Three candidates running for Wisconsin secretary of state in 2026 are seeking an office with duties that have been whittled away over the last several decades.

The Democratic Party candidate, JoCasta Zamarripa, and the Green Party candidate, Pete Karas, both focus on how they would do the work that’s still part of the office.

But the third candidate, Republican Jay Schroeder, has centered his campaign on taking back a power that hasn’t been part of the secretary of state’s job for more than half a century — running Wisconsin’s elections.

JoCasta Zamarripa: Not just ‘ceremonial’

Former Democratic state Assembly member JoCasta Zamarripa seeks to return to state government after having served as a member of the Milwaukee Common Council. Elected to the Assembly in 2010, Zamarripa served five terms, stepping down to run for Milwaukee alder in 2020. She’s now halfway through her second term in that position.

As she’s traveled the state, Zamarripa says, she’s heard from some voters that the secretary of state is a “largely ceremonial” job, but she strongly differs with that assessment.

The role as a member of the Board of Commissioners of Public Lands, which raises revenue from timber sales that go to public school libraries, is important, she says, because “our schools depend on that funding.” The board also provides competitive economic development and public project loans to local communities.

The office provides important services such as authenticating documents for overseas actions, from foreign adoptions to international business deals, Zamarripa says.

As an alder who has had to assist the community members she represents in a variety of contexts, “these are important constituent services that I’m well positioned to take on,” Zamarripa says.

She also favors adding staff and funds to the office.

Zamarripa says she decided to run for secretary of state after learning Gov. Tony Evers would not seek a third term and seeing that “there was going to be some movement” in the Democratic upper echelons of state government.

As the first Latina in the state Legislature and on the Milwaukee Common Council, Zamarripa said she “felt this was an opportunity for me to throw my hat in for a statewide run to galvanize and capture the Latino vote.” She said she believes her presence on the ticket could help curb the drop-off in voting by Latino voters in Wisconsin in the midterms.

“It’s very important that we retain this office in Democratic hands,” Zamarripa says.

Pete Karas: ‘People want more choices’

Long-time Wisconsin Green Party member and activist Pete Karas says he’s joined the race for secretary of state because he believes neither Democrats nor Republicans should have a political monopoly in Wisconsin.

“People are just sick and tired over the same two parties,” Karas says. “People want more choices.”

Karas says he’d actually like to see the job become a nonpartisan office, with its election in the spring along with local county board and common council races.

In the office itself, he favors modernization, noting that the incumbent, Sarah Godlewski, has taken steps to make state records more accessible to the public.

To that end, Karas says he’d support some additional funding, as well as partnerships with libraries, universities and nonprofit organizations who could “step up and help us modernize the records.”

Karas says he opposes a maneuver in the 2025-27 state budget that made an exception for  Milwaukee County from a longstanding state provision requiring counties to pay most of their traffic fine and forfeiture revenue into the Common School Fund, overseen by the Board of Commissioners of Public Lands.

The budget allows the county to use those funds to pay local prosecutors and district attorneys. The provision is now the subject of a lawsuit.

“I would have pushed the Board of Commissioners of Public Lands to file a lawsuit” against the funding carve-out, Karas says.

While Zamarripa says she’s confident she can overcome two opponents in the election, she acknowledges she’s concerned that Karas could pull enough votes that would otherwise go to her, thus enabling Republican Schroeder to get the most votes of the three.

Karas rejects that concern.

“I’m not running to take votes away from anybody,” he says. “The Democrats do not own people’s votes.”

Jay Schroeder: Replace the elections commission

Jay Schroeder won the Republican nomination with a vow to eliminate the Wisconsin Elections Commission and move election administration into the secretary of state’s office — as it is in 37 states.

In the August primary, he got more votes than the candidate who had the party’s endorsement. “I was focused completely on cleaning up the election system — which needs to be done, and that’s why I won,” Schroeder says.

Current and former state elections officials and the other candidates have all rejected the premise of Schroeder’s campaign.

“Those criticisms are more political than anything else,” says Kevin Kennedy, who  served as executive director for two previous Wisconsin election administration agencies before the Republican-led Wisconsin Legislature created the elections commission.

Election administration was separated from the secretary of state’s office in 1974 and handed over to the State Elections Board, an independent agency that operated until 2007, followed by the Government Accountability Board, which the Wisconsin Elections Commission replaced in 2016.

Zamarripa finds Schroeder’s campaign message troubling. “I’m very worried,” she says, predicting that if Schroeder wins, “he will be emboldened and the Republican Party will be emboldened to give him as much latitude as possible” to carry out his agenda.

Karas calls Schroeder’s goal “a ludicrous proposal” — but says he doesn’t think it has any chance of taking effect. “There’s so many holes in what he’s proposing, I cannot believe any Legislature or any governor would sign on to that,” he says.

Schroeder, however, says that if he wins, he expects to make the case to whoever wins the race for governor on the grounds that “my crystal clear platform” focused on taking over election administration delivered his victory.

In that scenario, he doesn’t expect the putative next governor to ignore him. ” I think that’d be kind of hard for them to do that,” he says.

Focus on voter lists

This is Schroeder’s second try for the job as the GOP nominee. He lost the general election in 2018 to long-time Democratic incumbent Doug La Follette. He also ran for the Republican nomination in 2022 but didn’t advance.

Schroeder’s campaign’s central premise is that the Wisconsin Elections Commission is a failed agency, beset by problems that have sowed public mistrust.

The elections commission’s defenders say that’s an unwarranted claim. In 2024, the commission’s executive director, Meagan Wolfe, received awards from two national organizations for public service and for improving its operations.

Schroeder’s criticism emphasizes the state’s practice of preserving the records of people who have been removed from the list of active registered voters.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission maintains a statewide electronic voting database. About 1,850 local clerks across the state register voters and enter their information in the database. When voters die, move away, are found incompetent by a court or are convicted of a felony (preventing them from voting until their sentence is completed), local clerks record that information, too.

Wisconsin law doesn’t allow the elections commission to delete the records of people removed from the active registered list. Instead, their records are switched to “inactive.”

Inactive voters are not included in the lists of registered voters sent to each polling place before Election Day, according to the elections commission.

Inactive voters who qualify — for example, a person who moves out of state and then later returns to Wisconsin — must register again, said Emilee Miklas, the elections commission communications director.

The elections commission staff sends local clerks “Registration Alerts” identifying deceased people, potential duplicate records, and the names of convicted felons to be checked against local registration rolls. The alerts draw on Wisconsin Department of Health Services’ monthly death reports and Wisconsin Department of Corrections daily updates on felony convictions.

The state also gets data from the national Electronic Registration Information Center, which collects it from other states and from federal agencies, including the Social Security Administration. The elections commission staff most recently reported their findings at the commission’s October quarterly meeting.

Records retention suspicion

Wisconsin’s retention of records for inactive voters has been a source of conspiracy claims of widespread voter fraud by some activists. But the elections commission says the practice enables clerks to cross-check a registration against inactive voters — preventing a person registering from impersonating a dead person, for example.

