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Gov. Tony Evers found himself in familiar territory last week, issuing his first 10 vetoes of the legislative session.

Only this time, instead of putting the legislation to bed, as a veto has done for decades in Wisconsin, the governor’s pen triggered a “veto watch” among Democratic lawmakers.

“Our caucus has determined protecting Gov. Evers’ veto to be a top priority,” Assembly Minority Leader Greta Neubauer, D-Racine, told Wisconsin Watch, adding that Democratic lawmakers are “remaining extremely vigilant and will do so throughout the session to ensure that we are able to uphold (the governor’s) vetoes and prevent Wisconsin from moving backwards.”

But why do Democrats need to be on alert when Republicans control fewer than 66 seats in the Assembly — the two-thirds supermajority needed to override a veto?

The answer: The Wisconsin Constitution says that to successfully override a veto, lawmakers only need support from two-thirds of members who are present on a given day — not two-thirds of all Assembly members. So if just three Democratic lawmakers were absent on a given day, Assembly Republicans could have a two-thirds majority and would be able to undo Evers’ vetoes.

It’s been a record 38 years since the Legislature has overridden a veto, a failure that “in recent decades has made the governor’s veto power practically invincible,” according to a January 2023 memo on the veto override process from the nonpartisan Legislative Reference Bureau.

How do vetoes work in Wisconsin?

When lawmakers send a bill to the governor for a final signature, the governor has six days, excluding Sunday, to veto it or it becomes law. Once the governor vetoes a bill, it first returns to the chamber where it originated. In the Assembly, Republicans control 64 of 99 seats. In the state Senate, they control 22 of 33 seats. The Assembly can vote on a veto override for the same bill multiple times during a session, whereas the Senate may only vote for one on the same bill once, according to the LRB.

Evers has vetoed bills passed by the GOP-controlled Legislature at a record-breaking clip in recent years. During the 2021-22 legislative session, he struck down 126 bills sent to his desk, or 32% of all bills sent to his desk, the most by any governor in a single session in Wisconsin history. Other governors have vetoed on average 3.7% of bills they receive, the LRB reported.

Four of the bills Evers vetoed last week would have made changes to Wisconsin’s unemployment insurance system. Another would have prevented state agencies and local governments from restricting the sale of gas-powered vehicles.

But with such slim margins this session, the governor’s veto doesn’t feel invincible to Democrats, and lawmakers are planning accordingly in an attempt to avoid being caught off guard by a surprise vote scheduled by their Republican colleagues. To prepare for a potential surprise override vote, Assembly Democrats are slated to receive a briefing from the LRB on the veto override process this fall, Neubauer spokesperson Sidney Litke told Wisconsin Watch.

When could a veto override take place? 

Veto votes may take place at any time during a regularly scheduled floor session. Those periods include Sept. 12-15, Sept. 18-21, Oct. 10-13, Oct. 16-19, Nov. 7-10, Nov. 13-16 and in 2024 on Jan. 16-19, Jan. 22-25, Feb. 13-16, Feb. 19-22, March 12-14 and April 11, 16-18. 

Next year on May 14 and 15 any vetoes that have not been overridden are automatically placed on the calendar for what is known as a “veto review floorperiod.”

“All of our members have made this commitment to be in Madison for every scheduled session day,” Neubauer said.

And now that there are vetoes available to be scheduled for an override vote, the Democratic leader said all 35 of her caucus members will also be in Madison on all skeletal session days — procedural sessions usually involving only a few members that are required to maintain established floor schedules on session days when the full body doesn’t actually meet.

Evers is also conscious that his veto authority is protected by the slimmest of margins.

“After the last election I met with all the legislators on the Democratic side and said, ‘You can’t be sick this year.’ And so far that’s worked out,” the governor told Wisconsin Watch earlier this summer in Oshkosh. He added, “We are well prepared to ensure that we keep the margins where they should be. Obviously, the Republicans have a large number of people in the Legislature, but the Democrats will always be there.”

Both Evers and Neubauer said they have not discussed with Republicans an informal deal to avoid a surprise override vote.

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, through a spokesperson, didn’t respond to a question about whether he would schedule an override vote if Democratic lawmakers were absent and Republicans had a two-thirds majority on a given day. Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu, R-Oostburg, through a spokesperson, didn’t respond to a question about whether he would support an override effort that had been approved by Assembly Republicans using procedural tactics.

Why would a veto override matter? 

Neubauer cautioned that a snap override attempt could harm the Legislature as an institution.

“People … have an understanding of the ways in which the rules have been changed in the Legislature — through the gerrymander and otherwise — to further consolidate Republicans’ power,” she said. “And I don’t think that an unscheduled veto override attempt would reflect well on our democracy and on the institution.”

She continued, “That being said, we just have to be as prepared as possible.”

Senate Minority Leader Melissa Agard, D-Madison, echoed Neubauer, likening a surprise override vote to other recent Republican “over stretches,” including lame duck legislation in 2018 that sought to weaken Evers and Attorney General Josh Kaul, Republicans’ decision to gerrymander the state’s voting maps to insulate their majorities and the attempt to submit fake presidential electors to Congress after the 2020 election.

“These types of parlor tricks are not true governing,” Agard told Wisconsin Watch. “They aren’t in the best interest of our state.”

Could courts play a role? 

A Republican veto override would leave little recourse for Democrats.

Even with liberals taking control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court last week, Democrats could face a tough path to reversing any potential surprise overrides via the courts.

Aside from what’s in the constitution, the Legislature sets the rules for override process. There are no statutes governing the process and the Legislature can change or enforce the rules however it wants, according to the LRB memo.

The state Supreme Court stated in 1983 that “if the Legislature fails to follow self-adopted procedural rules in enacting legislation, and such rules are not mandated by the constitution, courts will not intervene to declare the legislation invalid.”

The LRB concluded in its memo that the courts have no role in overseeing the veto override process.

“The veto override process is an internal, procedural matter created and governed by the Legislature alone. The Legislature adopts rules that regulate the process, and courts may not adjudicate the application or interpretation of the rules,” LRB director Rick Champagne wrote. “The veto override process is in every way a self-determined legislative process.”

Neubauer said Democrats are prepared to prevent it from getting that far.

“Our caucus is very clear that this is one of our top priorities for this session,” she said. “We’ve discussed it countless times and we are in very close communication with every member of the caucus and will be throughout the session to make sure that we’re doing what we need to do. And people will make real sacrifices — time with their family, vacation, time in their districts — in order to make sure that we are doing everything in our power to protect the veto.”

Wisconsin Watch reporter Jacob Resneck contributed to this report.

The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with WPR, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.

Wisconsin Democrats on ‘veto watch’ after Tony Evers blocks 10 bills 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.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.

An Oshkosh police officer shot and wounded a suicidal 34-year-old man two blocks from the man’s house this summer after authorities say he pointed a hunting rifle at them.

Benson Thao’s identity was splashed in news stories across the region in the weeks after the June 29 shooting, in which the Winnebago County district attorney announced the police officer was legally justified in firing his service rifle.

Yet the identity of the officer and some of the others involved in the incident remain withheld from the public — even in court documents.

The reason for breaking a longstanding norm in Wisconsin law enforcement transparency?

Police and prosecutors say the officers were victims for having a gun pointed at them and Marsy’s Law, a constitutional amendment passed by voters in 2020 to protect victims’ privacy rights, includes law enforcement.

It’s the latest example of a national trend in which more than a dozen states have passed nearly identical amendments leading some law enforcement agencies to withhold identities of witnesses and officers in police shootings, a practice civil liberties advocates say erodes police accountability. 

In Columbus, Ohio, police officers involved in fatal shootings have had their identities withheld and even their faces obscured in edited body camera footage released after city attorneys cited privacy for police officers under Marsy’s Law. 

In Florida, the state’s highest court is weighing a legal challenge brought by the police union to prevent the city from releasing the names of officers who shot and killed suspects, arguing the officers are victims and should be afforded privacy. 

Civil libertarians point to similar episodes in South Dakota and North Dakota that were reported before Wisconsin voters approved Marsy’s Law at the urging of a lobbying effort funded almost entirely by a tech billionaire.

DAs diverge on release of key information

A similar nonfatal shooting by Stevens Point police in April played out quite differently than the Oshkosh incident. Police shot and wounded an armed man after he allegedly opened fire on officers who had surrounded him in his home’s detached garage. 

Initially, the names of the police officers were withheld in charging documents against Nicholas E. Meyer, the wounded 41-year-old who faces attempted murder charges.

But Portage County District Attorney Cass Cousins released the names of the two officers — Alexander Beach and Zachary Gartmann — in a press release announcing that he had cleared their use of deadly force.

“There is nothing specifically in the statute that says these names must be kept confidential,” Cousins told Wisconsin Watch. “I think there’s always gonna be a tension between transparency and victim rights.”

Sometimes the names of police officers are released while the investigation is underway.

In Grand Chute, town police Lt. Russ Blahnik was named less than 24 hours after he shot a 34-year-old fugitive twice in the leg on Aug. 1. The Outagamie Sheriff’s Office said Pierce Don Lee Folkerts ignored commands to drop what later proved to be a replica pistol after leading police on a foot chase through an apartment complex. He’s expected to survive.

Uncertainty in applying Marsy’s Law

The difference in disclosure standards can be traced to uncertainty among police and prosecutors on how to fairly apply Marsy’s Law — a constitutional amendment approved by nearly 75% of Wisconsin voters that broadens the definition of a crime victim and strengthens privacy protections that critics say comes at the expense of the rights of criminal defendants.

Oshkosh Police Chief Dean Smith said law enforcement officials are keeping with a national trend to afford more privacy to victims — including their own police officers acting in the line of duty.

“The voters have said this is what they want,” Smith told Wisconsin Watch. “And this is a piece of that.”

But civil rights groups argue the constitutional amendment question on the ballot was simplistic and didn’t fully explain the implications of the law. 

“Who in their right mind would be opposed to expanding victims rights?” said Margo Kirchner, executive director of the Wisconsin Justice Initiative, a public interest lawyer group that unsuccessfully challenged the constitutional amendment in court. “And that one question just leaves out so much information on what it does to defendants’ rights, what it does to the rights of the public to know about police shootings.”

Wisconsin’s constitutional amendment made it through the Republican-controlled Legislature with bipartisan support including an endorsement from Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul. The 64-word question went to voters with no mention of changing standards for transparency in police shootings.

A foreseeable problem

Critics in the legal community say the complications created by Marsy’s Law were clear but crime victims’ rights are an untouchable third rail in politics.

