(Photo by Drew Angerer | Getty Images)

Wisconsin voters will weigh in on a constitutional amendment to enshrine the state’s photo ID requirement to vote in the state Constitution in the April 1 election. 

On ballots this spring, voters will be asked “shall section 1m of article III of the constitution be created to require that voters present valid photographic identification verifying their identity in order to vote in any election, subject to exceptions which may be established by law?”

If approved, the state Constitution would be changed to include the provision that “no qualified elector may cast a ballot in any election unless the elector presents valid photographic identification that verifies the elector’s identity and that is issued by this state, the federal government, a federally recognized American Indian tribe or band in this state, or a college or university in this state.” 

The provision would give the Legislature the authority to determine which types of ID qualify as acceptable. Current law includes state issued driver’s licenses and photo IDs, U.S. Passports, military IDs and unexpired university IDs (expired student IDs are allowed if proof of current enrollment such as a tuition receipt or course schedule is provided). 

In several recent elections, Wisconsin Republicans have put constitutional referenda on the ballot in an effort to make policy changes without needing Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ signature. 

Wisconsin has had a state law requiring voters to have an acceptable photo ID to register to vote and cast a ballot since 2011. During debate over the law, Republican lawmakers discussed its potential to help the party win elections by suppressing the vote of minority and college-aged people who tend to vote for Democrats. 

Democrats and voting rights groups said the law amounted to a “poll tax.” A 2017 study found that the law kept 17,000 people from the polls in the 2016 election. 

Since its passage, a number of court decisions have adjusted the law, leading the state to ease restrictions and costs for obtaining a photo ID — particularly for people who can’t afford a high cost or don’t have proper documents such as a birth certificate. 

Republicans in Wisconsin and across the country have increasingly focused on photo ID requirements for voting since conspiracy theories about election administration emerged following the 2020 presidential campaign. 

The process to amend the state constitution requires that a proposal pass the Legislature in two consecutive sessions and then be approved by the state’s voters in a referendum. 

If passed, the amendment would change little for Wisconsin voters because the existing law has been on the books in its current form for nearly a decade. When the amendment was proposed, Republicans said its goal was to protect the photo ID law from being struck down by the courts. 

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

But Democrats say it’s unnecessary to amend the constitution to add something that’s already in state law and accuse Republicans of including the referendum on the ballot in this election in an effort to increase Republican turnout in the contested races for state Supreme Court and superintendent of schools. 

“It’s my feeling, and it’s a feeling of most people, that you don’t legislate via changing the constitution,” Rep. Lee Snodgrass (D-Appleton) said at a March 17 panel on the referendum. “I think that there is pretty wide evidence that this is hitting the ballots for political reasons. I think that the majority party is afraid of what happens if we get into the majority and if we decide that existing law needs to be amended or changed or overturned entirely.”

Snodgrass added that  “we are essentially wasting everybody’s time by adding this to the ballot. And I think we’ve had five of these now already. So it’s a pattern, and it’s politically motivated.”

Proposed legislation would penalize the Milwaukee Public Schools if the district cancels plans to place police officers inside school buildings. (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)

Republican lawmakers are proposing a law that would financially penalize the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) and the city of Milwaukee if they stop complying with a state law that requires police officers in schools. 

The bill, coauthored by Rep. Bob Donovan (R-Greenfield) and Sen. Van Wanggaard (R-Racine), comes after months of noncompliance with state law by the school district. Wisconsin Act 12, which provided a boost in funding to local governments, included requirements that Milwaukee Public Schools place 25 school resource officers — sworn police officers assigned to schools. 

The law took effect in 2023, and officers were supposed to be in MPS schools by Jan. 1, 2024, but the district missed the deadline. On Tuesday, the city and the school district voted to approve an agreement to install the officers in response to a lawsuit. 

Donovan said during an Assembly Criminal Justice and Public Safety hearing Wednesday that it’s “unconscionable” the district took so long to follow through on the requirement.

“The biggest district, the one in my estimation that could benefit the most, has, along with the city, dragged their feet for 400 days. It’s absurd and the safety of our kids is at jeopardy,” Donovan said.

Citing a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel report found MPS averaged 3,700 police calls each year over 11 years, Donovan said the calls were “pulling officers from street patrols to respond.” He added that “SROs trained specifically for school incidents can handle many of these situations quickly, leaving officers to stay in our communities.” 

The school resource officer requirement was controversial when Act 12 was passed.  Officers had not been stationed inside Milwaukee schools since 2016, and the district ended its contract with the Milwaukee Police Department in 2020 in response to student and community opposition to the practice. At Wednesday’s hearing, Wanggaard blamed the district’s contract cancellation on  a “fit of anti-police bias.” 

Many advocates opposed to police officers in schools have pointed to potential negative impacts. 

A Brookings Institution report found  that the presence of school resource officers has led to increases in use of suspension, expulsion, police referral and arrest, especially among Black students and students with disabilities.

The agreement that the Milwaukee Common Council and Milwaukee School Board both voted to approve Tuesday was in response to a lawsuit against the district. 

In October 2023  the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL) sued MPS and the city of Milwaukee on behalf of Charlene Abughrin, a parent in the district, arguing the district’s noncompliance presented a “substantial risk to her and her child’s safety.” 

Last month a judge ordered the district and city to comply with the state law and instructed  the district and the city to split the cost for the officers evenly.

According to the agreement, officers in schools will have to be properly vetted and required to  attend state- and city-mandated training, including a 40-hour National Association of School Resource Officers course. The agreement also specifies that officers will not participate in enforcing MPS code of conduct violations and that school conduct violations and student discipline will remain the responsibility of school administrators, not police officers. 

Despite the agreement, the bill’s authors said Wednesday that a law is needed to serve as an enforcement mechanism and address potential future noncompliance. 