“Basically, you have one database with 7 million records, and there’s a very good reason why we keep records of inactive voter records, deceased voters, because if you got rid of those, you would lose one of your best tools to combat election fraud,” said Don Millis, the commission’s Republican chair, at the Oct. 1 meeting.

Schroeder says he doesn’t see any need to keep the records of people no longer registered.

“There’s more deceased people on the voting rolls than there are alive,” he said in an interview, conflating the records of active voters with the inactive voters whose records are kept separate from the active list. “They don’t need to be in the system.”

Federal laws require all states to retain some records of people struck from the voting rolls, according to Sam Liebert, Wisconsin state director for All Voting Is Local.

Nevertheless, Schroeder says numerous other states are able to produce “clean lists” regularly and that Wisconsin should, too.

“When you’re deceased, you should have nothing to do with any voting system, any recording or anything,” Schroeder says. He calls the idea of using “historical reasons” to maintain a list of inactive voters “a bunch of baloney.”

He suggests that the state could “interface that with Social Security, so when someone’s benefits stop, their name would go off the voting rolls.”

The elections commission already uses Social Security data to identify people who have died and to remove them from the active voter lists, according to the agency.

Schroeder says he first decided to run for secretary of state after reading about Wisconsin’s practice of keeping the records of people no longer registered, then looking up the record for his deceased father and seeing him still listed as registered.

Schroeder says he did not try to contact either the local clerk where his father had lived or the Wisconsin Elections Commission to correct his father’s status, however. 

“I’m like, ‘wait a minute, that’s not right,’” he says, and it triggered his decision to run for secretary of state. Eventually when he looked again for his deceased father’s name, he was no longer listed as an active registered voter.

“All my goal is, why I’m running for this office, is to increase confidence in elections,” he says. “And anything that gets in the way of that in my opinion needs to be changed.”

Incidents including duplicate ballots being sent by the Green Bay clerk to voters two elections in a row and a thumb drive at Milwaukee’s central count in August that had the wrong database loaded on it have convinced him that the system is flawed, Schroeder says.

Both incidents were the subjects of elections commission investigations, and audit logs in the Milwaukee case showed no evidence of tampering, Votebeat reported.   

When Schroeder ran in the Republican primary in 2022 for the office, he told a crowd that he would not have signed “a sheet of paper for the election,” apparently a reference to the certification of electoral votes for Joe Biden, who won Wisconsin in the 2020 presidential election, Bill Lueders reported in a commentary for the Wisconsin Examiner.

In an interview last week, Schroeder didn’t deny the comment but waved it away.

“I think there was other things that maybe could have been checked into,” Schroeder said. “But generally speaking, the system works. Joe Biden [was] the president. I’m not living in the past.”

Before the primary, Schroeder held himself out as an “authentic MAGA activist” and a “MAGA aligned candidate on election integrity.”

Asked Monday about his alignment with the “MAGA” movement associated with President Donald Trump, Schroeder said, “I don’t know that I would. I would try to do what’s right.”

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

Wisconsin election officials are divided over how to handle the possibility of unarmed federal immigration or law enforcement agents arriving at polling places this November and asking to observe voting.

The disagreement centers on a passage in new Wisconsin Elections Commission guidance intended to help local election officials navigate encounters with law enforcement at the polls. Among other instructions, the guidance says that agents from ICE, the FBI and other federal agencies who want to observe voting must follow the same rules as other election observers.

But officials in Dane County, home to Madison and one of Wisconsin’s most Democratic strongholds, warn that the language could lead poll workers to admit federal agents in violation of federal law. Federal law bans U.S. officials from sending troops or armed agents to the polls except under extremely limited circumstances, and a different law bans voter intimidation.

In an Oct. 15 email to the commission, the county’s attorney argued that the guidance could be read as permitting armed ICE agents to observe voting, despite federal restrictions.

Dane County officials have spent months preparing for the possibility of federal interference in the election. The commission, meanwhile, approved its guidance less than three weeks before Election Day, after receiving what it said were hundreds of questions from local clerks seeking clarity about federal law enforcement at the polls.

Clerks and attorneys interviewed by Votebeat were divided over whether the guidance provides the clarity they need. Some praised it as helpful and others said it came too late or warned that its language could lead election inspectors to misunderstand the limits of federal law.

On page three, the guidance instructs election officials to contact their clerks and the commission if federal agents arrive to observe voting. If federal officials are present “just to observe, they still have to check in like regular observers and are subject to the observer rule,” it states. The guidance does not, at that point, distinguish between armed and unarmed federal agents.

It then discusses circumstances in which armed, uniformed local officers might observe voting.

Only two pages later does the commission explain the federal law restricting armed personnel in federal service from polling places.

The structure of the advice, Dane County attorney David Gault told Votebeat, “creates the implication it’s OK for ICE to be there and observe, and I just don’t think that’s the case.”

“If they’re armed, it’s clearly prohibited,” he said. “If they’re unarmed but still in some kind of a uniform designating them as a federal agent, I think the law is still pretty clear they’re not supposed to be there.”

Dane County officials object to commission guidance

Election officials across Wisconsin have been preparing for months for the possibility of federal law enforcement at the polls, but the concern is particularly acute in the state’s largest, heavily Democratic counties. In Dane County, the state’s second-largest, officials say listening to the commission’s guidance could complicate their efforts to keep federal agents from interfering with voting.

The guidance lays out steps for election officials to take when federal agents appear. Chief inspectors are instructed to immediately notify their municipal clerk, who must then contact the county clerk and commission staff. Agents carrying out legitimate law enforcement duties, rather than observing voting, are treated differently. In those cases, election officials are told to request identification and any warrants, document the encounter and ask officers to conduct their business outside the voting area when possible.

The commission also tells election inspectors they can remove observers if they have a reasonable basis to believe they are, or are about to, intimidate or disrupt voters. In its instructions addressing local law enforcement officers who insist on observing while armed and in uniform, the guidance leaves inspectors to determine whether their presence crosses that line.

Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell took issue in particular with the statement that if federal agents wish to observe, they can check in like regular observers.

“It’s inaccurate,” said McDonell, a Democrat. “It’s confusing. It doesn’t reflect what the law is.”

If a back-office ICE employee who’s unarmed wants to observe, that might be fine, McDonell said. “But that’s not how I think anyone would read that,” he said, saying clerks may assume the sentence is referring to armed federal agents.

Sharing McDonell’s concerns, Gault, the Dane County in-house attorney, sent an email to Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe on Oct. 15, the same day the commission finalized the guidance.

Gault said that while armed ICE agents are clearly banned from the polls under federal law, a separate federal law bars a person acting under the color of law from intimidating voters. Gault argued that it would ban even an unarmed but uniformed ICE agent from observing at the polls.

“There is no legitimate reason for ICE to be at a polling place,” he told Wolfe. “Everyone there is presumptively a U.S. citizen. I don’t think WEC’s guidance should imply that an ICE agent can be a legitimate observer.”

Commission attorney supervisor Angela O’Brien Sharpe disagreed, saying federal law doesn’t address every situation that may bring federal agents to the polls. “If federal law enforcement wishes to observe an election, then they are permitted to do so,” she said, adding that they would be subject to Wisconsin observer rules.

