Don Millis and Ann Jacob, the former and current chairs of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, testify Tuesday, Feb. 4, at an Assembly hearing on a commission rule for election observers. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)
The Wisconsin Elections Commission on Monday published a new permanent administrative rule to guide how election observers are allowed to conduct themselves at polling places.
On Friday, the commission voted 5-1 to approve the rule after more than two years of work that involved the participation of a 24-person advisory committee made up of municipal clerks, poll workers, political parties and outside groups including advocates for people with disabilities and right-wing election conspiracy outfits.
The final rule order specifies who is allowed to observe elections and defines the boundaries of what observers are allowed to do at a polling place. The rule also dictates when poll workers are allowed to call law enforcement to diffuse a situation and includes provisions to require that observers be allowed to use available chairs and restrooms and for how the news media is allowed to operate inside polling places. The rules are different for members of the media, who are allowed to take videos and photos inside polling places while observers are not.
WEC commissioners of both parties advocated for the passage of the rule, arguing that while not perfect, the compromise reached to create the rule was better than the vague interpretation of state law that had previously governed observers.
But even after their involvement on the advisory committee, election skeptics opposed the rule’s enactment. WEC commissioner Robert Spindell, a Republican who has often flirted with election conspiracy theories, was the lone vote against the rule going into effect.
Republican lawmakers on the Legislature’s Joint Committee for the Review of Administrative Rules (JCRAR) had denied the passage of an emergency rule instituting similar provisions earlier this year. JCRAR deadlocked on a vote to deny the permanent rule’s enactment in April, allowing it to move out of the committee and back to WEC for final approval.
“Today marks a significant milestone that will ensure election observers, election officials, and voters all have a clear and consistent understanding of the observer process,” WEC Administrator Meagan Wolfe said in a statement. “After years of thorough public hearings, advisory committee input, and careful drafting, this rule enshrines standards for election observers that ensure participation in our electoral process.”
The commission will hold a meeting later this year to approve new guidance for election clerks administering the rule, according to a news release. The rule is set to go into effect Aug. 1.
Wisconsin Republicans are proposing an expansion of early voting, with new requirements for municipalities statewide, but some local officials say the one-size-fits-all mandate wouldn’t make sense for Wisconsin’s smallest communities.
The proposal would require every municipality in Wisconsin, regardless of its size, to offer at least 20 hours of in-person absentee voting at the clerk’s office, or an alternative site, for each election. The bill’s authors say they want to reimburse local governments for the added costs, though they haven’t yet clarified how they would do that.
Sen. Rachael Cabral-Guevara, a Republican, said she wrote the bill after noticing the stark difference in early voting availability between rural and urban municipalities.
In the Fox Valley cities that used to be part of her district — Appleton, Oshkosh and Neenah — early voting was widely available, she said. But in many of the rural areas that she began serving after the latest redistricting cycle, she said, “nobody has early voting.”
She argues the proposal would provide more flexibility for voters and offer an alternative for those who are uncomfortable voting by mail.
Local election officials generally welcome increased access, but worry about the 20-hour mandate being a burden on smaller communities.
Acknowledging the pushback, Cabral-Guevara said, “Why should we have hesitation about giving people the opportunity of voting? Why shouldn’t there be equity across the state for rural versus urban?”
In-person absentee voting access varies across Wisconsin
In cities like Madison and Milwaukee, voters have nearly two weeks before an election to cast an in-person absentee ballot. They can vote in one of multiple locations, and at almost any time of the day.
That isn’t the case in rural Wisconsin.
Some rural municipalities provide just a one- or two-hour window for in-person absentee voting during that two-week period. In others, in-person early voting is done by appointment only at a clerk’s home, which acts as an official office for that purpose. Many have no clear policy at all for in-person absentee voting.
Clerks in smaller towns expressed mixed feelings about the proposed changes.
In Luck, a northwest Wisconsin town with about 900 residents, Patsy Gustafson serves as a part-time clerk, generally working three or four hours per week and arranging in-person early voting by appointment only. This proposal would require her to work over double her normal hours during the early voting period.