“A lot of people knew that this was a problem coming,” said Ed Fallone, an associate law professor at Marquette University Law School who ran unsuccessfully for Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2013 and 2020. “And unfortunately, if you were an elected official or candidate for office, like myself, the smart thing to do from a vote-getting standpoint was to just keep your mouth shut.”

Oshkosh’s police chief pointed to the Winnebago County district attorney’s decision to withhold the names of the officers in deference to privacy concerns under Marsy’s Law. Still, he admitted it can cause frustration among some members of the public.

“This is a difficult thing,” Smith said. “I don’t know if when Marsy’s Law was enshrined within our Constitution, if there was a consideration of all the areas that this could touch.”

Winnebago County District Attorney Eric Sparr — a longtime prosecutor who began his career in the office in 2005 — said other than juveniles or victims of certain sensitive offenses like rape or domestic violence, it has long been standard for prosecutors to identify police, suspects and even witnesses in court filings.

“Once Marsy’s Law hit, we shifted right away and pulled all victim names from public documents,” Sparr told Wisconsin Watch.

That can include police officers that deploy lethal force. Sparr said he understands public concerns about loss of transparency but it’s a tough call and local prosecutors are left trying to interpret victims’ privacy rights, which he says are “annoyingly poorly defined” and left up to interpretation.

“There’s not a lot of guidance as far as implementation,” Sparr said. “Department of Justice has made some efforts to interpret and share their interpretations so there can be as much uniformity as possible around the state, but it’s just inherently difficult when the language and the amendment was really very general.”

The state Department of Justice referred Wisconsin Watch to a 2021 advisory from its Office of Open Government that discusses balancing victims’ privacy requirements with disclosure responsibility under the public records laws.

“Authorities cannot create a bright-line rule or policy to withhold all victim records and information,” it said. “Authorities must still apply the public records law balancing test to each and every record, on a case-by-case basis, to determine whether to release the records or information.”

Kaul declined to comment. But he did release a statement this spring on the third anniversary of the constitutional amendment.

“Ensuring that the rights of crime victims are respected both makes Wisconsin safer and is an important part of achieving justice,” Kaul wrote in a statement posted on the Marsy’s Law for All foundation’s website. “I’m proud of the excellent work the Wisconsin Department of Justice does to stand up for victims in Wisconsin.”

The department’s Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI) investigates many police shootings in response to a 2014 law requiring outside agencies to assist such investigations. It continues to release the names of police officers in case files posted on its website.

But it has allowed local authorities to interpret the complex and competing responsibilities. In the case of the Oshkosh police shooting, it deferred to that city’s police department’s interpretation of officer privacy in a press release.

Fallone, who chaired the Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission for two years until stepping down in July, said Marsy’s Law allows some police departments to backslide on transparency.

“It’s in the eye of the beholder,” Fallone said. “And I’m not surprised that some police departments and prosecutors define the victimhood of police broadly and other departments define it narrowly.”

Marsy’s Law doesn’t shield disclosure in Milwaukee

In Milwaukee, only one of the officers in a pair of police shootings on Cinco de Mayo that wounded two people has been identified in public documents. Milwaukee Police Officer Andrew L. Langer’s last name was included in charging documents against a teenager who allegedly fired an illegally modified pistol that fired rapidly like a machine gun.

Milwaukee police officials confirmed there is only one Langer on the force. He was also one of at least nine officers named in a lawsuit brought by a man who was clubbed, pepper sprayed and tased by several Milwaukee officers in a violent 2018 confrontation in which he fought off several officers. The incident attracted significant publicity and public scrutiny after being captured by bystanders and recorded on police body cameras.

The Milwaukee Common Council recently paid a $175,000 settlement after the civilian sued alleging excessive police force.

A Milwaukee Police Department spokesperson said it doesn’t publicly release the names of officers involved in shootings. But Fallone credits its police chief for not interpreting Marsy’s Law as a barrier against disclosure of officers in court records, public records requests or by members of the police commission. 

He said it’s important that the identities of officers involved in use of force be known so they can later be held accountable — which doesn’t always happen.

“Residents are still upset about officers who have kind of moved around and never really faced any consequences for their actions,” he said.

No charges were filed in an unrelated Cinco de Mayo shooting after the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s investigation found a 22-year-old Greenfield resident — whose name was not released — had been defending himself in a chaotic scene in which he exchanged gunfire with subjects in a car and legally owned the weapon.

The district attorney said MPD’s use of force remains under investigation in both May 5 nonfatal shootings. But in cases that aren’t prosecuted it remains unclear whether an officer’s name would be released.

Winnebago DA: Police aren’t automatically victims

In Shawano County in 2022, a police officer shot and killed 46-year-old Lucas Christenson in his home after he threatened his wife and her son with a shotgun. Shawano Police Officer Jeff Buettner fired 11 times — striking Christenson twice — as the man trained the gun on his wife and then aimed it at the officer.

Sparr conducted the legal review of the death of Christenson — who had mounted an independent challenge for county sheriff in 2014 — in response to a request by the Shawano County district attorney.

The sheriff’s office — which investigated the shooting in conjunction with state investigators — didn’t directly release the name of the police officer but did release Sparr’s full report, which identified everyone in the Nov. 19, 2022, incident aside from the dead man’s wife.

“We do a memo to law enforcement that does have those names,” Sparr said. “What they choose to do with that, ultimately is up to them.”

The decision to publicly name the officer who fired the deadly shots in that report contrasts with the recent withholding of key officer names involved in nonfatal police shootings in Oshkosh. 

Sparr said it’s a judgment call he has to make on a case-by-case basis.

“I don’t know if we were ever truly faced with the question explicitly of whether that officer or those officers were victims,” Sparr said. 

He said the person whose life was most threatened in that incident was the man’s estranged wife — whose name was withheld — not responding officers.

“The main person at least who was endangered in that one was someone else, not law enforcement,” Sparr added. “And so I guess I wasn’t, in that case, really thinking of them as victims.”

In another incident from this year, an Oshkosh police officer fired on a wanted suspect as he allegedly drove a car toward the officer. In that case the officer’s name remains blacked out in a legal memo and withheld in charging documents obtained by Wisconsin Watch.

Montrael Clark, the 44-year-old suspect who survived a gunshot to the forehead is identified in charging documents and faces felony charges of reckless endangerment.

If the case goes to trial, the facts of the case will be presented to a jury.

“And then clearly, names are coming out, people have to testify,” Sparr said. “There’s no way around it at that point.”

Fallone said taking police officers’ claim of victim privacy to the extreme, means normal scrutiny is made difficult.

“The day-to-day work of being a police officer could pretty much be construed by some in their own opinion as falling under Marsy’s Law,” Fallone said, “which makes any sort of public oversight and transparency and even some cases of discipline, quite difficult.”

In Dane County, the district attorney’s office hasn’t named officers in two recent press releases announcing it had ruled their use of force justified. But their names were released by the state DCI whose agents investigated the shootings.

The last time District Attorney Ismael Ozanne named officers who used force was in a March 2022 press release clearing Madison police officers who had tased a suicidal man in November 2021 after he shot himself with his own gun.

Ozanne did not respond to requests for comment about his office’s policy. 

Background to constitutional amendment

Marsy’s Law has been approved by voters in ballot measures in at least 14 states, though it has been overturned in Montana and Pennsylvania over questions of its conflict with the U.S. Constitution.

The movement to adopt the constitutional amendment was self-funded by tech billionaire Henry Nicholas III. The law is named after his sister who was killed by an ex-boyfriend in the early 1980s. 

In 2020 Wisconsin became the latest state to enshrine the law in its constitution after a $1.5 million legislative lobbying effort that at one point employed five registered lobbyists. 

Marsy’s Law for Wisconsin — which was funded entirely by Nicholas’ national organization — spent nearly $4.5 million to sway voters to support the constitutional amendment.

Wisconsin Justice Initiative tried to organize opposition but was outspent by a ballot measure that enjoyed support from both major parties.

“They had this single issue and a lot of money,” Kirchner recalled from the 2020 campaign. “They had ads on the air telling people to vote yes, there was nobody in response who could afford television ads.”

A legal challenge claimed that the ballot question was too simplistic. When the group won in Dane County Circuit Court, Wisconsin Justice Initiative publicly urged Kaul not to defend the amendment considering the well-publicized challenges in implementing it in other states.

“They could have decided to not appeal and just let Marsy’s Law fall — and they chose not to,” she said. “So Josh Kaul’s office chose to fight for the validity of the amendment.”

The Wisconsin Supreme Court ultimately decided to uphold Marsy’s Law. But the 6-1 decision was fractured with five separate decisions applying different legal reasoning. For now it’s the law of the land with the criminal justice system left to sort it out.

Legal challenges to Marsy’s Law continue

There is another challenge pending in the Court of Appeals, including a contempt order against a prosecutor who allowed both victims to hear each other’s testimony in a battery case. Courts routinely sequester witnesses so their testimony can’t be influenced by others, but Marsy’s Law guarantees victims the right to attend every hearing and stage of a trial.

Marsy’s Law for Wisconsin’s state director Nela Kalpic said since 2020 there have been multiple incidents where law enforcement fired shots and the names of those officers have been released. She said she was not familiar with the Winnebago County examples, but acknowledged a potential need to clarify how the law should be fairly applied.

“It is appropriate going forward that state and local policymakers and courts work out the application of the law over time,” she said.

For critics like Fallone, the two-time Supreme Court candidate, the constitutional amendment that “sailed through with minimal scrutiny” has left just these sorts of complexities for the criminal justice system to untangle. It won’t be easy.

“Once you amend the Constitution to put something in there,” he said, “you kind of have to live with it.”

The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with WPR, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.

Oshkosh police cite ‘Marsy’s Law’ to withhold names of officers who shot suspects 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.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.

Wisconsin Watch is pleased to announce the hiring of Jack Kelly as its new statehouse reporter.

Kelly, 26, joins Wisconsin Watch after two years as a statehouse reporter for the Capital Times based in Madison. Before that he worked as a contributing reporter with Wisconsin Watch reporting on judicial and environmental issues. He has also covered Congress, keeping tabs on South Carolina’s congressional delegation for McClatchy.

In Wisconsin Kelly covered the driving forces behind state politics over the last two years. He wrote about the partisan investigation of the state’s 2020 presidential election and conducted an in-depth probe of a Republican effort to abolish the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission. He also profiled some of Wisconsin’s top policymakers, including Gov. Tony Evers and Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu.

