Wisconsin election officials voted Friday to force Madison city workers to sit for depositions as they try to learn more about how nearly 200 absentee ballots in November’s election went uncounted.

The uncounted ballots in the state’s capital city didn’t affect any results, but the Wisconsin Elections Commission still launched an investigation in January to determine whether Madison City Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl violated state law or abused her discretion. She didn’t notify the elections commission of the uncounted ballots until December, almost a month and a half after the election and well after the results were certified on Nov. 29.

Commissioners astounded at failure to count ballots

The commission hasn’t made a decision yet on whether Witzel-Behl acted illegally or improperly, but commissioners appeared flabbergasted at the failure to count the ballots as they reviewed the investigation during a meeting Friday. Chair Ann Jacobs was particularly incensed with Witzel-Behl for not launching her own in-depth probe immediately.

“This feels like a complete lack of leadership and a refusal to be where the buck stops,” Jacobs said. “You don’t get to put your head in the sand for weeks. … I am genuinely shocked by this timeline.”

Don Millis said it was a “travesty” that the ballots were never counted. “You’re telling the world that these 193 people didn’t vote in what many thought was the most consequential election of our lifetime,” he said.

What did the commission decide to do?

The commission voted unanimously to authorize Jacobs and Millis to question Madison city employees in depositions — question-and-answer periods usually led by attorneys in which the subject gives sworn testimony. Jacobs said she would confer with Millis about who to question, but Witzel-Behl will likely be one of the subjects.

Madison city attorney Mike Haas, who was in the audience, told The Associated Press outside the meeting that he would not fight the depositions. “The city wants to get to the bottom of this as much as anyone else,” he said.

The commission also voted unanimously to send a message to clerks around the state informing them of the problems in Madison and warning them to scour polling places for any uncounted ballots during the upcoming April 1 election. Jacobs said she plans to call for more substantial changes to state election policy going into the 2026 elections after commissioners learn more about what happened in Madison.

The investigation’s findings so far

The city clerk’s office discovered 67 unprocessed absentee ballots in a courier bag that had been placed in a security cart on Nov. 12, the day election results were canvassed.

Witzel-Behl said she told two employees to notify the elections commission, but neither did. A third employee visited the Dane County Clerk’s Office in person to inform officials there of the discovery. That employee said he didn’t remember what the Dane County clerk said, but he recalled a “general sense” that the county would not want the ballots for the canvass.

The Dane County clerk, Scott McDonell, told the commission that he knew nothing of the uncounted ballots until they were reported in the media.

The clerk’s office discovered another 125 uncounted absentee ballots in a sealed courier bag in a supply tote on Dec. 2. Witzel-Behl said she didn’t inform county canvassers because the canvass was finished and, based on the county’s response to Nov. 12 discovery, she didn’t think the county would be interested.

The elections commission wasn’t notified of either discovery until Dec. 18. Witzel-Behl said the employees she asked to notify the commission waited until reconciliation was completed. Reconciliation is a routine process in which poll workers and elections officials ensure an election’s accuracy, including checking the number of ballots issued at the polls to the number of voters.

Holes in protocols

The investigators noted that Madison polling places’ absentee ballot logs didn’t list the number of courier bags for each ward, which would have told election inspectors how many bags to account for while processing ballots.

City election officials also had no procedures for confirming the number of absentee ballots received with the number counted. Witzel-Behl said that information was emailed to election inspectors the weekend before the election, but no documents provided the total number of ballots received.

If Witzel-Behl had looked through everything to check for courier bags and absentee ballot envelopes before the election was certified, the missing ballots could have been counted, investigators said.

Witzel-Behl also couldn’t explain why she didn’t contact the county or the state elections commission herself, investigators said.

Voters prep for lawsuit

Four Madison voters whose ballots weren’t counted filed claims Thursday for $175,000 each from the city and Dane County, the first step toward initiating a lawsuit.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup. This story is published in partnership with The Associated Press.

Wisconsin election officials to force depositions for Madison workers over uncounted ballots is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Four Wisconsin voters whose ballots were not counted in the November presidential election initiated a class-action lawsuit Thursday seeking $175,000 in damages each.

