite multiple emails and a call to his campaign.

In addition to responding to requests for its own records, the DOJ is empowered to interpret and enforce the public records and open meetings laws. Both Kaul and Toney said in 2022 that one of the biggest challenges to enforcing these laws was a lack of funding. This time around, we asked both candidates what has been done to close this gap and what more needs to be done.

Kaul, in his reply, said his administration sought 2.6 positions in the 2025-27 state budget for DOJ public records staffing, but these positions were ultimately cut from that budget. “The addition of those positions would have resulted in more DOJ staff time being available to promote and obtain compliance with the public records and open meetings laws,” Kaul said.

He added that his administration has made the same funding request for the 2027-29 state budget.

Toney told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel earlier this year that he would prioritize staffing in the DOJ.

We further asked the candidates whether the DOJ should take a more active role in enforcement of the public records and open meetings law.

Kaul said the DOJ should address enforcement on a case-by-case basis to balance compliance efforts with the agency’s limited resources. He said the DOJ should continue to offer guidance and training and to seek volunteer compliance for unintentional violations. “In a case involving an egregious, intentional violation, an enforcement action should be considered,” Kaul wrote.

Although Toney did not respond to the council’s questionnaire this year, he said in 2022 that he would, as attorney general, “apply sufficient resources and prioritize the proper administration and enforcement” of the public records and open meetings laws. Toney added that because the laws also allow for private enforcement, he would emphasize the DOJ’s role in issuing legal opinions, informal guidance and training.

“When elected, openness and transparency will be a priority for my office,” Toney said in 2022.

Asked what changes should be made to the state’s sunshine laws, Kaul said they “should be modernized to account for technological developments that have occurred since the laws were enacted.” He also said members of the state Legislature should no longer be exempt from record retention rules. (The removal of this exception has also drawn support from the two candidates for governor, Democrat David Crowley and Republican Tom Tiffany. That race will be the subject of an upcoming Your Right to Know column.)

Finally, Kaul said agencies should follow the DOJ’s practice of proactively releasing information about public records responses. The DOJ posts on its website a “snapshot” of pending records requests and reports detailing response times and other activities by the Office of Open Government.

The election is Nov. 3.

Read Kaul’s full response to WISFOIC’s questionnaire here.

Your Right to Know is a monthly column distributed by the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council (wisfoic.org), a group dedicated to open government. Jonathan Anderson is the organization’s treasurer.

Your Right to Know: More money is needed for records access, Attorney General Josh Kaul says 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.

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Wisconsin has spent decades building one of the country’s strongest apprenticeship cultures. 

In 2025, the state reached record Registered Apprenticeship participation, with 18,524 apprentices across more than 3,095 employers. Youth Apprenticeship also reached record scale, enrolling 11,344 high school juniors and seniors and partnering with 7,447 employers.

Now Wisconsin needs to apply that same learn-by-doing discipline to the artificial intelligence transition.

Stanford Digital Economy Lab’s August employment update found that employment among U.S. workers ages 22-25 in highly AI-exposed occupations is about 19% below where it would be if it had kept pace with similarly aged workers in less-exposed occupations. The comparable measure was 15% at the July 2025 data vintage. The adjustment is appearing mainly through reduced hiring, especially where AI automates tasks people previously performed.

That matters because entry-level work is not just cheap labor. It is the training ground where people learn how an organization actually operates.

A junior analyst becomes valuable by seeing why a clean spreadsheet can still produce a bad decision. A new claims employee learns which apparently routine case contains the one fact that changes everything. A beginning marketer learns that a polished message can still be wrong for the audience. Those lessons come from repetitions, exceptions and coaching.

If AI performs the first-pass work and the employer simply eliminates the beginner, Wisconsin gets an efficiency gain today and a capability problem later.

The state should encourage an apprenticeship dividend for AI adoption. Employers that save meaningful labor time through AI should reinvest a defined share of those savings into structured learning for newer workers. That can mean mentor hours, supervised exception cases, verification rotations, paid internships or registered apprenticeship slots in occupations that have not traditionally used apprenticeship language.

Wisconsin already has the machinery to support this. Its 2026-2028 Youth Apprenticeship grant program is designed to sustain and expand work-based learning partnerships among schools, employers, colleges, workforce boards and other local organizations. The state is also directing workforce funding toward advanced manufacturing and AI through WisTRAIN, including training for human-AI collaboration.

What is missing is a measurement standard for the human side of the investment.

Employers should track time to independent competence alongside time saved. How long does it take a new worker to verify an AI-generated answer, catch an exception, explain the trade-offs and make a sound decision without close supervision? If that clock slows down even as the productivity dashboard improves, the organization is consuming its own future talent.

Wisconsin’s apprenticeship tradition offers a better path. Use AI to remove repetitive preparation, then move beginners more quickly into the work that requires judgment. Give experienced workers explicit coaching responsibilities. Make the workplace an extension of the classroom, just as the Youth Apprenticeship program already does.

AI productivity should not mean a thinner career ladder. In Wisconsin, it should fund a faster one.

Gleb Tsipursky, Ph.D., is a behavioral scientist, CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts and author of “The Psychology of AI Adoption at Work: From Resistance to Results.” He lives in Columbus, Ohio.

Guest opinion: Wisconsin should make an AI productivity fund apprenticeship 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.

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President Donald Trump recently broke Wisconsin law by offering cash to voters if his preferred candidates win this fall’s congressional elections. This continues his patterned disregard for state election laws and long-standing policies enacted to keep our democracy free from corruption. The president is unlikely to face legal repercussions, though others have been punished and likely would be prosecuted for similar conduct. The reality is that we, as citizens and voters, bear the responsibility of deciding what we will tolerate from our leaders.

Recently in Texas, the president said, “If the Republicans win, you win with us and you get $5,000. It will be called the Trump dividend.” Some shrugged his comments off as unserious or impracticable. Others opined that they fall within the bounds of First Amendment protected speech. But Wisconsin law expressly rejects paying for votes in any fashion; in particular, Wis. Stat. § 12.11(1m)(a)3. prescribes felony charges for “Any person who … offers (or) gives … anything of value … in order to induce any elector to … vote or refrain from voting for or against a particular person.” 

A different provision in the same statute — this one prohibiting offers to induce people to vote or refrain from the act of voting — is the basis of Law Forward’s ongoing lawsuit against Elon Musk for promising opportunities to receive $1 million payments in exchange for voting before Election Day in the 2025 Wisconsin Supreme Court election. Wisconsin’s election bribery statute contains exceptions to protect ordinary endorsements of candidates and robust campaign activities, but neither the president’s recent promise nor Musk’s scheme last year seems to fit into those exceptions. 

This is a big deal. Wisconsin law forbids any offers to voters worth more than a single dollar. This has been raised over the years in response to numerous food-related giveaways, from sandwiches to barbecue to ice cream. Wisconsin authorities even considered filing election bribery charges against Democratic campaign workers who provided kringle to residents of a group home in an effort to encourage them to cast absentee ballots. This is no kringle: The president is using the prospect of $5,000 payments to sway the midterm elections in favor of Republican candidates. 

