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Hey, Wisconsin. There’s an election on Tuesday.

If that comes as news, it could be because the top race is a relatively low-key Wisconsin Supreme Court contest between Appeals Court judges Maria Lazar, backed by Republicans, and Chris Taylor, backed by Democrats. They are running for an officially nonpartisan open seat on the court after conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley chose not to run for another term. 

While the state Supreme Court race will appear at the top of the ballot, there are other local municipal and judicial elections and school referendum questions for voters to decide.

As of Monday, the Wisconsin Elections Commission reported 317,000 people voted early in-person or by mail. In 2025, more than 693,000 people voted early ahead of the spring election.  

The polls will be open from 7 a.m. until 8 p.m. on Tuesday. You can find out what’s on your ballot, the location of your polling place and more at myvote.wi.gov. Voters can register at the polls on Election Day. 

Wisconsin Supreme Court 

The 2026 Wisconsin Supreme Court election is a quieter race with fewer fireworks and significantly less overall spending than the two recent contests in 2023 and 2025, which the liberal candidate won by 10 points. 

The sleepier race is likely due to there being no majority on the line in 2026. A Lazar victory would maintain 4-3 liberal control. A Taylor win would grow the liberal majority to five out of the seven seats on the court and guarantee liberal control through at least 2030. 

Lazar and Taylor represent contrasting judicial philosophies on political issues that come before the court, including reproductive health care, redistricting, criminal justice and the power balance between government and business. 

The candidates have taken starkly different paths to the bench. Lazar served as an assistant attorney general under former Republican Attorney General JB Van Hollen after starting her career in private practice. She was elected to the Waukesha County Circuit Court in 2015 and 2021 and then to the Court of Appeals in 2022. 

Taylor also began her career in private practice but then worked as the policy and political director for Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin. She won a special election in 2011 as a Democrat to represent a Madison-focused district in the Assembly. Gov. Tony Evers appointed Taylor to the Dane County Circuit Court in 2020, and she ran unopposed in 2023 for her seat on the Madison-based 4th District Court of Appeals. 

Taylor has maintained a significant fundraising and spending advantage over Lazar throughout the campaign. The Marquette University Law School Poll in the weeks leading up to Election Day found a large percentage of undecided voters. 

In the last poll conducted before the April 7 election, 30% of likely voters said they supported Taylor, 22% favored Lazar and 46% said they were undecided.

School district referendums

Seventy-two Wisconsin school districts are asking voters in their communities to approve tax increases totaling $1 billion to borrow money for construction projects or to pay for operations, such as educational programs, technology or transportation services. 

The districts are turning to voters at a challenging time for referendum approvals. Referendum approval rates have declined since 2018, according to the Wisconsin Policy Forum. 

Sixty-two of the school districts are seeking operating referendums. The remaining districts are asking for capital referendums, or approval of construction projects. Two districts, Howard-Suamico and Sauk Prairie, are asking for both operating and construction referendums. 

Appeals and circuit court races

There are appeals court and circuit court races on the ballot in multiple counties across the state, but most of these are uncontested elections. Candidates elected to county circuit courts and the Court of Appeals are elected to six-year terms.

The appeals court races in the Milwaukee-based 1st District, the Waukesha-based 2nd District and Madison-based 4th District are uncontested. The unopposed candidates include incumbent Judge Joe Donald in the 1st District, conservative attorney Anthony LoCoco in the 2nd District and incumbent Judge Rachel Graham in the 4th District. 

Twenty-six circuit court district seats are on ballots across the state, but only six — Dane, Marathon, Washburn, Washington, Wood, and a shared seat in Florence and Forest counties — feature contested races. 

Voters in Marathon and Florence and Forest counties will select new circuit court judges after the incumbents in those seats did not seek reelection. Evers-appointed judicial incumbents are running against challengers in circuit court branch races in Dane, Washburn, Washington and Wood counties. 

Other local elections 

Voters on Tuesday can also make decisions on who represents them on school boards, as county supervisors and as city mayors and alderpersons. 

What is on the ballot in these local races will differ from community to community. To find out more about specific local races on your ballot, visit myvote.wi.gov.

Wisconsin’s spring election is today. See what’s on your ballot. 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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The Wisconsin Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments Wednesday in a case that highlights how judges can apply different interpretations of the law and constitution to suit their ideological viewpoints.

The case resulted from disagreements between the Republican-led Legislature and Attorney General Josh Kaul following the 2018 lame-duck session that limited the powers of the incoming Democratic administration. 