The voters were among 193 in Madison whose ballots were misplaced by the city clerk and not discovered until weeks after the election. Not counting the ballots didn’t affect the result of any races.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission investigated but did not determine whether Madison Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl failed to comply with state law or abused her discretion.

She didn’t notify the elections commission of the problem until December, almost a month and a half after the election and after the results were certified on Nov. 29.

The goal is to reinforce and strengthen the right to vote in Wisconsin, said attorney Jeff Mandell, who is general counsel of Law Forward, which filed claims against the city of Madison and Dane County on Thursday.

“When people’s votes are not counted, when the right to vote is violated, our democracy is diminished,” Mandell said during a news conference announcing the action.

The four affected voters are seeking $175,000 each from the city of Madison and Dane County. That is above the $50,000 maximum that can be sought in class-action lawsuits against municipalities.

The lawsuit will argue that the cap is unconstitutional, the notice of claim said.

The number of affected voters who could join the lawsuit might grow, Mandell said. All of the voters whose ballots were not counted are named in the notice made public Thursday.

Madison takes election integrity seriously, the city’s spokesperson, Dylan Brogan, said in reaction. He noted that the clerk’s office apologized for the error both publicly and to each affected voter.

The clerk’s office has also taken steps to ensure the such a mistake won’t happen again and looked forward to additional guidance from the state elections commission, Brogan said. He declined to comment specifically on the lawsuit.

The state elections commission is scheduled to discuss its investigation into the uncounted ballots on Friday.

According to a summary of its findings, the clerk didn’t explain what exactly happened at the polling places, how the uncounted ballots went unnoticed all day on Election Day or how they were misplaced.

She also hasn’t said whether she spoke to the chief inspectors in the affected wards to find out what happened, making it difficult to develop guidelines to help election clerks throughout the state avoid similar issues, investigators said.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup. This story is published in partnership with The Associated Press.

Wisconsin voters whose ballots were not counted in November election seek damages is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

An audit of the November election won by President Donald Trump in swing-state Wisconsin found that not a single vote was counted incorrectly, altered or missed by tabulating machines.

The audit also found no evidence that any voting machine or software had been hacked or otherwise tampered with. The Wisconsin Elections Commission released the audit’s findings last week and is scheduled to discuss them Friday.

Trump defeated former Vice President Kamala Harris in Wisconsin by just over 29,000 votes.

In 2020, when Trump lost to Joe Biden by just under 21,000 votes, Trump and his supporters alleged there was widespread fraud in Wisconsin. But two partial recounts, a nonpartisan audit, a conservative law firm’s review and multiple state and federal lawsuits did not support the claims.

Trump and his allies have not made similar accusations about wrongdoing in the 2024 election that he won.

Meagan Wolfe, Wisconsin’s top elections official, said in a memo that the audit shows the public how effectively elections are run and also works to “dispel any misinformation or disinformation about the security of electronic voting systems.”

The post-election audit is required under state law and has been done after each general election since 2006. Local elections officials in 336 randomly selected municipalities across the state hand-counted 327,230 ballots as part of the 2024 audit. That is nearly 10% of all Wisconsin ballots cast in the 2024 election and the largest post-election audit ever undertaken in the state.

The only errors found during the audit were made by people, not the vote-counting machines. And only five human errors were detected, resulting in an error rate of just 0.0000009%, according to the report.

“My hope is that this reassures persons on all sides of the political aisle that voting tabulators are doing their jobs accurately,” Ann Jacobs, chair of the elections commission, said in a post last week on the social media platform X. “We all lament when our candidate loses, but in WI, it wasn’t because someone hacked the machines. The other guy just got more votes.”

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup. This story is published in partnership with The Associated Press.

Wisconsin audit of Trump win finds not a single voting machine error is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

State law outlines what Madison could have done

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lapse raises doubts for voters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some missing Madison ballots could have been counted — if clerk’s staff had acted in time is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wisconsin Elections Commission launches investigation into uncounted Madison ballots is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Madison has decentralized absentee processing

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

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

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

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

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

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

What we know about the missing ballots

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

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

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

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

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

Madison clerk, mayor vow to prevent future oversights 

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

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

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

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

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

Nearly 200 Madison ballots went uncounted. Officials don’t know exactly how. is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Wisconsin politics were shaken up this year with the signing of new legislative maps that ended over a decade of extreme and effective Republican gerrymandering.