Wisconsin law forbids election bribery to prevent any hint of corruption and to ensure that voters are making their choices on the merits. For the same reasons, Wisconsin forbids voting in an election where you have wagered on the outcome. This law has recently been criticized by prediction market websites.

The law’s laudable goals will remain out of reach if prosecutors are unwilling or unable to enforce them. No prosecutor has challenged President Trump over his latest comments. That is unsurprising: The U.S. Supreme Court decided a few years ago that the president stands above the law, enjoying near-absolute immunity from prosecution for his conduct. In so doing, the court weakened a fundamental axiom of our democracy: that ours is a nation of laws, not men. This misguided decision shields the president from even the threat of criminal liability for, among other things, violations of Wisconsin’s election bribery law. 

But even those without presidential immunity are evading criminal accountability. Earlier this year, the Wisconsin Elections Commission found probable cause that Musk engaged in illegal election bribery. La Crosse County District Attorney Tim Gruenke nevertheless declined to prosecute, even as he acknowledged that a statement by Musk “could be seen as … (offering) to pay someone (for) voting.” To be sure, picking a fight with Musk is a daunting prospect, given his public profile, his wealth, his ownership of X, and his scorched-earth litigation tactics. But the rule of law requires standing up to even those — indeed, especially those — who wield tremendous power. Yet, sadly, America’s most powerful figures increasingly operate under their own set of rules in our shared democracy. 

This is evident right now in the president’s all-out assault on voting rights. Even as he routinely votes absentee by mail, the president seeks to limit everyone else’s ability to do so. He has the federal departments of Justice and Homeland Security running roughshod over state election laws in a fruitless quest to identify noncitizen voters. He has sued dozens of states in an effort to seize private voter information, but courts in Wisconsin and every other state that has considered the matter have ruled against him. And after the president asserted in a primetime national address that DHS had identified more than 24,000 noncitizen voters in just four states, the administration admitted that number is false. DOJ has indicted 19 noncitizens — in the entire country — for allegedly voting unlawfully over the past decade. 

So, what should we expect in the face of unprecedented attacks on the right to vote and ever-increasing threats to our democracy? That is up to us, as citizens and as voters. Each of us individually, and all of us societally, must decide how much we value our freedoms, our traditions and the rule of law. In the face of emboldened corruptors, wary prosecutors and an overburdened judiciary, how will we exercise active citizenship and stand up for our values? Will we demand that political parties and candidates for office, if they want our vote, must speak to these issues and defend democracy? 

Corruption erodes and weakens the foundations underlying democracy. The future of American democracy is in our hands. We are the inheritors of a profound legacy, and it is up to us to ensure that, in Abraham Lincoln’s words, “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”  

Jeff Mandell is the president and general counsel of Law Forward.

Guest opinion: Voters must stand up to leaders who act above the 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.

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On Aug. 28, Milwaukee County Judge David Borowski, during a hearing for a defendant charged with triple homicide, learned the defendant had used a county jail-issued tablet to discuss threatening witnesses. 

Borowski revoked the defendant’s tablet access and ordered him confined to his cell around the clock. The judge also pointed to two other recent instances in which tablets and laptops had been used in ways detrimental to personal and public safety.

“Why is the sheriff’s department handing laptops or iPads to defendants?” Borowski asked.

The comments soon went viral, picked up by candidates, public relations firms and political influencers. Few explained why tablets and laptops exist in correctional facilities, how common they are across the country or what actually happened in the security lapse. Instead, a nuanced issue was reduced to a single alarming anecdote.

The sheriff’s office would later note that it does not hand out iPads, but rather “pre-programmed devices with limited capabilities.”

Tablets have been used in jails and prisons nationally for well over a decade. They are now used in 48 state prison systems, the Federal Bureau of Prisons and numerous county jails throughout Wisconsin. They were introduced to help incarcerated people communicate with loved ones and access educational programming. Yes, the companies that provide them also profited from poor, disproportionately Black and brown families in the process. See Worth Rises for more information on this issue.

This is how the model works in Milwaukee County: Incarcerated users and their families pay the cost, not taxpayers. Over time, better vendors entered the market, prices dropped and some services became free. What has never changed is that these tablets do not provide internet access. They operate on a controlled intranet system. These cost and access dynamics are why tablets were requested in the first place.

Correctional officials have credited tablets with reducing violence and disturbances inside correctional facilities. Some jurisdictions have reported declines of up to 40%, and the director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons described the agency’s tablet program as reducing administrative burdens and allowing staff to focus more on institutional safety, not as a security risk it was forced to accept.

This is not a partisan issue. Some of the nation’s most conservative states have rolled out tablets to every person in custody, regardless of charges or convictions. Sheriffs, who as a group tend to skew conservative, have widely approved their use because those who actually work with incarcerated people understand the benefits they provide.

Responding to the misuse of a few by eliminating a beneficial service for everyone mistakes the appearance of action for the work of actually solving the problem.

Tablets do not inherently create greater opportunities for witness intimidation. They simply create a more visible story when they happen to be the tool used. If tablets disappeared tomorrow, people could still call home, write letters or find other ways to intimidate witnesses.

We do not even know the full story of how this breach occurred. 

But tablet security features are more than capable of preventing situations like it. A more useful conversation would focus on identifying and closing the security gap that allowed it.

While I was incarcerated, I had access to a tablet during the final two years of my 17-year sentence. The growth, efficiency and preparation for the real world it gave me as a writer, student, researcher and future employee were light-years beyond what I achieved during the previous 15 years.

Most people do not realize that 90% to 95% of incarcerated people will eventually return home. The only question is who we want them to be when they do.

The nonprofit I founded while incarcerated, The Community, publishes rehabilitative videos, newsletters and podcast episodes that reach more than one million incarcerated people each month through these tablets. The positive feedback and outcomes have been considerable.

But what technology builds, fear can still take away.

I once tried to pay for the language-learning software Rosetta Stone so people inside could learn Spanish. Instead, all of the existing language tapes and CDs were removed because someone unfamiliar with the fact that they had been available for years worried that people might learn another language to plan something illegal.

That episode illustrates how easily a single anecdote — or even a hypothetical possibility — can define the entire conversation, producing a hammer where a screwdriver would do.

As a national advocate for criminal legal system reform, I have many concerns about tablets in jails and prisons, so I do not defend them uncritically. But many outlets covering this incident stopped at the sensational headline instead of doing the reporting the story required. Political candidates and influencers with their own agendas were then given free rein to use the incident as content.

Half a story, told quickly and left uncorrected, leaves the public further from understanding a system it pays dearly for every day.

Wisconsin deserves a justice system more worthy of that name. This episode demonstrates how far we remain from that goal — but also that we know exactly how to get there, if decision-makers take the problem seriously.

Shannon Ross is the founder of The Community and a founding member of the Justice Forward Wisconsin coalition, which prepares incarcerated people for healthier futures, creates opportunities for them and their loved ones and advocates for positive systems change for everyone impacted by the criminal legal system.

