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

Shortly after former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman commenced his error-ridden and fruitless investigation into the state’s 2020 election, he raised eyebrows when he derided chief election official Meagan Wolfe’s clothing choices.

“Black dress, white pearls — I’ve seen the act, I’ve seen the show,” he said on a conservative radio program in spring 2022.

Not long after that comment, Wolfe was scheduled to appear at a county clerk conference, and a county clerk bought fake pearl necklaces for everyone in the room, according to Wood County Clerk Trent Miner, a Republican.

“Every one of us, men, women … were wearing those pearl necklaces to show support for her,” he said. “There’s nothing but support from the county clerks for Meagan and the job that she does.”

In contrast with that virtually unanimous support from clerks, he said, most of the criticism she’s received is based on false conspiracy theories or from people who don’t know her or understand her role on the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

Since becoming the commission’s nonpartisan administrator six years ago, Wolfe has faced death threats, repeated efforts to oust her, opposition from President-elect Donald Trump, and more lawsuits than you can count on two hands.

It’s the kind of intense pressure that has caused many election officials to leave their roles in recent years. But in the eyes of other election officials, Wolfe has thrived. Many of her peers say she is a nonpartisan and clear-headed model for navigating the world of election administration at a time when election officials are under ever-increasing scrutiny.

For Wolfe, that pressure was just a din of mostly political noise seeping into the already-complicated work of election administration. Even before the 2020 election, she learned how to cope with a level of stress that has now become the norm.

“I cannot imagine what it would be like to be in a position or an environment where we’re not constantly putting out fires,” Wolfe told Votebeat. “I’ve come to really like and appreciate those challenges. Where a challenge comes up, we have to figure out how to overcome it, how to accomplish this thing that’s never been done before.”

Politics inherent to the job for Wolfe

Wolfe, who has degrees in strategic communications and English writing, came into her administrative job with a long election background. That stands out from the many election chiefs across the country who start their roles with little or no election experience.

When Wolfe was hired at the commission’s predecessor, the Government Accountability Board in 2011, her role was to help implement and train clerks and voters about the state’s new voter ID law. The law, which was the target of litigation, was “very divisive,” Wolfe said.

In her training sessions, she said, “I’d start everything by saying, ‘I’m not here to talk about if this is a good law or this is a bad law. I’m just here to tell you what the law is and what we all need to know to be able to navigate it.’”

Those experiences, along with the continuing political and legal battles she faces, she said, have given her an ability “to separate the noise that’s intended to distract us, intended to sway us from what the important things are that actually deserve our resources and our attention.”

“If you don’t have that experience and perspective,” she said, “then it’s really easy to fall into the trap of, here’s this really loud voice or this really loud claim that’s being made, let’s shift all of our resources and our time and everything over to dealing with that, and then it allows other things to fall by the wayside.”

Wolfe moved into IT and leadership roles before becoming administrator in 2018. Some of her work has been groundbreaking across the country.

For example, Wolfe oversaw the in-house development of the statewide registration system and made Wisconsin among the first states to deploy multi-factor authentication for election officials to access that type of system — a crucial cybersecurity tool.

Wisconsin seems like an “unlikely candidate” to develop those complex systems, Wolfe said, but the state has the most decentralized election system in the nation, which means there are few ready-made programs that it could easily implement.

“We’re used to having to just sort of trailblaze,” she said.

Both of those systems became models for other states, including Rhode Island, whose former election director Rob Rock called Wolfe when the state was trying to develop its own custom-built system.

“I really had no idea how to do this, and so to have someone who kind of helped me out through this process was really instrumental,” said Rock, who is now Rhode Island’s deputy secretary of state. “We certainly wouldn’t have the system we have today if it wasn’t for folks like Meagan and her insight into how they did it in Wisconsin.”

Added Rock, “Meagan is one of the best election administrators in this country. I say that without hesitation at all.”

Wolfe’s accomplishments led to her taking leadership roles in national organizations, such as the Electronic Registration Information Center and National Association of State Election Directors.

Last year, the latter organization gave Wisconsin an award for developing a set of videos outlining how elections work.

Clerks recall Wolfe being there in times of need

A significant portion of Wolfe’s job is to be a conduit between state and local election officials.

She appears at clerk conferences to update local election officials on changing laws and oversees programs to train an ever-evolving cast of full- and part-time county and municipal clerks.

Marathon County Clerk Kim Trueblood, a Republican, said she has come to lean on Wolfe, sometimes for emotional support and other times for advice.

This past election cycle, Trueblood faced a contentious primary from an opponent who, she said, accused her of corruption and targeted her over an outstanding speeding ticket, calling her a fugitive from justice and saying she was unfit to serve.

As the attacks wore on, Trueblood said, Wolfe gave her a call to see how she was doing.

“She was not taking any sides,” Trueblood said. “She wasn’t involving herself politically at all. She was just checking in on a fellow human.”

“That says a lot about a person’s character,” Trueblood added.

Another local election official, Douglas County Clerk Kaci Jo Lundgren, a Democrat, recalled Wolfe being there for her when she was in a pinch.

Ahead of the August election this year, Lundgren mistakenly assigned the wrong Assembly district on every ballot in a small town. After catching the error on election day, Lundgren said, one of her first moves was to call Wolfe for advice.

There wasn’t much the commission could do, Lundgren recalled, but Wolfe offered her templates to communicate the error to the town’s voters. Additionally, Lundgren said Wolfe provided emotional support.

“I felt like one mistake ruined everything for me. And she affirmed that I was here because I’m doing a good job, and I’m upset because I care,” Lundgren said. “She knows what it’s like to deal with difficult situations in elections, and because it was my first time having to deal with something so difficult, it was just nice to have her as a resource.”

One figure in national elections, Carolina Lopez, the executive director of the Partnership for Large Election Jurisdictions, recalled a particularly volatile time in Wisconsin elections around 2022, when courts were flip-flopping on the legality of drop boxes.

During that time, she said, the elections commission sent rapid updates to make local election officials aware of the recent changes.

“That’s probably the biggest thing you could do for … your counties and the people that you partner with – it’s prompt communication, clear communication.”

For all the credit that clerks give Wolfe, the state’s top election official said she has it easy compared to them.

“If we don’t have them and we don’t have people that are resilient and resourceful and compassionate and tough in each of our communities, then this doesn’t work, right?” Wolfe said. “And so my job is really just to support them.”

Wolfe becomes GOP target after 2020 election

After the 2020 election, a multitude of prominent Republicans, including Trump, blamed Wolfe for Trump’s loss in that year’s election. They baselessly alleged fraud and called for investigations and her ouster, blaming her for a slew of decisions by election commissioners that she had no vote on, like bypassing a state law that ordinarily requires sending election officials to conduct elections in nursing homes.

Calls for a new administrator haven’t entirely ceased. But now, over four years after Wolfe became a target, scores of people in the election community — and even many Republican leaders — are ready to move on.

The Legislature’s top Republican, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, was recently asked on WISN 12 if the Assembly would move to impeach Wolfe. Vos, who had authorized Gableman’s investigation, called it unlikely, adding, “I really want 2020 to be in the rearview mirror.”

Trueblood, the Marathon County clerk, said there’s a sense of camaraderie between local election officials and Wolfe, especially after she became targeted in the wake of the 2020 election.

“For a while, she wasn’t going anywhere by herself for fear of her own safety,” Trueblood said. “I don’t care what your political feelings about somebody are, things like that just aren’t okay. And I think we all developed a really close bond with her.”

If that vitriol gets under Wolfe’s skin, she’s not expressing it.

“I’ve always felt really strongly that we cannot allow people threatening us, harassing us, bullying us, whatever you want to call it – we cannot allow that to sway how we behave or, in my position, to stop me from going out and talking to the public about how elections work,” Wolfe said. “Because in some ways I view that as almost giving in to partisan pressure … and I’m just not going to do that.”

Smooth 2024 election sign that Wolfe should continue, former chief says

Despite efforts to move forward, the fight to target and oust Wolfe has continued into 2024, past the November election, which for the most part went off without a hitch.

After 2020, the commission received thousands of calls and emails replete with election conspiracy theories and false claims, she said. Since the 2024 election, she said, conspiracy theory-laden calls and emails number in the single digits.

At least one significant hurdle awaits, though.

As Wolfe’s term expired in the summer of 2023, the election commission deadlocked on her reappointment. She remained in her role as a holdover appointee and, along with the commission, filed a lawsuit against GOP legislative leaders who sought to oust her.

That case is pending before the Wisconsin Supreme Court. In November’s oral arguments, a majority of justices appeared skeptical of the argument against her.