It was the first time in Wisconsin history a Legislature and a governor of different parties agreed on legislative redistricting, the Legislative Reference Bureau told Wisconsin Watch.

In a good Republican year across the country, Wisconsin Democrats flipped 14 seats in the Legislature — largely because of those new maps. It wasn’t enough to win a majority in the Assembly or the Senate, but the resulting 54-45 and 18-15 splits better reflect Wisconsin’s swing-state status.

Wisconsin’s congressional maps were not redrawn. Republicans kept six of the state’s eight congressional seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The state’s current congressional maps were drawn by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and approved by the then-conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2022. The last time a governor of one party and a Legislature of another agreed on congressional maps was in 1991.

Evers’ maps were slightly more favorable to Democrats than the previous decade’s maps, but they didn’t change that much because the court established a “least change” rule when deciding which maps it would approve. That meant they would largely conform to the Republican maps that had been in place since 2011.

In March, the now-liberal high court denied a request to reconsider the state’s congressional maps before this year’s elections without stating a reason. Evers had asked for changes to the congressional maps soon after he signed the new legislative maps into law in February. Those maps were approved by the GOP-controlled Legislature.

Elias Law Group filed a motion in January asking the court to revise the congressional boundaries ahead of the 2024 election. The Democratic law firm argued that new maps were justified after the court abandoned the “least change” approach when deciding on the legislative map challenge last year. In that case, the state Supreme Court said it would no longer favor maps that present minimal changes to existing boundaries.

Democrats argued that Evers’ congressional boundaries drawn in 2022 were decided under the “least change” restrictions later thrown out by the court in the legislative redistricting case.

Republicans pushed back, arguing that newly elected liberal Justice Janet Protasiewicz prejudged the case during her 2023 campaign. They requested she recuse herself from the case. But Protasiewicz said she decided not to vote on the motion to reconsider the congressional maps because she wasn’t on the court when the underlying case was decided.

Republican Party of Wisconsin chair Brian Schimming in a statement called the court’s decision “the demise of Governor Evers’ latest attempt to throw out his own hand-drawn congressional maps.”

Republicans have retained control of six of Wisconsin’s eight House seats, with Democratic Reps. Mark Pocan and Gwen Moore safely controlling the two districts that cover Madison and Milwaukee. In comparison, Democrats held five of the eight seats in 2010 — the year before Republicans redrew the maps.

The 1st and 3rd districts are currently the only competitive congressional districts in Wisconsin, represented by Republican Reps. Bryan Steil and Derrick Van Orden respectively. Steil won his race this month with 54% of the vote, and Van Orden won with 51.4% of the vote.

Conservative Chief Justice Annette Ziegler and Justice Rebecca Bradley in their concurrence wrote the new majority’s “reckless abandonment of settled legal precedent” in the legislative redistricting case “incentivizes litigants to bring politically divisive cases to this court regardless of their legal merit.”

Representatives of Elias Law Group did not respond to Wisconsin Watch when asked if they anticipate another legal challenge to the congressional maps ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

“I remain very interested between now and 2030 in trying to find a way to get the court to … tell us whether partisan gerrymandering violates the Wisconsin Constitution. I believe it does,” Jeff Mandell, founder of the liberal legal group Law Forward, told Wisconsin Watch. “I believe the court will say it does when we present the right case.”

But Mandell said nothing has been drafted, and his group won’t bring a case to the Supreme Court unless it has “got the goods.”

Wisconsin Watch readers have submitted questions to our statehouse team, and we’ll answer them in our series, Ask Wisconsin Watch. Have a question about state government? Ask it here.

Why were state legislative districts redrawn for 2024, but congressional districts remain unchanged? 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.

As President-elect Donald Trump stocks his Cabinet with some of his most loyal followers, we’ve already checked some of their surprising and dubious claims.

Here’s a look at a few of them:

No, 40% of children in the U.S. are not taking antidepressants.