Editor’s note: This column was updated to correctly describe the facility where the defendant accused of using a tablet to intimidate witnesses was held.

Guest opinion: The debate over jail tablets is missing the point is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Reading Time: 3 minutes

For Wisconsin parents, the most disturbing aspects of their teen’s phone probably have little to do with screen time. Bigger questions surround what happens inside the apps: notifications, endless feeds, the urge to keep checking and personalized recommendations. Families sense these problems even when scientists can’t prove causation or define a diagnosis.

Wisconsin’s Assembly Bill 963 aimed to target some of those features. It would have required large platforms to estimate users’ ages, obtain parental consent for minors and add safeguards such as the highest-privacy settings, no targeted advertising and no infinite scrolling or profile-based feeds. The Assembly passed it in February with bipartisan support, but the Senate didn’t take it up before adjourning in March 2026, meaning it did not become law. 

What the research does — and does not — tell us

About 97% of teens use the internet daily, and about four in 10 say they’re online almost constantly, according to the Pew Research Center. 

Nearly half of teens also express concerns about social media: 48% say it has a mostly negative effect on people their age, and 45% say they spend too much time on it, Pew’s surveys show. 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey found that frequent social media use is associated with a higher prevalence of persistent sadness or hopelessness, bullying and certain suicide-related risks. But association isn’t proof of causality. Teens experiencing psychological difficulties may use social media differently, and many other factors shape their well-being.

A systematic review of 32 studies on adolescent anxiety and social media found similarly mixed evidence. More than half found a positive association between social media use and anxiety, with stronger associations in studies focused on problematic use. Even so, the authors called for more research and better ways to measure use.

The distinction between association and causation matters as lawmakers consider a difficult question: How should they regulate potential harms that researchers are still working to define?

From screen time to platform design

Wisconsin is part of a national movement. By March 2026, all 50 states had introduced legislation on digital media and minors, ranging from age verification and parental consent to feature restrictions and limits on targeted advertising. States have also pursued social media companies through litigation. 

Attorney General Josh Kaul joined Wisconsin in a 47-state settlement with Meta that requires stronger child-safety measures, including time limits, age-assurance measures and limits on push notifications. 

The settlement matters, but it applies only to Meta and does not cover every design feature targeted by AB 963. The bill would have set broader standards for large social media platforms, including limits on targeted advertising, infinite scrolling and profile-based feeds. 

AB 963 focused on minors’ social media accounts and the platforms themselves, shifting attention from whether and how long children use social media to how platforms are designed to keep them engaged.

If a platform’s design encourages engagement through features such as personalized recommendations, infinite scrolling or constant notifications, responsibility should not fall entirely on the child or parent. Parents can identify problems and set boundaries, but they cannot control every feature built into an application they did not design.

Measuring whether the rules work

Although AB 963 stalled this year, similar proposals are likely to return. If Wisconsin enacts a similar proposal, lawmakers should measure whether the protections change how platforms operate and improve young people’s online experiences.

Wisconsin does not need to wait for perfect scientific certainty before taking reasonable steps to protect children. But evidence, not fear, should drive any response.

Stan Gottfredson is president of Atraxia Law, a paralegal firm supporting families dealing with the legal and practical challenges minors face online.

Guest opinion: Beyond screen time — Wisconsin should focus on the features that keep teens engaged is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Reading Time: 4 minutes

In 1998, the Madison School Board adopted an important academic goal: “that all students complete the 3rd grade able to read at or beyond grade level.”

Flash forward 28 years to a July 29 Rotary Club event. Madison Superintendent Joe Gothard highlighted recent improvements in literacy in district schools. But he pointed out that proficiency rates still hovered around just 40% at the elementary, middle and high schools he listed.

“We should not be sitting in a place where we can say 60% of our students are not proficient at their grade level in reading,” Rebecca Kundert, the district’s senior executive director of curriculum and instruction, said in follow-up remarks.

As Wisconsin embarks on another major effort to improve reading, the history of previous initiatives shows why sustained attention matters.

“It’s complicated,” one retired teacher said at the Rotary talk. Many factors add complexity, including readiness to learn, distractions, leadership turnover, attention spans and civic malaise.

Nearly three decades have passed without Madison reaching that goal, even as the district spends substantial money. It has a total budget equivalent to about $26,000 per enrolled student — far above average. 

But Wisconsin doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Other states have significantly improved their reading proficiency.

What should Madison and other school districts learn from other states?

1. Stick with it

In 2011, Wisconsin lawmakers approved one of Massachusetts’ teacher-content-knowledge requirements for early literacy. Beginning in 2014, the law required applicants for a broad assortment of teaching licenses to pass the Foundations of Reading test, just like Massachusetts educators, before they could teach early learners.

But the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) allowed many who failed to keep teaching on temporary licenses. First-time pass rates were often in the mid-60% range.

Consider the message this sends to teachers, schools of education, administrators, students and parents.

2. Commit real effort

Former Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale and his wife, Sally, donated $100 million in 2000 to improve early literacy in Mississippi, which ranked 49th nationally in fourth grade reading.

Wisconsin ranked above average at that time.

The funds helped retrain teachers, update curriculum and teacher preparation, and provide classroom coaches. Mississippi also passed SB 2347 in 2013, requiring “intensive intervention for any K-3 student with a reading deficiency, notice to parents, and no promotion past third grade for children whose deficiency is not remedied, subject to good-cause exemptions.”

In 2019, Alan Borsuk, writing in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, noted that Mississippi “was the only state where fourth grade reading scores improved.” He cited a “strong requirement that teachers be well-trained in reading instruction,” similar to what Massachusetts previously implemented.

National Assessment of Educational Progress results in 2024 showed Mississippi fourth graders at 219, outscoring the national average for the first time. Wisconsin, at 215, was statistically indistinguishable from the national average of 214.

The New York Times published a district-by-district test-score lookup in May 2026. Columnist Nicholas Kristof reported that “a Black fourth-grader in Mississippi is now two and a half times as likely to test proficient in reading as a Black fourth-grader in California.”

Comedian Bill Maher carried the comparison to his show. 

“Mississippi is kicking our ass in education and for way less money.” he said. 

3. Use an honest scorecard

Wisconsin has shown weak academic transparency and changed the goalposts when convenient.

In 2003, for instance, 80% of Wisconsin fourth graders scored proficient or advanced on the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination (WKCE) in reading, but just 33% scored at the proficient or advanced level on the NAEP.

In 2008, DPI officials went so far as to state: “Schools should not rely on only WKCE data to gauge progress of individual students or to determine effectiveness of programs or curriculum.”

Wisconsin has a fresh opportunity to get it right

In 2023, the Wisconsin Legislature passed and Gov. Tony Evers signed Act 20, modeled on Mississippi reforms, after he vetoed the two previous attempts to address Wisconsin’s literacy disaster.

Act 20 shifted reading instruction from 4K through third grade toward phonics and the science of reading, bans the “three-cueing” method beginning in the 2024-25 school year and requires universal early-literacy screening, reporting of results to parents and personal reading plans for struggling readers.