Both of Wolfe’s predecessors expressed support for her to stay in her job.

Mike Haas, who was administrator at the accountability board and later became the commission’s first administrator, said the smooth administration of the 2024 election “is evidence that the right person is in the job and should continue in it.”

Added Haas, “It would be nice in Wisconsin if we could get to a position of people supporting election officials, rather than being focused on creating imaginary conspiracy theories.”

Kevin Kennedy, who was Wisconsin’s chief election official for over 30 years, said both he and Haas were replaceable — and Wolfe is too.

But Kennedy wondered why people would want to replace “someone who’s really good.”

“I think it’s best for Wisconsin if she stays,” he said.

For her part, Wolfe said she has “no immediate plans to leave” if she wins that case and continues to receive the election commissioners’ approval. She has many ongoing projects, but also wants to gauge what next year looks like, she said.

Wolfe also questioned whether she may get in the way of her agency’s functions, like budget negotiations. If there’s ever a time “where me being in this role seems like it’s not productive to the needs of our agency or the state,” she said, then she may reevaluate staying at the commission, “because this isn’t about me. It’s much bigger and more important than me.”

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

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

How Meagan Wolfe navigates intense scrutiny to make elections and her peers stronger 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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Update, Dec. 12, 2024: A federal judge dismissed the Republican Party of Wisconsin lawsuit on Thursday, saying there’s no controversy over the main issue in the case. Both the GOP and the defendants agree they should cast electoral votes for President-elect Donald Trump on Dec. 17, in compliance with a federal law, not the Dec. 16 date dictated under a state law.

Original story: The Republican Party of Wisconsin filed a lawsuit Friday to resolve a discrepancy between state and federal law directing when appointed presidential electors must meet to cast Electoral College votes.

State law requires presidential electors to meet on Dec. 16 this year, but a federal law passed two years ago calls for them to meet on Dec. 17. The state GOP is calling on a U.S. District Court of Western Wisconsin judge to enforce the federal requirement and strike the state one.

“The presidential electors cannot comply with both requirements,” the lawsuit states.

Resolving the current conflict is key to avoiding the state’s electoral votes getting challenged or contested in Congress, the state GOP states.

The lawsuit highlights the Legislature’s failure to pass a bill that would have brought Wisconsin in line with the new federal law. That inaction, the state GOP says, “led to the current conflict between the federal and state statutes.”

The lawsuit is filed against Gov. Tony Evers, Attorney General Josh Kaul and Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe.

The GOP is asking for the federal court to declare the current state law requirement — for the electors to meet on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December, as opposed to the federal law’s requirement to meet on the first Tuesday following the second Wednesday — unconstitutional and unenforceable. Given the tight timeline, it’s seeking a hearing “as soon as the Court’s calendar allows.”

Spokespeople for the Wisconsin Elections Commission and Evers declined to comment for this story. 

Generally, federal law supersedes state law if there’s a conflict between the two, said Bryna Godar, a staff attorney at the University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative. Under the current, conflicting laws, electors this year definitely have to meet on Dec. 17, but it’s less clear what they should do on Dec. 16, she told Votebeat in May.

The new designated day arose as a result of the new federal law, commonly called the Electoral Count Reform Act. Congress designed the law in 2022 to prevent the post-election chaos that then-President Donald Trump and his allies created after the 2020 election, which culminated in efforts to send fake electoral votes to Congress, block certification of legitimate electoral votes and then storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. 

The new federal law sets specific schedules for certifying election results and casting electoral votes. It cleared up ambiguities contained in the previous version of the law, which was enacted in 1887 but never updated until two years ago. 

As of mid-October, 15 states had updated their laws to comply with the Electoral Count Reform Act, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. A Wisconsin proposal to bring the state in line with the new federal law passed the Senate nearly unanimously in February. But it never received a vote in the Assembly. 

“It would have been beneficial if Wisconsin had also done that,” Godar said.

Scott Thompson, a staff attorney at the liberal-leaning legal group Law Forward, said the Legislature knew about this problem for over a year but chose not to resolve it with a simple fix.

“This eleventh hour lawsuit merely confirms that our state Legislature needs to stop peddling election conspiracy theories and start taking the business of election administration seriously,” he said.

Wisconsin Republicans were among those who sent documents to Congress in December 2020 falsely claiming Trump won the state. Trump won the state in 2024. The Wisconsin fake electors were subject to a civil lawsuit, and there’s an ongoing criminal case against their attorneys.

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.

UPDATE: Parties agree on date Trump’s electors are supposed to cast their votes 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 seven members of the Wisconsin Supreme Court hear oral arguments. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

The Wisconsin Supreme Court heard oral arguments Monday morning in a lawsuit over Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) Administrator Meagan Wolfe’s ability to remain in her post. 

Several times during the arguments, justices and attorneys described the situation as “absurd” and “bizarre” as the Court is being asked to deal with the ramifications of a divided state government that has frequently deadlocked over executive appointments to boards and commissions and the Republican-held Senate’s confirmation of those appointees. 

Two years ago, the Court, at the time controlled by a conservative majority, ruled that Frederick Prehn, a Republican appointee to the state’s Natural Resources Board, did not have to leave his post at the end of his term — even though Democratic Gov. Tony Evers had nominated his replacement. 

The Court found that until the Senate — whose GOP leaders were collaborating with Prehn to remain in the seat in an effort to influence policy decisions over wolf hunting and water quality — confirmed his replacement, state law allowed Prehn to remain on the board as a holdover. 

In the summer of 2023, Wolfe’s initial four-year term as WEC administrator expired and Senate Republicans, influenced by the three previous years of constant Republican attacks on the state’s election administration, said they would not confirm her to a second term. 

The three Democrats on the commission, in an effort to shield Wolfe from the Senate, abstained from a vote to reappoint her while the three Republicans on the commission voted to nominate her again. State law requires a majority of the six member body to vote in favor of an administrator’s nomination, however, meaning the nomination wasn’t officially advanced to the Senate for a vote. 

But the Senate acted anyway, voting against Wolfe’s appointment. Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul immediately filed a lawsuit arguing that under the precedent Republicans set in the Prehn decision, Wolfe is able to remain in her position as a holdover. 

At the circuit court level, Republicans admitted that the Senate vote to remove Wolfe was “symbolic.” But after a Dane County judge ruled in Wolfe’s favor, the GOP leaders appealed the decision to the Supreme Court. 

While neither side in the Wolfe case argued for overturning the Prehn precedent, the arguments put Republicans in the position of arguing against principles they had themselves fought for in the earlier case — only this time in front of a Court held by a liberal majority. 

Misha Tseytlin, the attorney for the Senate, argued that the statute that guides the commission’s authority to appoint an administrator creates “an affirmative duty,” and that the commission must nominate a new administrator when the four year term expires. He said that if the law doesn’t require WEC to act, unelected officials can shield the administrator from the elected Senate indefinitely. 

“Whatever level of absurdity one wants to put on the Prehn situation, whether it’s zero or 100, this one’s orders of magnitude more,” Tseytlin said. “There you had a traditional constitutional standoff between the governor and the Senate. They didn’t agree with the appointment, that’s resolved in the holdover. Here we have three, essentially bureaucrats, who have no constitutional status, holding the chief election officer appointment hostage away from the people.” 

But Justice Jill Karofsky questioned if this outcome simply forced the Republicans in the Senate to deal with the consequences of a legal interpretation they previously asked for. 

“You are trying to thread a needle here that has no eye,” Karofsky said. “Six of the seven of us sat in this courtroom two years ago when your client insisted that Fred Prehn should be able to retain his position on the DNR board, even though his term had expired and your client won. This is a case of careful what you wish for, isn’t it? Now the Legislature is here two years later, demanding that Meagan Wolfe must vacate her position.” 

“It seems to me, this has little to do with what the law actually says, and far more to do with who is in these positions,” she continued. “If the Legislature favors someone, they stay. If they don’t, they must go. Does that sound like the rule of law to you?” 

Assistant Attorney General Charlotte Gibson, the Department of Justice lawyer arguing on behalf of Wolfe, said that the statute that gives the commission the authority to appoint administrators does not require it to act when the administrator’s term expires. The administrator, she said, becomes a holdover appointee and serves at the will of the commission, who can fire her at any time. 

“[Wolfe’s] role is not a part-time policymaking position like the [Natural Resources] board people,” Gibson said. “This is an intense, full-time job requiring expertise and experience, and it just doesn’t work if there are frequent changes in personnel and sudden vacancies … but if an administrator is underperforming, the Commission’s right there on the ground with her. They’re going to see that, and regardless of whether they’re Republicans or Democrats, they’re going to coalesce and bring in an administrator who can do the job.”

