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

Wisconsin clerks can count ballots that are in a municipality’s possession by 8 p.m. on Election Day but don’t arrive at polling places until after that time because of election official errors, a Dane County judge ruled Tuesday.

The decision comes months after Dane County Circuit Judge Everett Mitchell first ruled that Madison was correct to count 23 ballots that the city had in its possession before Election Day in April but didn’t reach the polls until after the 8 p.m. deadline, a delay city officials say was caused by election administrator error.

“Where a qualified elector has complied with every statutory requirement, and the ballot was in the custody of the municipal clerk in time for delivery to the polling place, the failure of election officials to deliver it by 8:00 p.m. is not a lawful ground for rejecting the ballot,” Mitchell said in his Tuesday order.

Wisconsin law says that ballots must be “delivered to the polling place no later than 8 p.m.” on Election Day.

A lawsuit was filed by Margaret and Robert Honig, two of the 23 voters whose ballots in the state’s April Supreme Court race were delayed and whose ballots the Wisconsin Elections Commission ordered not to be counted before Mitchell reversed the agency’s decision in May. It alleges that discounting properly cast votes over election officials’ errors would deprive voters of their constitutional voting rights.

The commission argued that a plain reading of Wisconsin law states that ballots arriving after 8 p.m. may not be counted. Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell disagreed, saying that state law can’t be reasonably interpreted to punish voters over election officials’ mistakes.

Ann Jacobs, a Democratic appointee on the Wisconsin Elections Commission, said she was delighted by the Tuesday decision.

“The errors of the clerk should not be visited upon innocent voters,” she said. “This is the right outcome.”

Wisconsin Elections Commission chair Don Millis, a Republican, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mitchell clarified that the decision doesn’t extend deadlines for voters who return ballots late, nor does it allow officials to count late-arriving ballots if the voter was even partially responsible for the late arrival.

“Today’s decision is a cause for celebration, a major victory for voting rights in Wisconsin,” said Law Forward staff counsel Scott Thompson, who represents the Madison voters in the case.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Wisconsin officials can count ballots that arrive late if officials make errors, judge rules is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

A $3 million capital investment to equip Dane County sheriff’s deputies with body cameras has been included in the proposed 2027 county budget. Dane County Executive Melissa Agard and Sheriff Kalvin Barrett praised the move as an investment in public safety. 

“Public Safety is one of the most fundamental responsibilities we have in county government, and our residents deserve to feel safe and have confidence in the people and institutions that serve them,” Agard said last week. “This $3 million investment is about strengthening safety, transparency, and public trust. Body-worn cameras can provide greater clarity when questions arise, strengthen accountability, and help protect both members of the public and the deputies who serve them.”

A county press release states that a Wisconsin Department of Justice Survey found that 88% of responding law enforcement agencies reported using at least one form of recording device. The survey found 12% of responding agencies reported using neither body cameras nor dash cameras. 

Sheriff Barrett called body cameras “an important resource that supports accountability, transparency, and trust.” Barrett added that “this investment will enable us to build on the work we began with our pilot program and move Dane County forward. The funding reflects what can be accomplished when we collaborate with our community partners and elected officials toward a shared goal. I especially appreciate County Executive Agard’s leadership and support in making this possible.”

The sheriff’s office is also finalizing policies for the cameras including how to use them, how long footage is retained and when it can be released.

Body cameras became a hot topic in Dane County after the shooting of Corey Ruiz by a Madison police officer. The officers involved in the shooting were not wearing body cameras, leaving bystander video as the main public video evidence of the incident. The Madison Police Department, despite being one of the state’s largest, does not have a uniform body camera program. After the Ruiz shooting, community members called on city officials to equip all officers with body cameras.

“Technology alone does not create trust,” said Agard. “It matters how that technology is used and whether the public understands the policies surrounding it. As we make this investment, we are committed to ensuring transparency and accountability remain at the center of implementation.”

President Donald Trump knows the midterm elections are shaping up to go poorly for him and the Republican party so he’s trying to cast as much doubt about the country’s election systems as possible, U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin said at an event Monday morning. 

Meeting with three Madison-area election officials, Baldwin noted that Trump made 107 false claims about the results of the 2020 election in the six months from December 2025 to May of this year while taking a number of actions to restrict voting or discredit election systems ahead of the November election. 

The U.S. Supreme Court recently struck down Trump’s proposed executive order to limit the ability of the U.S. Postal Service to process absentee ballots sent through the mail. His administration has, at various times, promised to send ICE agents, National Guard troops, FBI agents and other federal law enforcement to polling places on Election Day — an action that opponents see as an effort to intimidate Democratic voters. He advocated strongly for the passage of a bill that would institute strict national voter ID requirements. 