Wisconsin Act 20 requires school boards to have adopted a written policy specifying criteria for promotion from third to fourth grade by July 1, 2025. Then, beginning Sept. 1, 2027, a school board may not promote a third grader to fourth grade unless the student satisfies the criteria in that district’s policy. 

The law also created an Office of Literacy at DPI, authorized up to 64 literacy coaches and created a Council on Early Literacy Curricula to vet curricula for a program that reimburses schools for part of the cost of approved materials. The $50 million earmark for literacy initiatives in the Joint Finance Committee’s supplemental appropriation became the subject of litigation involving DPI, the Legislature and Evers.

Citizens, parents, teachers, politicians and administrators now have an unprecedented view of 4K-through-third-grade literacy skills through Act 20’s early-literacy screener requirement. The screener is administered three times annually in kindergarten through third grade and twice to students in 4K.

Nearly 97,414 4K-through-third-grade students, or 37%, scored below the 25th percentile in a national comparison group during the 2024-25 school year. Madison lagged the state, with 3,888 students, or 43.7%, scoring below the 25th percentile.

What can you do?

Understand your school district’s total spending, staffing and student enrollment. Review early-literacy screener data and ask elected officials what they are doing about it. Track changes over time.

Packers President Dominic Olejniczak hired Vince Lombardi after the team’s disastrous 1-10-1 season in 1958, its 11th consecutive season without a winning record. 

Lombardi won a title in 1961, his third year, and again in 1962, 1965, 1966 and 1967.

We can do much better, quickly.

Jim Zellmer is part of the team that created Fast Lane Literacy by SEDSO, a research-based early literacy box designed to accelerate foundational reading skills for nearly anyone attempting to learn to read.

Guest opinion: Wisconsin has tried to improve reading for decades. Will this time be different? is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Reading Time: 3 minutes

It took until the early morning hours to call the Democratic primary for governor of Wisconsin. When the counting ended at 3 a.m., Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley had beaten state Rep. Francesca Hong by fewer than 4,000 votes, closing a gap that public polling had put at double digits in Hong’s favor. Hong, a democratic socialist, made a moratorium on new AI data center construction a signature of her campaign. Crowley had a different data center answer: build, but make sure the data centers provide real benefits to surrounding communities.

The postmortems have treated the race as a proxy war between the party’s establishment and its left flank, which is certainly a theme. But it was also a statewide primary in which data centers became a defining issue, and it is worth asking why an issue that appears so popular at first glance was held by the candidate who underperformed at the polls. 

Dig beneath the surface, and the anti-data center position seems politically weaker. While national polling can’t explain the results of a statewide race, it suggests voters’ views on data centers may be more nuanced than a simple for-or-against debate. In the Rainey Center’s May national survey of 1,010 registered voters, data centers sat underwater, 29% favorable to 48% unfavorable, and the sharpest hostility was exactly where Hong was strong: 41% of very liberal voters held a very unfavorable view, the most intense opposition of any ideological group.

But when you look closer the picture changes. Black voters were the most favorable group in the electorate, 36% favorable to 30% unfavorable, with a third saying they were not sure. White voters ran 29% to 53%. None of this makes Black voters cheerleaders for AI, but it is a long way from the revolt a moratorium presumes, and the rest of the survey shows why. 

Hong’s dismissal of data centers excites populists, but most voters are interested in a more thorough understanding of the issue. It’s worth understanding what voters are actually worried about and how Crowley defused those concerns. In our polling, Black voters are most concerned that data centers will destroy jobs: 19% named AI destroying jobs as their top concern, and another 12% said the projects do not create enough permanent jobs. Jobs are justice, and Black voters want to see a data center policy that creates jobs in their communities. 

Unions, another key constituency that Democrats, particularly left-wing Democrats, claim to speak for, are standing on the opposite side of the activists on data centers. Unions understand that data centers are a source of blue-collar jobs that don’t require a college degree and can’t be outsourced.

And while data centers sound scary in the abstract, their impact can be enormously positive. Loudon County, home of more than 250 data centers, will see $1.3 billion in tax revenue next year from data centers, enough that property taxes have been slashed by 30% in the last decade. 

Data centers are still controversial, and advocates for America leading the world in technology will need arguments that persuade voters. The pro-data center coalition is unions, blue-collar workers, rural communities looking for economic development, and Black voters. Accountability can strengthen data center support with these voters and expand the coalition. 

Requiring data center operators to sign a community benefits agreement, committing to local hiring, infrastructure upgrades, and payments to the community before construction begins, drew 66% support overall and 60% to 14% among Black voters. And 61% want ratepayer protections, the industry pledge that data centers cover their own power costs, written into binding law.

Crowley has embraced the principles of Donald Trump’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge (though he would surely plead ignorance as to the policy’s provenance). He has said data center companies should cover the full cost of the grid upgrades they require, use union labor and sign community benefit agreements. His position aligns with Black voters, union voters and non-college voters who want jobs and accountability.

Rob Smith is a fellow at the Joseph Rainey Center for Public Policy and a commentator on American public policy, culture, leadership, and national priorities. His work focuses on issues including energy independence, U.S. competitiveness and the policies shaping America’s future.

Devan Patel is the Visiting Fellow for Tech Ethics & Democracy at the Joseph Rainey Center for Public Policy and a lawyer and political strategist focused on artificial intelligence, technology and public policy. He is also an adjunct professor of law at Notre Dame Law School and has worked at the intersection of AI ethics, national security and democratic governance.

The Joseph Rainey Center for Public Policy, named for the first Black House member, is a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit think tank formed in 2018 to examine public policy issues. Its advocacy positions span the partisan divide.

Guest opinion: What Wisconsin’s Democratic primary reveals about data center politics is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Reading Time: 3 minutes

I’m 32 and I’ve already had more jobs than I care to admit. In my first job after college, I joined the marketing team at a big corporation. I remember asking my manager one day, “Hey, I’ve done everything on my list. Can I help with something else?” Their response: “No.” The message was clear: stay in your lane.

After that, I tried other roles, including operations, sales, construction and custodial work. Like many of my peers, I was searching for a place where I could grow and keep learning. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was looking for the right culture.

Then, two years ago, I saw a job posting at DSG, a wholesale contractor supply company based in the Midwest. I remembered a college coach who worked for DSG. He seemed to have a great experience there. DSG had a training program, so I decided it was worth a try, even without experience in contractor supply. I had run out of other ideas.

That was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I’ve turned off all my old job alerts because I hope to work here until I retire. I believe I’ll keep improving my skills and moving upward even if I’m here for decades, and my co-workers will value creativity and unconventional ideas.

We’re 100% employee-owned through an employee stock ownership plan, or ESOP. It’s a retirement plan that allows companies to share ownership with workers. Our employee ownership culture is the secret ingredient that makes me excited to stay here for the next 30 years.