He has a bachelor’s degree from UW-Madison and a master’s degree from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. He was named the Wisconsin Newspaper Association’s 2022 Rookie Reporter of the Year. His reporting has also earned several other awards from the WNA and the Milwaukee Press Club.

“I am drawn to Wisconsin Watch’s commitment to fearless and fair journalism,” Kelly said. “Whether it’s thorough examinations of ‘election integrity’ proposals or a news-you-can-use guide to help formerly incarcerated people navigate voting, every story Wisconsin Watch publishes leaves readers better equipped to pursue meaningful change in their communities.”

Kelly, who starts Aug. 7, is based in Madison. He can be reached at jkelly@wisconsinwatch.org.

The Wisconsin Watch statehouse team focuses its nonpartisan investigative reporting on state government and political issues, including disinformation, governmental overreach, threats to Wisconsin’s democracy and issues affecting Wisconsin’s most vulnerable communities. The team works closely with the entire Wisconsin Watch staff and other news outlets to investigate government integrity and quality of life issues including environment, education, economy, racial and criminal justice, and health.

Other members of the statehouse team include:

— Matthew DeFour, the statehouse bureau chief, previously worked for 16 years at the Wisconsin State Journal as a local government, education and statehouse reporter and editor. DeFour is based in Madison and can be reached at mdefour@wisconsinwatch.org.

— Jacob Resneck, a Report for America corps member, previously worked in Juneau, Alaska as an editor and reporter for the nonprofit public media consortium CoastAlaska. Resneck is based in Oshkosh and can be reached at jresneck@wisconsinwatch.org.

— Phoebe Petrovic covers disinformation for Wisconsin Watch and previously worked with Kelly to produce Justice Deferred, a Wisconsin Watch and WPR investigation that examined the unusual sentencing practices of an Outagamie County judge. Elements of that reporting were included in Petrovic’s Open and Shut podcast, which has won several awards, including a regional Edward R. Murrow. Petrovic is based in Madison and can be reached at ppetrovic@wisconsinwatch.org.

Kelly emerged as the top choice from a very competitive application process. More than 30 journalists with varying levels of skill and experience applied.

“From insightful interviews with top political leaders to producing one of the state’s best political newsletters, Jack Kelly has quickly established himself as a major force in Wisconsin journalism,” DeFour said.

Wisconsin Watch’s mission is to increase the quality, quantity and understanding of investigative reporting in Wisconsin, while training current and future generations of investigative journalists. Our work fosters an informed citizenry and strengthens democracy. Wisconsin Watch distributes its content for free to newspapers, radio and TV stations, and news websites in Wisconsin and nationwide. In 2022, Wisconsin Watch produced 65 major stories that were picked up by more than 280 news outlets, reaching an estimated audience of more than 49.9 million readers.

To support the Center’s work, click here. All financial support is publicly acknowledged to protect the integrity of our journalism.

For more Wisconsin Watch news straight to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

Wisconsin Watch hires Jack Kelly as new statehouse reporter 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.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.

Republican lawmakers held a day of back-to-back public hearings in mid-April for bills that would add restrictions to receiving unemployment insurance payouts, ban local guaranteed income programs and prevent state agencies from automatically renewing low-income health insurance. 

A lead proponent testifying at the Capitol was a former Republican legislative aide representing a Florida-based advocacy group with no membership and tens of millions of anonymous donations. One Republican lawmaker noted it was the third time that afternoon that Adam Gibbs had spoken in favor of the bills, all which were aimed at dismantling the state’s social safety net.

“Busy day in the Legislature,” replied Gibbs, communications director for the nonprofit Foundation for Government Accountability.

His pitch that April afternoon was succinct: Wisconsin employers struggle to fill jobs because the state’s unemployment insurance benefits — which are among the bottom third of benefits in the nation — are too generous.

“One of the fastest ways that we can deal with Wisconsin’s ongoing workforce shortage is to keep people who are still in the labor market, those recently unemployed, productively engaged in the workforce,” Gibbs told members of the Assembly Committee on Workforce Development and Economic Opportunities.

The committee later voted 10-5 along party lines to advance the four bills that would add barriers to unemployed workers receiving cash payments from the state. The bills sailed through the Republican-controlled Legislature with only that single public hearing.

Once sent to Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ desk they’ll likely be blocked. Evers has vetoed similar bills in the past and a spokesperson told Wisconsin Watch that “similar if not identical legislation” would face the same fate.

But in Republican-controlled states, FGA and its lobbying arm, Opportunity Solutions Project, have racked up a series of wins. Recently, FGA got national attention for its successful drive to relax child labor restrictions in Iowa and Arkansas. A similar effort supported by the group is pending in the Missouri legislature.

Major Wisconsin Republican benefactors have fueled FGA’s successes. They include the Uihlein family, owners of the Pleasant Prairie-based Uline Industries, and the conservative Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation of Milwaukee.

In Wisconsin — where unemployment remained at a record low of 2.4% in May — the group has pushed bills that would broaden the definition of workplace misconduct to ease unemployment benefit denials as well as empower the Legislature’s budget committee to veto future federal jobless relief. It also opposes Medicaid expansion and supports certain election changes such as purging the names of ineligible voters from election rolls and making it harder for clerks to correct minor mistakes on absentee ballot envelopes.

Opponents of the bills include the left-leaning Main Street Alliance which organizes small businesses for grassroots advocacy on economic and social issues. Interim policy director Shawn Phetteplace said dark money pro-business groups like FGA enjoy privileged access with the Republican leadership setting the agenda.

“There are a lot of ex-Republican operatives,” he said. “And so it’s like you leave the building and go right back in on the other side.”

A Wisconsin Watch analysis of the 2021-22 session found that of the 17 bills passed with Opportunity Solutions Project/FGA support, Evers vetoed all but one. The lobbying group also opposed a Democratic-sponsored bill that would extend Medicaid for eligible women for a full year after childbirth; Republicans refused to schedule a hearing, and the GOP-led budget committee stripped it from the governor’s budget. The group also supported 16 bills that ultimately did not pass both chambers.

FGA and its lobbying arm in recent years have kept a relatively low profile despite collecting millions in funding, hiring at least 115 lobbyists and flying lawmakers, including some from Wisconsin, across the country for educational seminars.

In Wisconsin, Opportunity Solutions Project reported three registered lobbyists — two of them in state — and $106,863 in lobbying expenditures during the 2021-22 session. This year’s numbers aren’t in yet, but a Wisconsin Watch tally puts its lobbying expenditures at nearly $275,000 between 2017 and 2022.

Secret donors seek to influence state policy

Watchdogs that monitor dark money groups say FGA is just the latest example of an advocacy organization bankrolled by a small network of billionaire activists intent on deregulation, dismantling welfare protections and restricting voting rights.

FGA doesn’t disclose its donors. But IRS data tracked by the Center for Media and Democracy, which investigates the influence of money in politics, show some of the largest checks came from foundations tied to conservative causes.

The Ed Uihlein Family Foundation donated $17.85 million between 2014 and 2021, according to tax filings. The Bradley Foundation of Milwaukee gave $2.75 million over a similar period. 

FGA’s lobbying arm isn’t required to disclose its funding sources. Critics call that a loophole in the law, giving donors the ability to secretly influence public policy. 

The IRS says charitable foundations like FGA aren’t supposed to engage in substantial political lobbying. But like other similar groups, it shares office space, staffers and other resources with its lobbying arm. Such arrangements allow donors to make tax deductible donations that ultimately end up being used for lobbying.

David Armiak, research director with the Center for Media and Democracy, called it a “bit of a wild wild west with these groups.”

“There’s just not that much analysis or investigations or audits into these groups to see if this stuff is really legal,” he added.

Gibbs has a business card identifying his employer as the tax-exempt foundation — while also testifying on behalf of Opportunity Solutions Network, the group registered to lobby lawmakers. Until last year, Gibbs had worked in several legislative offices including most recently as the communications director for state Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu, R-Oostburg.

Gibbs told Wisconsin Watch it’s a common practice among charities, including progressive groups, to have both nonprofit and lobbying arms.

“We’re like any of the other ones: NAACP, Sierra Club, all of those types of organizations,” Gibbs said. “We have to file the necessary paperwork with the IRS. But we protect the identity of donors as well, just like all those other organizations do.”

Armiak agreed the issue is bipartisan.

“It’s a problem that exists on both sides of the political spectrum,” he said. “But it’s been exploited because the IRS has been defunded and defanged.”

A review of lobbying records found that Opportunity Solutions Project has focused on public assistance programs, health insurance and election reform. This session, it opposed a rule that would have allowed Wisconsin clerks to correct minor mistakes on absentee ballot envelopes. 

FGA is part of the State Policy Network, a national network of conservative nonprofits. Other network affiliates active in the Badger State include the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty law firm, the Badger Institute, MacIver Institute and Institute for Reforming Government. Armiak said having the same messages and proposals amplified by multiple groups gives them additional weight.

“There are all these different groups, and experts that are calling for one thing, right?” he said. “When in fact, they’re basically the same thing funded by a handful of very wealthy interests.”

Group pays for lawmakers’ travel

At least half a dozen Wisconsin Republican lawmakers have traveled out of state at FGA’s expense for educational seminars. They include Senate President Chris Kapenga, R-Delafield, who reported $800 in in-kind donations from the group to attend a legislative conference last December in Florida. He declined to comment.

In April Sen. Dan Feyen, R-Fond du Lac, Sen. Cory Tomczyk, R-Mosinee, and Rep. Clint Moses, R-Menomonie, traveled to Nashville for a two-day meeting at FGA’s expense. The lawmakers have not yet reported the cost of that three-day trip. 

“It was not a super partisan convention or anything like that,” Moses told Wisconsin Watch. “Just more of a think tank.”

Moses said there were Republican lawmakers from at least a half-dozen Midwestern and Southern states. The thrust of the agenda was cutting Medicaid fraud and making it harder for able-bodied adults to draw benefits rather than return to work.

“There’s a lot of people that are not in the workforce that are on the sidelines and choosing not to go back to work,” Moses said.

He brushed off the fact that unemployment rates have cratered with labor participation higher than pre-pandemic levels.

“I’ve heard that argument: Unemployment rates are at a record low and this and that,” he said. “But we still have, obviously, people that are not working and we still have a huge demand.”

He added that demographic changes that include an aging population combined with declining fertility rates also factor into employers’ struggles to find workers.

Feyen also traveled in December to a two-day FGA “educational” seminar in Naples, Florida, at a value of $1,983. 