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A lawsuit that could determine whether Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe can keep her job is coming before the state Supreme Court on Monday. The case focuses on the legality of appointees staying on after their terms expire, rather than any matter of her performance as the state’s top election official.

Republicans targeted Wolfe, a nonpartisan appointee, after Donald Trump lost Wisconsin in the 2020 election. Since then, she has endured criticism from Trump supporters for several decisions that the election commission made, as well as for some memos she sent to clerks who run local elections. 

As Wolfe’s term expired in the summer of 2023, the election commission deadlocked on her reappointment. Shortly after, the Republican-controlled state Senate voted to fire her in a move that it later said was only symbolic, but that triggered a protracted fight. 

She and the Wisconsin Elections Commission sued Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu, a Republican, who pushed to oust Wolfe following the expiration of her term. The lawsuit also names Senate President Chris Kapenga and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, both Republicans, as defendants.

Wolfe has now spent the last 16 months as a holdover appointment. During much of that time, it wasn’t clear who would be running the commission during the 2024 presidential election. Wolfe stayed in her role despite the pressure from the right, simultaneously becoming one of the most respected — and scrutinized — election officials nationwide.

One day after the presidential election, Wolfe said that she was “completely committed to seeing through this election,” which has yet to be certified. But she didn’t clarify whether she was seeking to stay in her role beyond the fall.

Lawsuit comes after years of scrutiny, legal battles

The Wisconsin Elections Commission is composed of three Democratic and three Republican commissioners. Wolfe, as the administrator, can issue recommendations to the commissioners on guidance they issue to local election officials, but she has no vote. The commissioners are the ones who decide whether to approve them.

Still, Wolfe has been a scapegoat for election conspiracy theorists seeking to blame somebody for Trump’s loss in the 2020 election.

After the 2020 presidential election, Wolfe was blamed for a slew of decisions by the commissioners, like letting local officials cure mistakes on absentee ballot envelopes and bypassing a state law that ordinarily requires sending election officials to conduct elections in nursing homes. She was also criticized for issuing a memo about using drop boxes in 2020, two years before the high court banned them. (The court reversed that decision this year under a new liberal majority.) 

Some went further, saying baselessly that Wolfe led a wide-ranging conspiracy to commit fraud to rig the 2020 election in Joe Biden’s favor. Late last year, some legislative Republicans tried but failed to impeach Wolfe.

In April, Trump charged that Wolfe “will try to steal another election” if she’s not removed from office. Trump won Wisconsin in the 2024 presidential election.

Commission inaction can ‘undermine trust’

Wolfe’s term expired in July 2023, and the Senate appeared poised to reject her confirmation had she been reappointed. All three Republicans on the commission voted to reappoint Wolfe at the time, which would set her up for a Senate confirmation vote.

But Democratic election commissioners abstained from the vote. They cited a 2022 Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling stating that appointees can stay in their roles past the expiration of their terms, a decision that Democrats had previously opposed.  

That meant Wolfe wasn’t formally reappointed and therefore not subject to another Senate confirmation proceeding. Senate leaders acknowledged that later, but still took a vote to fire her, leading to the current lawsuit. 

A Dane County judge in January sided with the elections commission argument that Wolfe is a lawful holdover. GOP leaders appealed that decision to an appeals court, and the election commission appealed it to the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

“This case is fascinating because the shoes are all on the wrong feet,” said Jeff Mandell, founder of the liberal legal group Law Forward. “And maybe what that shows is that there’s less — maybe on all sides — there’s less of a matter of principle and Constitution than of political convenience.”

Mandell has long pushed back against the false accusations against Wolfe and other election officials in Wisconsin that arose from the 2020 election. Still, he said, “it’s not ideal” for democracy for Wolfe to be in her role past her term.

The debate further demonstrates how both Democrats and Republicans have been relying more on hardball tactics to accomplish their policy goals recently, said Barry Burden, a political science professor at UW-Madison. 

Those tactics escalated as Senate Republicans slow-walked or outright rejected appointments, many of them made by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, to critical roles in state government. 

The various twists in the fight are examples of dysfunction in the appointment processes that can “undermine trust in those processes and in those institutions,” said Bryna Godar, a staff attorney at the University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative.

“Whether or not you think that (Wolfe) should continue in her role, I think it is important 

for appointment processes and confirmation processes to happen in the way that they’re supposed to happen,” Godar said.

Under state law, the election commission administrator serves a four-year term. Election commissioners are supposed to appoint a new administrator if the current position is vacant. 

Until the Senate confirms an appointment, the law says, the commission would be overseen by an interim supervisor selected by a majority of commissioners. If the commission doesn’t appoint somebody within 45 days of the vacancy, a legislative committee can appoint an interim administrator.

Republican legislators are pointing to that law now in their attempt to force commissioners to appoint an administrator, saying the current state of play “would allow a partisan minority of WEC to keep in place a holdover administrator indefinitely,” without a process for Senate confirmation.

But some of the Democrats supporting Wolfe say they’re just following the 2022 Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling.

“When the law has things you can do, you use the law the way it allows you to use it,” said Ann Jacobs, a Democrat on the election commission. 

The high court’s 2022 ruling about holdovers makes clear that Wolfe can be a holdover, Jacobs said, adding, “if the Legislature wants to change the law, they have every ability to do that.”

“The Legislature has hijacked the appointment process for all appointees, not just WEC, where they don’t act on them, so they try to maintain control over appointees by refusing to either confirm or reject them, and I don’t think that’s good government either,” Jacobs said.

Wisconsin Watch reporter Jack Kelly contributed to this report.

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 Supreme Court case could decide fate of state’s top election official 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.

Boxes of ballots wait to be counted at Milwaukee's central count on Election Day 2024. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin was declared the winner of Wisconsin’s Senate race by The Associate Press on Wednesday, earning her third term in the chamber. But her opponent, Republican businessman Eric Hovde, remains within the margin allowed under state law to request a recount. 

Under state law, candidates who lose by a margin of less than 1% are able to request a recount of both the whole state and individual counties. If the margin is less than 0.25%, the state pays for the costs of the recount — which include staff labor, space, transportation, rentals and supplies — but if it’s more than 0.25% the candidate’s campaign pays for those costs. If the recount changes the result of an election, the counties and state are responsible for the costs. 

In 2020, Donald Trump paid $3 million for recounts in Dane and Milwaukee counties. 

While official results won’t be ready for weeks, unofficial results show Hovde trails Baldwin by 0.9%. 

Wisconsin’s election certification process begins at the local level when  boards of canvass in 1,850 communities meet to validate and certify the results of the election. The local boards of canvass, which consist of the municipal clerk and two appointed members from each community, must meet and certify the local election results no later than 9 a.m. on the first Monday after the election. 

The certification then moves to the county level, where similarly constructed county boards of canvass meet to validate and certify the results. Results from the county boards of canvass must be transmitted to the Wisconsin Elections Commission within 14 days after a general election. This year that deadline falls on Nov. 19. 

At each level, and for the final state certification, the action of the boards of canvass is ministerial, meaning the board has no discretion to not certify a result it doesn’t like. If all the votes were accounted for and legally cast, the board must certify the results. 

After the county boards of canvass are complete and the final county sends its results to the state, a candidate within the recount margin can request a recount. Presidential candidates must file their request within one business day after the final county canvass. Other candidates, including Hovde, have three business days. That gives the Hovde campaign until Nov. 22 to request a full or partial recount. 

When a recount is called, it is the responsibility of the county to hold it. The recount is a public process and in 2020 the recounts were livestreamed. Representatives from the two parties are involved in the process as election inspectors from each recounted  county’s municipalities goes through the ballots again, making sure they were tabulated correctly. Each party is able to challenge individual ballots and each challenge is adjudicated by a bipartisan recount court. 

“It’s a very, very public process that has a lot of involvement from the party representatives and the political parties as well,” WEC Administrator Meagan Wolfe said at a Wednesday news conference. 

Counties have three days to begin their recount after it is ordered and a recount must be completed by Nov. 30 because the state’s deadline to certify the election results is Dec. 1.

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Voting carrels set up at Madison's Hawthorne Library on Election Day 2022. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

The Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) approved communication to election clerks Friday to help prepare them for a potential recount of presidential election results in Wisconsin. Commissioners also approved guidance for clerks about how to handle prospective voters who present photo IDs marked as “Limited Term” and “NonDomiciled,” which could indicate they weren’t citizens when it was issued.

Wisconsin received petitions for a full or partial recount of the presidential elections in 2020 and 2016. In both years, the results in Wisconsin were decided by about 20,000 votes. Under state law, a recount is permitted if the margin is 1% or less between the top two vote-getters.