When I started, I didn’t know anything about ESOPs or what being “employee-owned” meant. During my orientation, my manager showed me our company’s ESOP retirement wealth calculator. If I stayed at the company long enough, I could accumulate generational wealth for myself and my family without contributing a cent to my ESOP account. From year one to year two, my ESOP account balance grew by more than 200%.

From the start, DSG’s training program encouraged me to get involved in every aspect of the business. Instead of a “that’s not my job” attitude, my co-workers went out of their way to answer my questions and help me learn. They celebrated when I got involved outside my direct job and listened to my ideas. When the training program ended, DSG hired me full time as an inventory planning analyst. I learned that this welcoming environment was the norm across the company.

As employee owners, we all have an interest in doing our best and helping others excel. For example, all 63 of our branches share inventory. Rather than compete, we cooperate. We know the savings across the organization benefit our finances in the long run. I also travel for my job. Instead of using company funds to buy expensive meals on the road, my co-owners in other branches have invited me over for home-cooked dinners. By doing what’s best for each other and the company now, we all reap the rewards in our ESOP accounts later.

Most importantly, it’s not just people with college degrees who are building generational wealth. Whether we’re working with spreadsheets, driving delivery trucks or loading equipment in the warehouse, we have the same opportunity to change the trajectory of our financial futures. No matter the position, background or education level, each full-time employee at DSG gets an ESOP retirement plan.

I’ve read studies that found companies with ESOPs tend to have higher employee retention and withstand economic downturns better than non-employee-owned companies, but there are only 240 ESOPs in Wisconsin. Still, momentum is building. 

The Expanding ESOPs coalition is building a movement of nearly 100 organizations focused on expanding employee ownership in Wisconsin and beyond.

U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa., previously introduced H.R. 3105, the Promotion and Expansion of Private Employee Ownership Act of 2025. The bill would help small businesses establish S corporation employee stock ownership plans (S ESOPs), provide technical assistance to companies pursuing S ESOPs and create an employee ownership advocate within the U.S. Department of Labor.

Two years ago, I took a chance and applied for a position meant for recent college grads. I knew nothing about ESOPs. I thought it would be just another job. I couldn’t be happier that I was wrong. If employee ownership can have that kind of impact on me, imagine the impact of having more ESOP companies in Wisconsin.

Conner Scott lives in Eau Claire with his wife and two sons. He is an SIOP analyst at DSG, which has locations across Wisconsin.

Guest opinion: Why Wisconsin needs more employee-owned companies is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Reading Time: 3 minutes

A few weeks ago, Wisconsin State Journal reporter Chris Rickert was using his cellphone to scan records in the office of the Dane County clerk of circuit court, when an office staffer informed him that this was not allowed. 

Rickert complied, but followed up with an email to the office’s clerk of courts, Jeff Okazaki, noting that he and the paper’s former courts reporter had routinely done this to avoid the mandatory $1.25 per-page charge for copies made by office staff. “We have not been secretive about scanning the documents and no one else has ever told us not to,” he wrote.

Okazaki, in reply, explained that while the public can inspect documents for free using the office’s terminals, any copies must be made by staff for the statutory fee. He cited a 2014 opinion by then-state Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen stating that clerks of court and registers in probate cannot charge for copies made using personal devices such as a camera phone or handheld scanner, but can “choose whether to allow an individual to make copies in this manner.” Okazaki said most county clerk’s offices, including Dane’s, promptly disallowed this practice, noting that the office has long had a “No Cell Phones!” sign posted in its records room.

But Carlo Esqueda, who headed the office from 2007 to late 2023, shortly before Okazaki was appointed to the post, says it “wasn’t my policy to prohibit people from taking photos of the screens in the records center.” He says the sign about cellphones likely predated the 2014 opinion and was not about preventing people from using them to scan court records: “My recollection is that we just didn’t want folks carrying on phone conversations in that room where people are trying to concentrate on reading.”

In my four decades as a reporter, always working for cash-strapped media outlets, I have rarely forked over the $1.25 per-page copy fee set by statute for court records. In recent years, that has meant snapping photos of court records, mostly in Dane County. If anyone had objected, and no one ever did, I would have simply resumed doing what I did, back in the days before everyone had cellphones equipped with cameras — copy relevant sections from the records by hand. 

In other words, barring frugal requesters like me from making copies means additional labor and inconvenience, and potentially hours spent at terminals others might be waiting to use. But it will not necessarily generate additional revenue for the clerk’s office. (Rickert says he is now paying the per-page fee for some records and “taking notes on other, less important stuff.”)

Okazaki, who is running unopposed for a four-year term this fall, insists he has “provided no changes, updates or new policies regarding or related to the use of personal electronic devices to copy court records” and that any enforcement has come from “staff operating under existing policy and training.” He says there may have been instances in which violations went “unnoticed at the time.” And he wonders how anyone could see the “No Cell Phones!” sign and think it was OK to use a cellphone to take photos of records. (Well, one reason might be that this sign goes on to ask visitors to “respect others” in the room by exiting to the lobby to use their phones.)

But even if clerks are within their rights to adopt this prohibition, consistently or otherwise, that doesn’t make it a good idea. Letting people make their own copies, as the AG’s opinion expressly allows, is a harmless practice that reduces the workload of office staff and removes a potential barrier from people seeking to obtain public records for which they are, as taxpayers, already paying. A commitment to openness should trump the ability of government agencies to rake in money. 

Court records are among the most important public records we have. Clerks of court should not be making it harder or cost-prohibitive for members of the public to access them. 

Your Right to Know is a monthly column distributed by the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council (wisfoic.org), a nonprofit, nonpartisan group dedicated to open government. Bill Lueders, editor-at-large of The Progressive magazine, is the group’s president.

Your Right to Know: Let the public copy court records is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Faceless megacorps scouring rural Wisconsin for land have put residents on edge – and it showed in the state’s primary earlier this month.

The big story in Dairyland isn’t the narrow defeat of state Rep. Francesca Hong, who preached a data center moratorium before losing the Democratic primary by roughly 3,000 votes to Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley.

The big story comes from a small but consequential place that residents love and vowed to protect. Wrightstown, Wisconsin, just wrote the playbook for communities confronted by the proliferation of AI data centers, sometimes planned in secret. Residents learned of a potential project, organized against it, pushed village officials to pause development and forced the issue onto the ballot.

Then nearly 9 in 10 Wrightstown residents spoke through their votes on Aug. 11 and said “Yeah, no” to AI data centers. And what happened next? Rep. Tom Tiffany, the Republican  candidate for governor, made more than a dozen online posts claiming Crowley is too soft on data centers, according to an Aug. 23 Washington Post analysis. Crowley’s campaign countered by highlighting Tiffany’s congressional vote for legislation that included a 10-year ban on state and local AI regulation — and his previous description of data centers as “exciting new technology.”

But as the Wisconsin Examiner reported, the candidates largely agree on key guardrails: Both support giving communities the final say, banning local government nondisclosure agreements and protecting utility customers from added costs. Neither supports a moratorium, though Tiffany wants to repeal state tax incentives for data centers while Crowley has called for scrutinizing whether those incentives benefit taxpayers.