The sessions included presentations by FGA of its legislative agenda in other states and how similar legislation could work in Wisconsin.

“If something’s working successfully in other states, we want to try and replicate that here,” Feyen said. 

Even though Evers vetoed nearly all of the FGA-backed bills, Feyen said he’s not discouraged, having reintroduced three bills relating to unemployment insurance the day after the meeting in Tennessee.

“We’re bringing some of these bills back, hoping that the governor will finally come around,” Feyen said.

Bills face Evers’ veto pen

With unemployment rates at historic lows Democrats question why Republican lawmakers are focused on increasing barriers to unemployment assistance.

“This is a cynical distraction from the work that we should be doing,” Senate Minority Leader Melissa Agard, D-Madison, said. “But thankfully, they’re not becoming law.”

Civil rights, social welfare and public health advocates said in a May 31 letter the four unemployment bills were rushed through legislative committees without much chance for public comment. Three of the bills received public hearings in separate committee meetings at the same time.

Main Street Alliance, the left-leaning small business advocacy group, was one of the more than two dozen signatories. Phetteplace said pro-business groups like FGA that are awash in dark money claim to advocate for small business employers but are out of step with ordinary people.

“For a long time, you’ve had this sense of identity theft, where you have organizations that claim that they’re speaking on behalf of small business, when really they’re speaking on behalf of their corporate donors,” he said.

Editor’s note: The story and a photo caption were corrected to clarify that the Bradley Foundation is not a family foundation.

The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with WPR, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.

Wisconsin billionaires quietly bankroll effort to shrink state’s social safety net 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.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.

Editor’s note: A previous version of the story referenced a grant Cassville obtained through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. We removed that reference after learning the village obtained the funding without a formal application, making the information irrelevant to this story.

Wisconsin’s small communities could obtain slices of the billions of federal dollars allocated for infrastructure and renewable energy projects, such as upgrading drinking water systems or purchasing electric buses.

But the Republican-controlled Legislature has rejected a recent proposal to help staff-strapped towns and villages circumvent the greatest barriers for bringing home such funds: the federal government’s time-consuming application and record-keeping requirements.

In his two-year budget proposal, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers pitched the creation of a five-person resource team to help local governments identify and apply for federal and state grants.

“This is a small amount of state money that can help local units of government access large amounts of federal funds,” Milwaukee Rep. Evan Goyke, the ranking Democrat on the state’s budget-writing committee, said during a June hearing. “And what those federal funds can do locally can be transformational, but those locals have to know the opportunity is there and they have to have the technical assistance.”

However, the GOP-controlled Joint Committee on Finance rejected the $960,000 measure along party lines before sending the budget to the full Legislature.

Evers on Wednesday signed the budget, vetoing 51 items from the $99 billion plan mostly authored by Republicans, including scaling back a major income tax cut and extending school funding increases for more than 400 years. But because the state grant team under his original proposal would have created new positions, Evers could not write them back into the budget with his veto pen.

Small communities struggle to manage grants

Wisconsin cities and villages, where the median population is about 1,500, often lack the staff capacity to track, apply for and manage grants.

“Wisconsin is a state of small towns. We need to recognize the limitations,” said Jerry Deschane, executive director of the League of Wisconsin Municipalities. “They simply don’t have a bunch of bodies sitting around waiting to do federal paperwork.”

In southwest Wisconsin, the village of Cassville, population 777, contracts with a local engineering firm for grant administration.

Keevin Williams, who retired as village president earlier this year after 27 years in public service, said grant applications and recordkeeping would be significantly harder to handle without outside assistance. A state team could be of great use to communities lacking that resource, he said.

But even for small municipalities that employ staff with expertise, federal programs aren’t always relevant to their needs.

“Much of the funding at the federal level tends to be for projects that we just don’t have,” said David Carlson, administrator of Lancaster, a city of 3,907.

He pointed to a recently announced program that seeks to increase connectivity in rural areas, funded under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which allocated $550 billion dollars in new spending for water, transportation, energy and broadband internet projects. The rural connectivity program requires proposals to have a regional impact, according to grant criteria.

“Let’s face it, most small communities don’t have transportation projects that have regional impacts,” Carlson said.

Environmental lobbyists who backed the grant resource team found most lawmakers actually supported the proposal and observed a need for it within their own communities. But a majority on the Joint Committee on Finance nonetheless opposed creating additional government staff positions.

“It’s the very communities this was most supposed to help that are going to be most hurt by this rather political decision,” said Jennifer Giegerich, government affairs director with Wisconsin Conservation Voters.

Committee co-chairs Sen. Howard Marklein, R-Spring Green, and Rep. Mark Born, R-Beaver Dam, did not respond to requests for comment.

Ultimately, the communities and states that aggressively invest in staff capacity will be the ones that reap the federal funding, Giegerich said.

“My hope is that in the next year, there’s just gonna be so many opportunities coming down and so many communities in Wisconsin who are not able to take advantage of them, that legislators will see the error of their ways and hopefully include this in our next budget.”

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter to get our news straight to your inbox.

Republican lawmakers reject proposal to help Wisconsin communities access federal grant programs 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.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.

When Jamie Gaffke gave birth to her first son in 2014, she and her spouse spent about $3,000 on a lawyer to ensure among other things that both of their names appeared on the birth certificate.

One reason the expense was necessary at the time: On birth certificates, according to Wisconsin statutes, the parents in artificial insemination cases are defined as the mother and the “husband of the mother” when the individual is conceived or born.

Gaffke, 43, and her wife Ruth Vater, 39, recalled in an interview with Wisconsin Watch feeling terrified during the hearing at the Rock County Courthouse where they went to file a petition to ensure Vater’s same-sex parental rights. At one point, the judge appointed a guardian ad litem, “a person whose responsibility would be to represent the interests of our child, as if we did not,” Vater said.

The case came shortly after the federal courts struck down Wisconsin’s 2006 constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. But even in 2018 — three years after the U.S. Supreme Court had legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in the landmark decision Obergefell v. Hodges — Gaffke and Vater had to return to court to secure Vater’s parental rights for their second son.

For many same-sex couples in Wisconsin, the Obergefell decision being commemorated now during Pride Month was only one step in an incomplete legal journey.

State law still includes more than 100 references to “husband” and nearly as many references to “wife,” a Wisconsin Watch review found.

Those sections of the law include documents and laws related to not just birth, marriage and divorce, but also taxes, fishing licenses and veterans home accommodations. Even the definition of “parent” is outdated, including either a biological parent, a parent by adoption or a “husband who has consented to the artificial insemination of his wife.” The state’s unconstitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage and the “Family Code” in state statute, which refers specifically to “husband and wife,” remain on the books.

Court decisions and administrative actions under Democratic Gov. Tony Evers have blocked the practical effects of those terms — for now. But the 2022 revival of Wisconsin’s 1849 abortion ban after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned federally guaranteed abortion rights reminds many in the LGBTQ+ community that some rights, once granted, can still be taken away.

“It’s really frustrating because most folks across the state of Wisconsin support the rights of our family, but the law doesn’t,” said Vater, whose family now lives in Madison. “Most people assume that the status for families like ours is much safer and better than the one we actually live with. The reality of our situation is much more tenuous than most people realize.”

Bipartisan legislation stalls

Wisconsin is among a small number of states that include discriminatory language against same-sex couples in how they define “parent,” according to a Wisconsin Watch review of all 50 state laws. Only two states — Wisconsin and South Dakota — include a reference to “husband” in the primary definition of “parent.”

At least 21 states have adopted neutral language through a law known as the Uniform Parentage Act, according to a recent report from the Movement Advancement Project, a research group that promotes equity and inclusiveness. Wisconsin is among 29 states that have not.

Maine, for example, in 2016 changed its definition of parent to include a person if “the person and the woman giving birth to the child are married to each other and the child is born during the marriage.”

In Wisconsin, a once bipartisan effort to update state law to include gender neutral terminology for spouses and parents has stalled in the Republican-controlled Legislature.

Sen. Mark Spreitzer, D-Beloit, and several colleagues introduced bills to update the language in each of the past four sessions. The 2019 bill had two Republican co-sponsors, Reps. Todd Novak, R-Dodgeville, and Joel Kitchens, R-Sturgeon Bay.

Spreitzer said when he has talked to Republican colleagues about the bill, which he expects to introduce again later this session, the term “let sleeping dogs lie” comes up.

“ ‘You’ve got your win at the U.S. Supreme Court, why do you want me to take a vote on something I’m going to take heat from my base for?’ ” Spreitzer said, characterizing the responses. 

Novak, the state’s only openly gay elected Republican lawmaker, said everybody acknowledges that same-sex marriage is the law “so there’s really no interest in doing a bill just for statute cleanup.”

“Most legislators don’t even realize the statutes say this,” said Novak, who declined to sponsor last session’s bill after clashing with the Legislature’s LGBTQ+ caucus over his support of an unsuccessful measure to ban transgender women from women’s sports.

Evers has proposed revising state statutes to incorporate gender-neutral terms in each of his last two budget requests, but the Republican-controlled Joint Finance Committee removed the language as part of a broad motion removing non-fiscal policy measures.

Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu, R-Oostburg, and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, did not respond to requests for comment.

Public opinion, court majorities shift on same-sex marriage

Voters amended the Wisconsin Constitution in November 2006 by a 59%-41% margin to state: “Only a marriage between one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in this state. A legal status identical or substantially similar to that of marriage for unmarried individuals shall not be valid or recognized in this state.”

The Obergefell decision nullified that language, but it will remain in the state constitution unless the Legislature in two consecutive sessions votes to remove it, and voters approve the change. Should a future U.S. Supreme Court overturn Obergefell, some warn Wisconsin’s constitutional ban on same-sex marriage could again take effect.

In a concurring opinion last year to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the half-century constitutional right to an abortion before viability, conservative Justice Clarence Thomas said the court “should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents” — including the 5-4 same-sex marriage ruling. The court now has a 6-3 conservative majority. 

In December, Congressional Democrats and President Joe Biden repealed the federal 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, even though Obergefell had already nullified it. A key provision of DOMA, which prevented states from having to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states, was previously struck down in the 2013 U.S. Supreme Court decision U.S. v. Windsor.

Megin McDonell, executive director of FAIR Wisconsin, an LGBTQ+ advocacy organization, said there’s “definitely value” in updating the statutes.

“We want to make it permanent in the statutes, or as permanent as the statutes can be,” she said.