She emphasized that the guidance does not authorize armed federal observers and was intended to help poll workers “manage how to respond to varying situations like these” including deciding whether an officer’s presence constitutes intimidation or a disturbance.

Gault was unsatisfied, calling the guidance “confusing at best.”

“If asked, this office will advise election officials and law enforcement in Dane County that armed federal agents should not be at a polling place under any circumstances,” he wrote. “If they are there legitimately to vote they should at a minimum be unarmed.”

Local attorneys can offer advice to city and county election offices that contradicts the commission’s, Sharpe said.

Little precedent for federal agents observing elections

Federal election monitors from the Justice Department have observed voting for decades, but the prospect of ICE or FBI agents arriving at polling places specifically to monitor voting presents a largely untested legal question.

Justin Levitt, an election law specialist at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who worked in the White House under President Joe Biden on voting rights issues, said the commission’s guidance is “legit and accurate,” adding that it’s “straight down the middle of providing lawful advice without picking a fight.”

“I understand why Dane County wants a different emphasis,” Levitt said. “I don’t think that means they were right and the state was wrong. I think that just means they’ve got different interests here.”

He said the commission and Dane County agree more than they disagree: They both agree that armed agents are banned at the polls and that chief inspectors can kick out anyone intimidating voters.

Had the commission gone further and said ICE was banned from the polls entirely, he said, “That would actually be getting Wisconsin in trouble because you cannot single out federal officials for special treatment.”

Sterling Knoche, a staff attorney at the University of Wisconsin Law School-based State Democracy Research Initiative, similarly said the guidance provides clerks with good instructions for minimizing disruptions at the polling place while instructing them to consult the people who could seek a court injunction if necessary.

Knoche said the commission may not have had a sound legal basis to categorically prohibit unarmed federal agents in uniform from observing. Whether their presence is lawful would depend on their conduct and the circumstances, he said.

In Milwaukee on Monday, Wolfe drew a similar distinction. She said that federal and state law prohibits armed federal agents from showing up at the polls, but said the legality of unarmed agents observing is less clear. In that case, she said, chief inspectors and poll workers must determine whether their presence intimidates or disturbs voters.

How clerks are preparing to apply the guidance

Local officials offered differing assessments of how useful the guidance would be, even as some agreed that federal agents in uniform could intimidate voters.

Marathon County Clerk Kim Trueblood, a Republican, said the guidance was “fine.” She said county clerks have been coordinating with their local sheriffs, who would be their first call if federal agents do show up at the polls. If she were an inspector, she said, she would not allow federal law enforcement agents to register as observers if they’re in uniform, even if they were unarmed.

“We would be on a very strong legal footing to say, ‘You standing there in your FBI vest is intimidating to voters, and so we’re not going to allow that,’” she said.

In an interview, Green Bay Police Chief Chris Davis told Votebeat that the guidance was quite helpful and would be instructive in the unlikely situation that federal agents show up at a city polling place.

“We have to make a decision about what to do fairly quickly,” he said, “so any time we can get guidance like this from an authority, it helps us do that.”

Green County Clerk Arianna Voegeli, a Democrat, said the commission’s guidance came late but was consistent with the guidance that she already had given to local election officials. She agreed that the mere presence of federal officers in uniform could constitute voter intimidation, though she said it’s a legal gray area if they’re unarmed.

“I’m not too concerned about issues here in Green County, just because we’re a smaller county,” she said, though she’s discussed the issue with law enforcement and feels prepared. Larger counties, she said, have likely developed their own plans already.

McDonell, the Dane County clerk, said this guidance might add to the confusion for some clerks instead of taking away from it.

“It would have been better if they hadn’t sent this out,” he said. “It’s at minimum badly worded.”

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

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

Can unarmed ICE agents watch voting? In Wisconsin that depends on who you ask 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-person absentee voting for Wisconsin’s elections begins on Tuesday, with hours and locations varying by municipality. 

Elections officials have said ahead of the midterms that they expect early voting to be especially popular this year as concerns mount about the speed and reliability of sending absentee ballots through the U.S. postal system. 

Data from the Wisconsin Elections Commission shows that as of Monday morning, 364,888 absentee ballots have already been requested and 173,164 of those have been returned. Those numbers lag the 2022 election when 438,673 absentee ballots had been requested and 195,287 had been returned by the same point. 

WEC Administrator Meagan Wolfe said the early numbers suggest a surge in popularity for early voting. 

“Although voter behaviors are difficult to forecast, the data so far indicates that local clerks should prepare for higher turnout during in-person absentee voting,” Wolfe said in a Monday news release.

About 2.6 million people voted in Wisconsin in the 2022 midterm elections. Officials expect turnout to be similar to that total this year. 

State election officials have recommended that absentee voters should mail their ballots at least two weeks before the election to give a large enough buffer to ensure they are received by Election Day. With the clock ticking before polls open on Nov. 3, voters can also return their absentee ballots directly to local clerks’ offices or, in municipalities that use them, into ballot drop boxes. 

“If you’re planning to mail your ballot back, you should do so as soon as possible,” Wolfe said. “Your ballot must arrive by 8 p.m. on Election Day to be counted.”

The in-person absentee voting process involves a voter requesting an absentee ballot, completing the ballot and returning it to the clerk all in one stop. Voters will need to provide a voting-eligible photo ID to receive their ballots. 

In-person absentee voting runs through Nov. 1. Local hours and early voting sites can be found at MyVote.WI.gov.

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

Election officials are again urging Wisconsin voters to return their absentee ballots as early as possible after an Oct. 6 court ruling blocked a plan that would have allowed voters with late-arriving mail ballots to cast provisional ballots on Election Day. That decision led officials to double down on their long-standing advice for voters to submit absentee ballots well in advance, whether by mail or through alternative return methods.

Voters should not mail back their ballots if Election Day is less than two weeks away, Rock County Clerk Lisa Tollefson told reporters on a call Tuesday. Instead, she said, “We want them to actually deliver it to the clerk directly, use a drop box, find an alternate method, because if we don’t have it by 8 p.m. we can’t count it.”

Two-thirds of Wisconsin clerks observed issues with absentee ballot mail delivery in the April election, a Wisconsin Elections Commission survey showed. Clerks like Tollefson worry delays could happen again and would be exacerbated by voters mailing ballots late.

So far, clerks haven’t seen many issues with mailing ballots, Chetek City Clerk Mark Eby, the vice president of the Wisconsin Municipal Clerks Association, told reporters Tuesday. Ballots began going out in mid-September, and voters have already returned over 142,000. It’s the late returns clerks worry about.

Mail delays pose a significant risk to Wisconsin voters because it is one of 35 states that do not accept late-arriving mail. Unlike the 15 states that allow ballots postmarked by Election Day to arrive late, Wisconsin requires all absentee ballots to arrive at the polls by 8 p.m. on Election Day to be counted.

The League of Women Voters of Wisconsin filed a lawsuit in July to allow voters whose mail ballots would likely arrive late to cast a provisional ballot in case the mail one doesn’t show. The lawsuit is still pending in Dane County court, but Judge Rhonda Lanford ruled last week against a motion for a temporary injunction that would have allowed the provisional ballot relief in the upcoming election.