Robert Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick for health and human services secretary, made that claim while campaigning for Trump in Milwaukee.

The latest evidence we found was for 2022:

Two million adolescents ages 12-17 filled at least one antidepressant prescription, according to a 2024 University of Michigan-led study. That’s 7.9%.

Antidepressants were obtained for 2.7% of children 17 and under, according to a federal agency.

Check out our video version of this fact brief here and please share!

No, Obamacare did not cause health insurance premiums to increase 100%.

Kennedy, who still needs Senate confirmation, made that claim at a forum sponsored by U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis.

Average annual health insurance premiums have increased 67% to 75% since Obamacare became law in 2010 — less than what they increased before the law.

No, deportations under Trump were not “the highest ever”.

That statement was made at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee by Thomas Homan, former head of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). He is Trump’s pick for border czar and does not require Senate confirmation.

Such removals were highest during Bill Clinton’s second term as president, averaging 1.7 million annually from 1997 through 2000. 

Trump’s highest was 600,000 in 2020.

Check out the video version of this fact brief here.

Yes, Kamala Harris supported taxpayer-funded gender-affirming surgery for inmates and detainees

The vice president has supported the rare occurrence of taxpayer-funded gender-affirming surgery for prison inmates and detained undocumented immigrants.

That supports a claim made on Wisconsin radio by former U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican who was Trump’s pick for attorney general. Last week Gaetz withdrew himself from consideration amid reports he had paid women for sex and also had sex with an underage teen. Trump has since announced he plans to nominate former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi to be the nation’s top law enforcement officer instead.

Wisconsin Watch and its partners have also fact-checked claims about (but so far not by) Elon Musk, Trump’s selection to co-lead a government efficiency effort.

We found that Musk was not the founder of Tesla (it was founded by two other entrepreneurs); and that, as of 2022, he was not the richest person in history.

Go here to see all of our fact briefs.

Here are some claims made by Donald Trump’s Cabinet picks — and the facts is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Milwaukee error initially drew complaints, but not suspicion 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Milwaukee’s results were late

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

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

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

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

Checklist change could ‘improve transparency’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Milwaukee’s Election Day mistake left the door open to more misinformation is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Marquette University’s John Johnson analyzed voting data for Wisconsin’s 2024 U.S. Senate and presidential elections. “Our electorate is increasingly polarized by education,” Johnson writes.

The youngest voters in Wisconsin shifted slightly toward Republicans in both races while other age groups shifted Democratic in the Senate race and Republican in the presidential. The poorest and richest areas in Wisconsin more often vote Democratic, while the middle class areas have leaned Republican.

Wisconsin has one of highest percentages of tipped workers in the US

The Tax Policy Center’s August 2024 analysis showed that about 5% of workers in the state of Wisconsin work “tipped” jobs. The data analysis classifies tipped employees as dining room staff and the majority of people working in personal care or service jobs (nail technicians, hair stylists, etc.). In July 2024, Wisconsin’s state minimum wage for tipped workers was slightly higher than the federal standard of $2.13 per hour.

Chronic absenteeism has improved among students, but remains high

Wisconsin Policy Forum’s October 2024 analysis showed that students of all ages are chronically absent, defined as missing more than 10% of school days in a year under any circumstances.

The issue is most common at the high school level, where nearly one in four students is chronically absent. Chronic absenteeism reached a peak following the pandemic, and while the 2023 rates are lower than the 2022 rates, they have not returned to pre-pandemic norms.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

DataWatch: Rightward election shift was weaker in Wisconsin than other states is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Wisconsin Republican Eric Hovde conceded defeat on Monday to Democratic incumbent Tammy Baldwin in their U.S. Senate race, saying he did not want to “add to political strife through a contentious recount” even though he raised debunked election conspiracies.

Hovde, who was backed by President-elect Donald Trump, could have requested a recount because his margin of defeat was less than 1 percentage point, at about 29,000 votes. He would have had to pay for it himself.

Baldwin’s campaign referred requests for comment on Hovde’s concession on Monday to her victory speech. In that address, Baldwin pledged to work with Trump when possible but also vowed to fight him to protect the national health care law and abortion rights.