“This is the law of the land in all 50 states,” McDonell added. “We should update our state statutes just to reflect that. … Cleaning up the statutes and fixing the language would provide more clarity, more recognition for people.”

Asked for a response to advocates trying to neutralize gender-specific language in state law, Julaine Appling, president of Wisconsin Family Action, the lead organization opposing same-sex marriage, chuckled and said, “I guess that ship has sailed.”

She later backtracked on using that phrase adding, “I will fight every single day to retain the terms husband and wife, mother and father, male and female, all those terms” in state law. Appling explained that retaining the terms is important in case Democrats take control of Wisconsin’s GOP-run Legislature.

“The minute we don’t have a more conservative majority in the state Legislature,” she said, “is the minute everything like that changes.”

There’s no doubt public opinion has shifted sharply on same-sex marriage in the past generation. In 1996, when Congress passed DOMA, just 27% of respondents nationwide told Gallup they approved of same-sex marriage. In 2022, that number was 71%.

Husband and wife in Wisconsin law

In June 2021, Evers issued an executive order directing “each cabinet agency to use gender-neutral language whenever practicable in external documents, including but not limited to: using gender-neutral terms and pronouns, drafting to eliminate the need for pronouns, omitting superfluous gendered words, and making any reference to gendered family relations, to the extent allowable by state and federal law.”

That order covered administrative rules, guidance documents, manuals, websites and all similar documents. But it could not re-write statutes. That’s the Legislature’s job.

Wisconsin state statutes remain riddled with language that excludes same-sex married couples. For example, the definition of “parent” that refers specifically to “husband” appears in multiple sections of law, such as for bone marrow transplants, juvenile justice and access to children’s medical records.

Other examples where “husband” and “wife” still appear in state law include: 

• The crime of theft doesn’t apply if the perpetrator and the victim are “husband and wife.”
• For bank accounts, marital accounts are defined as those who “claim to be husband and wife.”
• State law nearly covers same-sex couples in a section on veterans homes, acknowledging that the second priority for housing goes to spouses of those who qualify for a veterans home. But it later notes the department may deviate from that order “to prevent the separation of husband and wife.”
• Divorce proceedings allow couples to attempt reconciliation during which time they may attempt to live together as “husband and wife.”
• Statutes refer to a “combined husband and wife resident fishing license.”
• A homestead tax exemption applies to land owned “by husband and wife jointly.” 
• Even wild rice harvesting license rules say immediate family members, including “husband and wife,” may share licenses. 

Same-sex couples take cases to court

Evers’ order came after years in which same-sex couples had to return to court to ensure equal treatment under the law, even after it was legalized nationally.

“There was just a time when the language didn’t match the reality on the ground,” said Juscha Robinson, an attorney who has worked on real estate and estate planning cases for same-sex couples. “You would have couples flipping coins over who was going to be husband and who was going to be wife.”

Even though the 2015 high court ruling required that same-sex couples be granted immediately all of the same rights as heterosexual couples, Wisconsin and several other states continued to resist.

The Department of Health Services under Republican Gov. Scott Walker failed to update birth certificate forms to accommodate same-sex couples, despite employees expressing confusion internally about how to address the issue. 

In 2016, a federal judge in Madison granted a married female couple and other similarly situated couples the right to a birth certificate listing both spouses, suggesting that DHS update its forms. A 2017 U.S. Supreme Court decision affirmed the right to have both spouses listed on birth certificates nationwide.

Around that time, other official forms in Wisconsin began to change. The Wisconsin Court Records Management Committee began updating divorce and child custody forms to include gender-neutral language in 2017, according to archived meeting minutes. Previously divorce forms specifically referred to husband and wife, but now refer to petitioner A and B.

Judges and court officials from around the state heard no objections as they oversaw updates to the forms, according to Court Information Officer Tom Sheehan.

Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Kevin Martens, chair of the forms subcommittee, said court decisions — not political considerations — drove the changes in the forms. Should a future U.S. Supreme Court decision overturn the right to same-sex marriage, the current wording on the forms should suffice, he said.

“Even if that were the case, it wouldn’t change identifying the parties as ‘petitioner,’ ” Martens said. “You wouldn’t go back to a caption that said ‘husband and wife.’ You wouldn’t need to.”

Fight for equal rights continues

When Laura Megna, 37, of Madison, had her first child in 2018, the birth certificate form she and her wife filled out at the hospital still asked for the name of the “mother” and “father.” They crossed out those words and wrote in “parent” and “parent.”

The hospital mailed in the form and the state sent back a proof of the final birth certificate asking for any corrections. It still said “mother” and “father,” so they corrected it again. The final birth certificate came back with the correct titles.

Megna, who is the family liaison care coordinator at UnityPoint Health-Meriter, said the process was similar in 2020 when she had their second child, but there was greater awareness in the health care world that the change was possible. Last year, when their third child was born — after Evers’ executive order — the form had a “parent” and “parent” option.

Although that issue has been resolved for now, Megna said she would still like to see the language in the law changed because “we’re significantly more evolved than when many of these things were written.”

LGBTQ+ legal advocacy groups recommend all same-sex parents not rely on birth certificates, but also have courts legally recognize their parental rights, said Emily Dudak Leiter, an attorney at the Law Center for Children and Families in Madison.

“It still comes down to the culture in our country,” Dudak Leiter said. “That’s why all of this is more societal, not legal. It’s until you don’t have to worry about that unfairness, that’s when I won’t want a court order for every single one of my clients.”

The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with WPR, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.

Wisconsin law still refers to husband and wife, a reminder to LGBTQ+ families that their rights are at risk 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.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.

Around noon on an overcast April Election Day, dozens of canvassers returned to a second-floor conference room of the Greater Spring Hill Missionary Baptist Church on Milwaukee’s North Side.

They were dressed for the weather: Layers, winter hats and a few with ponchos. Within an hour, they would be back out in neighborhoods and knocking on doors. Walking a careful line between helpful resources and yet another person asking them to vote for the sixth time in less than 16 months.

The gathering of Black Leaders Organizing Communities represents a bulwark against an alarming trend in Wisconsin electoral politics: The state has transformed from one of the easiest places to cast a ballot 30 years ago to one of the most difficult. That trend is particularly pronounced among Black and Latino voters, according to recent research.

If BLOC’s canvassers were tired of talking about elections, executive director Angela Lang told them to imagine the fatigue voters felt.

“We had four elections just in 2022. Four,” she said. “The last one was in November. We slept for like a day, and we’re back at it. If we were doing all of this, imagine being a voter that’s not involved and engaged.”

There’s evidence the increased difficulty voters face compounds the election fatigue.

“If we believe in this experiment of democracy, one of the basic tenets of it … in our current iteration is that everyone who is a citizen at this point has the right to engage with the process,” said Andrea Benjamin, an African American studies professor at the University of Oklahoma who has researched and written about race and politics.

“And we shouldn’t be doing anything that makes that right harder to exercise.”

How it’s gotten more difficult to vote in Wisconsin 

For nearly 20 years, Wisconsin was a model for making the voting process easy, with the state’s same-day registration a major factor, according to the Cost of Voting Index. In 1996, Wisconsin ranked fourth among the 50 states.

In 2022, Wisconsin was among the most difficult places to register and vote, ranking 47th.

The Index, started by researchers at Northern Illinois University, ranks each state using 33 different variables, with registration deadlines carrying the most weight. As other states began to adopt measures already present in Wisconsin, such as same-day voter registration, Wisconsin’s ranking dipped slightly, but remained in the top 10.

Then Republicans took control of the Legislature and governor’s office after the 2010 election and implemented several measures that made voting more difficult. They extended residency requirements, shortened the time frame for early voting, increased residency requirements from 10 to 28 days and enacted the state’s voter ID law, which after several court challenges took effect in 2016.

“As soon as Wisconsin adopted that, it really caused the state to drop in accessibility,” said Michael Pomante, a Jacksonville University political science professor and co-author of the Index. He added that the drop suggested Wisconsin voters faced a “significantly” different landscape compared to other states.

More recently the state Supreme Court disallowed ballot drop boxes — even as some states expanded use — pushing Wisconsin even further down the list.

“It needs to be said or at least noted to Wisconsinites that their voting has become significantly more difficult for their voters over the years compared to other states,” Pomante said. “I mean, they are one of the states that has seen the most dramatic shift in the difficulty of voting over the last two decades.”

Republicans enacted the voter ID law and other restrictions in the name of election security. Then-Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, described the voter ID law specifically as making it “easier to vote and harder to cheat.”

There’s no evidence that the laws have significantly affected election fraud. 

From 2012 through 2022, there were 48 general, primary and special elections in Wisconsin. Prosecutors brought only 192 election fraud cases, or 0.0006% of all votes cast, Wisconsin Watch previously reported. And only 40 cases dealt with fraudulent actions like double voting or voting in the name of a dead person. The data didn’t show that the new laws had reduced the number of cases, the majority of which related to voting, often by mistake, by those on probation for a felony conviction.

And while it’s possible the laws make it harder to cheat in ways that elude prosecution, they also make it harder for many to vote.

Complicating matters over the past decade: changes to law or procedure coming right before an election, usually as the result of a lawsuit. That’s one of the biggest challenges for election administration, said Claire Woodall-Vogg, executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission.

Those late changes, along with lack of voter education funding makes matters more difficult, she said, adding that groups like BLOC can help fill those gaps. 

Woodall-Vogg said she’s “cautiously optimistic” that things could improve after last month’s Supreme Court win by Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Janet Protasiewicz, which ended 15 years of conservative control of the state’s high court.

“But I will also say it’s cautious,” she added, “because the length of time it takes to get a lawsuit there would again come right in the middle of a presidential election year.”

Additional barriers for Black and Hispanic voters

Barriers to voting disproportionately affect certain racial groups, according to research from UW-Madison journalism and mass communications professor Michael Wagner.

Black voters spent about 9 minutes getting to the polls during the 2018 midterm election, compared with about 6.5 minutes for non-Black voters, the research found. Researchers also found that Hispanic voters spent about 11 minutes in line, more than twice the wait for non-Hispanic voters.

Additionally, they found that Black and Hispanic voters were less likely to use early voting measures, which could ease those time burdens.

In researching the 2022 midterm election, Wagner’s team found Black voters spent 10.8 minutes getting to the polls and 15.6 minutes waiting in line. For white voters, those times were 6.8 minutes and 7.7 minutes.

“It’s really a tale of two states. On the one hand, Wisconsin has incredibly high voter turnout. We’re always in the top three,” Wagner said, adding that same-day registration and tradition of civic engagement help. “But things are clearly getting worse for Black, Hispanic and lower income voters.”