“I think I’d be sitting around a lot of that time for nothing, but hopefully it would make more people that wouldn’t otherwise vote come,” she said.
Gustafson said she supports state reimbursement to municipalities — “elections are expensive,” she said — but questions how the state would cover her added costs, especially because she’s salaried.
Cabral-Guevara said the funding formula is still being finalized.
Sen. Rachael Cabral-Guevara, R-Appleton, is seen when she was a state representative at the State Capitol in Madison, Wis., on Feb. 22, 2022. (Coburn Dukehart / Wisconsin Watch)
In Elcho, a town of about 1,200 people in northern Langlade County, the 20-hour requirement would be unnecessary, Clerk Lyn Olenski told Votebeat.
“I guess I wouldn’t want that,” she said about the proposal. “We don’t have that many people that want to vote early.”
The 20-hour mandate would make even less sense for smaller municipalities, Olenski said.
“If we had 100 people, I sure wouldn’t want to sit in there for 20 hours,” she said.
Cabral-Guevara said she believes behavior could shift as early voting becomes more accessible.
“I believe that there is a duty as a clerk to make sure that there is easy access for people to be able to vote,” Cabral-Guevara said. “And if they’re sitting around, well, then they can find other things to do if they would like.”
That may be wishful thinking in places like the village of Yuba, which has only 43 registered voters. Clerk James Ueeck, who also works full time for the county in another role, said he would have to request time off from his main job to be able to provide 20 hours of early voting.
Even if every voter in the village cast a ballot early, the total time required wouldn’t come close to 20 hours. And his office would still have to keep polls open on Election Day.
“For us, it makes no sense,” he said. “I would rather just leave it where I can do it by appointment.”
Ueeck added that many clerks in Richland County also work full-time jobs and might resign their clerk positions if the mandate becomes law.
Rep. Scott Krug, a Republican from Rome and co-author of the measure, told Votebeat that he has heard concerns from small-town clerks over the 20-hour requirement. He said he’s open to tweaking the measure — for example, requiring fewer hours in communities with fewer than 250 voters. But he said there must be “access everywhere” to early voting.
Similar versions in Washington County and Connecticut
The Republican proposal mirrors a local initiative in Washington County, where officials have offered to cover the costs for municipalities that voluntarily expand early voting hours.
For the April 2025 election, the county compensated municipalities at 150% of the added cost for extending their early voting hours beyond what they were in the April 2023 election. About 90% of the municipalities in the county participated. Unlike the state proposal, Washington County’s plan had no mandated minimum hours.
Early voting has been taking off across the country, too. At this point, 47 states offer some version of in-person early voting. In Connecticut, which recently passed an early voting initiative, the program requires every municipality to be open between four and 14 days for early voting, depending on the election, regardless of population size.
In Union, Connecticut — a town of just 800 residents — Clerk Heidi Bradrick said only eight voters showed up during the 14 days of early voting in May.
“I understand their desire to have it,” she said, “but they definitely need to take into account the size of the municipality. We always laugh, like, ‘What if we get everybody to vote the first day? Can we close?’”
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
When the clerk of Rock County, Wisconsin, gets a public records request for images of election ballots, much of it is easy to fulfill. For most municipalities in the county, it’s just a matter of uploading a photo of the ballot that’s already captured when it gets tabulated.
But for two of the county’s largest cities — Janesville and Beloit — it’s a lot more complicated, and time-consuming, because of a state law governing places that use a central counting facility for their absentee ballots.
For those ballots, Clerk Lisa Tollefson must redact the unique identifying numbers that the law requires poll workers to write on each one. Otherwise, the number could be used to connect the ballots to the voters who cast them. And because the numbers don’t appear in the same place on each ballot, Tollefson must click through the ballot images one at a time to locate and blot out the number before releasing the images.
To respond to records requests for this year’s April election, she had to redact the numbers from 10,000 ballot images. In November, it was over 23,000.
Given her other job duties, Tollefson says, fulfilling these requests can take months. Without that step, she says, she could fulfill public records requests in “no time at all.”