Trump’s Departments of Justice and Homeland Security have been working since he was inaugurated last year to build a national database of registered voters. The effort by the DOJ to obtain Wisconsin’s voter rolls was halted in May by a federal judge. DHS is now working to compile a federal voter registration list for ICE to use to search for non-citizens who are registered to vote. 

“With everything so unaffordable, so expensive, the Trump administration should be focused on that,” Baldwin said. “But instead, I think, they are worried that they’re going to be held accountable for things this election, and so they’re selling conspiracy theories. The president has a history of election denialism, and so instead of focusing on lowering costs, he’s focusing on undercutting the midterm elections.”

At the meeting in the city county building in Madison, Baldwin met with Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell, Sun Prairie City Clerk Elena Hilby and Waunakee Village Clerk Karla Endres. McDonell is an elected Democrat while the other two serve as non-partisan officials. 

The three election officials outlined the ways in which Wisconsin’s election systems are built to be resilient and transparent. 

In the years since the 2020 presidential election, a subset of Wisconsin’s electorate has remained skeptical of the state’s election system — repeatedly making false claims that fraud has stolen victories from their preferred candidates. 

McDonell said Monday that every step of the process is done in public, from the pre-election tests of the voting equipment to the voting itself and the counting process. Election officials, he said, try to plan for anything that could go wrong so if it does, they’re able to respond and get ballots counted. 

“We assume failure at every point along the way, and so we’re checking to make sure everything’s accurate as we go along,” he said. 

The three clerks said that in the remaining weeks before the election, they’re working on their emergency response plans in the event that Trump does send armed agents to the polls. Last week, U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, the Republican candidate for governor, celebrated the Trump administration planning to send DOJ staff to the polls. 

Hilby said that she wants the people working the polls in Sun Prairie to know what to do if federal agents show up, balancing the need to follow the law against the risk that poll workers could be put in danger. 

“An armed federal agent is illegal to have at the polling place,” Hilby said. “I wouldn’t want my election officials confronting them, but more approach them and say, you know, ‘what are you here for? Do you have a warrant?’ Get whatever information they can, so they can contact me, so I can immediately contact my city attorney, and I would probably be on the phone to [McDonell], so we knew how to respond. I don’t want to put them in danger. I also want to protect the election.” 

McDonell said it’s “frustrating” that local election officials are being forced to plan for this contingency and that he would like more concrete advice from the state elections commission. This year, the Wisconsin Elections Commission has issued a number of guidance documents to clerks about problems with the U.S. Postal Service, but remained silent on the question of federal agents at the polls. 

“It’s good to have some statewide advice on how to handle these situations, but it is tough,” he said. “We’ve been doing a lot of planning around these scenarios, making sure we have criminal defense attorneys, federal criminal defense attorneys, on retainer in case we have to rush to [federal court] to get an order. So a lot of planning is going on behind the scenes for different scenarios.”

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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.

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Wisconsin election officials have reignited a legal battle over absentee voting with July guidance stating that voters cannot void a returned absentee ballot and cast a new one, even if Election Day is weeks away or the candidate they supported has dropped out. 

Three Democratic residents in Dane County on Thursday sued the Wisconsin Elections Commission over the guidance, which was adopted by the commission on July 9, calling it an unconstitutional violation of the state’s absentee voting laws. All three plaintiffs voted for a gubernatorial candidate who has since dropped out of the primary, and under the commission guidance they cannot change their votes, even though those votes have not yet been counted. The legality of spoiling ballots just to change a vote has long been disputed.

The lawsuit says WEC’s guidance means the plaintiffs “will all be disenfranchised from meaningfully participating in this August election unless this Court steps in.”

Thursday’s lawsuit is the latest development in a legal dispute that began in 2022 and was reopened by an appeals court decision earlier this year. It was filed two days after the Democratic Party of Wisconsin sent the commission a letter urging it to rescind the guidance. The letter raised many of the same concerns later cited in the suit, including that the policy could disenfranchise voters and was adopted after early voting in the primary had already begun.

The July 9 guideline for clerks reverses the Wisconsin Elections Commission’s previous position and Attorney General Josh Kaul’s legal arguments on the agency’s behalf that voters should be allowed to replace absentee ballots they have already returned as long as they comply with statutory deadlines.

The WEC spent years arguing in court in favor of that broader definition of ballot spoiling, but its latest guidance effectively restores the rule imposed by a 2022 court ruling that banned the practice.