The lawsuit, which the Legislature filed in 2021 when there was a conservative majority on the state Supreme Court, focuses on who has oversight of the dollars the state receives from legal settlements. The Legislature argues the 2018 law requires the attorney general to put money from a financial settlement in the general fund, which state lawmakers control. Kaul argues that he can put settlement funds in accounts that the Department of Justice oversees and still comply with the law.

In December 2024, the 2nd District Court of Appeals in a 2-1 ruling reversed part of a circuit court decision that said Kaul could continue to direct settlement dollars into DOJ-controlled accounts.

The Appeals Court opinion was written by Judge Maria Lazar, a conservative who is running for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court in April against liberal Appeals Court Judge Chris Taylor. Lazar ruled the language in the 2018 law aligns with the Legislature’s arguments that settlement dollars belong in the general fund. 

“Despite the legislation expressly designed to bring all settlement funds under legislative control and despite the simple and plain language of that legislation, the Attorney General has continued to act precisely in the manner which the Legislature sought to end,” Lazar wrote.

But in a dissent, retiring Appeals Court Judge Lisa Neubauer, the only liberal on the Waukesha-based District 2 Court of Appeals, criticized Lazar for basing her decision on what the Legislature intended, rather than a strict reading of various clauses in the law that may give the attorney general wiggle room.

The oral arguments this week follow a series of decisions in recent years on lawsuits challenging the separation of powers between the Legislature and the executive branch. In June, the court unanimously struck down a portion of the 2018-era lame-duck laws that required the attorney general to receive approval from the Legislature’s budget-writing committee to settle most civil cases. For the 4-3 divided liberal-majority court, the rulings in these cases have shown agreement among the justices over the need for clear boundaries between the core powers of the branches of government, legal experts said. 

Where this latest lawsuit differs is the debate seems focused more on the language of the law than the separation of powers, said Chad Oldfather, a professor at the Marquette University Law School. Typically the conservative approach to statutory interpretation has been to focus on the basic meaning of the law while the liberal approach has been to examine the law’s intent. That has been the opposite in this case, Oldfather said.  

“The advocates are kind of flipping a little bit the usual ideology of the statutory interpretation approach,” Oldfather said. “And all that’s going on while it’s clear that there are some people on the court who want to fundamentally shift the way the court does statutory interpretation. So there’s a real interesting mix of issues going on in this case.” 

The law in question has been wrapped up in a yearslong debate over separation of powers that has made its way to justices in recent years, said Bryna Godar, a staff attorney at the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School. In many of those cases, the Supreme Court opinions have shown the justices interested in balanced branches of government. 

“There seems to be an inclination to reinstate greater separation of powers between the branches and preserve the important roles of various actors, whether that’s the attorney general or the governor or the Legislature,” Godar said. 

For example, in a 6-1 decision in 2024, with Justice Annette Ziegler dissenting, the court ruled the Legislature’s Republican-led budget-writing committee could not block spending by the Department of Natural Resources for the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Fund. 

“While the legislature’s motivation for overseeing the public fisc may be well-intentioned, fundamentally, the legislature may not execute the law,” Justice Rebecca Bradley, a member of the conservative bloc, wrote in the majority opinion. “The people gave the executive alone this power.”

In the 7-0 decision last June on the Legislature’s approval of the attorney general’s civil case settlements, Justice Brian Hagedorn wrote that the constitution does not give lawmakers the ability to execute the law when there are financial decisions. 

“If the Legislature has a constitutional interest in the execution of the laws every time an executive action involves money, there would be virtually no area where the Legislature could not insert itself into the execution of the law,” Hagedorn wrote. 

There are still areas of disagreement among the court in these types of cases. Last July, the court reached a 4-3 decision in a lawsuit between Gov. Tony Evers and the Legislature, which determined 2018 lame-duck legislation that gave a legislative committee the ability to delay rules and policy changes from executive agencies was unconstitutional.

In that case, the court’s four liberal justices were in the majority. Hagedorn wrote an opinion both concurring and dissenting with the majority’s decision, while Bradley and Ziegler dissented.

“The majority has created a grave constitutional imbalance by strictly construing, and thus confining, the constitutional powers of the legislative branch while not doing the same when it comes to the power of the executive branch,” Ziegler wrote.

Latest Wisconsin Supreme Court case flips the script on which judges strictly interpret the 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.