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

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

Wisconsin officials call for prompt ballot return after court rules against proposed backup plan 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 voted Thursday to send a memo to clerks across the state with guidance for what they should do if local, state or federal law enforcement shows up at polling places. 

WEC discussed the guidance as fears have risen across the country that President Donald Trump could send armed federal agents to polling places in an effort to intimidate voters. 

The agency’s administrator, Meagan Wolfe, said at the commission’s Thursday morning meeting that “we don’t expect anything unusual at the polls on Election Day.” 

“We expect voters to have the same experience that they’ve had at previous elections, and so by no means are we looking to make anybody feel panicked or anything about this,” Wolfe said. “But clerks are asking very directly for this type of information because they are getting hundreds of emails from voters and from groups asking, ‘Do you have a plan if these sorts of things were to happen?’ And so I see this just like any other contingency planning that we do to assist our clerks.” 

The memo to be sent to clerks notes that unless law enforcement officials are conducting a legitimate law enforcement activity or casting their own ballots, they generally shouldn’t be at the polls. If they are, the memo states, officers are subject to the same rules as any other election observer. Armed federal agents and the military are not allowed at polling places. 

The guidance says that if agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Homeland Security or the FBI show up at the polls, poll workers should immediately notify the municipal and county clerks and WEC staff. 

The commissioners noted that in many communities across the state, local law enforcement regularly checks in with election staff to make sure there aren’t any problems. Commissioner Ann Jacobs said it’s preferable if that’s done by plainclothes officers, because that’s less intimidating than a uniformed officer with a gun and bulletproof vest on. 

Republican Commissioner Robert Spindell said he was worried the guidance would depress turnout. 

“It seems to me that the Democrats are worried about federal agents showing up at some of these polling places, and you know, obviously, to instruct the clerks what to do if they do,” he said. “But I think this guidance is only going to scare away some people from the polls when they, when this law enforcement guidance hits the news. I think it will, and I personally think this guidance is unnecessary, as we have not seemed to have needed this for the last 201 years.”

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Elections officials in battleground Wisconsin on Thursday approved guidance for local clerks to help them know what to do if federal law enforcement officials show up at the polls on Election Day, as some activists fear might happen.

A Republican on the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission cast the lone vote against sending the guidance, saying it “is only going to scare away some people from the polls.” A hotly contested race for governor tops the ballot in Wisconsin.

“I personally think this guidance is unnecessary because we have not seemed to need it the past 201 years,” Republican Commissioner Bob Spindell said.

Clerks have been deluged with questions from voters about what they would do if agents showed up at the polls, Wisconsin elections administrator Meagan Wolfe said. The guidance is intended to explain how to handle it, she said.

“I see this as just like any other contingency planning we do to assist our clerks,” she said.

The memo tells Wisconsin’s roughly 1,800 clerks who administer elections what to do if U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, Department of Homeland Security officials, FBI agents or local law enforcement shows up at the polls.

If officers arrive, the guidance says the head of the polling site should inform the municipal clerk, who should then tell the county clerk and the state elections commission. If the agents are there to observe, they must check in like any other observer and be subject to rules governing them, the guidance says.

Democratic commissioner Ann Jacobs said she was concerned about uniformed officers intimidating voters. The commission agreed to her recommendation that the guidance tell clerks to encourage law enforcement agents planning to come to the polls to be in plain clothes and not uniforms.

“I don’t think we want full flak jacket, whatever, law enforcement three feet from our voters,” Jacobs said. “I think that is much different from an ordinary, quiet observation by somebody in plain clothes.”

Department of Homeland Security officials have said they don’t plan to send immigration enforcement officers en masse to patrol the polls and have dismissed concerns that they plan to do so as “fearmongering.”

Election legal experts say federal law clearly prevents the government from deploying any armed troops, agents or officers to election sites except to “repel armed enemies of the United States” — a high bar to clear.

But organizations that represent Latino, Black and Asian American voters say the rhetoric and ICE’s own activity make them worried at a time the number of immigration arrests is soaring as President Donald Trump carries out his mass deportation agenda.

Wisconsin elections officials have been traveling the state in recent days holding news conferences to discuss the process for casting and counting ballots. They have been saying they don’t anticipate anything unusual at the polls this year.

“I expect this election will go like all other elections,” Republican Don Millis, chair of the elections commission, said Thursday.

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 issue guidance for handling federal agents at polls is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Reading Time: 2 minutes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Madison City Clerk Lydia McComas took over her job in September 2025 with the city under heavy scrutiny from state election officials after nearly 200 absentee ballots were lost during the 2024 election. During the April 2026 state Supreme Court election, 23 late arriving absentee ballots nearly weren’t counted after a staff error. 

Ann Jacobs, a Democrat on the Wisconsin Elections Commission, said at a meeting in April that the second error was “absurd.” The two problems made the city of Madison the subject of the first two investigations ever opened by WEC. 

In June, Votebeat reported that McComas told Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway that she would “firmly address the lack of communication” that caused the mistake and the clerk’s office would have more staff in place for the August and November elections. 

But McComas will be on maternity leave during the Nov. 3 election. 

Despite McComas’ absence, city officials say the processes put in place to avoid repeated errors, additional staff and help from other city departments will be enough to smoothly manage the midterm elections and the potential scrutiny that could come from WEC or the Republican Party of Wisconsin —  whose gubernatorial candidate this year, Tom Tiffany, has previously cast doubt on election results from Wisconsin’s largest cities. 

City spokesperson Dylan Brogan said of the recent errors in Madison that the city is “confident these things won’t happen again.” 

“This is a team process that involves 2,000 people,” he said. 

In McComas’ absence, deputy clerk Kaitlyn Bernarde is running the election. Brogan said that other city staff, such as City Attorney Mike Haas, who previously served as the WEC administrator, can help fill in. 

Bernarde spent more than four years as the clerk in Wausau, a credential that convinced WEC the transition wouldn’t be a problem. 

“[McComas] hired a new deputy who was the clerk out of Wausau. Based on that we didn’t have any concerns,” Jacobs told the Wisconsin Examiner. 

In an interview with the Examiner, Bernarde said prior to the August primary elections, the clerk’s office added a staff member who is responsible for managing the thousands of absentee ballots returned to the city, which she believes will prevent any further absentee-related errors. 

“That is one of our major new changes in our office, we implemented an absentee lead position before the August election, and so we have a full time staff member who’s in charge of that, as well as additional hourly staff and other city staff who are helping to ensure that we have checks in place in the system, that we can check in at different points to make sure that we’re on track to get ballots out on time to our AM delivery, our PM delivery, as well as any late deliveries throughout the day so that way some of those similar mistakes don’t happen again.” 

Bernarde also said that the city and election staff are prepared to run the midterms under scrutiny from WEC and outside observers.

“I think Madison always kind of is under scrutiny by the state, our residents and other people who are involved in the process, and so we’ve had experience working under that kind of pressure the last couple elections,” she said. “And we all want a zero [error] election, and so we talk through that with our staff, with our poll workers to ensure that we are trained and that we document any instances that happen. Because elections involve humans and so sometimes mistakes happen but we have processes in place to confront them, minimize them and then also respond to address them appropriately after.”