WEC Administrator Meagan Wolfe said the materials were being considered to make sure that the commission can communicate to local election officials the timeline and process for a recount, “so everybody’s prepared and they can staff appropriately.”

“In 2020, the Commission considered making some changes after the election to clean up things … and that was met with a lot of resistance because people didn’t want the commission to be changing things once we already knew who the parties to a recount might be,” Wolfe said. “Today’s memorandum and the draft communication are really meant to make sure that everybody’s on the same page.”

Commissioners unanimously approved the communication, which includes information about recount deadlines, information needed to determine recount fees, minor revisions to the recount manual and about how commission staff plans to compile unofficial county results to track recount margins.

A recount must be requested within one business day of the elections commission receiving all the completed county canvasses. The deadline for a recount would be Nov. 30.

“We’ve presented a timeline that shows exactly when the various aspects of a recount would take place, so that again our local election officials and any potential parties to a recount would be able to prepare for that possibility and understand when that recount could potentially occur,” Wolfe said.

The communication will also include information to help clerks make preliminary estimates of the cost of a recount. Wolfe said election officials should plan ahead so that if a candidate is within the recall margin and asks for a recount, officials can produce a cost estimate quickly, which the candidate must pay for. In 2020, former President Donald Trump paid $3 million for recounts in Milwaukee and Dane Counties, which confirmed President Joe Biden’s victory.

“We don’t want to be thinking about it for the first time when there is some type of recount pending,” Wolfe said. “We want to think about it ahead of time and make sure that everybody’s prepared to provide that information in a very expedited way.”

Wisconsin has a decentralized election system with 1,850 Municipal clerks and 72 County clerks — a total of 1,922 local election officials. On election night, municipal clerks will report unofficial results to their county clerks. The Commission plans to go to each county’s website, see the unofficial results that have been posted, and enter the data in a spreadsheet for the federal contest and for any other state-level contest where the margin may be close and post it publicly.

“Usually we do this sort of behind the scenes because we have to know, is there a contest or candidate where we’re within the recount margin if they’re eligible,” Wolfe said, “but I think this is a more transparent way to do it, so that everybody knows where that data comes from and where to turn to to find whether or not a contest is eligible to request a recount.”

Clerks will receive communication about one substantive change to the recount guide: the removal of guidance that clerks can conduct administrative review of recount materials before the Board of Canvassers meets. The change was for transparency and statutory compliance purposes, according to the draft communication. Other changes were not substantive and added statutory citations, provided additional detail or clarity or reorganized information to resolve ambiguities.

The commission also approved guidance for clerks about IDs issued by the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) with “limited term” and “NonDomiciled” labels, which are issued to temporary visitors. The DMV has been able to issue these types of ID since 2016.

Wolfe said during a press call that there have been some questions about noncitizens in voting, and that there’s been “a lot of really inaccurate information” on the issue. She emphasized that noncitizens are not allowed to vote in elections. Republicans have focused on the issue of noncitizen voting in recent years, and placed a referendum on ballots this November to amend the Wisconsin Constitution to change one word to prevent non-U.S. citizens from voting in any local, state or federal elections.

“We understand that some non-citizens that are in the country legally may have a photo ID issued by the Department of Motor Vehicles that shows the word ‘limited term’ or ‘non-domicile.’ It’s also important to understand that, in many circumstances, an individual who may have that type of ID could in fact be a U.S citizen, if they have since been naturalized after receiving that limited-term license,” Wolfe said during a press call ahead of the meeting. “This is why the guidance our commission is considering today emphasizes to poll workers that they would need to follow proper challenge procedures that would allow the voter to respond to any such allegations.”

The guidance explains that IDs marked “Limited Term” indicate that the ID holder is “a non-immigrant (Temporary Visitor) with legal status in the United States” and IDs marked “Non-Domiciled” indicate a commercial driver’s license holder is “a non-immigrant (Temporary Visitor) with legal status in the United States.” It says that, in accordance with statutes, the licenses must be accepted as a proper form of voter identification, but that possessing a valid identification does not necessarily mean the holder of the identification is eligible to vote.

The draft guidance states that if an election inspector notices that a photo ID contains an indication that the individual may not be eligible to vote, state law directs that the inspector examine whether the person’s qualifications to vote should be challenged. It also provides a script clerks can use.

“This is not a change in procedure or law,” Wolfe continued. “The challenge process has always been an avenue for election inspectors to ensure that only eligible voters can participate. For instance, if a poll worker were to see that based on someone’s photo ID, they’re only 16 years old, they would initiate the same challenge process to that voter’s eligibility.”

Commissioner Bob Spindell, a Republican, cast the only vote against the guidance.

Commissioner Mark Thomsen, a Democrat, said it’s unfortunate the issue came up.

“We used this law in 2016 when Donald Trump won, and we’ve used it in every election since that. This hasn’t been an issue,” Thomsen said. “I voted for years without even ever giving my poll worker an ID. We used to actually just trust each other and our neighbors to run the elections, and I really believe we have to get back there. I trust the people in my neighborhood to run the election, and we know we run clean elections in Wisconsin, and we should stop the talk about all this nonsense that we can’t trust our neighbors.”

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(Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

Election officials have expressed confidence in Wisconsin’s election system and its ability to withstand any 2020-style attempts to overturn the results — yet some members of the state’s Republican party, and Donald Trump himself, have continued their work of the past four years to undermine trust in the system. 

On Friday, Trump posted on X that if elected he would prosecute people who “cheated” in the election. 

“I, together with many Attorneys and Legal Scholars, am watching the Sanctity of the 2024 Presidential Election very closely because I know, better than most, the rampant Cheating and Skullduggery that has taken place by the Democrats in the 2020 Presidential Election,” he wrote. “It was a Disgrace to our Nation! Therefore, the 2024 Election, where Votes have just started being cast, will be under the closest professional scrutiny and, WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again. We cannot let our Country further devolve into a Third World Nation, AND WE WON’T! Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”

After the 2020 election, Wisconsin Republicans formed the plan that became the fake elector scheme. In Wisconsin and six other states where President Joe Biden won, slates of Republicans cast fraudulent Electoral College votes for Trump. Those votes became the basis for Republican members of Congress’ effort to vote to change the results of the election and give the victory to Trump on Jan. 6, 2021. 

In the months leading up to the 2024 election, election experts here have pointed to legal developments that should prevent a similar effort this year. The Republicans who took part in Wisconsin’s fake elector scheme have been barred from serving as presidential electors, Congress passed a law making it harder for them to dispute election results and more people are watching than in 2020. 

Absentee counting

But some conspiracy theories that abounded after 2020 have persisted. Republicans in Wisconsin claimed that voter fraud had occurred in Milwaukee because thousands of votes from the largely Democratic voting city were “dumped” in the middle of the night, flipping the election to President Joe Biden. 

The votes hadn’t been dumped. Instead the city — dealing with a massive increase in absentee voting because of the COVID-19 pandemic — took longer to count those ballots at its central count location. 

While most communities in the state count absentee ballots at the same polling place where the voters who cast them would vote in person, 36 communities send their absentee ballots to be counted together at one location. 

In response to the conspiracy theories about late night “ballot dumps,” the state Legislature considered a bill that would allow local election officials to begin processing absentee ballots on the Monday before the election. Local clerks would be able to open absentee envelopes and get the ballots ready to be counted, though not actually fed into tabulating machines, ahead of time, which would have allowed the counting on Election Day to move faster. 

The bill passed the Assembly, but Republicans in the state Senate killed it. 

On Thursday, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) blamed state Rep. Janel Brandtjen (R-Menomonee Falls) for the bill’s failure. Brandtjen has been one of the Legislature’s most outspoken election conspiracy theorists. Some of Wisconsin’s most prominent election deniers had opposed the bill’s passage during public hearings — alleging that if the ballots were processed ahead of time, nefarious actors could figure out exactly how many fraudulent votes were needed to swing the result. 

Wisconsin Elections Commission Chair Ann Jacobs expressed her exasperation on social media: “It was based on her conspiracy theory that (somehow) if the 10’s of 1,000’s of envelopes were opened early, someone could figure out the exact # of fake ballots (how? Who knows!) would be filled out & added to the ballot count. Complete nonsense yet here we are!”

Because the bill failed, and because many voters have continued to use the absentee and early voting processes after the pandemic, it’s likely that Milwaukee will again report results long after polls close on Election Day. 

Wisconsin’s system

Unlike most other states, Wisconsin’s election system is decentralized. Administration of elections is handled by the 1,850 municipal clerks working across the state. Each clerk is responsible for the election within their community. 