The political brawl comes after an LLC swooped into Wrightstown earlier this year, armed with a generic name and hungry for rural land deals.

Village officials denied at spring community meetings that they’d seen a project proposal from developer Cloverleaf Infrastructure. Yet emails released in response to an open records request revealed they’d been communicating with the company since January, WPR reported.

Residents pushed for and got a June pause on all AI data center projects until they could speak at the polls. Village board members in July unanimously extended the moratorium to a year as residents prepared to vote in a nonbinding referendum on Aug. 11.

NetChoice, a tech industry association that counts Amazon, TikTok, Meta, YouTube and other  Big Tech players as members, threatened legal action over the referendum.

But the industry couldn’t defeat months of grassroots organizing.

According to Ballotpedia, Wrightstown was the only Wisconsin municipality with a data-center-related measure on the primary ballot. Nationwide, Ballotpedia is tracking eight such measures in six states, including California, Illinois, Michigan and Nevada. As of Aug. 26, voters had approved four measures that limited development, none that favored it, and four remained pending.

In Wisconsin, Wrightstown’s vote followed Port Washington, where 66% of voters in April backed a measure requiring voter approval for future tax incremental financing districts exceeding $10 million — a referendum spurred by opposition to incentives for a massive data center.

Janesville voters will weigh in next: A November referendum will decide whether projects exceeding $450 million at a former industrial site must go before voters. Any referendum on a specific data center project would come later.

Why do we supposedly need these data centers in the first place? 

First, let’s look at some of the people behind these projects.

Former New York City Mayor Eric Adams sprang to action in Wisconsin Rapids this month as a paid adviser to the PNK Group. You may recall that Adams faced an indictment in a five-count federal bribery case. President Donald Trump’s administration bailed him out.

Adams is flacking these days for a 150-megawatt data center campus in Wisconsin Rapids. Attendees didn’t hold back at the pitch meeting, with one asking: “So, one question is how can we trust you because you’re a convicted felon, you’re indicted for bribery, and secondly, you talk about how AI and the medical use of AI, but given your ties to cryptocurrency and to the Russians, what is your AI data center going to be used for?” Adams was indicted but not convicted. Wisconsin Watch reported Aug. 28 that the two partners behind the project have strong ties to Russia — including being born, educated or having worked there.

I’ll get out my scythe now to cut through the facts and hammer home the details.

Residents booed Adams. They pushed for answers about water use, electricity demands, jobs and foreign ownership. Wisconsin Rapids’ Planning Commission will hold a hearing Sept. 16 and recommend whether the City Council should approve a conditional use permit for the proposed data center, Wisconsin Watch reported.

Without solid information on the who, let’s move to the why.

Big Tech has ready answers, citing national security for instance. 

They cry “Just trust us!” as Elon Musk’s company xAI fights for the right to nudify kids.

Does national security include spying on U.S. citizens with Flock cameras, which are so universally loathed that people are chopping them down? The Washington Post documented at least 50 cases across the country of law enforcement officers misusing the cameras, including to stalk women. Right- and left-leaning communities are ending contracts.

So, what’s next? Our state and federal lawmakers should wake up and follow the Wrightstown playbook.

Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul ordered a first-in-the-nation statewide AI data center moratorium.

There is room for bipartisanship in Washington. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.,  and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., introduced the Artificial Intelligence Data Center Moratorium Act to impose a pause on development of data centers.  

Elected officials are finally catching up, with Republicans increasingly criticizing data centers nationwide, according to a Washington Post analysis. 

What the Flock are the rest of you waiting for? Lawmakers, act now or suffer at the ballot box. Your political action committees can’t save you.

Juliana Keeping is the founder of  Keeping Strategies LLC, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy communications firm specializing in moving evidence-based bipartisan reform at scale. She also serves as strategic artificial intelligence adviser at Our Lady of the Lake University in Houston and a Rotarian. She is the author of Keeping Shop, a newsletter on Substack.

Guest opinion: Big Tech wants Wisconsin land for data centers. Voters are saying ‘Yeah, no.’ is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Every August, families in our state settle into familiar routines: filling backpacks with school supplies, scheduling sports physicals and wondering how summer disappeared so quickly. But before the first school bell rings, every family should put one more item on its checklist: making sure everyone — including children, parents and grandparents — is up to date on recommended vaccinations.

That message takes on new urgency with the recent measles outbreak in our state, and President Trump’s executive order calling for significant changes to the nation’s childhood vaccine recommendations, including splitting the combined measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine across separate visits. The order comes amid renewed claims linking childhood vaccines to autism — claims repeatedly contradicted by decades of scientific research.

As vaccine-preventable diseases resurge, Wisconsinites should follow the evidence and trusted medical expertise while making it easier — not harder — for families to protect their children.

All of this is especially fitting during National Immunization Awareness Month. Vaccines are one of the few health decisions that protect not only the individual but those around us as well. Infants, older adults, cancer patients and neighbors with weakened immune systems all benefit when more of us are protected.

Unfortunately, our state is already moving in the wrong direction. The Wisconsin Department of Health Services reports that only 66.9% of children reaching 24 months of age received the recommended routine vaccine series in 2025, down from 68.8% the year before. MMR vaccination rates among 2-year-olds have fallen below 80%, well below the approximately 95% coverage public health experts say is needed to prevent measles from spreading in a community.

This summer, the United States surpassed 2,700 measles cases, the highest total in 35 years. The overwhelming majority occurred among people who were unvaccinated, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

Clark and Vernon counties had kindergarten MMR vaccination rates of just 44% and 50%, respectively, creating pockets where a single imported case could quickly spark a local outbreak.

Children are only part of the story. Protection against some diseases fades over time, which is why adults also need routine vaccinations. Many adults remain behind on their recommended flu, COVID-19, Tdap, RSV, pneumococcal and hepatitis B vaccinations. Staying current helps prevent serious illness and hospitalization, particularly among older adults and people with chronic health conditions.

And vaccination isn’t a rural issue or an urban issue — it’s a Wisconsin issue.

Whether you live in Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay, Eau Claire, Platteville, Kenosha or a small town in between, viruses don’t recognize county lines or political boundaries. An outbreak in one community can quickly spread to another, disrupting families, straining health care workers and increasing costs for everyone.

Parents and adults deserve facts — not fear. They deserve public health recommendations grounded in evidence rather than unproven claims. Decades of research have found no credible evidence that vaccines cause autism, and the combined MMR vaccine has been safely used for generations.

The federal government may be changing its approach, but states still have a critical role in protecting public health. My hope is that Wisconsin will do the right thing: follow the evidence, listen to physicians and public health experts and ensure our children continue to have access to vaccinations based on sound medical evidence.

Families should rely on conversations with trusted physicians, nurses, pharmacists and local public health professionals rather than on misinformation circulating online.

As another school year begins, make vaccinations part of your family’s back-to-school routine, and don’t forget the adults in your life. Check immunization records through the Wisconsin Immunization Registry and ask your health care provider which vaccines are recommended for every member of your family.