Hovde, in his concession video, repeated claims he made saying there were “many troubling issues” related to absentee ballots in Milwaukee and when they were reported. Republicans, Democrats and nonpartisan election leaders all refuted the claims of impropriety Hovde made.

“Without a detailed review of all the ballots and their legitimacy, which will be difficult to obtain in the courts, a request for a recount would serve no purpose because you will just be recounting the same ballots regardless of their integrity,” Hovde said Monday.

Although there is no evidence of wrongdoing in the election, many Hovde supporters questioned a surge in votes for Baldwin that were reported by Milwaukee around 4:30 a.m. the morning after the election. Those votes put Baldwin over the top.

The votes were the tabulation of absentee ballots from Milwaukee. Those ballots are counted at a central location and reported all at once, often well after midnight on Election Day. Elections officials for years have made clear that those ballots are reported later than usual because of the sheer number that have to be counted and the fact that state law does not allow for processing them before polls open.

Republicans and Democrats alike, along with state and Milwaukee election leaders, warned in the days and weeks leading up to the election that the Milwaukee absentee ballots would be reported late and cause a huge influx of Democratic votes.

Hovde also repeated his complaint about the candidacy of Thomas Leager, who ran as a member of the America First Party. Leager, a far-right candidate who was recruited by Democratic operatives and donors to run as a conservative, finished a distant fourth.

Republicans supported independent presidential candidates Cornel West and Jill Stein in efforts to take votes away from Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tried to get his name removed from the ballot in Wisconsin and other swing states after he backed Trump.

In the Wisconsin Senate race, Leager got about 400 fewer votes than the margin between Baldwin and Hovde. But Hovde claimed on Monday that he would have won the Senate race if Leager had not been on the ballot.

Baldwin declared victory after The Associated Press called the race for her on Nov. 6. She outperformed Harris, who lost Wisconsin by about as many votes as Baldwin defeated Hovde.

The Baldwin win came in the face of Democratic losses nationwide that allowed Republicans to take control of the Senate.

Her win was the narrowest of her three Senate races. Baldwin won in 2012 by almost 6 percentage points and in 2018 by nearly 11 points.

Hovde, a multimillionaire bank owner and real estate developer, first ran for Senate in 2012 but lost in the Republican primary. He poured millions of dollars of his own money into his losing campaign this year.

Hovde on Monday did not rule out another political campaign in the future. Some Republicans have floated him as a potential candidate for governor in 2026.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup. This story is published in partnership with The Associated Press.

Eric Hovde concedes defeat to Tammy Baldwin in US Senate race in Wisconsin is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

On Nov. 5, Wisconsin voters approved nearly 78% of the 138 school district referendums across the state.

That’s higher than the 60% passage rate this past spring, but the percentage of K-12 referendums approved statewide has been declining since 2018, according to the Wisconsin Policy Forum.

The 70% approval rate of all school referendums this year was a 10 percentage-point decrease from 2022 and was the lowest passage rate in a midterm or presidential election year in the last decade.

But more and more districts are going to referendum as state aid has fallen far behind inflation over the last 15 years. A total of 241 questions were posed in 2024, the most ever held in a single year, according to the Policy Forum.

Almost half of Wisconsin’s 421 school districts went to referendum this year, asking for a record total of nearly $6 billion from taxpayers — up from a previous record of $3.3 billion in 2022. Voters ultimately approved $4.4 billion in additional taxes.

School districts are increasingly holding operational referendums, asking residents to take on a recurring tax hike just to cover everyday costs like utilities, routine maintenance and staff salaries. Capital referendums are one-time asks for big projects like a new school.

This year, 66% of operational referendums passed statewide, while 76% of capital referendums passed. There were 148 operating referendums held, the most on record, according to the Policy Forum.

The reliance on school referendums comes amid a heavy debate over state-imposed revenue limits and funding for public education.

Revenue limits were created in the early 1990s to keep in check school property tax increases. In 2009, the state Legislature decoupled per-pupil revenue limits from inflation, and districts have had to manage tighter budgets ever since, especially as inflation in recent years has exceeded revenue limit increases.