At a virtual event hosted on Friday by Keep Our Republic — an organization that has spent four years trying to rebuild trust in the election system by explaining to skeptics exactly how the system works — former Wisconsin Congressman Reid Ribble said that if a person can’t trust politicians that the system is safe and secure, they should trust their local clerk and their friends and neighbors who volunteer as poll workers. 

“Elections in Wisconsin are fair and safe and the 1,800 county and municipal clerks that are running those elections, and the thousands and thousands of local volunteers and poll workers, are working very hard to do their jobs in a non-partisan manner,” Ribble said. “I’ve often told friends of mine and other citizens … I get it if you don’t trust politicians. One person you should be able to trust is that — usually a senior citizen — poll worker at your local precinct that’s checking your ID and giving you a ballot and making sure that everything is done correctly. You often see these people at your grocery store. They might sit two or three rows in front of you at church and these are your friends. They’re your neighbors. They’re people that are concerned about defending democracy and seeing it unfold in front of their very eyes.”

Once polls close on Election Day and the votes are tallied, unofficial results get sent to county clerks, who report those preliminary numbers. It’s from those initial reports that media organizations use statistical processes to “call” races, declaring who has won. But the actual winners aren’t officially declared until the results are certified at multiple levels. 

This multi-step process gives election experts another layer of assurance that despite continued conspiracy theories, Wisconsin’s system is resistant  to meddling. 

Each municipality convenes a Board of Canvass, a multi-member body that reviews the community’s election results and makes sure that there aren’t any irregularities — making sure that the number of ballots cast equals the number of people who signed the poll books, for example. 

Board of canvass members live in that community, which experts say makes it hard for them to throw a wrench in the process and refuse to certify results, because they’d be declaring that their friends and neighbors’ votes shouldn’t count. This differs from states such as Georgia, where fears have arisen after last-minute process changes that partisan officials placed in this step of the process could throw out results, swaying the election to Trump. 

After the local board certifies the results, in Wisconsin, a similar body at the county level does the same. Then the state elections commission reviews the tallies and the chair of the commission certifies the results. Gov. Tony Evers will then certify whether the Democratic or Republican slate of electors has been chosen. 

On Dec. 17 this year, the electors will meet and cast their Electoral College votes for the winner of each state. 

Lawsuits 

Ahead of the 2020 election, many lawsuits were filed as questions arose over how to conduct a presidential election during a pandemic. After Biden won, Trump and his campaign undertook a flurry of legal efforts in an attempt to overturn the results. 

UW-Madison Law School Professor Robert Yablon said at the Keep Our Republic event Friday that 2024 has seen even more litigation than 2020. 

“In Wisconsin and around the country, election contests are increasingly being waged, not just in the court of public opinion, but in actual courts,” Yablon said. “The volume of litigation that we have seen in Wisconsin in 2024 is already higher than we saw in 2020, despite the fact that we’re no longer dealing with a pandemic that’s creating an array of controversies and questions about what sort of voting accommodations to be providing.”

The most significant lawsuit ended when the Wisconsin Supreme Court overturned a previous decision that outlawed the use of absentee ballot drop boxes. Drop boxes became very popular with the rise in absentee voting in 2020, but Republicans turned against them as conspiracy theories spread, claiming the boxes are vulnerable to fraud. Hundreds of drop boxes were in place across the state in 2020, but despite being legal again this year, only 78 are being used. 

A lawsuit has also changed rules guiding absentee witness signatures. Absentee voters are required to have someone witness their ballot by  signing the absentee ballot envelope and providing their address. If the address isn’t included, the ballot can’t be counted. 

In the past, local clerks have been given some discretion to add missing information to the address line. If, for example, a married couple filled out their ballots together and a voter’s spouse wrote “ditto,” the clerk could write in the complete address. Or if the clerk knows where the person lives, they could add that information themselves, similarly if the person left off a zip code or city name, the clerk could complete it. 

This practice was banned by a 2020 court decision, but subsequent lawsuits have clarified that the ballot must be counted “as long as the certificate contains enough information for the clerk to reasonably be able to identify the place where a witness may be communicated with,” Yablon said. 

A number of other lawsuits amount to what Yablon said are efforts to sow distrust in the system, even if they won’t be resolved ahead of the election. Two of these lawsuits involve the state’s voter rolls and when election officials are required to deactivate a voter’s registration. 

Some Republicans have become obsessed with the voter registration system in recent years, claiming that election officials are keeping voters active in an effort to allow fraudulent votes. 

“To some extent, it seems like these cases are serving to perpetuate and reinforce dubious doubts about legitimacy of the election, and to feed into narratives that the results shouldn’t be trusted,” Yablon said. “They’re trying to implicitly suggest that our voter rolls are bloated, and so there are many people on them who might vote who shouldn’t be voting.” 

“The reality is that this is a lawsuit that is not likely to create any action,” he added. “We’re not going to start purging voters days before the election.”

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PHOENIX, ARIZONA - AUGUST 23: Former Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gives remarks at the Renaissance Phoenix Downtown Hotel on August 23, 2024 in Phoenix, Arizona.Kennedy announced that he was suspending his presidential campaign and supporting Republican presidential candidate, former U.S. President Donald Trump.(Photo by Rebecca Noble/Getty Images)

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. filed an emergency request Monday seeking to have U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett issue an emergency injunction pending an appeal to the Court that would allow his name to be taken off the presidential ballot in Wisconsin. 

Before Kennedy ended his third party presidential run late this summer and endorsed former President Donald Trump, he had filed the paperwork — which included the signatures of thousands of Wisconsin voters who wanted him to run — to get on the ballot. Later, he asked that the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) not include his name on the ticket, but the commission ruled that state law requires anyone who files the paperwork be placed on the ballot. 

Kennedy sued to get his name removed in circuit court, lost and then lost appeals at the appellate and state Supreme Courts. Kennedy’s appeals were taking place right before absentee voting was set to begin, with county clerks across the state having already printed and begun mailing ballots with his name on them. 

Attorneys for Kennedy pointed to a state statute that allows clerks to cover a candidate’s name with a sticker if that candidate dies before the election takes place and said Kennedy’s name on the ballots could be covered the same way. Election officials across the state warned that the voting machines used to count ballots haven’t been tested with stickers and that those stickers could cause the machines to break — both forcing election staff across the state to use a less accurate hand count of vote totals and local governments to cover the costs of repairing the machines. 

In a brief filed during the state court proceedings, Kennedy’s attorneys said “it doesn’t matter” that their proposed solution could wreak havoc on the state’s election systems. 

Kennedy’s lawsuits argue that state law discriminates against third party candidates for president by giving them less time between when the required paperwork is due and WEC finalizes the ballot to decide whether or not to run. He’s also argued that keeping him on the ballot violates his First Amendment right to endorse Trump. 

The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled against Kennedy’s efforts in late September. Weeks later, the day before early voting was set to start, he filed his appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. As of Thursday morning, 810,626 absentee ballots with his name on them have already been mailed to voters, 592,902 of those ballots have already been returned and another 191,869 people have cast early votes. 

At the same time that he has been working to get off the ballot in some states, including successfully in North Carolina, Kennedy has been suing to get on the ballot in others. A lawsuit to force his name onto the New York ballot was unsuccessful. 

“It’s Robert F. Kennedy’s absolute right to endorse Donald Trump for President,” the appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court states. “Over the past months, he’s done that in myriad ways, all over the country and especially in the critical swing state of Wisconsin, where Kennedy has appeared at rallies, spoken on television shows, and provided public endorsements whenever and wherever he could. In Wisconsin, he wants everyone who will listen to him to vote for Trump. That is core political speech and it’s protected under the First Amendment. To ensure that message is conveyed clearly and without confusion, he asked that his name not appear on the Wisconsin ballot. He wanted to be clear: his endorsement was for Trump.”

In the filing to the Supreme Court, Kennedy’s attorneys state that “the costs of administering a remedy would be minimal” even though more than a million ballots with his name on them have already been sent out or even filled out and returned. 

In September, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to take action in a similar case involving a third party presidential candidate. In that case, the Court refused Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s effort to get on the ballot in Nevada.

Voting carrels set up at Madison's Hawthorne Library on Election Day 2022. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

Early in-person voting for the November election opens Tuesday for Wisconsin voters. Hours and locations for casting an early vote are set locally by municipal clerks. You can check the hours and locations in your area at MyVote.wi.gov.