The commission adopted the guidance after clerks had already mailed ballots for the Aug. 11 primary and, notably, after multiple candidates in the crowded Democratic gubernatorial race dropped their bids. 

“It seems to me exceedingly likely that this is something that people are going to keep fighting about,” Jeff Mandell, founder of the liberal law firm Law Forward, said ahead of the lawsuit.

He added that the timing of the guidance was unusual: Typically courts are skeptical of efforts to change rules close to an election. Some absentee voters in this election cycle probably cast their ballots under the assumption that they could spoil their ballot and cast a new one if their preferred candidate dropped out or they just wanted to change their vote, Mandell said.

Even if the commission’s guidance is in line with Wisconsin law, it creates a clear discrepancy between in-person Election Day and absentee voters, said Sam Liebert, the Wisconsin state director of All Voting is Local and a former municipal clerk. 

Election Day voters can receive up to three ballots at the polls if they make a mistake, he pointed out. On the other hand, he said, absentee voters now get no second chance once they return their ballots, even if Election Day hasn’t arrived yet.

“The inconsistency is hard to ignore,” he said, and it presents a policy question for the Legislature — or maybe the courts.

Spoiling controversy blew up amid similar political dynamics in the 2022 primary

The WEC’s more permissive August 2022 guidance on ballot spoiling was prompted by similar dynamics as that of the present: highly contested primaries with candidates dropping out throughout the race and at the last minute. 

In September 2022, GOP voter Nancy Kormanik sued over that guidance allowing absentee ballot spoiling, arguing that clerks can only reissue an absentee ballot if a voter returns an absentee ballot in a “spoiled or damaged” condition. Voiding a ballot that’s already been submitted and getting a new one over a voter’s own mistake or a candidate dropping out didn’t fall under that category, she argued.

Kaul, the state’s Democratic attorney general, saw the issue differently. A few different laws allow ballot spoiling, he said in a court filing, and “none requires the elector to explain how or why the ballot is ‘spoiled.’”

Siding with Kormanik, a lower court banned the practice of spoiling absentee ballots in October.

The ban stood until February of this year, when an appeals court vacated the lower court ruling. But the new ruling wasn’t on the merits of the case. Rather, it came because the court said Kormanik didn’t properly serve documents to a legislative committee at the start of the suit.

After the February ruling, clerks sought the commission’s updated guidance about how to deal with spoiling. They didn’t receive it in time for the Wisconsin Supreme Court election in April, and some municipalities offered instructions on how to spoil ballots. But with midterm primaries coming up — and particularly as rumors of gubernatorial candidates dropping out swirled — clerks were especially eager to know if the commission planned to stand by its earlier interpretation of the law and allow absentee ballot spoiling again.

On July 9, the commission provided an answer: It voted 4-2 that absentee ballot spoiling is prohibited after a voter returns an absentee ballot. Democratic commissioner Carrie Riepl, a former clerk, voted with the three Republicans in favor of the guidance. Democratic commissioners Mark Thomsen and Ann Jacobs voted against it.

The guidance came just one day after Democratic gubernatorial candidate David Crowley, the Milwaukee County executive, dropped out of the race and endorsed Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez for governor. Just over a week later, Rodriguez dropped out of the race and Crowley reentered. 

Over 36,000 Wisconsin voters had already returned ballots by the day the commission issued its guidance, commission data shows. Voters had returned nearly 68,000 ballots by the time Rodriguez dropped out.

At the July meeting, commission chair Don Millis, a Republican, argued that voters should only be able to void — or spoil — ballots before they return them to the clerk.

“Once you’ve turned your ballot in, that’s it,” he said.

Meanwhile, Thomsen noted that in-person voters on Election Day can mark a ballot and receive a replacement ballot if they make an error, as long as the first ballot isn’t tabulated yet. But under the new guidance, an absentee voter couldn’t spoil a returned ballot even if it’s weeks from being tabulated.

“Why are we treating people that use mail differently than me if I show up?” he said.

On one hand, voters can argue that the inability to spoil ballots effectively disenfranchises them if they vote for a candidate that has since dropped out, said Bryna Godar, a staff attorney at the University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative. 

On the other hand, she said, others can cite the Wisconsin law calling absentee voting a privilege, not a right, and argue that voters who exercise that right accept some risk in casting an absentee vote that can’t be taken back.

“The issue of whether ballot spoiling is or is not allowed under Wisconsin statutes hasn’t been definitively resolved,” she said.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Can Wisconsin voters void a returned absentee ballot? New lawsuit sends issue back to court is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.