The Wisconsin Elections Commission met Thursday to assess its preparations for the midterm elections in November, review reports on allegations of voter fraud and determine the outcome of two complaints against election officials. 

The commission met as concerns continue to swirl around Wisconsin and the country over the possibility that President Donald Trump and his Republican allies will work to undermine confidence in the results of the election. 

In the meeting, WEC Administrator Meagan Wolfe gave the agency’s pre-election readiness report in which she outlined the ways the commission works to keep the state’s voter rolls accurate, train election officials, ensure the election’s security and answer any questions that come from local officials or voters. 

One of the most frequent complaints about the election system made by conspiracy theorists is that Wisconsin’s voter registration database includes the information of “inactive” voters who have moved, died or been convicted of a felony. The critics argue that leaving these files in the database makes it easier for fraud to occur.

The report states that WEC and local election officials have reviewed or updated nearly 500,000 voter files ahead of the election to make sure that only eligible voters cast votes in November. 

“And in total, since the last general election, our municipal clerks have updated or deactivated over a half a million records, and so I think that’s really, really important to highlight how much work goes into maintaining Wisconsin’s voter registration list all day, every day to ensure that anybody that’s lawfully registered will show up on the registration list,” Wolfe said. “They’ll show up on the polls when they go to vote on Election Day, and anybody who is not eligible, so anybody who maybe has been convicted of a felony or is otherwise not eligible, is removed from the list or their record is updated.”

Commission Chair Don Millis, a Republican, said that leaving the inactive voter files in the database actually protects against fraud. 

“Basically, you have one database with 7 million records, and there’s a very good reason why we keep records of inactive voter records, deceased voters, because if you got rid of those, you would lose one of your best tools to combat election fraud,” Millis said.

Wolfe also said that in an effort to provide as much information as possible to voters and clerks, the WEC office is set to open at 5 a.m. in the weeks ahead of the election. 

Commissioner Ann Jacobs, a Democrat, said she appreciates the sacrifice from WEC staff to help people, but that the agency’s 30-person staff is not large enough to handle the demands of the public. 

“We have put in a request for our budget for many more positions because the work we’re doing has expanded dramatically,” Jacobs said. “It shouldn’t be something where people are sacrificing as much as they are. And I want to express my admiration for our staff’s devotion to this work and commitment to it. And also say that our need for additional staff is real. It’s profound. And I hope if any legislators are out there listening, that you treat our budget request for more personnel with great attention, and hopefully give us those staff positions.”

Voter fraud, felon reports 

Commission staff also presented the results of the agency’s regular reports on felons who have voted and reported election fraud. 

As is generally the case, neither report shows widespread levels of election fraud at the level Republicans have regularly alleged in recent years. 

The report shows that since the 2020 general election, nearly 22 million votes have been cast in Wisconsin. Only 445 of those votes, 0.002%, were matched to voters with felony convictions and an even smaller number of those instances were actually referred to prosecutors and charged. 

The commission’s annual report on voter fraud found that in the elections since November 2025, municipal clerks have referred 53 cases of election fraud to local prosecutors. The WEC report, agency staff said, could be an undercount because it’s dependent on clerks reporting the referrals to WEC when they happen. 

Most of the referrals, 44 of them, were made because the “election day registration” postcard delivered to a person’s address after they register at the polls was returned undeliverable. 

Milwaukee Complaint

The commission also voted on Thursday that there is no probable cause to further investigate a voter’s complaint that the city of Milwaukee violated state law by sorting absentee ballots at its central count location behind a curtain. 

The complaint alleged that city staff were conducting “observable” election activities behind the curtain at the city’s central count location during the November 2024 and April 2025 elections. The commission’s discussion of the complaint reopened long-running arguments between commission members — most notably from Republican Robert Spindell, who has long been the WEC member most friendly to election conspiracy theories. 

Spindell argued that people continuing to have doubts about Wisconsin’s elections is evidence that Wisconsin’s elections aren’t run competently or transparently enough. 

“Let’s stop having these problems that we have, where 45% of the citizens of Wisconsin feel that there’s something wrong with this thing,” Spindell said. “I’m sure Mayor [Cavalier] Johnson does not like the bad publicity that comes out regarding the lack of transparency. There’s no reason why that black curtain is up. There’s no reason why all these actions are being blocked if there’s nothing nefarious going on.” 

Jacobs pointed out that the complaint included several blatantly false statements.

“Bob, I’m concerned by your comments because I know you’ve been to Central Count. I know you have seen ballots being opened in the machines. I know you have seen the tables. I know you have seen the poll workers calling out names. I know you have seen all this,” Jacobs said. “And this complaint was by someone who swore under penalty of perjury that those things were happening behind this curtain. This man brought a lie to us, a lie, because he’s so invested in putting forward this conspiracy theory of secret things going on behind black curtains that he’s willing to lie on these documents to us. You and I both know, we’re both there, you and I both know that’s not true and he lies to this commission with the hopes of diminishing the work being done in the city of Milwaukee and I think you should be as offended as I am by that, because I’m pretty darn offended.” 

Mark Thomsen, another Democratic member of the commission, said that it’s Spindell’s repeated indulgence of conspiracy theories that has allowed distrust of the system to continue. 

“For you to turn this discussion about a complaint and a recommendation into the politics of the election, I think that hurts us more than anything,” Thomsen said. “I think that promotes mistrust, and … years and years of this is like it’s like Chinese torture, Bob. I mean, it’s enough.”

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

It took mere minutes for conspiracy theorists to seize on a Milwaukee election error after the August primary, when officials initially forgot to extract election results from five of the city’s nine absentee ballot tabulators. They lobbed baseless accusations that election officials had switched votes or otherwise tampered with the results.

But audit logs from those five tabulators show no evidence of tampering between the time officials initially left the facility and returned again to correctly extract results, experts told Votebeat.

“I don’t see a ‘there’ there,” said Duncan Buell, a chair emeritus of computer science and engineering at the University of South Carolina who has been analyzing election data and voting systems since 2010.

Ryan Macias, an election consultant who previously worked for the arm of the Election Assistance Commission that certifies voting machines, agreed there were “no signs or evidence that anything was done outside the norm” between the initial error and the successful extraction of the results.

More than three weeks after the primary election, city officials released audit logs from all nine tabulators to the Wisconsin Elections Commission and the public on Sept. 4. The files detail every action on the nine Milwaukee tabulators used to count absentee ballots for the Aug. 11 election.

On each of the five affected tabulators, the logs tell the same story: Officials mistakenly selected “export audit log” instead of “export files” during the initial extraction, which happened between 10:15 p.m. and about 10:40 p.m. Then, officials locked the machines.

Officials began turning the machines back on at around 11:30 p.m., after they realized they had made a mistake. They extracted the correct files shortly after midnight. The audit logs show no ballots being scanned, votes being deleted, or that the data contained on the tabulators was manipulated in any way.

The error didn’t change the vote count at all. It just delayed election results by a couple hours.