Officially known as in-person absentee voting, Wisconsin’s early voting allows a voter to request and cast an absentee ballot at a polling location during the two weeks before an election. The in-person absentee process includes checks of a person’s voter registration and identity. Because absentee voting in Wisconsin requires a witness to sign the ballot envelope, a municipal clerk staff member working at the early voting site serves as the witness. The ballots, like absentees sent through the mail or returned to drop boxes, aren’t processed and tabulated until polls open on Election Day. 

The deadline to register to vote online or by mail has already passed, but people can still register in-person at their municipal clerk’s office. Wisconsin also has same-day voter registration that allows people to register to vote at the polls on Election Day. Wisconsin requires voters to show a photo ID to register and vote. Acceptable IDs include driver’s licenses, Department of Transportation-issued identification cards, student IDs from Wisconsin universities, passports and military ID cards. 

While in-person absentee voting opens this week, voters have already been receiving and returning absentee ballots through the mail for weeks. 

As of Friday, the most recent data available from the Wisconsin Elections Commission shows that 593,550 voters have requested absentee ballots and 305,344 of those ballots have already been returned. Those totals are a far cry from the 2020 presidential election when the COVID-19 pandemic pushed many voters to the absentee process. By the Friday before early voting opened in 2020, 1,395,272 absentee ballots had already been requested and 821,300 had been returned. 

In the months ahead of Election Day, voting rights advocates and election officials have fretted about the speed of the U.S. Postal Service and its ability to deliver absentee ballots fast enough. For most voters, the legal deadline to request an absentee ballot is Oct. 31, however officials warn that isn’t enough time for the ballot to arrive, be filled out and returned by the close of polls at 8 p.m. on Election Day. Voters worried about mail times can return ballots to drop boxes (in communities that are using them), to their municipal clerk’s office or their designated polling place on Election Day.

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A Wisconsin resident casts their ballot in the state's primary election at a polling location on April 2, 2024, in Green Bay, Wisconsin. (Scott Olson | Getty Images)

Voting rights advocates across the state are warning of efforts to intimidate voters while right-wing groups have been  filing lawsuits attempting to force people off the voter rolls. 

With just 20 days until Election Day, more than 573,000 people have already requested absentee ballots and 267,524 of those ballots have been returned. In-person absentee voting will open next Tuesday, with locations and hours set by local election officials. 

Wednesday was the deadline for people to register to vote online or by mail — with mail-in registration forms required to be postmarked by Oct. 16. Voters can still register in-person at their municipal clerk’s office or at the polls on Election Day. 

On Tuesday, voting rights advocates asked the state and federal Departments of Justice to investigate reports that thousands of voters received text messages that could be seen as voter intimidation. The messages, which seem to have targeted young voters, warn recipients that anyone who votes in Wisconsin when not eligible to do so can be punished with fines up to $10,000 and 3.5 years imprisonment. 

In a state with elections as close as Wisconsin, college-aged voters can often play a major role in deciding who wins. College students, even if they’re from another state, are eligible to vote in Wisconsin elections. 

“Many students and other young voters are fearful that they will face criminal prosecution if they register and exercise their right to vote — because of a malicious, inaccurate text sent by an anonymous party,” the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin wrote in a letter about the messages. 

At a press conference Wednesday, Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) Administrator Meagan Wolfe said that the commission is aware of third party communications that could be seen as intimidating. She said that voters should go to official sources of information to decide if they’re eligible to vote. 

“Election officials do continue to receive reports from voters who have received these third party communications, like text messages that they’ve described as intimidating or that contain false information,” she said. “Unfortunately, many voters that receive these kinds of communications during election season, and sometimes they can be misleading, and to avoid being misled by any sort of communication that might come from a third party to a voter, voters should make sure to get their election information from the official source.” (For more information go to Wisconsin’s MyVote website.)

At the press conference, Wolfe also gave an update on the use of absentee ballot drop boxes across the state, which were declared legal by the state Supreme Court earlier this year after a previous court majority had barred their use. Wolfe said local clerks have reported to WEC that this year in Wisconsin at least 78 drop boxes are in use, a steep decline from the more than 500 that were used in the 2020 election and earlier before Republicans turned against them over baseless allegations of fraud. 

Drop boxes have remained a major issue in this year’s election, with the Wausau mayor drawing criticism after he removed the city’s drop box without permission from the local election clerk. 

The 78 boxes means that less than 50 communities across the state are using the boxes because Madison and Milwaukee have a total of 14 drop boxes available across the two cities. 

“The decision to have drop boxes or not, as our state Supreme Court said, is a decision that rests with the municipal clerk, and just like any decisions they make for their community, they have to weigh the considerations or the needs of their local community, and so I won’t undercut any of those decisions that have been made by our municipal clerks, because they’re making a decision for their community and the best needs of their community,” Wolfe said. 

As Republicans have continued to attack the voting system in Wisconsin and across the country, two lawsuits have been filed seeking to make last-minute changes to the voter registration system. 

One of the lawsuits, filed by Daniel Eastman, an attorney involved in former President Donald Trump’s legal fight to overturn the results of the 2020 election, alleges that more than 140,000 voters on the voter registration list are ineligible because cross-checks with U.S. Postal Service data shows they don’t live at the address where they’re registered to vote. The lawsuit states that more than 50,000 of those registrations are in Milwaukee. 

Election officials use the USPS data to keep voter rolls updated but the data has a high error rate and is generally confirmed through other sources. 

The lawsuit asks the Milwaukee Elections Commission to mail postcards to all the voters found in the data to confirm if they’ve moved and asks WEC to instruct all the other clerks in the state to do the same. 

The second lawsuit alleges that there’s a “legitimate concern” the state and local election officials are activating inactive voter registrations and asks a Marinette County judge to order WEC not to activate any voter registrations 

Courts are generally unlikely to make rulings affecting voting so close to an election. Clerks use a variety of sources of information, including data from a national coalition of states tracking when people move to or die in other states, to keep voter rolls up to date.

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The Wisconsin Elections Commission's October 4, 2024 meeting.

Local elections clerks found just 30 instances of fraud in elections from July 1, 2023 through Sept. 12, according to a report the Wisconsin Elections Commission approved and sent to the Legislature Friday. 

Those incidents occurred during the four elections in that span in which more than 4 million votes were cast. In the report, clerks from across the state found 18 instances of people voting twice in the same election — usually voting both absentee and in person. One case found a person who voted in two Kenosha County municipalities. Kenosha County also had six instances of people who attempted to register to vote while serving felony sentences. 

The WEC’s annual report on election fraud has frequently found that it is an exceedingly rare crime. Despite that, baseless allegations of fraud have continued to come from members of the Legislature and prominent election deniers. 

At Friday’s meeting, the commission also ended an effort to pass an emergency administrative rule guiding how election observers must operate at poll locations during the November election. The body has already approved a permanent rule on the same topic and forwarded it to the governor for approval. 

Republican Commissioner Don Millis, who proposed withdrawing the emergency rule, said that he was told by Republicans in the Legislature that the Joint Committee on the Review of Administrative Rules (JCRAR) wouldn’t approve the emergency rule and if WEC forwarded it to the committee, it could result in the permanent rule not passing the committee. 

“I’ve been told in no uncertain terms by the Senate side of the administrative rules committee that this rule will be suspended as soon as the committee has the opportunity,” Millis said. “Moreover, I’ve been told that proceeding on this could endanger the permanent rule. I think the permanent rule is a good thing, I’m glad it’s going to be in place. We’ll see what happens.” 

The rule on election observers is meant to provide a statewide template for how poll workers should deal with election observers, including how far away from voting activities observers must be, what type of seating should be provided, ensuring access to restrooms and providing guidance for when an observer is being disruptive and can be asked to leave a poll site. The emergency rule would have gone into effect sooner, but with an expiration date while the permanent rule, if approved, won’t expire. 

WEC has worked on the permanent rule for more than two years, gathering input from a wide range of partisan and advocacy groups. But with JCRAR’s opposition to the emergency rule, the fate of the permanent rule, once it reaches the Legislature, is unclear. 

“I’ve asked a number of people if they would prefer to have no rule or the administrative rule, which they may find some fault with, and they’ve actually said they prefer to have no rule,” Millis said. “So I’m very disappointed, but I think that for the long term opportunity to have a rule in place is that the best course of action is to cease the emergency rulemaking process and see what happens to the permanent role in the Legislature.”

JCRAR has become increasingly hostile to WEC in recent years, including a fight in 2022 over guidance the commission had sent to clerks over the use of absentee ballot drop boxes. 