Wisconsin’s per-pupil K-12 spending increased at a lower rate than every other state in the nation besides Indiana and Idaho between 2002 and 2020, according to the Policy Forum.

School districts across the state are also grappling with declining enrollment, mainly caused by a drop in birth rates.

“Schools are funded based on the number of students we have, so as we have fewer students, our budget shrinks,” Kenosha Unified School District Superintendent Jeffrey Weiss told Wisconsin Watch.

When costs exceed the per-pupil revenue available to the district, state law allows them to go to referendum to ask their voters to authorize their district to exceed their revenue caps at the expense of property taxpayers.

State revenue limits have fallen more than $2,300 behind inflation per student behind inflation  even in smaller school districts like Hudson, generating millions in lost revenue.

The 2023-25 state budget included a yearly increase of $325 per student to the state-imposed revenue limits. But that increase still lags behind inflation, Wauwatosa School District Superintendent Demond Means told Wisconsin Watch. 

“Are they providing more money to schools? Yes, but they’re still behind. They’ve dug a hole for themselves,” Means said. “They have to come to grips with the fact that they have created an obstacle and a gap that they have to fill.” 

Schools are still reeling from a freeze in revenue caps in the 2021-2023 budget, Means said, in which the Legislature provided zero increases to public school funding immediately following the pandemic. Wisconsin ended its 2024 fiscal year with a $4.6 billion budget surplus.

Republican lawmakers tout the $1 billion they added to the budget for public schools last year, emphasizing that education is the largest portion of the state budget. The increase was part of a deal struck between the GOP-controlled Legislature and Democratic Gov. Tony Evers to simultaneously increase funding for private school vouchers. 

Democrats argue the state has fallen so far behind, $1 billion isn’t nearly enough. 

“Those are just red herrings,” state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jill Underly told Wisconsin Watch. “They’re trying to distract because public education has always been one of the most expensive components of our state budget. It just is. It’s a labor-intensive operation, and labor costs money.”

Underly recently called for a $4 billion increase in public school funding in the Department of Public Instruction’s state budget request. It includes a proposal to tie revenue limits to inflation again.

“The fact that we’ve gone to referendum now three different times in the last six years is a sign that state funding is really becoming a challenge,” Means said. “A community like Wauwatosa does not take going to a referendum lightly.”

The district just passed operational and capital referendums totaling $124.4 million. That translates to a $630 annual tax increase on a $300,000 home, according to district calculations.

While passage rates are typically higher in a presidential or midterm election year due to voter turnout, some referendums still failed. School districts like Hudson, serving many rural, conservative townships, are now faced with a choice: cut programs and staff or push to referendum again in April. Its $5 million operational referendum was voted down on Nov. 5.

The referendum would have increased property taxes annually by $5 on a $500,000 home, according to district calculations. 

“These are recurring expenses. This is literally to make ends meet,” Hudson School District Superintendent Nick Ouellette told Wisconsin Watch.

State lawmakers like Rep. Shannon Zimmerman, a Republican who represents the city of Hudson, have suggested that schools need to close and consolidate in light of declining enrollment. Ouellette said it’s not that simple. 

The district is receiving less per-pupil funding from the state due to a steady drop in students. But enrollment is not declining at a fast enough rate to immediately close and consolidate schools and classrooms, Ouellette said. 

“You lose the revenue, but you don’t lose the expense,” Ouellette said. “You have to allow things to drop enough before you can cut.”

Ouellette said blame is often directed at the school districts with claims that they are mismanaging their budgets or not “living within their means.” 

“State lawmakers are well aware that if they continue to not fund schools, it will force local school districts to ask their property tax payers to pay more,” Ouellette said. “So they understand they are raising taxes.”

In Hudson, 54% of the school district’s budget is paid by local taxes, 39% is covered by state aid and 3% comes from federal aid, according to the Policy Forum. A decade ago more than half of the district’s operating revenue came from state aid.

“They’re placing school systems in a very precarious position,” Means said. “Local communities are, in essence, bailing out the Legislature, and that has to stop.”

Forward is a look ahead at the week in Wisconsin government and politics from the Wisconsin Watch statehouse team.

Record-high number of school referendums held this year, but approval rates are declining 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.