And it’s all due to a law that she and other clerks in the state say is not only outdated, but also a potential threat to the constitutional right in Wisconsin to ballot secrecy.
Tollefson and other county clerks said they support an ongoing legislative effort to repeal the law requiring election officials to write down those numbers. The proposal has come up in past legislative sessions but hasn’t gone far. It will be revived again this year, said Rep. Scott Krug, a Republican legislative leader and vice chair of the Assembly elections committee.
Number is obsolete and creates security risk, clerks say
The law might have been useful in the past, Tollefson said, when voters who changed their minds or made errors on absentee ballots that had been cast but not yet counted could void their ballot and cast a new one. The ID number allowed election officials at central count facilities to locate the ballot and cancel it before issuing a new one.
But courts have since blocked voters from spoiling their absentee ballots, rendering the numbers obsolete. Now, if a voter tries to cast an in-person ballot after already voting absentee, the voter would be flagged in the poll books as having voted and would be turned away, Tollefson said.
Moreover, the labeling of ballots could pose a privacy risk at central count locations, where observers and poll workers might be able to match up numbers to deduce how someone voted, Tollefson said. The number written on each ballot corresponds with the voter’s number on the poll list, a public register that election officials use to enter information about voters.
There are rules in place to prevent an observer from connecting a ballot to the voter who cast it, Tollefson said, but she added, “We have laws that people shouldn’t steal, but they still do.”
Rock County Clerk Lisa Tollefson, seen at an Aug. 29, 2023, hearing at the State Capitol in Madison, Wis., supports an ongoing legislative effort to repeal a law requiring election officials to write down unique ID numbers on absentee ballots. (Drake White-Bergey / Wisconsin Watch)
Marathon County Clerk Kim Trueblood, a Republican, said the increased presence of election observers in recent years exacerbates that risk.
So far, there’s no indication that any observers or poll workers have intentionally used the numbers to link voters to their absentee ballots at central count. But election officials told Votebeat that the law creates an unnecessary risk, to go along with the significant added workload.
After the 2020 presidential election, Milwaukee County was asked to release images of its ballots as part of Donald Trump’s request for a recount in the county. The county had over 265,000 absentee ballots, all marked with identifying numbers that had to be redacted individually, Elections Director Michelle Hawley recalled.
Given time pressures, the county hired its election vendor, Election Systems & Software, to do the redactions. It cost $27,000, which the Trump campaign covered as part of its recount request.
The county has since looked for ways to streamline the redactions and avoid outsourcing it, Hawley said. But the state law remains “extremely time-consuming,” she said. In addition to complicating records requests, she said, the law slows down absentee ballot processing as election officials at central count must write a number on every ballot.
Repealing little-known practice has had little momentum
Trueblood said the biggest obstacle to repealing the law may be simply that too few people know it exists. She said she has “talked to every” legislator from Marathon County and some were “horrified to learn” about what the law entails.
“Hopefully the Legislature will do something about it,” she said.
Last session, the proposal to repeal the law had bipartisan support. The Assembly elections committee unanimously approved it after its Republican author, former Rep. Donna Rozar, encouraged committee members not to discount the bill just because she wrote it with a Democrat.
But the proposal was never introduced in the Senate and never got a floor vote in the Assembly.
Trueblood hopes the Legislature will act before 2026, when there will be an April Supreme Court election and legislative primaries and a general election later in the year.
If they just “cross off that little line in the state statute,” said Tollefson, “we would be good to go.”
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
Voters in Wisconsin could be seeing double on Election Day if the practice of fusion voting — which allows the same candidate to appear on the ballot under multiple party lines — makes a comeback in the battleground state.
A lawsuit filed Tuesday seeks to legalize the practice, saying it would empower independent voters and lesser-known political parties at a time of increasingly bitter partisanship between Republicans and Democrats. The lawsuit comes just four weeks after the Wisconsin Supreme Court election, which broke records for spending and saw massive involvement from the two parties and partisan interests.
Common in the 1800s, fusion voting means a candidate could appear on the ballot as nominated by Republican or Democratic parties and one or more lesser-known political parties. Critics argue it complicates the ballot, perhaps confusing the voter, while also giving minor parties disproportionate power because major-party candidates must woo them to get their endorsements.