“We spent two years, we had multi-partisan input, we had non-partisan input, we had both major political parties, we had minor political parties, we had persons who were advocates for persons with disabilities, who were advocates for all other aspects of it,” Democratic Commissioner Ann Jacobs said. “And we’ve had, I don’t know how many people come in here and demand that they wanted chairs and toilets and they were going to raise heck and high water, and then we put forward a rule that allowed it, and then all of a sudden they’re like, ‘Well, but not like that.’ And we read every single comment from every single person who had every single complaint. This was a bipartisan, multi-partisan rule. The fact that the Legislature is indicating, and I take Don at his word that they’re not going to let it go forward, is just sort of ridiculous, and it’s unfortunate.”

The commission also discussed updates to the agency’s open records request policy. A staff report notes that since 2020, the commission has received record-high amounts of requests — mostly for the communications of commissioners and WEC Administrator Meagan Wolfe. Often, those requests require commissioners to search their personal devices and accounts for relevant records. 

Staff proposed having commissioners forward any communications involving official government business that takes place on those devices or accounts to their Wisconsin.gov email accounts so staff can conduct those searches. 

Commissioners Mark Thomsen and Millis questioned the policy, with Thomsen saying people could effectively shut down his work by requesting communications from his work email that he receives unsolicited. 

“This is not a rational response to the problem posed,” he said. “We cannot invite people to shut down our businesses by sending us unsolicited emails.” 

State law generally considers messages about official government business conducted by officials on personal devices and accounts to be public records.

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Rep. Janel Brandtjen speaks at a February 2022 rally of election conspiracy theorists, where she told them "you're not crazy." (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

One of the Wisconsin Legislature’s most prominent election deniers has sued the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) to force the state out of an agreement with an organization that helps states track when voters move to or die in other states. 

State Rep. Janel Brandjten (R-Menomonee Falls) filed the lawsuit last month in Waukesha County Circuit Court. The suit takes aim at the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), an organization currently made up of 24 states and Washington D.C., established to help states keep accurate voter rolls. 

Election conspiracy theorists have regularly targeted ERIC in recent years, and a number of Republican-controlled states have dropped out of the compact, despite its role in assisting state election officials in keeping voter rolls updated. Election deniers in Wisconsin and across the country have frequently complained that the voter rolls don’t get updated enough and leave the election system open to fraud. 

Brandtjen brought the lawsuit despite voting in 2016 for a bill that required the state to enter into an agreement with ERIC. She is being represented by Kevin Scott, who worked as an attorney for former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman during his ill-fated review of the 2020 election. Scott represented Gableman in court during Gableman’s attempt to jail the mayors of Green Bay and Madison. 

The case has been assigned to the circuit court of Judge Brad Schimel, the former Republican Attorney General under Gov. Scott Walker who is now running a campaign for a seat on the state Supreme Court. 

Jeff Mandell, general counsel for voting rights-focused firm Law Forward, says the lawsuit  — which he doesn’t believe will be successful or even heard before Election Day in November — shows how far into the conspiracy rabbit hole Brandtjen has gone since 2020. 

“We’ve seen that Rep. Brandtjen over the last four years has slipped fairly deep into the fringes of election denial, and given that, I think it’s somewhat unsurprising that she would bring claims that are part of discredited conspiracy theories, but are similar to claims that we’ve seen in other states,” Mandell says. “It is, of course, a testament to her journey that what is most bizarre about this lawsuit is that she is asking a court to order the Elections Commission to end its relationship with ERIC when that relationship is required expressly by state law, and it’s a law that she voted for.”

The lawsuit argues that Wisconsin’s agreement with ERIC was made by Kevin Kennedy, who was the executive director of the Government Accountability Board (GAB), the predecessor agency to the elections commission that was disbanded by Republicans in the spring of 2016. Because the agreement was made with the GAB, it is not valid, Brandtjen argues. 

Brandtjen’s lawsuit also states that the agreement with ERIC violates a constitutional amendment passed by voters earlier this year which prohibits non-election officials from carrying out election-related duties; violates the state public records law because of ERIC requirements that its data remain confidential, and violates the statute that initiated the agreement with ERIC because rather than just updating the voter rolls, the state uses the data to find voters and contact people who are eligible to vote but not registered to vote.

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Sign for the Wisconsin Elections Comission. (Wisconsin Examiner photo)

The Wisconsin Election Commission (WEC) on Tuesday delayed taking action on two complaints against municipal clerks for not following state and federal laws guiding the return of absentee ballots. 

A complaint against the city of Greenfield alleges that the local clerk created separate deadlines for disabled voters’ lawfully designated assistants to return absentee ballots. State law gives absentee voters until polls close at 8 p.m. on Election Day to bring their ballot to their designated polling place and drop it off. 

In Greenfield, a man returning his wife’s ballot because of her disability was turned away and sent to the clerk’s office because of a local policy that states someone returning another voter’s ballot must take it there. 

A separate complaint was filed against the city of Brookfield alleging that the city refused to accept any absentee ballots at polling places and instead required them to be returned to the clerk’s office with enough time for the clerk to bring the ballot to the correct polling place to be counted. The man who brought the complaint alleges that when he arrived at the polling place around 5 p.m. he was told he must bring his ballot to the clerk’s office but that no one would be there to receive it because city staff was in a meeting. 

With less than 50 days until the election, Brookfield has drawn other criticisms over its absentee voting policies after the city council voted not to allow the use of absentee ballot drop boxes to collect ballots. A group of voting rights focused organizations held a press conference in the city Tuesday to protest that decision. 

At the WEC meeting Tuesday afternoon, which at times grew heated, Republican commissioners questioned if it was possible to create a system that perfectly accommodates voters with disabilities returning their ballots while allowing clerks to affirm that people who have permission to assist a disabled voter are returning another person’s ballot. 

“We cannot make this world perfectly equitable for all,” Commissioner Don Millis said. 

Republican Commissioner Robert Spindell drew repeated pushback from the Democrats on the commission for arguing that whatever the body decides, it has to make sure it doesn’t encourage “ballot harvesting” — a practice that is prohibited by  state law  involving organizations gathering and returning large amounts of absentee ballots — which Republicans regularly warn against without much evidence that is widespread.  . 

The Democrats on the commission also said that the state has had the same interpretation of the absentee ballot statutes since long before WEC was created in 2015 — that voters can return their ballots until polls close at 8 p.m. on Election Day. Commission Chair Ann Jacobs pointed out that the Uniform Voting Instructions, approved by the commission last year and made mandatory for clerks to follow, reaffirm  that longstanding interpretation of statute. 

“I’m sort of floored that, coincidentally, in a political year, there’s attacks on absentee voting,” Jacobs said. “Suddenly, we’re changing our minds on the rules. I’m just flabbergasted by that. We made those instructions mandatory, and it tells every absentee voter in this state that they can take their absentee ballot to the poll site.” 

The Republicans on the commission signaled they’d be unwilling to vote to accept the complaints against the two cities while the Democrats said they didn’t want to take a vote that would upend the interpretation of the uniform voting instructions so close to the election, with hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots already sent to voters with those instructions included on the envelope. 

“I am extremely against even the consideration of us undoing our uniform instructions prior to Nov. 4, when we have — what is it? — as of this morning, 450,000 ballots out with our uniform instructions,” Jacobs said. 

The commission ultimately voted to delay the consideration of the complaints until after the election.

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PHOENIX, ARIZONA - AUGUST 23: Former Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gives remarks at the Renaissance Phoenix Downtown Hotel on August 23, 2024 in Phoenix, Arizona.Kennedy announced that he was suspending his presidential campaign and supporting Republican presidential candidate, former U.S. President Donald Trump.(Photo by Rebecca Noble/Getty Images)

The Wisconsin Elections Commission on Thursday asked the state Supreme Court to take up Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s lawsuit seeking to force his name off the presidential ballot in the state, bypassing the Court of Appeals. 

Kennedy has been trying for weeks to get his name off the ballot after filing nomination papers to get his name on the ticket but then later dropping out of the race and endorsing former President Donald Trump. More than 8,000 Wisconsin voters signed nomination papers to put Kennedy on the ballot. WEC ruled that state law requires a candidate who files the proper paperwork to get on the ballot to remain on the ballot unless they die. 

Kennedy has been trying to get off the ballot in a number of states, succeeding in a few. His effort comes as polling has shown that his support largely draws votes away from Trump. 

Earlier this week, a Dane County judge dismissed a lawsuit from Kennedy against the WEC decision and on Wednesday the state’s District 2 Court of Appeals, controlled by a conservative majority, took up the case. 

In its request for the Supreme Court to take up the case, WEC said that Kennedy is seeking “extraordinary” relief and the case should move to the state’s highest court because it is “highly time sensitive and hugely consequential for the people of Wisconsin.” 