Closed polling locations and continued underfunding of elections could help explain growing times from 2018 to 2022, he said. 

The researchers who maintain the Cost of Voting Index have linked increased difficulty and a drop in voter participation, but impact varies between groups.

“It actually disenfranchises the undereducated and the lower socioeconomic populations more,” Pomante said. “But if we were to strip those things out and were just looking at racial features, when states have made voting more difficult, it actually spurs Black voters to come to the polls more.”

One reason for that might be the role of community organizers, Pomante said.

Benjamin, the University of Oklahoma researcher, agreed.

“I think that these local organizations … they're priceless,” she said. “I mean, it's just worth everything because they have the community's trust. They have a reputation. The community wants to earn those people's trust and show that they are also good stewards.”

Wisconsin’s increasingly divisive and contentious politics may also help turnout, Wagner said. 

“More people see it as valuable to have their voice heard on Election Day,” he said. “Even if it’s harder, many people still show up.”

Current proposals to address voting issues

Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, proposed a range of voting-related changes in his most recent budget proposal that would elevate the state’s Cost of Voting Index ranking.

Pomante said automatic voter registration has propelled many states toward top rankings. Evers has proposed that the Department of Transportation provide identifying information to the Wisconsin Elections Commission so it can automatically register eligible voters. The proposal also allows people to opt out.

The governor also proposed removing restrictions on how early a voter can return their absentee ballot and lowering the residency requirement from 28 days to 10 days. Evers’ budget also includes changes to the type of ID technical college or university students can use and would restore previous requirements that high schools be used for voter registration, something Republicans ended in 2011.

The budget proposal also includes additional funding for local election officials and would allow election workers to start processing absentee ballots before Election Day, a measure that would speed up ballot counting. Republicans plan to remove all those and hundreds of other measures from the budget bill during the first votes in the process Tuesday.

Last year, Evers vetoed a number of election-related bills passed by the Republican Legislature. They would have prevented a voter’s friend or family member from returning their absentee ballot, required clerks to verify voters are U.S. citizens, and given the Legislature control over guidance to clerks from the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

State Sen. Duey Stroebel, R-Saukville, said that if there are issues with the time it takes voters to cast ballots, those are “the fault of local municipalities failing to address the needs of their communities.”

“This trend of higher participation holds up across nationwide elections since passing Voter ID,” he said. “Wisconsin voters routinely rebut the premise of voter disenfranchisement through their actions.”

How BLOC and community organizers find solutions 

BLOC doesn’t plan to put politics on the shelf until the 2024 spring primary. Politics and voter education is baked into everything it does, Lang said.

“If we’re having conversations in the field about what does it look like for the Black community to thrive, nine times out of 10, those responses have a political connection, whether it’s the city budget that’s going to come out this fall or it’s the state budget,” she said weeks after the election. 

“And so there’s so many different ways that civics plays a role indirectly that people may not necessarily see, but every single aspect of our lives has been politicized.”

BLOC reaches voters by building trust. It intentionally set up its headquarters in the 53206 ZIP code, among the most-incarcerated places in the state. BLOC’s members grew up in the community and share the same experiences as the people whose doors they knock on.

They see voters walk into their polling place carrying BLOC literature handed out or placed in doors. 

But it wasn’t always like this, Lang said, recalling the group’s first election in November 2017 when residents viewed them like just another group dropping in. They could see through the “transactional electoral organizing” done time and time again by groups parachuting in for the runup to an election.

Attitudes toward the group changed once people saw that they didn’t leave.

“The team (here at BLOC) came up with this idea last year to do monthly neighborhood cleanups as a way to engage residents around other issues and do something that's beautifying the community,” Lang said. “I think by just having a constant presence allows us to be those trusted messengers.”

Three weeks after the April 4 election, BLOC’s second-floor conference room was once again filled with dozens of people, some of whom endured the rain to canvas on Election Day. But they weren’t there to talk about the next election or even voter registration.

The meeting was about plans for community wellness programs.

It may be the electoral offseason, but BLOC has plenty of work to do

The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with WPR, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.

Voting has gotten harder in Wisconsin. Organizers have found ways to help 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.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.

Wisconsin’s powerful Republican-controlled budget committee, under fire for using a secretive “pocket veto” to block certain funding, denied several of those requests in a public meeting Tuesday, including for one of the largest conservation projects in state history.

The abrupt about-face by the Joint Finance Committee came after Wisconsin Watch reported on how some groups have questioned the legality of the committee not setting a date for a public meeting to review the projects halted by anonymous committee members.

On Wednesday, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers criticized Republicans for using a “secret process” to block projects and said his administration was considering next steps.

The JFC has oversight over state agency expenditures including land conservation deals over $250,000 and in the northern part of the state. By law, committee members have 14 days to object after receiving a request for their approval, after which a meeting must be scheduled.

But in recent months the committee has come under scrutiny after Wisconsin Watch detailed its longstanding practice of exercising a pocket veto to kill projects without holding a meeting. A legal memo obtained through a records request found legislative attorneys doubted the legality of withholding funding for months, even years, without scheduling a meeting.

On Tuesday, with barely 24 hours’ notice, the co-chairs called a meeting to review five projects that had been held up by anonymous objections, one for nearly two years.

One by one the proposals failed on party-line votes on a committee where Republicans hold a 12-4 majority. In a meeting that lasted less than 40 minutes — and as is common included no public testimony — the Republicans voted to block:

• $4 million in state funding to leverage a federal match to close a $15.5 million deal that would conserve from development 56,259 acres around Pelican River for public recreation and logging; 
• $17.5 million for a program to increase COVID-19 vaccination rates for low-income Wisconsin residents;
• The Department of Health Services from plugging a budget hole using several revenue sources, including $2.3 million from the sale of five surplus parcels of land at its Northern Wisconsin Center in Chippewa Falls;
• $1.7 million for the Department of Natural Resources to hire a full-time employee for four years to help implement state obligations under the Great Lakes Compact;
• $288,000 for a Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. tax credit to remodel a historic fraternity house in Madison.

Conservation groups said after the hearing that the JFC’s meeting to clear out a backlog of objections did not go far enough to satisfy the law.

“Because they failed to schedule that meeting within their 14-day passive review window, they don’t have any legal authority over the expenditure,” said Charles Carlin of Gathering Waters, an umbrella group of land trusts in Wisconsin. “So the ball is really back in the DNR’s court.”

Evers has proposed ending anonymous objections but has so far resisted calls to either challenge the JFC in court or allocate funds it had held up without a hearing.

“I’m not sure what’s next. We’re taking a look at that,” he said Wednesday at an event at a union training center in Fitchburg. “Obviously, we’re disappointed in the Joint Finance Committee’s response and why it took so long, why it’s a secret process and then suddenly a decision is made. That said, we’re looking at alternatives.”

Has committee violated law?

Conservationists have argued that repeated objections have threatened the health of the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Fund. Some groups have proposed more modest conservation projects that are too small to trigger JFC oversight. 

Gov. Tony Evers has proposed ending anonymous objections but has so far resisted calls to either challenge the JFC in court or allocate funds it had held up without a hearing.

Rep. Evan Goyke, D-Milwaukee, a committee member and vocal critic of what he called a lack of transparency, said the committee’s leadership has been feeling pressure.

“I think they wanted to remove everything that’s been sitting there for a long time because they’re not in compliance with the law,” Goyke told Wisconsin Watch shortly after the meeting.

Goyke commended several Republican members — including committee co-chair Sen. Howard Marklein, R-Spring Green — for revealing that they had lodged anonymous objections and explained their reason.

Marklein said over the years, the DNR had brought proposed acquisitions or easements with inflated appraisals that were later reduced in price after the committee objected.

“I know I’ve saved the state of Wisconsin a lot by objecting and by getting a better deal, better appraisal and in scoping the project,” Marklein said.

Fellow co-chair Rep. Mark Born, R-Beaver Dam, defended the committee’s ability to stall projects discreetly while the committee seeks more information.

“Sometimes it’s just getting our questions answered — it’s that simple,” Born said.

Some conservation projects sail through — some die

In recent weeks, a 195-acre acquisition in Vilas County sailed through without objection —as did a 76-acre Mississippi River bluffs conservation easement in Pierce County.

But on Tuesday, several Republicans said town governments opposed the Pelican River project,  and local officials only received the minimal notice of one of the largest conservation deals in state history. However, a tally by WXPR found a mix of support and opposition among the 21 nearby town governments.

“I basically went to the co-chairs and asked them as well as some of the representatives to vote this down,” Sen. Mary Felzkowski, R-Irma, told reporters after the meeting.

She had been an outlier on the committee after revealing herself as one of the lawmakers behind the objection.

“Getting some of this criteria unearthed is — in a very strange and terrible way — a step forward,” Goyke said. “Because even though the process is clearly going to continue, at least we’re hearing more from the majority party about what they’ve done, why they’ve done it and who’s behind it.”

Evers has so far proposed in the 2023-25 state budget legislative changes that would remove some anonymous objections. But those tweaks would have to be approved by the JFC as part of its budget review.

Does new court majority change equation?

But the door remains open for a potential legal challenge arguing the JFC has long flouted the law in a practice that goes back decades. The door may even open wider on Aug. 1 when liberals take a majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which would have final say on whether the committee’s actions were legal. 

Conservative justices, who have controlled the court for the past 15 years, have often sided with the Republican Legislature. But Born said the changing legal landscape was not why the committee convened Tuesday’s “routine” meeting. 

“We are only continuing the work of the committee as it has been done for decades,” he told reporters. “There is no new concern or new thing that’s changing the way we’re doing our job.”

The clearing of the backlog didn’t last long. 

Less than an hour after the meeting concluded, DHS was informed that its plan to spend $8 million of the state’s opioid settlement fund on expanded Narcan, fentanyl test strips and prevention education in public schools had received an anonymous objection from a JFC member.

The letter sent out to the agency didn’t specify when or why the objection was raised. It only said a meeting would be scheduled — at a future date.

Wisconsin Watch Statehouse Bureau Chief Matthew DeFour contributed to this report. 

The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with WPR, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.

Wisconsin Republicans clear out projects stalled by secretive ‘pocket veto’ 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.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.

Democrats celebrated Tuesday’s election of Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Janet Protasiewicz to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, cementing a 4-3 liberal court majority. But another election result fanned speculation that Republicans could topple that new majority by impeaching Protasiewicz.