“If that agreement is terminated, this legislation provides a similar compliance framework to ensure that both remain in compliance with Act 12,” Donovan said. “To prevent the ongoing and future non-compliance, consequences must be in place.” 

If the agreement is terminated, the bill would implement a timeline requiring a new agreement within 30 days, another 30 days for the city to certify with the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee that officers are trained and available. The district would then have 30 days to certify with the committee that officers are present in schools.

If there is noncompliance, 10% of the city’s shared revenue payment will be withheld by the state and 25% of the school district’s state aid payments would be withheld. 

Under the bill, MPS would be responsible for paying 75% of the cost for the school officers program, while the city would be responsible for the remaining 25%.

Rep. Jodi Emerson (D-Eau Claire) asked about the discrepancy between the 50-50 payment implemented by the judge and the one in the bill. 

Wanggaard said that bill assigns a larger share of the cost to the school district because  “it was MPS that made the schools less safe by not having officers in the school, not the city, and based on these factors and other conversations I’ve had, I believe MPS was the major cause of delaying returning officers to the schools.” However, he appeared open to amendments, noting that the bill is still pending. 

MPS is opposed to the bill, in part because of the difference in how it apportions the cost.

The district said in written testimony that school officials have been working on getting a memorandum of understanding with the city for over a year, sought the selection and training of police officers, and worked to negotiate a fair apportionment. The statement noted that the district has no authority to train or hire officers. 

The district statement endorsed a plan proposed by Gov. Tony Evers, which assigns 75% of the costs to the city and 25% to the district. The statement said that because “the school resource officers were part of a legislative deal negotiated without the participation of MPS and that provided hundreds of millions of dollars to the City of Milwaukee, the Governor’s proposal appears as the fairest.” 

The district statement also called for the state to reimplement a law in the 2009 budget that allowed districts to use generated funds to “purchase school safety equipment, fund the compensation costs of security officers, or fund other expenditures consistent with its school safety plan.”

“Whatever the apportionment, there should be no debate that school safety costs be adequately funded,” the district statement said. 

The Wisconsin Police Association and WILL support the bill, according to the state’s lobbying website.

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers still wants certain powers restored to his office.

In his executive budget proposal, Evers last month proposed repealing a series of controversial laws that were approved in a 2018 “lame-duck” session after he defeated his Republican predecessor Gov. Scott Walker, but before he took office. The laws stripped the governor and attorney general of certain powers and instead gave them to the Legislature.

He’s called for repealing the laws in all four of his proposed budgets.

One law Evers targeted, for example, specifies that when the state Senate rejects the governor’s nominees for state government positions, the governor may not reappoint that person to the same position. The law clarifies what “with the advice and consent of the Senate” means in other parts of state law. Evers’ proposal to cut the statute prompted outrage from one Republican senator last week.

“What’s the point of advice and consent of the Senate if the person can serve after being rejected by the Senate?” Sen. Van Wanggaard, R-Racine, said in a statement. “Can you imagine the uproar from Gov. Evers and Democrats if President Trump or former Gov. Walker did this?”

“This is a repeal of the 2018 lame-duck provisions Republicans passed because you were mad about losing to a Democrat,” Evers’ spokesperson Britt Cudaback fired back on social media. 

The statute is just one of many approved by GOP lawmakers over six years ago as they moved to swiftly strip powers from the incoming governor and attorney general, sending fast-tracked bills to Walker’s desk during his final weeks in office.

Among those last-minute changes was a move to block governors from re-nominating political appointees who are rejected by the Senate, which is controlled by Republicans. More than 180 of Evers’ appointees have yet to be confirmed by the Senate. Republicans have fired 21 of his picks since he took office in 2019, according to the nonpartisan Legislative Reference Bureau. Evers has tried to repeal the Senate advice and consent law in all four of his budget proposals.

Attorney General Josh Kaul, whose authority was also hampered by the laws, has challenged the lame-duck laws for years. In 2020, the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s then-conservative majority upheld the GOP’s last-minute legislation. But now, with a 4-3 liberal majority, Kaul has asked the court to decide whether one of the laws — granting the GOP-controlled Joint Finance Committee the ability to reject settlements reached by the Department of Justice in certain civil lawsuits — is constitutional.

While these legal challenges have persisted for nearly six years, Evers has attempted to repeal lame-duck laws via another route: his state budget proposals.

“This is why you read the actual language of the budget,” Wanggaard said. “Trying to sneak this through is exactly why Republicans start from scratch in the budget.”

Evers has attempted in all four of his budget proposals to repeal a lame-duck law that gave the speaker of the Assembly, the Senate majority leader and the co-chairs of the Joint Committee on Legislative Organization — positions held by Republicans for more than a decade — the power to authorize legal representation for lawmakers, allowing them to hire counsel outside of the DOJ.

In all four budgets, Evers has also proposed striking down a lame-duck statute that requires at least 70% of the funding for certain highway projects to come from the federal government each year. If the Department of Transportation is unable to meet this, the law allows the department to propose an alternate funding plan that must be approved by the GOP-controlled JFC. 

The governor also proposed overturning a statute in all four budget proposals requiring the Department of Health Services to obtain legislative authorization before submitting requests for federal waivers or pilot programs. It also requires DHS to submit plans and progress reports to the JFC for approval, additionally granting the committee the power to reduce DHS funding or positions for noncompliance.

In each budget proposal, Evers has also tried to overturn other lame-duck statutes that grant Republican-controlled legislative committees greater power, such as approving Capitol security changes and new enterprise zones. 

Republican lawmakers have rejected the governor’s efforts in the previous three budget cycles. That will likely be the case again this year.

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Gov. Tony Evers attempts to repeal Wisconsin lame-duck laws in budget again 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.