If Kennedy’s effort is successful, the remedy is now complicated because local election clerks have already put hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots into the mail. An effort to print new ballots would be hugely expensive to county clerks across the state. Kennedy’s attorneys have suggested placing white stickers over his name on the ballots — a remedy that is available under state law if a candidate dies. 

WEC added that the Supreme Court should accept the case and issue a final resolution, avoiding a temporary decision at the appeals court that will still end up at the Supreme Court level. 

“This Court should provide final resolution of this case and avoid an interim appellate court decision that disrupts or casts doubt on that process, or causes clerks to commence an all-hands-on-deck stickering effort,” WEC’s petition states.

When it accepted the case, the appeals court asked a number of questions about the viability of the stickers, including if electronic machines would be able to handle their use. The appeals court had asked for Kennedy’s attorneys to file briefs in the case by Thursday with responses from WEC by Friday. 

In its petition to the Supreme Court, WEC calls the proposal of the stickers a “logistical nightmare.” 

“Kennedy appears to recognize that it is too late to reprint the ballots, which already are on their way to municipal clerks and absentee voters, including overseas and military voters,” the petition states. “He proposes that all can be solved by requiring local clerks to create and affix stickers to every Wisconsin ballot, but that solution would ignore state law; force clerks to spend tens of thousands of hours creating and affixing stickers; and, as the circuit court put it, create a ‘logistical nightmare’ that could threaten the accuracy of the election results and confidence in the election.”

As part of its request to bypass the appellate court, WEC Technology Director Robert Kehoe stated that more than 340,000 absentee ballots have been sent to voters in the mail. He also said that he is “unaware of any clerk ever placing stickers on ballots in the administration of an election,” adding that the stickers could cause problems with votes being counted. 

“The voting tabulation machines tested and certified for use in this state by the Commission are calibrated to read even a light mark so that no vote goes uncounted, and a sticker in the target area of an oval or error could register a double vote,” Kehoe stated. “Even a shadow or wrinkle (for instance, caused by how the sticker is applied) on an optical scan ballot can cause the voting tabulation machine to register a vote.”

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Just days before Wisconsin clerks are supposed to begin sending voters absentee ballots, two court cases involving Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s bid to get off the November presidential ballot may require election officials to make new ballots from scratch — and delay sending them out.

A lawsuit in Dane County circuit court and a pending appeal in a conservative court based in Waukesha County have yet to be resolved. An oral ruling in the Dane County case is scheduled for Sept. 16, three days before clerks are required under state law to send out their first batch of absentee ballots. But the appeals court may take it up before then.

Similar cases have played out in other swing states, where Kennedy has tried to get off the ballot after endorsing former President Donald Trump.

The North Carolina Supreme Court ruled in favor of Kennedy, ordering election officials to take him off the ballot after counties had already printed nearly 3 million ballots with Kennedy’s name listed. The Michigan Supreme Court ruled to keep Kennedy on the ballot, but he has since filed a federal lawsuit to get off it. 

Regardless of how the courts rule, the issue could fuel a legislative debate over whether to change a state law that appears to make it virtually impossible for candidates to get off the ballot once they file nomination papers and qualify to appear on it.

Waukesha County Clerk Meg Wartman, a Republican, said on Friday that she has already ordered the printing of ballots and is proceeding as normal at this point, expecting to get ballots to municipal clerks by Wednesday’s deadline. But if a court orders new ballots without Kennedy’s name, she said, it would take her a couple of weeks to program, test and check the new ballots before sending them to municipal clerks. That would go far beyond the current Sept. 19 deadline.

Then, Wartman said, municipal clerks would have to send voters the new ballots. If the ruling comes after local clerks send out a first batch of ballots on Thursday, municipal clerks may have to send those voters new, corrected ballots later on.

“That adds to voter confusion, time, energy — just things we have to work with at the polling place,” she said. “For us that work in elections, we’re able to adjust and work as needed, but to send the voters two ballots is difficult.” 

Some county clerks have already delivered ballots to their municipal clerks, Wartman said. She said she’s waiting until the Wednesday deadline just in case.

New ballots wouldn’t just amount to more time but also more money, Wartman said. Redoing the process could cost up to $50,000, Wartman said, and more for municipalities to send out each ballot.

“We’ve learned that in elections, everything’s doable. It’s just how expensive it is, the stress that it causes and, again, confusion for the voters,” she said.

Clerks typically finalize ballots well before they go out to voters. 

A Dane County election official said the lawsuit was filed after the county already sent finalized ballots to the printer. La Crosse County Clerk Ginny Dankmeyer, a Democrat, said on Sept. 4 that many other clerks around the state had finalized their ballots as well, “and printers are already printing.”

Dankmeyer said she waited a few days after the election commission finalized presidential candidates before she finalized ballots and sent them to be printed, just in case a lawsuit came up.

“I actually waited until Friday to send my ballots out, just because I figured that would be the three days if someone would file a lawsuit, that they would do it right away,” she said. “And then someone waited until … a week later to file a lawsuit.”

If the lawsuit is successful, Dankmeyer said, “there’s a lot involved. There’s a cost involved. There’s time involved. There’s confusion. If these ballots get back and get mailed out before a decision is made, then a new ballot has to be mailed.”

Legislative change may follow ballot access debate

Kennedy said on Aug. 23 that he was dropping out of the race and endorsing Trump. He filed to withdraw his candidacy ahead of an election meeting on Aug. 27 to give ballot access to presidential candidates. Five of the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission’s six commissioners — three Democrats and two Republicans — approved putting him on the ballot despite his request to withdraw from it. One commissioner, Republican Bob Spindell, voted to remove him from the ballot.

The commissioners voting to keep Kennedy on the ballot cited a law stating that candidates who file nomination papers and qualify to be listed on the ballot can’t decline nomination and must appear on the ballot unless they die.

The law troubled some of the commissioners, like Republican Don Millis, who said it would make sense to allow candidates to withdraw from the ballot up to the point that the commission sets the ballot. Still, Millis voted to keep Kennedy on the ballot. 

Rep. Scott Krug, a Republican who chairs the Assembly Elections Committee, said he objects to the law that the Wisconsin Elections Commission cited in keeping Kennedy on the ballot. He’s considering a proposal to change that law next legislative session.

“I have a hard time seeing why we want to force somebody to be on the ballot, even if they are seen by one side as trying to play shenanigans or whatever some have said that he’s trying to do,” Krug said. “It’s still somebody’s freedom to associate however they want to. And I just don’t see it being a good choice for good policy and long-term good governance saying, ‘Hey, you’ve got to do it. We know you don’t want to but you have to.’”

Krug’s proposal, which he has yet to solidify and circulate, would allow independent candidates to withdraw from the ballot anytime before the governing board overseeing ballot access finalizes its list of candidates.

“If you’re in the process of being approved for ballot access as an individual candidate who went through nomination papers, why not let you off? What are we hurting by letting you go?” Krug said.

The criticism against such a law, Krug said, is that it would incentivize coalition-building — allowing independent candidates to drop off the ballot at the last minute, in exchange for something, to give other candidates a boost.

But Krug said European politics have long operated through coalition-building. 

It’s unclear how much support the proposal could receive in the Legislature. Lawmakers are expecting Republicans’ near-supermajority to shrink substantially after the November election, with some Democratic legislative leaders even predicting they’ll flip the Assembly to a Democratic majority.

Candidates who no longer wanted to appear on the ballot used to have an easier off-ramp. 

A state law on the books until the late 1970s allowed a candidate to “decline the nomination by delivering to his filing official a written, signed and acknowledged declination,” according to the Legislative Reference Bureau.

The drafting file for the legislation that repealed that law didn’t offer insight into why lawmakers wanted to change it, the bureau stated.

Kennedy says rights are violated by keeping him on ballot

Kennedy’s lawsuit alleges that as an independent, he is being treated differently from major party candidates in a way that violates the First Amendment and a constitutional clause guaranteeing equal protection.

The complaint points to a state law allowing major party candidates to submit their presidential and vice presidential candidates up until the first Tuesday of September, while independent candidates have to file nomination papers by the first Tuesday in August.

Those different standards give major parties more time to vet candidates and decide their best course of action, Kennedy’s lawyers state. 

The lawsuit further alleges that candidates don’t qualify to appear on the ballot until the Wisconsin Elections Commission approves them. Until that date, the lawsuit states, the commission should have allowed him to withdraw from the ballot.

“In First Amendment parlance: it has compelled him to not just speak, but to associate with a cause he doesn’t want to be part of,” the lawsuit states.

This coverage is made possible through Votebeat, a nonpartisan news organization covering local election administration and voting access. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Should candidates be allowed to just drop out? RFK Jr. lawsuit spurs debate about changing state law 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.