The healthiest thing Wisconsin students can carry into school this year isn’t in a backpack. It’s the protection that comes from a community committed to keeping one another healthy and from public health decisions grounded in science.

Rob Gundermann is president and CEO of the Coalition of Wisconsin Aging & Health Groups (CWAG).

Guest opinion: As vaccine guidance shifts, Wisconsin families should follow the evidence 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.

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After reading Wisconsin Watch’s preview about the upcoming commutation hearings — and learning that people convicted of serious crimes, including murder, are among the first cases to be heard — I find it mind-boggling.

I understand that Gov. Tony Evers’ executive order establishing Wisconsin’s commutation process specifically excluded people convicted of any offense on a broad list of disqualifying sex offenses. Yet the order allows someone who took another person’s life to potentially receive early release. That contrast deserves serious discussion.

Wisconsin’s prison system also faces significant capacity and financial pressures, with more than 23,000 people incarcerated in facilities not designed for today’s prison population. 

Taxpayers are paying to incarcerate people who have spent two or three decades behind bars, including some whose offenses did not involve death or physical injury.

The commutation conversation cannot be only about the people we all agree should not be released. Where is the conversation — and the support — for those who have demonstrated that they should be considered for release?

This debate also raises questions about forgiveness and second chances. Our federal government has demonstrated that clemency can be used for serious offenses. Shouldn’t our elected state officials at least be willing to have an honest conversation about who has earned a second chance?

When I read about Wisconsin’s commutation bill in Wisconsin Right Now and came across the stories of two men who received decades-long, de facto life sentences for armed robbery — despite no one suffering bodily injuries — I was stunned. One of the men later saved the life of a correctional officer during an attack by another inmate. And both the court and the district attorney agreed that he had served enough time.

There are always two sides to every story. But perhaps elected officials should look more closely at people who didn’t get a fair shake in life, who have paid their debt to society and who are now in their 50s and capable of becoming productive members of their communities.

This isn’t about being soft on crime. It’s about recognizing rehabilitation, proportionality and redemption while confronting the enormous financial cost of keeping people incarcerated indefinitely when they have demonstrated that they are no longer the same people who entered prison decades ago.

Wisconsin has an opportunity to address both a massive taxpayer burden and one of the state’s most difficult ethical questions. The question is whether our elected officials are willing to look beyond the headlines, examine individual cases and support people who have genuinely earned a second chance.

The commutation conversation should be about all of these people — not just the cases that generate the strongest opposition.

Tonia Thornhill is a Milwaukee resident.

Guest opinion: Wisconsin’s commutation debate should look beyond the toughest cases 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.

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Editor’s note: This column was excerpted from an open letter sent on July 30, 2026, to Madison city officials. On Aug. 2, Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway announced plans to remove barricades and tow vehicles occupying Williamson Street — while relocating memorial items. 

On July 22 Madison police shot Corey Ruiz on Williamson Street. That shooting should have been a moment of profound self-examination for this city. Instead, what has followed has exposed another failure of leadership.

Let me be clear: The shooting raises profound questions about Madison’s use of force and demands a full, independent investigation and public accountability. A man is dead in a system that too often relies on armed police to respond to public health and social crises.

But what has happened in the days since has become something else entirely.

I spent time walking along Williamson Street this week and speaking with business owners. I watched volunteers attempting to provide mental health support, addiction services, sanitation and basic necessities that should never have fallen on their shoulders.

This is not a functioning response.

I saw broken glass, discarded needles, human waste and other signs of a neighborhood under tremendous strain. Businesses that have served this community for decades are struggling to stay open. That includes St. Vincent de Paul, which helps keep families housed by paying utility bills and distributes thousands of diapers every month. 

Small business owners who had nothing to do with the shooting are seeing their livelihoods threatened as city leaders allow others to shoulder responsibilities that should belong to the government.

This crisis was entirely predictable.

Williamson Street has long been home to organizations that provide food assistance, harm reduction resources and help navigating housing and social services. Those organizations perform essential work, and our community is better because they exist. But they were never meant to become substitutes for a comprehensive public health system.

When a city fails to provide sufficient emergency shelter, addiction treatment, psychiatric care, crisis response, supportive housing and outreach, people in crisis congregate wherever help can be found. This is the consequence of the government failing to build a system capable of meeting people’s basic needs.

Instead of investing in that system, Madison has effectively concentrated its social safety net in one neighborhood.

That isn’t compassionate.

It isn’t sustainable.

And it isn’t fair — to people struggling with addiction or mental illness, to the volunteers trying to help them, or to the residents and small businesses that call Williamson Street home.

What disturbs me most is that everyone now seems to be fighting the wrong battle.

The shooting of Ruiz should have united Madison around demanding better policing and stronger public health infrastructure.

Instead, neighbors are turning against protesters. Protesters are turning against businesses. Businesses are turning against the city. Residents are exhausted. People experiencing homelessness and addiction remain trapped in the same circumstances that existed before the shooting.

No one is winning.

I’ve read dozens of comments from Madison residents, many of whom initially supported the demonstrations but now say they feel abandoned by city leadership. They describe blocked businesses, unsafe conditions, interrupted access to essential services, fire hazards, open drug use and a neighborhood that increasingly feels less like a protest than a place where the government has stopped governing. Whether every account is accurate is beside the point. The common thread is unmistakable: People feel abandoned.

Government exists precisely for moments like this.

It is not enough to allow volunteers to build makeshift public health services on a public street while trained professionals remain absent.

It is not enough to leave sanitation to neighbors cleaning up broken glass, discarded needles and human waste outside their own storefronts.

It is not enough to ask local businesses to absorb devastating financial losses while waiting indefinitely for a resolution.

And it is certainly not enough to respond to profound social failures primarily with police.

Madison prides itself on progressive values. Those values mean very little if they amount to outsourcing public health to nonprofits, addiction treatment to volunteers, housing to charities, sanitation to neighborhood residents and crisis intervention to police officers.

Williamson Street deserves better.

The people living with addiction deserve better.

The business owners deserve better.

The residents deserve better.

Corey Ruiz deserved better.

If this city truly wants to honor his memory, then stop managing symptoms and start addressing causes.

Invest in mental health infrastructure.

Expand shelter and supportive housing.

Fund addiction treatment and professional outreach.

Restore sanitation and public safety.

Support the businesses and nonprofits that have borne the costs of this crisis.

Hold officers accountable when they use unlawful or excessive force.

And stop expecting one neighborhood to carry burdens that belong to all of Madison.

The tragedy began years before the shooting when we accepted that nonprofits, charities, neighborhood volunteers and police officers could substitute for the public systems that are supposed to be run by the government. 

The shooting was one terrible consequence of that failure.

The chaos that has followed is another.

Madison can do better.

Right now, it is choosing not to.

Sarah A. Larsen is a Madison resident. 

Guest opinion: After the Corey Ruiz shooting, Williamson Street encampment exposes Madison’s deeper failures 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.