Currently, full fusion voting is only happening in Connecticut and New York. There are efforts to revive the practice in other states, including Michigan, Kansas and New Jersey.
The lawsuit by the newly formed group United Wisconsin seeks a ruling affirming that minor parties can nominate whoever they like — even if that person was nominated by the Republican or Democratic parties. Under fusion voting, “John Doe, Democrat” could appear on the same ballot with “John Doe, Green Party.” All of the votes that candidate receives are combined, or fused, for the candidate’s total.
United Wisconsin wants to become a fusion political party that will cross-nominate a major party candidate, said Dale Schultz, co-chair of the group and a former Republican Senate majority leader.
But first, he said, “we’d like to see the state courts affirm that we have a constitutional right to associate with whomever we want.” Schultz is one of the lawsuit’s five named plaintiffs, which include a former Democratic county sheriff and a retired judge who was also a Republican state lawmaker.
The lawsuit was filed against the Wisconsin Elections Commission in Dane County Circuit Court, and it argues that the state’s nearly 130-year-old prohibition on candidates appearing on the ballot more than once for the same office is unconstitutional.
Wisconsin Elections Commission spokesperson Joel DeSpain declined to comment on the lawsuit.
Attorney Jeff Mandell, president of Law Forward, which is representing United Wisconsin in the lawsuit, said voters want more choices and called the current two-party system “calcified and deeply unstable.”
But Wisconsin Republican Party spokesperson Anika Rickard came out strongly against the concept, saying voters could be “manipulated into voting for a major party candidate masquerading as an independent.”
“Fusion voting will be used to confuse voters, will be an election integrity nightmare, and is simply dishonest,” she said in a statement.
Haley McCoy, a spokesperson for the Wisconsin Democratic Party, declined to comment.
Last year, the Wisconsin Democratic Party unsuccessfully tried to remove both Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein and independent Cornel West from the ballot. Democrats feared that third party candidates would draw votes away from then-Vice President Kamala Harris. President Donald Trump won Wisconsin by more than 29,000 votes. Stein and West combined got about 15,000 votes.
Fusion voting was commonplace in the United States in the 1800s, a time when political parties nominated their preferred candidates without restriction. The practice helped lead to the creation of the Republican Party in 1854, when antislavery Whigs and Democrats, along with smaller parties, joined forces at a meeting in Wisconsin to create the GOP.
Less than 50 years later, in 1897, that same Republican Party enacted a prohibition on fusion voting in Wisconsin to weaken the Democratic Party and restrain development of additional political parties, the lawsuit contends. That’s in violation of the state constitution’s equal protection guarantee, United Wisconsin argues.
Similar anti-fusion laws began to take hold nationwide early in the early 1900s as the major political parties moved to reduce the influence and competition from minor parties.
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.
Denise Jess walked into a Madison polling place on Saturday to vote early in person and encountered a familiar barrier: an absentee ballot envelope with a blank space for writing in her name, birthdate and address.
Jess, who is blind, chuckled along with her wife, who accompanied her to the polls. Who was going to do all that writing?
A poll worker quickly offered help, reminding Jess that she had the right to assistance. Jess, who is executive director of the Wisconsin Council of the Blind & Visually Impaired, knew she had those rights. But the moment still bothered her.
“It’s just a bummer,” she said, comparing voting with other tasks she performs independently, like identifying birds by ear, paying bills online, posting on social media, and grocery shopping. Voting is a constitutional right in Wisconsin and yet, she said, it remains far less accessible.
Other industries have prioritized accessibility because it benefits their bottom line, she said, but voting systems were not originally designed with accessibility in mind.
“We’re making strides,” she said, “but it’s still always, always about retrofitting and trying to catch up.”
Denise Jess uses an accessible voting machine during a test run at a Madison, Wis. polling place on March 29, 2025 (Courtesy of Denise Jess)
Jess’s experience illustrates a persistent tension in election policy: how to ensure both ballot security and accessibility for all voters. Electronic absentee voting is particularly nettlesome. Disability rights advocates have pushed for this option as a way for people with vision or other disabilities to vote independently, and in private, from home. But cybersecurity experts warn that current technology cannot guarantee that ballots returned electronically will be safe from hacking or manipulation.