When Macias first learned of the issue, he assumed that the problem was human error and would be resolved.

“Now, looking at the audit log, I can tell you with a 100% fact that what I assumed happened (is what) happened,” he said.

Other experts agreed.

Jennifer Morrell, CEO of The Elections Group, said she reviewed the audit logs with her team of experienced election experts.

“From what I see, those logs match the public account exactly,” she said.

“In the roughly two hours between those two exports, there’s no scanning or counting activity recorded in the logs on any of those five machines,” she said. “And just as importantly, the ballot counts on every machine match the officially reported.”

Conspiracy theories percolated well before Milwaukee released audit logs

Conspiracy theories about what may have transpired in Milwaukee on Election Day began circulating almost immediately after Milwaukee officials announced the mistake. Popular social media accounts questioned the credibility of election officials, and others suggested that officials were directly involved in fraud.

Three days after the election, Votebeat requested the audit logs — the records that could show exactly what happened on the tabulators during the period conspiracy theorists were questioning. Milwaukee did not release them until Sept. 4, more than three weeks later, and after the Wisconsin Elections Commission also asked the city to make them public.

Experts said that delay was not unusual.

“Releasing audit logs — these machine logs — that’s not a typical part of the documentation that election offices normally produce,” Morrell said, adding that it’s likely that Milwaukee would have needed legal approval before releasing the logs. “The fact that they did make them public, I think that’s a responsible process — not a cover-up.”

More important, she said, is that the officials retained the records in the first place.

“The fact that the log is there, the fact that these things are recorded should be seen as a positive even though it was slow for them,” she said. “I think the more concerning thing would be if the log just didn’t exist at all.”

Milwaukee plans better documentation for the future

In response to the error, Milwaukee election chief Paulina Gutiérrez outlined several changes meant to prevent similar problems.

Written instructions for extracting results will now include images showing election officials which options to select on screen, Gutiérrez said in a letter to the Wisconsin Elections Commission. Those instructions will also be made available to observers at the city’s absentee ballot facility.

Before the results are downloaded, she said, the extraction teams will be briefed on the process. As workers move through the steps, they will verbally identify each selection they make so other members of the team can confirm they have followed the correct procedure.

“In this instance, an error occurred during the results-download process,” she told the commission. “At the same time, the safeguards surrounding the election worked as intended: The discrepancy was identified, the underlying election results remained intact, the correct files were retrieved, and Milwaukee’s accurate election results were ultimately reported.”

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.

Milwaukee audit logs show no evidence of election fraud, experts say is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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

Systems used to transmit unofficial election night results broke down in Green and Winnebago counties during Wisconsin’s August primary, causing problems processing and posting results.

The issues had no bearing on the official results that counties across the state are still certifying. But those breakdowns come as national experts have encouraged a move away from transmitting results over modems and toward physically delivering them. Many other states and election jurisdictions have shifted away from transmitting results by modem, but it remains common in Wisconsin.

Much of the concern about sending results over modems has related to cybersecurity. But experts say there are additional reasons to avoid the use of modems, and the recent issues in Wisconsin are one example. There’s no indication that the Election Day issues in Green and Winnebago counties, which both use Liberty Vote election technology, had anything to do with a hack.

Pam Smith, the president and CEO of Verified Voting, an elections technology organization, said election security is not only about preventing incorrect results or cyberattacks. It also means making sure the systems that election officials rely on are available and functioning when they need them.

A breakdown in transmitting unofficial results may not change the outcome of an election, she said, but it can still disrupt election night operations and consume significant staff time.

“It matters because it’s a time suck for the county and everybody trying to deal with it,” she said.

In a statement, a Liberty Vote spokesperson said the company has “every confidence these isolated issues will not occur in future elections.”

Green County changing results reporting process for November

The results transmission failure caused the most significant delay in Green County, where officials did not fully shift to a backup method for collecting results from municipalities until the next morning.

Officials there and their vendor, Liberty Vote, are still trying to understand what went wrong after county staff were unable to process the results that municipalities sent over via fax modems, Green County Clerk Arianna Voegeli told Votebeat.

When municipalities in Green County send their unofficial results to the county clerk’s office, they appear as encrypted files on a so-called listener server set up to receive the transmissions, said Voegeli, a Democrat. Normally, a different software called a results workstation pulls those files and uploads the results to the county’s unofficial results reporting system, but that process broke down on Election Day, she said.

County staff tried to troubleshoot the issue with Liberty Vote after discovering the issue at 9 p.m. on election night but couldn’t find a solution. That meant they had to turn to alternative methods to get the results from municipalities and didn’t have them all until the next morning — far later than most counties.

Voegeli said she consulted with the Wisconsin Elections Commission at the time to discuss what to do. The commission, she said, encouraged her to get municipal results as quickly as possible.

“Their recommendation was, at that point, to do my due diligence and do the best I can with trying to contact people (that) night to get those results in,” she said.

She opted not to use sheriff’s deputies to wake clerks that night, she said. Instead, she called all 24 of them; most didn’t return her call until early the following morning, but the few who responded delivered results over the phone. She got back to work at 6:30 a.m. on Wednesday to finish processing results as municipal officials either came in person to deliver the unofficial results or told Voegeli the results over the phone. All the results were uploaded by 11:30 a.m. on Wednesday.

Had it been November, she said, she would have employed sheriff’s deputies to wake up clerks. She opted not to do it this time around, Voegeli said, in part because the Wisconsin Elections Commission didn’t give hard guidance, and she didn’t feel she’d save meaningful time by waking them.

As of Monday, she said, officials still had not determined what caused the failure. But Green County is changing its approach for the November election.

Voegeli said nearby municipalities will drive to the county office to physically deliver unofficial results, and the faraway ones will verbally transmit results via telephone.

“Even if we determine what the cause of this issue is, I think we’re still going to plan on that for the general election,” she said. “We really want to make sure that we’re getting those results out in a timely manner.”

Winnebago County shifted gears on Election Day

Winnebago County, which also uses Liberty Vote systems, also had trouble transmitting unofficial results by modem, but officials there shifted to a backup plan that same night.

After polls closed, municipal clerks were initially unable to send unofficial election results over a cellular modem. County officials and Liberty Vote are still trying to understand what went wrong, County Clerk Julie Barthels said. After noticing the error, Barthels instructed municipal clerks in the county to drive in the results and hand them over physically. The last one arrived around 10:30 p.m. on Election Day.

The city resolved the results-reporting issue by 9 p.m., said Barthels, a Republican. But by then, municipal officials were already on their way to the county and Barthels said she didn’t want to turn the municipal officials around again to deliver them via modem.

Winnebago County isn’t planning for any shift in results reporting for November. But she said she’ll work with Liberty Vote to understand what went wrong.

“They’ve promised me this will not happen in November,” Barthels said about Liberty Vote. “We’re going to get to the bottom of what happened. I so trust our system. But it’s like any other computer. One day it works, and the next day it doesn’t.”

Some election security experts warn against modeming results

Smith, the Verified Voting CEO, said any method that requires election equipment to communicate with other devices — whether that’s through a secure cellular network or a physical phone line — introduces additional vulnerabilities.