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The Wisconsin Ethics Commission’s new dashboard tries to make campaign finance information more accessible to the public. It cost $285,000 to build and will cost more than $270,000 to maintain over two years, plus another $20,000 to eliminate erroneous and duplicative records, according to Daniel Carlton, administrator of the Wisconsin Ethics Commission. 

“The biggest gain for the public is that the new website has much easier and more complete access to reported activity,” says Carlton. “It’s presented in a much more transparent, easy-to-navigate way than ever before.” The website’s tagline? “Welcome to Sunshine.” 

As a reporter, I remember scraping through campaign finance reports under the old system, trying to find information about state legislative campaigns. The website was slow and frequently froze up. Campaign finance information was uploaded via PDF. Sorting through the data was not fun. 

The new dashboard was launched a year ago, in August 2025, and the coming Aug. 11 primary and the Nov. 3 election will present key opportunities to test it out. You can use the portal — at campaignfinance.wi.gov — to search for information on state candidates, including governor, attorney general and state legislator. 

The site tracks individual candidate’s donors and recipients. You can also see how candidates spend (or “disburse”) the money they raise on such things as media, campaign staff and polling. You can find donors and easily see what other candidates they’ve given to. There are many other ways to filter information. To confirm your information, you can download the actual reports submitted by the campaigns. 

As is often the case, the data isn’t always perfect. This spring, while reporting on a circuit court race, I used data from the Ethics Commission, confirming it in the actual campaign finance report. That data, according to the campaign manager, was wrong; it showed the campaign of a state Supreme Court justice donating more than the $6,000 maximally allowable for a circuit court election.

The campaign manager promised to correct this error in April, blaming the new reporting website. When asked again ahead of the most recent filing deadline, in July, he again promised to correct it. It has still not been corrected. 

Blowback over erroneous campaign finance reports recently forced Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez out of the race for governor. 

Carlton says typos and imperfect recordkeeping can create multiple entities when there should be one. ActBlue — a PAC that helps Democrats fundraise — is a good example. A filer can accidentally type “Act Blue” or “ActBlur,” which would be logged as separate entities. 

The Ethics Commission has built a tool to “de-duplicate” entries like these. So far, it has reduced duplicative entities by 78% — from 12 million down to roughly 2.6 million. Carlton says the extra cost to streamline the data was “well worth it.” 

“Staff is watching for obvious duplications and trying to deduplicate them after reporting deadlines,” says Carlton. “Of course, anyone that identifies duplicates can let us know and we can fix them quickly.” But a challenge of the system, he adds, is that “many users input data without training or experience, which can lead to data integrity issues. The system has to be set up to try to keep entities separate, but there is no perfect way to do that.”

Like with any new technology, the site comes with some growing pains. But the state should be lauded for trying to make campaign finance information — famously a shadowy process with plenty of loopholes — more accessible to the public.

Chali Pittman is a staff writer at Isthmus newspaper and a member of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council (wisfoic.org), a nonprofit, nonpartisan group dedicated to open government. Your Right to Know is a monthly column distributed by the council.

Your Right to Know: Campaign finance site a big improvement 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.

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For years, the story surrounding American manufacturing was in decline. We heard about factories closing, jobs moving overseas, and communities struggling to replace the industries that once defined them. That narrative is beginning to change.

As executive chairman of QPS Employment Group, an employee-owned staffing and recruiting firm headquartered in Brookfield, I speak every day with manufacturers across Wisconsin and the Midwest. Unlike economists analyzing data after the fact, our recruiters hear what’s happening in real time. We know when production lines are speeding up, when companies are adding shifts, and when employers begin asking for more workers.

Today, the message we’re hearing is encouraging. Manufacturing is making a comeback. A recent Institute for Supply Management report backs up what employers have been telling us for months: U.S. manufacturing has expanded for six consecutive months. While growth moderated slightly in June, factories continue to report healthy levels of new orders and steady production, signs that demand remains resilient despite ongoing economic uncertainty.

That’s especially good news for Wisconsin. Manufacturing has long defined our identity.

From precision machining and industrial equipment to food processing and paper products, our state has built its reputation on making things. These industries don’t just create products; they create careers, support local businesses and strengthen communities.

A busy factory means more truck drivers delivering materials, warehouse employees moving inventory, and electricians, maintenance technicians, welders, engineers, accountants and administrative professionals supporting operations. The ripple effect extends well beyond the factory floor.

Several factors are contributing to today’s momentum. Companies continue investing in domestic production. Businesses learned from recent supply chain disruptions and increasingly recognize the value of producing more goods closer to home. Investments in artificial intelligence, data centers and advanced technologies are fueling demand for equipment, components and industrial products that American manufacturers are well positioned to produce. 

None of this means manufacturing is easy.

Many employers still face rising material costs, interest rate uncertainty and rapidly changing global markets. Labor shortages also remain one of the biggest obstacles to continued growth.

One of today’s biggest challenges is that manufacturing demand continues to grow even as companies struggle to find enough workers. That challenge won’t solve itself.

For decades, we’ve encouraged nearly every young person to pursue a four-year degree while overlooking opportunities in skilled trades and manufacturing.

The reality looks very different today. Modern manufacturing is clean, technology-driven and increasingly sophisticated. Employees operate advanced robotics, program automated equipment, analyze production data and work with technologies transforming the industry. Many of these careers offer competitive wages, excellent benefits and long-term stability without requiring massive student loan debt.

That is a message we need to do a better job of sharing with students, parents and educators alike. Employers share that responsibility.

Successful manufacturers aren’t waiting for talent to walk through the door. They’re investing in training, partnering with technical colleges, offering apprenticeships, improving workplace culture and creating career paths that encourage employees to stay.

Workforce development has become a competitive advantage. Wisconsin has long benefited from its work ethic and entrepreneurial spirit. Those strengths remain just as valuable today as they were generations ago. Sustaining this manufacturing resurgence will require continued investment not only in equipment and facilities but also in people.

That means supporting technical education, expanding apprenticeship opportunities, helping veterans transition into manufacturing careers and creating workforce solutions that allow businesses to fill critical positions. 

Manufacturers remain optimistic. After several years marked by supply chain disruptions, inflation and economic uncertainty, many employers are once again planning for growth rather than simply reacting to challenges. That shift in mindset matters because confidence often drives investment, hiring and long-term expansion.

We see that confidence firsthand. No one can predict exactly what the economy will look like a year from now. Manufacturing has always been cyclical, and challenges will inevitably emerge along the way. Still, the trajectory is moving in the right direction.

Wisconsin has an opportunity to build on that momentum by continuing to support the industries that have long been the backbone of our economy. If we invest in our workforce, embrace innovation and ensure manufacturers have access to the talent they need, this comeback can become sustainable.

It can become the foundation for the next generation of American manufacturing. That’s something worth building.

Scott Mayer is the founder and executive chairman of QPS Employment Group, an employee-owned staffing and recruiting firm headquartered in Brookfield, Wisconsin.

Guest opinion: Manufacturing’s comeback depends on Wisconsin’s workforce 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.