Over a dozen other states provide fully electronic absentee voting for people with disabilities. In those states, voters with disabilities can receive a ballot electronically, mark it using a screen reader and return it electronically — similar to signing and returning a document electronically. Wisconsin isn’t one of them. Here, voters with disabilities must cast their votes on a paper ballot, or on an accessible voting machine at a polling place that prints out a paper ballot.
That means that voters who are visually impaired or unable to write must often rely on others to complete their ballots — undermining ballot secrecy, which is also constitutionally protected. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when many disabled voters were reluctant to visit the polls in person, Wisconsin’s rules presented an even bigger barrier.
Last year, four voters with disabilities, along with Disability Rights Wisconsin and the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin, filed a lawsuit seeking access to electronic absentee voting. A lower court initially granted some voters that option, but an appeals court paused and eventually reversed that order. The case is now before the Dane County Circuit Court.
Beyond the roughly dozen states that offer fully electronic voting, a few others, including Vermont, Michigan, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, allow voters with disabilities to fill out ballots electronically, but they have to print out the ballots and return them by mail, drop box, or in person. Verified Voting, a nonpartisan election technology group, promotes this option as a step forward for states wary of fully electronic voting.
That wouldn’t solve the issue for everyone, though. Jess pointed out that many blind voters don’t own printers, meaning they’d still face accessibility hurdles.
Security concerns haven’t been resolved
At a time of heightened concern over election security and integrity, some technology experts say fully electronic voting is still not ready to be used widely.
Between August 2021 and September 2022, the University of California, Berkeley, hosted a working group of election, technology and cybersecurity experts to discuss the feasibility of creating standards to enable safe and secure electronic marking and return technologies. The group found that widespread adoption of electronic return would require technologies that don’t currently exist or haven’t been tested.
A 2024 report by several federal agencies, including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Election Assistance Commission, found that sending digital copies of ballots to voters is safe and that filling them out electronically is somewhat safe, but that returning them electronically adds significant security risks.
“Sheer force of will doesn’t suffice to solve this problem,” said Mark Lindeman, the policy and strategy director at Verified Voting. “There needs to be extensive technical innovations that we can’t just dial up.”
Lindeman said threats from electronic ballot return include the possibility that somebody hacks into the system and changes votes. One potential safeguard — having voters verify that their selections were received and counted correctly — remains unproven at scale, the UC-Berkeley working group said.
“That’s the fundamental technical tragedy at this stage of the game,” Lindeman said. “Paper ballots are obviously inconvenient for many voters. They pose real obstacles to voting, but we haven’t found a technical alternative to paper ballots that solves all the problems.”
Denise Jess chooses ‘path of least pain’
In Wisconsin, Jess chooses among three imperfect voting options.
She can vote on Election Day in her polling place, whose layout she has memorized, though it can get too busy for her comfort. She can vote using an accessible machine but still has to hand-sign the poll book, something she typically does with the assistance of a poll worker and a signature guide, a small plastic card with a rectangular cutout that frames the area where she has to sign.
Alternatively, she can vote absentee in person during the early voting period, but then she has to receive help with paperwork and navigating an unfamiliar polling place.
Or she can fill out an application online and vote by mail, which she avoids because she can’t fill out a paper ballot without assistance.
“It’s kind of like, what’s the path of least pain?” she said.
An ExpressVote machine is on hand at Madison West High School polling place during the spring election on April 1, 2025, in Madison, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
An ExpressVote machine is on hand at Madison West High School polling place during the spring election on April 1, 2025, in Madison, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
For this Wisconsin Supreme Court election, given the potential for bad weather, she opted for early in-person voting at the Hawthorne Public Library, which isn’t her regular polling place.
“There’s enough consistency here at Hawthorne, but still there are surprises,” she said, sitting at a table at the library on Madison’s east side. “Even the simple navigation of going to the table to get the envelope, getting in line. They’re queuing people to wait behind the blue tape, which, of course, I can’t see.”