“It’d be great if they would move towards a safer operation of not not having that connectivity,” she said

But Geoff Hale, a visiting fellow for election security at the Center for Democracy & Technology, said transmitting unofficial results via modem does not pose a major technical risk as long as the official results are protected through testing and audits of paper ballots. Every method for transmitting results has trade-offs, he said: Driving a USB stick for an hour may have fewer vulnerabilities than an internet-connected method, but it also takes far longer.

The more important safeguard, Hale said, is for election officials to stay involved throughout the process, validating results and checking for errors — especially when verifying the official count. Hale previously worked for a decade at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

In this case, he said, Winnebago and Green counties responded appropriately by having backup plans in case their initial systems failed.

“This one doesn’t concern me quite as much as some other things I’ve seen,” he said.

Noah Praetz, president of Ready For Tuesday and a longtime election administration and security consultant, said jurisdictions embraced reporting results via modems in the 2000s and 2010s.

That momentum stalled around 2016, he said, amid Russian attempts to interfere with U.S. elections and after Ukraine’s results reporting system in 2014 was successfully hacked. After that, Praetz said, following responses from the FBI and CISA, and the designation of elections as critical infrastructure by the secretary of Homeland Security, election officials began recognizing that results in transit over modems posed a risk, even if the results were unofficial.

But a major benefit of using modems is speed, and Praetz emphasized the downsides of slower alternatives, as delays in reporting results can create openings for bad actors — including foreign governments — to sow distrust.

“People want to get results out of their hands,” he said. “They want to satisfy their voters.”

That was evident in Milwaukee on Aug. 11, when a human error in exporting results caused a 90-minute delay that exasperated election watchers and prompted widespread conspiracy theories about what had gone wrong.

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.

Issues with election systems delayed primary results in two Wisconsin counties is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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

Green Bay Clerk Celestine Jeffreys has resigned amid a state investigation into how her office sent duplicate ballots to voters two elections in a row, the city announced Friday.

Jeffreys had been on administrative leave since July 9. Her resignation came shortly after the first stage of a Wisconsin Elections Commission investigation showed just how central Jeffreys was to the city sending out 152 duplicate ballots in the April election and an undisclosed number ahead of the August primary.

“We wish her the best in her future endeavors,” the city said in a brief, two-sentence statement, declining to comment further on the matter.

Stacy Menke, previously the city’s deputy clerk, is serving as interim clerk for the August primary election. The job of picking a permanent replacement will fall to Mayor Eric Genrich, although his nominee must be confirmed by the city council.

Like all municipal clerk positions in Wisconsin, the Green Bay clerk’s office is nonpartisan.

Previously the mayor’s chief of staff, Jeffreys became city clerk in January 2021. Her tenure was marked by extensive scrutiny, and it followed a turbulent year for the city’s elections.

When she entered the role, the city was under fire, especially from Republicans, for allegedly giving an election consultant too much authority over its operations during the November 2020 election. The Wisconsin Elections Commission found no wrongdoing. But that incident, in part, led to a statewide ban on outside election assistance and a particular focus from conservatives on Green Bay’s election operations.

Jeffreys’ practices repeatedly drew criticism even before the duplicate ballot incidents.

The commission in late 2023 said Jeffreys’ policy of letting a third party return absentee ballots for someone who’s sick but not disabled likely broke state law.

The following year, she admitted that for several elections, she hadn’t followed the state law requiring clerks to deactivate certain voter registrations. The law applies when postcards sent to Election Day registrants at their stated mailing addresses are returned as undeliverable. She didn’t follow that law because she wasn’t aware of it, a city attorney said on her behalf.

As officials began to probe her recent duplicate ballot mistakes, former Brown County Clerk Sandy Juno, a Republican, told the city to consider moving on from Jeffreys.

“I would hope that when you go through this process, you really evaluate how things are done, because you may not have the right person in that job,” she said.

Sam Liebert, the Wisconsin state director of All Voting is Local and a former municipal clerk, said voters need not worry about the transition coming amid the midterm elections.

“Green Bay has experienced leadership transitions before, and the systems in place are designed to ensure continuity regardless of personnel changes,” he said. “Voters in Green Bay can still vote with confidence, knowing election workers across the city remain committed to conducting free and democratic elections.”

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.

Green Bay clerk resigns amid investigations into duplicate ballot incidents is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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Wisconsin’s voter list from the state elections commission is available to the public — and to foreign countries — for a $12,500 fee. 

In a primetime speech on July 16, 2026, President Donald Trump said voter data had been “bought, stolen or hacked by China” in 18 states following the 2020 election. 

Wisconsin’s voter list is not known to have been hacked, and state election officials say election systems are secure. 

The voter list available from the Wisconsin Elections Commission includes names, addresses and whether a person voted in recent elections, but excludes other personal information such as date of birth, driver’s license number and Social Security number.

State laws don’t apply limits to how that data can be used once it is purchased, according to Wisconsin Legislative Council guidance. Buyers can use it “to contact individuals for any purpose.”

This Fact Brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

Sources

• CNN: Trump’s speech claiming US election vulnerabilities, annotated
• Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Trump questioned election security. What to know about Wisconsin laws
• Wisconsin Legislative Council: Voter information as public record
• Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: In reversal, feds proclaim Russians did not seek to hack Wisconsin's election system
• Wisconsin Elections Commission: Contingency Planning and Election System Security

Can anyone buy Wisconsin voter roll data? is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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

Ahead of the 2026 midterms, Wisconsin election officials are planning for the potential of mail ballot delivery delays by encouraging voters to mail back absentee ballots as soon as possible or return them some other way.

And on Friday, the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin sued the Wisconsin Elections Commission, arguing voters should be able to cast provisional ballots on Election Day if they don’t think their mail ballot will arrive on time.

Unlike many other states, which allow ballots to be counted if they arrive after Election Day as long as they’re postmarked by that day and arrive by a set cutoff time, Wisconsin requires mail ballots to arrive by 8 p.m. on Election Day to be counted.

Historically, the USPS and Wisconsin Elections Commission advised voters that mailing back a ballot a week ahead of Election Day would suffice. Now, the commission and municipal clerks are calling on voters to allow more time.

Milwaukee election chief Paulina Gutiérrez reported receiving only 20 mail ballots on Election Day in April’s Wisconsin Supreme Court election — a low number even for a small election — but more than 269 late ballots on the day after, which Gutiérrez said was a high number for an election of that size. Seeking to avoid such a high number of late-arriving ballots in the future, Gutiérrez told Votebeat that for the upcoming August election, the city opened its ballot drop boxes four weeks sooner than it would have in the past.

“We are encouraging voters to use our drop boxes or drop off their absentee ballot at (early in-person voting sites),” she said.

If they’re unable to do either, Gutiérrez said voters should mail back their ballots at least two weeks ahead of Election Day.

In Madison, which received more than 100 late ballots in April — also more than what’s typical — City Clerk Lydia McComas told Votebeat that drop boxes open three weeks ahead of the August election.

“We emphasize this is a convenient and far faster option than returning an absentee ballot via USPS,” she said.

Many election officials observe mail delays

These concerns are shared by election officials across the state.