Rep. Dan Knodl, R-Germantown, won the 8th Senate District special election, giving Republicans a two-thirds majority in the state Senate. That is the threshold for the Senate to remove office holders. An Assembly majority, which Republicans hold, can impeach. 

But a legislative effort to oust a justice would steer Wisconsin politics into nearly uncharted waters. Lawmakers have impeached just one judge in state history — in 1853 (and the Senate didn’t convict) — and legal experts call a modern-day removal under the current set of facts unlikely, citing finer details of the process. 

Speculation about Republican-led impeachments of Democratic Gov. Tony Evers or other statewide officeholders has run rampant, especially after Knodl said he would be open to removing Milwaukee judicial officials from office, including Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm and possibly Protasiewicz as a circuit court judge. Knodl said he wouldn’t favor removing Evers, because he’s been able to work with him. Knodl hasn’t specified whether he would consider removing Protasiewicz in her Supreme Court capacity. 

“If there are some that are out there that are corrupt, that are failing at their tasks, then we have the opportunity to hold them accountable,” Knodl told WISN-TV’s UpFront last month.

But impeachment isn’t supposed to be exercised for political differences or poor performance.

“The Assembly may impeach an elected official by a majority vote based on specific reasons: corrupt conduct in office or for the commission of a crime or misdemeanor,” according to a Wisconsin Legislative Council memo.

Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu, R-Oostburg, acknowledged that threshold in an interview with WISN-TV on Wednesday saying, “we’re not going to use impeachments to overturn elections or anything like that.”

“To impeach someone they would need to do something very serious, so no, we are not looking to start the impeachment process as a regular occurring event in Wisconsin,” he said.

Other method has lower removal standard, but higher vote threshold

There is another method for removing judges and justices specifically under the state constitution, known as “address,” which does not require a trial before the Legislature.

A 1971 state law specifies that reasons for removing judges and justices through the address process must relate to “misconduct” or because they are “not physically or mentally qualified to exercise the judicial functions of the office.”

State law defines misconduct as “willful violation of a rule of the code of judicial ethics; willful or persistent failure to perform official duties; habitual intemperance, due to consumption of intoxicating beverages or use of dangerous drugs, which interferes with the proper performance of judicial duties; or conviction of a felony.”

If Republicans want to remove Protasiewicz, they might wait to see if she rules on cases in which she had shown some kind of bias — a potential violation of judicial ethics rules — said Daniel Suhr, a Cedarburg lawyer who previously served in Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s administration.

“Rather than saying her entire campaign approach was flawed to the point of impeachable, I think an alternative approach is to say, on this particular case, this particular topic, you cannot be impartial, or you certainly cannot appear impartial, which is the standard that the law sets,” Suhr said.

While Assembly Republicans hold the simple majority needed to impeach civil officers for corruption or crimes, they lack the two-thirds majority required for removal under the address process, which covers misconduct issues such as judicial ethics.

The fact that the address process has a lower standard for removal, but a higher vote threshold than impeachment is significant, said Chad Oldfather, a Marquette University Law School professor.

“It’s absurd to suggest that Protasiewicz has engaged in ‘corrupt conduct in office’ when she hasn’t even taken office yet,” Oldfather said. “ ‘Corrupt conduct,’ especially in the era when the Wisconsin Constitution was adopted, was mostly understood to be about people using public office for personal gain — not policy or legal disagreements, but self-dealing. That’s consistent with the longstanding American norm that judges are not to be impeached simply because the authority with impeachment power doesn’t like the judges’ decisions.”

What if there were a dispute over the Legislature’s handling of an impeachment? Then the Wisconsin Supreme Court would decide, as it has in other states, said Miriam Seifter, a University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School professor.

“An impeachment that immediately follows a free and fair election is not a sign of a healthy democracy,” Seifter said. “Absent allegations of corruption or crime, impeaching a judge who just won a resounding electoral victory would show a troubling disregard for the will of the voters.”

Trial of Levi Hubbell

Only one judge in Wisconsin history has faced an impeachment trial: Levi Hubbell, according to a Wisconsin Court System biography.

Hubbell’s story and 1853 trial provides background on the impeachment process and foreshadows today’s debate surrounding the role of partisanship in Wisconsin’s judicial elections.

Four years after arriving in Milwaukee from New York, Hubbell — an opportunistic politician who drew the suspicions of Milwaukee’s political establishment by successfully courting German Catholic and the Irish votes — was elected circuit court judge in 1848, the same year Wisconsin became a state, according to a 1998 Marquette Law Review essay by historian Ellen Langill.

Commentators at the time decried how the state’s first supposedly nonpartisan race had become “clandestinely partisan,” Langill wrote.

Hubbell served on the first Wisconsin Supreme Court as part of his circuit court duties. He became chief justice in 1851 before the separately constituted Supreme Court was established in 1853.

That same year he was accused of a variety of charges, including handing out arbitrary sentences, misusing funds, accepting bribes and hearing cases in circuit court for which he had a financial interest. Some discussion unfolded about removing Hubbell through the address process, which would not require a trial, but Hubbell asked for a Senate trial.

The Assembly impeached him, but the Senate ultimately acquitted him.

“The vote to acquit Hubbell sent shock waves across the Second Circuit,” Langill wrote. “Many of his partisans and Democrats rejoiced at the news, while many judges and attorneys reacted with dismay and disbelief.”

The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with WPR, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.

Republicans can’t simply remove a Wisconsin Supreme Court justice 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.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.

Here are shortened biographies of the justices from the Wisconsin Supreme Court website.

Conservative justices

Chief Justice Annette Kingsland Ziegler was elected to the Supreme Court in 2007 and re-elected in 2017. In 2021, she was chosen by members of the court to serve as chief justice. Before joining the high court, Kingsland Ziegler was a Washington County Circuit Court judge, appointed in 1997, elected in 1998 and re-elected in 2004. Prior to that, Kingsland Ziegler was in private practice, where she engaged in civil litigation. She also served as a pro bono special assistant district attorney in Milwaukee County in 1992 and 1996. Immediately prior to serving as a circuit court judge, she was an assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Wisconsin. Kingsland Ziegler’s current term expires in 2027.

Justice Patience Drake Roggensack was elected to the Supreme Court in 2003 and re-elected in 2013. In 2015, she was chosen by members of the court to serve as chief justice. She was re-elected to serve as chief justice in 2017 and 2019. Before joining the Supreme Court, Roggensack was elected to the Court of Appeals in 1996 and re-elected in 2002. Prior to becoming a judge, Roggensack practiced law for 16 years in state and federal courts. Her current term expires July 31, 2023. She is retiring, to be replaced by Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Janet Protasiewicz, who won a 10-year term on Tuesday.

Justice Brian Hagedorn was elected to the Supreme Court in 2019. Prior to that, he was a judge on the Court of Appeals, having been appointed in 2015 and elected in 2017. Prior to his judicial service, Hagedorn served for almost five years as chief legal counsel to Gov. Scott Walker, as an assistant attorney general at the Wisconsin Department of Justice, as a law clerk for Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, and as an attorney in private practice at one of Milwaukee’s largest law firms. His current term ends in 2029.

Justice Rebecca Grassl Bradley was elected to the Supreme Court in 2016 after being appointed by Gov. Scott Walker in 2015. Before joining the Supreme Court, Bradley served as a District I Court of Appeals judge (appointed 2015), a Milwaukee County Circuit Court judge (appointed 2012, elected 2013) and worked as an attorney in private practice (1996-2012), including serving as vice president of legal operations for a global software company. Grassl Bradley’s current term expires in 2026.

Liberal justices

Justice Jill J. Karofsky was elected to the Supreme Court in 2020. Before her election to the high court, Karofsky served as a judge on the Dane County Circuit Court to which she was elected in 2017. Prior to becoming a judge, Karofsky was the executive director of the Office of Crime Victim Services for the state Department of Justice. She previously served as an assistant state attorney general, an adjunct professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School, general counsel for the National Conference of Bar Examiners, and as an assistant district attorney and deputy district attorney for Dane County. Her current term expires in 2030.

Justice Ann Walsh Bradley, was elected to the Supreme Court in 1995 and re-elected in 2005 and 2015. A native of Richland Center, Wisconsin, Walsh Bradley was a high school teacher before entering the University of Wisconsin Law School, where she earned her law degree. Bradley was in private practice until becoming a circuit court judge in Marathon County in 1985. Her current term expires in 2025.

Justice Rebecca Frank Dallet was elected to the Supreme Court in 2018. Before joining the high court, Frank Dallet was elected to the Milwaukee County Circuit Court in 2008 and re-elected in 2014. Prior to that, Dallet was an assistant district attorney in Milwaukee County from 1996 to1999 and again from 2002 to 2007. She was the presiding court commissioner for Milwaukee County in 2007 and 2008. Frank Dallet was a special assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Wisconsin from 1999 to 2002 and taught as an adjunct law professor at Marquette University Law School from 2005 to 2008. Her current term expires in 2028.

Who are the liberal and conservative members of the Wisconsin Supreme Court? is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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Thousands of Wisconsinites have been “adjudicated incompetent” to vote under state laws designed to protect mentally incapacitated people from having someone else fill out their ballot.

Under laws in Wisconsin and many states, a court may determine someone is incompetent to vote. Ten states — including neighboring Illinois and Michigan — place no disability-related restrictions on voting rights, according to a 2018 Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law report.  

But Wisconsin lacks a statutorily defined system for tracking people ruled mentally incompetent to vote, Wisconsin Watch reporting has revealed. That has led to instances of people casting ballots in recent elections despite being on the statewide ineligible voter list. They include two voters who told Wisconsin Watch they didn’t know they were ineligible.

Disability rights advocates and legal experts disagree over whether — and to what extent  — certain people with mental disabilities should lose their voting rights.

“Historically, people with disabilities have experienced a lot of discrimination with certainly their rights, and that includes the right to vote,” said Barbara Beckert, external advocacy director of Disability Rights Wisconsin. “There is a lot of inconsistency from state to state and how this is currently in place.”

Why does Wisconsin disenfranchise certain people with mental disabilities, and how can some restore their right to vote?

Here’s what you need to know. 

Who in Wisconsin could lose their voting rights for mental disability reasons? 

A subset of people under legal guardianship — someone who has a court-appointed guardian to make health and financial decisions — may lose their right to vote. 

People with degenerative brain disorder, including dementia, and developmental disabilities — such as cerebral palsy, epilepsy and autism — may be ruled “incompetent” or “incapacitated” and lose their voting rights.