She could opt for more hands-on help from poll workers to speed up the process, but she said she sees her voting trips as a chance to learn more about the potential barriers for people with disabilities.
Some voters who are newer to vision loss or have more severe barriers can quickly become demoralized by the extra energy they need to put into casting a ballot, especially if poll workers aren’t trained or ready to help, she said.
“We’ve had voters say, ‘I’m not going back. I’m just not doing that again, doing that to myself,’ she said. “So then we lose a voter.”
If electronic voting were available, Jess said, she would do it a lot more often than voting in person because she wouldn’t have to depend on transportation or the weather.
“It would just be absolutely liberating,” she said. “I might still vote in-person at my polling place periodically, because I like my poll workers, and I always like to visit with them and give them kudos. But it would surely ease some stress.”
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
Absentee voting didn’t used to be popular in Addison, a rural town of 3,300 in southeast Wisconsin. A few days before the last Supreme Court election in 2023, only about 60 residents had cast absentee ballots in person.
This year, at the same point in the election cycle, that number was over 300.
The sharp increase is due partly to Republicans’ recent embrace of absentee voting, especially in the nearly two-week period before Election Day when voters can cast absentee ballots in person. Washington County, where Addison is located, is one of the state’s most Republican counties and one of many Republican-dominated areas across Wisconsin where early voting rates have surged.
But perhaps a bigger reason is a recent Washington County initiative aimed at making early voting more accessible for voters and more feasible for municipalities. The program compensates municipalities for the costs of extending their hours during the state’s early in-person voting period. It makes up for the gaps in municipal budgets that previously limited early voting opportunities.
“It really comes down to a matter of priorities,” Washington County Executive Josh Schoemann, a former municipal clerk, told Votebeat. “And there’s nothing more fundamental to county government and to government in general, in Wisconsin and America, than the opportunity for people to vote.”
County absorbs the added costs for municipalities
The county first rolled out the initiative during the November 2024 election as part of a broader funding package approved by the county board. The package included over $150,000 for extended in-person absentee voting hours, voluntary audits and cameras for ballot drop boxes across the county.
Public funding for such activities is more critical now after voters last year approved a Republican-written constitutional amendment banning private funding for election support, responding to a Republican outcry over private grants to fund election administration, especially in Democratic strongholds.
County Board Chair Jeff Schleif said he was eager to support the proposal because it would ensure that Republicans, who were just coming around to voting early, had the time and opportunity to do it, just as Democrats did in places like Milwaukee.
“Our board is as conservative as it’s ever been,” he said, adding that extending early voting hours is helpful to everybody.
Moreover, Schleif said, the proposal would authorize and fund election audits that could debunk allegations from people like MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell that some voting machines were being hacked to change votes.
After the November election, about $71,000 of the funds remained unspent. This year, the county signed off on using that money to continue the program into this high-stakes April election.
For this election, the county is compensating municipalities at 150% of the added cost for extending their early voting hours beyond what they were in the April 2023 election. About 90% of the municipalities in the county are participating, Washington County Clerk Ashley Reichert, a Republican, said. The county also mailed voters a schedule of their town’s early voting hours.
Reichert said the initiative aims to provide local residents with voting opportunities comparable to urban areas, including weekend and night voting options. The additional hours benefit many residents who commute to Milwaukee for work and can’t vote during typical business hours, she said.
“We have quite a few very rural communities where the clerks are very part-time, and their budgets are small, and so for them, offering additional time was just not a feasible option,” she said. “Being able to take the funding off the table as a concern really helped quite a few of our municipalities.”
More hours for voting, and more voters showing up
Addison Town Clerk Wendy Fairbanks said early voting hours have expanded significantly due to the county’s support. In 2023, Addison’s early voting was generally open from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Thursday. Now it’s open as early as 7 a.m. and as late as 6 p.m., including Fridays.
“I’m able to bring in election workers to help me with this so I’m not doing it all on my own,” Fairbanks said. “Otherwise, I’d get no other work done.”