In a recent survey, two-thirds of Wisconsin election officials said they observed problems with absentee ballot mail delivery in the April election. About one-third of officials said voters had complained to them about mail delays.

Nearly 40% said that mail performance in the election was somewhat or much worse than mail performance in past elections.

That experience isn’t universal. Vernon County Clerk Jerry Pedretti, who’s also clerk of the separate town and village of Genoa, told Votebeat that rural USPS workers recognize absentee ballots from the envelopes and make “every effort to make sure that they’re getting them delivered.”

Similarly, Buffalo County Clerk Lisa Schmitt said a couple of ballots arrived after Election Day in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election but problems weren’t major. That was likely a result of postmasters keeping the mail local rather than sending it out via Minnesota for processing, which she said is the typical procedure for non-election mail.

Nonetheless, commissioners at the Wisconsin Elections Commission are concerned about the delays. On MyVote, a website for voters to request ballots, the commission still includes the USPS recommendation for voters to return mail ballots at least seven days before Election Day. But in June, the commission’s new election manual and guidance to voters went further, suggesting at least 10 days before Election Day.

At a meeting in early July, commissioners discussed this updated guidance. “I’m concerned about us just saying 10 days is enough,” Democratic commissioner Mark Thomsen said at the meeting.

USPS spokesperson Desai Abdul-Razzaaq said that he is confident the Postal Service will perform well in the upcoming elections. While he said the USPS takes officials’ concerns from the April election seriously, he said “the overwhelming majority of Election Mail was processed and delivered within established service standards.”

Voters sue for ability to cast provisional ballots

Amid these delays, voters are challenging commission guidance prohibiting voters from casting in-person ballots on Election Day if they think their mail ballot might arrive too late to be counted.

The League of Women Voters of Wisconsin said the commission’s guidance violates the right to vote enshrined in the Wisconsin Constitution and is calling on a Dane County Circuit Court judge to allow voters to cast provisional ballots if they think their ballots might arrive late.

Unlike standard in-person ballots, which generally go directly from the person casting them to a tabulator, provisional ballots are segregated and verified and counted later on, once election officials determine they are validly cast. The league is asking for mail voters to be able to cast provisional ballots and only have them counted if their mail ballots don’t arrive on time.

State law says that a voter who mails or delivers an absentee ballot to a clerk isn’t permitted to vote in person in the same election on Election Day. But the league said the commission is too narrowly interpreting that law in its rule prohibiting voters from casting ballots if they suspect their ballot will arrive late.

“This rule risks denying Impacted Voters their right to vote — the right most preservative of all others,” the lawsuit states.

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.

Amid USPS delays, Wisconsin officials tell voters to mail their ballots ASAP as voters sue for more options is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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If the 2026 Democratic primary for Wisconsin governor seems large, 2018 certainly had it beat.

That year, 10 names were on the Democratic primary ballot, plus an 11th write-in candidate, according to results of the 2018 partisan primary kept by the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

Two Republican candidates and two additional write-ins appeared on the 2018 GOP primary ballot. 

The Aug. 11, 2026, primary ballot includes seven Democrats and two Republicans.

In both years, a few candidates dropped out of the race, but their names remained on the ballot due to approval deadlines. 

As of July 14, that includes Democrats Missy Highes and David Crowley. So, only five of the Democrats on the Aug. 11 ballot are still campaigning.

In 2018, two higher-profile candidates had also dropped out by late June: Andy Gronik and Dana Wachs, though both appeared on the ballot.

This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

Sources

• Wisconsin Elections Commission: 2018 Fall Partisan Primary Results: Ward by Ward – Governor
• MyVote Wisconsin: What’s On My Ballot
• Wisconsin Elections Commission: Commission Meeting June 9, 2026 – Ballot Access
• Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Democrat Missy Hughes drops out of Wisconsin governor race
• Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Milwaukee County Exec David Crowley withdraws from governor's race

Did more Democrats run for Wisconsin governor in 2018 than in 2026? is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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Billionaire Elon Musk likely broke Wisconsin law when he promised to hand out $1 million checks to voters in the 2025 state Supreme Court election, a bipartisan panel has found.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission last week referred two complaints to the Brown County district attorney’s office, which can choose to bring criminal charges over violating the state law against election bribery. Prosecutors have 40 days to report back to the commission.

Musk, the founder of SpaceX and CEO of Tesla, was deeply involved in the effort to flip majority control of the highest court in battleground Wisconsin.

The tech titan and groups he supported spent at least $20 million on the candidate backed by Republicans, Brad Schimel. However, he lost by 10 percentage points to Democratic-backed candidate Susan Crawford.

A month after the lopsided loss, Musk announced that he would be spending far less on political campaigns. Spending on the election topped $100 million, making it the most expensive judicial race in U.S. history.

The complaints, which are confidential under state law, were brought by voters in Milwaukee and Green Bay, which is in Brown County. Musk handed out checks at a rally there just days before the election.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission, consisting of three Democrats and three Republicans, voted 5-1 in closed session on Thursday to refer the complaints to the district attorney, the commission’s spokesperson Emilee Miklas said.

Brown County District Attorney David Lasee, a Republican, did not immediately return a message seeking comment Tuesday.

The motion approved by the elections commission said it found probable cause that Musk broke Wisconsin law by making a social media post offering $1 million to people who voted in the Supreme Court election “in order to induce them to vote in that election.”

Spokespeople for Musk did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Musk gave $1 million checks to 3 Wisconsin voters

Three Wisconsin voters received checks from Musk, including two who got them in person at the Green Bay rally. Two weeks before the election, Musk’s political action committee, America PAC, offered $100 to voters who signed a petition in opposition to “activist judges,” or referred someone to sign it.

Crawford’s win kept liberals in control of the state Supreme Court, and their majority grew to 5-2 after Democratic-backed candidate Chris Taylor’s victory this year.

Musk’s spending on the 2025 race has already resulted in one lawsuit filed by a government watchdog group, the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, which seeks to prohibit him from ever again offering cash payments in the state.

That lawsuit is pending in Brown County. It alleges that Musk and two groups he funds violated prohibitions on vote bribery and unauthorized lotteries and that his actions were an unlawful conspiracy and public nuisance.

Attempts to stop Musk failed in 2025

Wisconsin’s Democratic attorney general sued to stop Musk from handing over the checks to two voters, but was rejected by state courts.

Musk’s attorneys argued in legal filings in 2025 that Musk was exercising his free speech rights with the giveaways and any attempt to restrict that would violate both the Wisconsin and U.S. constitutions.

The payments are “intended to generate a grassroots movement in opposition to activist judges, not to expressly advocate for or against any candidate,” Musk’s attorneys argued in court filings.

Musk’s political action committee used a nearly identical tactic before the 2024 presidential election, offering to pay $1 million a day to voters in Wisconsin and six other battleground states who signed a petition supporting the First and Second amendments. A judge in Pennsylvania said prosecutors failed to show the effort was an illegal lottery and allowed it to continue through Election Day.

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.

Elon Musk likely broke law by promising voters $1 million payouts, Wisconsin Elections Commission says is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.