The county’s help, she continued, “takes the burden off the town, so that we’re not using money from our tax levy that could go towards road repair or something in the town.”
Another Washington County municipality, the village of Richfield, now offers Saturday hours for early voting thanks to county funding. About 90 residents participated on a recent Saturday, contributing to a total of 1,674 early ballots cast as of Thursday morning — about double the amount from this time two years ago.
Village Administrator Jim Healy said the initiative was crucial for voters who couldn’t vote during regular hours. “We really felt strongly for these types of elections that have either state or national implications that we ought to try to go the extra mile,” Healy said, expressing hope that other Wisconsin counties might follow Washington County’s example.
In all, as of Thursday morning, Washington County had over 13,400 voters cast absentee ballots in person, nearly triple the number of votes at this point in the 2023 cycle and the fourth most in the state, despite it being only the 10th largest county by voting age population.
While increased absentee voting means additional ballots to process, local clerks aren’t concerned about significantly longer counting times.
“This is absolutely adding one more thing,” Schoemann said, “but I also know that their biggest pain point is their budgets. They’re really, really tight. So we want to try to hit their biggest pain point where we can help them and get what voters want, and that is more opportunity.”
Other clerks look at the Washington County model
Reichert, the Washington County clerk, said she has heard from a number of county and municipal clerks, along with legislators, interested in replicating this initiative across the state. Right now, though, she said Washington County appears to be the only county offering municipal clerks that compensation.
That may change soon: At a recent event, Rep. Scott Krug, a legislative leader who formerly chaired the Assembly Elections Committee, said one of his top upcoming legislative priorities was funding early voting so every municipality offers the same availability. He wasn’t available to comment further on Thursday.
Meanwhile, in most counties, early voting hours are uneven from town to town. In neighboring Ozaukee County, municipal clerks are staggering their hours to try to make time for residents seeking to vote early in person, said County Clerk Kellie Kretlow, a Republican. Some municipal election offices are open every day for early voting, while others are only open a few days across the nearly two-week voting period.
Sheboygan County Clerk Jon Dolson, a Republican, told Votebeat he was interested in the proposal but couldn’t see how his fiscally conservative board would approve a $15,000 funding increase, much less a $150,000 package like the one passed in neighboring Washington County. The county board recently cut the number of positions in his office, he said.
Washington County Executive Josh Schoemann, seen at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in 2024, said the county board prioritized an initiative to help municipalities expand early voting hours after years of disciplined budgeting and surplus management. (Matthew DeFour / Wisconsin Watch)
So how did such a large spending proposal for election offices get through the fiscally conservative Washington County Board of Supervisors, which represents one of the most staunchly Republican constituencies in the state?
Schoemann, the county executive, said the board prioritized this initiative after years of disciplined budgeting and surplus management.
He said it was important for officials at the county level to take the lead, rather than expecting local clerks to each ask for help.
The proposals together were billed as an “election integrity package” that would enhance election security — a concern that Republicans have repeatedly raised.
Reichert, the county clerk, said it likely helped that the support for extended early voting hours was rolled into a broader package addressing security concerns around drop boxes and audits. Extending early voting hours itself addressed a security concern, she said, since some supervisors questioned whether mailed ballots would arrive too late or get lost in the mail.
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
City of Milwaukee election officials process absentee ballots at one location on Election Day, which sometimes means ballots are still being fed into tabulators late that night or early the next morning. Results are reported once processing finishes.
Conservative Brad Schimel, who faces liberal Susan Crawford in the April 1 Wisconsin Supreme Court election, suggested the late counting was malfeasance, a long-debunked claim.
Schimel on March 18 urged supporters to vote early “so we don’t have to worry that at 11:30 in Milwaukee, they’re going to find bags of ballots that they forgot to put into the machines, like they did in 2018, or in 2024.”
Schimel lost his attorney general re-election bid in 2018. Republican Eric Hovde lost to U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., in the Nov. 5, 2024, election.
State law prohibits municipalities from preparing absentee ballots before Election Day. A bill that would allow an earlier start has stalled.
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