Courts rely on opinions of medical professionals and a court-appointed guardian ad litem to assess a person’s capacity to make important decisions, such as those related to their health care or finances. During a hearing, a court will determine whether a guardian is necessary and will outline the scope of the guardian’s decision- making power.  

Not everyone under guardianship loses the right to vote. 

While people under the guardianship might struggle to make choices about health care and finances, many can still decide who they want to vote for, said Tami Jackson, a public policy analyst for the Wisconsin Board for People with Developmental Disabilities.

Under Wisconsin law, people disallowed from voting in Wisconsin include: “Any person who is incapable of understanding the objective of the elective process or who is under guardianship, unless the court has determined that the person is competent to exercise the right to vote.”

Under that broad definition, those who understand their reasons for voting, want to vote for a candidate and want that candidate to win should retain their voting rights, said Ellen Henningsen, who directs the Voting and Guardianship Project for Disability Rights Wisconsin.

“It’s a very simple standard. It’s a very low standard, frankly, because we don’t impose any capacity tests on average voters,” Henningsen said.  

Who decides whether someone is competent to vote?

Only a judge can determine a person’s legal competence to vote in Wisconsin. No one else has that power — not a family member, caregiver, election official, doctor or designated power of attorney. 

How many people in Wisconsin have lost their voting rights under this process? 

A Wisconsin Elections Commission list contains more than 22,000 people who have been “adjudicated incompetent” to vote in Wisconsin. But that list is imperfect. Some, but not all, counties notify state elections officials when a person is found incompetent to vote, Joel DeSpain, a Wisconsin Elections Commission spokesman, previously told Wisconsin Watch. Additionally, the statewide list includes people who have since died. 

Why disenfranchise people with certain mental disabilities?

The laws are designed to bolster election integrity and to protect mentally incapacitated people from having someone else fill out their ballot or manipulate them into voting a certain way.

“Individuals who do not understand the nature of voting creates a pool of potential votes that might be cast by anyone with the ability to gain access to those individuals’ ballots — a species of vote fraud,” Pamela Karlan, the co-director of the Supreme Court Litigation Clinic at the Stanford University Law School, wrote in the McGeorge Law Review. 

For instance, an assisted living facility staff member could influence the votes of people with severe cognitive disabilities in their care, she told the nonprofit news outlet Stateline in 2018.

A partisan review of Wisconsin’s 2020 election raised those same concerns when it found a couple of examples of nursing home residents who had voted despite being on the state’s “adjudicated incompetent” list. But no cases of nursing home voter fraud have come to light. 

Critics of disenfranchisement laws and practice point out such scenarios involve law-breaking by people other than the person with a disability, and they question the idea of protecting the rights of a cognitively disabled voter by stripping them away.

Can people restore their voting rights after losing them? 

Yes. That involves petitioning the county probate court. Filing a petition carries no cost and should be done 180 days after a guardianship hearing. 

Petitioners can get help from someone who supports the restoration of their voting rights, whether a guardian, family member, service provider or teacher. 

There, petitioners can show they understand the election process, said Henningsen, who advocates for people to restore their voting rights. There are good reasons to do so, she said.  Judges may have been mistaken in the first place. Or petitioners may now understand the election process, whether because they’ve matured or received education — or their health conditions have improved.

But once people lose the right to vote, they face a higher burden of proof in having it restored, Jackson said. 

Petitioners should be prepared for the court to ask questions, says Disabilities Wisconsin Rights, which publishes a guide for voting rights restoration. 

If a court restores a petitioner’s right, the person must register to vote before casting a ballot. 

How have these issues been politicized in Wisconsin?  

The issue first gained attention a year ago as part of former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman’s partisan investigation into the 2020 election. Gableman identified a couple of cases of people in nursing homes who had voted despite a court removing their voting rights.

That unfolded as Republican backers of former President Donald Trump sought to sow doubts about the results of his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden — and to purge thousands of names from Wisconsin voter rolls.

“It’s unfortunate that people with disabilities are being looked at as somehow violators of election law when so many of them who have their right to vote experience incredible barriers to access voting,”  said Jackson of the Wisconsin Board for People with Developmental Disabilities. “I just see that this is a solution that is looking for a problem.”

Although conservative activists pushed misinformation in that process, including conflating ineligible and eligible voters, they did help identify some holes in Wisconsin’s statewide voter database. 

As Wisconsin Watch reported in March, Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell conducted a review of about 1,000 names from the state’s list of people a court deemed incompetent to vote and found 95 examples of people who voted after being added to the list.

While more examples than previously known, the number is small compared with the millions of votes cast in statewide elections — and not enough to alter past results as Trump and others have claimed. In reviewing some of the cases, Wisconsin Watch found examples of human error, rather than coordinated or intentional illegal voting.

“We all want our elections to have integrity, but we also want to make sure that doesn’t come at the expense of the rights of people with disabilities,” Beckert said. 

The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with WPR, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.

Why some Wisconsin residents with mental disabilities lose voting rights — and how they can restore them 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.

Days before the Wisconsin Supreme Court election a major union representing transit workers wrote an $18,000 check to Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Janet Protasiewicz’s campaign.

For the Amalgamated Transit Union, which represents bus drivers and mechanics, it was a huge donation compared with their previous donation to a Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate in 2018 for just $250.

“There’s a lot on the line with the Supreme Court race here,” said Donnell Shorter, head of the ATU Local 998 in Milwaukee.

But that $18,000 is a drop in the bucket compared with the contributions of a few dozen ultra-wealthy donors.

Recent filings show a total of 41 individual donors wrote Protasiewicz’s campaign checks for the statutory maximum of $20,000. Former Justice Daniel Kelly’s campaign received at least 21 such donations over the same period.

The disparity between wealthy donors and contributions raised by working Wisconsinites doesn’t sit right with Shorter.

“I represent basically 1,600 people,” Shorter said. “Their voices won’t be heard as loudly as that one billionaire, that one celebrity.”

Both campaigns have boasted record-shattering fundraising from their political allies, but a Wisconsin Watch analysis shows the lion’s share of campaign cash is coming from special interest groups and a relatively small number of deep-pocket donors across the political spectrum.

Records show Protasiewicz received nearly 25,000 individual donations for $50 or less, totaling $568,549. That’s still less than the $820,000 donated by the top 41 donors to her campaign including $20,000 checks from Hollywood director Steven Spielberg and his wife, actress Kate Capshaw.

Kelly’s campaign has consistently trailed in individual donations large and small. His campaign received 3,803 individual donations of $50 or less totaling $139,620. That’s only a third of the amount from his top 21 donors who wrote $20,000 checks.

And those are just donations directly to the candidate campaign funds. Some of the maximum campaign donors have also given $1 million or more to political action committees or political parties to flood the internet and airwaves with campaign ads. And more money has flowed into the campaign via so-called “issue advocacy” groups that aren’t required to disclose their donors, often referred to as “dark money.”

Kelly leads in support when all spending is counted.

WisPolitics.com estimates the Wisconsin Supreme Court spending is on pace to break $45 million, demolishing the previous record $10 million spent in the 2020 high court contest. The previous national record was $15 million in the 2004 Illinois Supreme Court election.

The infusion of supersized checks from both philanthropists and industrialists has good governance groups aghast.

“There’s just an obscene amount of money on both sides of this thing, which raises some serious questions for our democracy,” said Matt Rothschild, executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. “The voices of average Wisconsinites are being drowned out, so we don’t have an equal say as to who’s having influence over our elections.”

Out-of-state donors dig deep for liberal cause

Protasiewicz’s campaign has benefited from donors such as Oklahoma energy heirs Lynn and Stacy Schusterman, who each donated $20,000 and also a combined $1 million to the state Democratic Party.

According to Wisconsin campaign finance records, Manhattan dance school director Hana Ginsburg Tirosh wrote a $20,000 check to Protasiewicz’s campaign. She and her Wall Street trader husband Raz Tirosh made headlines for purchasing actress Susan Saranadon’s $7.9 million Manhattan loft in 2020.

Raz Tirosh’s firm, Jane Street, was called “the top Wall Street firm no one’s heard of,” according to a 2021 Financial Times profile, having traded $17 trillion in assets in 2020 alone.

At least three of his colleagues at Jane Street — Sandor Lehoczky, Ron Minsky and James McClave, and their partners — also gave max campaign contributions, increasing the cash haul from households tied to the firm to $120,000. 

That same day, just five days before the February primary, a pair of $20,000 donations also arrived from San Francisco courtesy of Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson and his physician wife Erica.

The Protasiewicz campaign didn’t directly address whether the combined $200,000 in maximum donations were somehow coordinated in a 24-hour span in mid-February.

Campaign spokesperson Sam Roecker said Protasiewicz did not travel out-of-state to solicit the funds. He said it’s no surprise the race is receiving national attention. As of the March 27 pre-election filing deadline, her campaign has raised more than $15 million.

“It’s widely known that Wisconsin’s Supreme Court came one vote short of overturning the 2020 election,” Roecker wrote in a statement. “So there is interest across the country in making sure Judge Janet Protasiewicz, the pro-democracy and pro-rule-of-law candidate, is elected over an extreme right-wing activist like Dan Kelly.”

Committees do heavy lifting for Kelly camp

Before the primary, Kelly’s campaign reported a pair of $20,000 donations — from Leonard Leo, co-chair of the conservative Federalist Society and Beloit industrialist Diane Hendricks, a top-tier Republican Party patron, who recently gave $200,000 to the Wisconsin GOP. But subsequent campaign records show a flurry of activity with at least 21 individuals writing $20,000 checks to the campaign.

They include Michael White, chair and owner of major Milwaukee industrial manufacturer Rite-Hite, who penned an infamous email warning his 1,400 employees of “personal consequences” if President Barack Obama was re-elected in 2012.

Northwestern Mutual chair and CEO John Schlifske and his wife Kim also contributed a combined $40,000. 

The family owners of Sargento Foods, the Plymouth-based cheese giant, also gave generously to the Kelly campaign, with retired executive Louis Gentine and his wife Michelle shelling out $20,000 each in addition to the $100,000 he gave to the Wisconsin GOP. His son, Sargento CEO Louie Gentine, followed suit three days later with a maximum donation of his own.

For Kelly, other in-state interests include Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, the state’s largest business lobby. Real estate interests have also contributed about $37,000 from their membership and a Realtors’ PAC.

Protasiewicz appears to hold a lopsided advantage in direct donations. But that’s not the whole story, cautioned Douglas Keith of the Brennan Center for Justice, which tracks money in politics.

That’s because Kelly’s core mega donors have funneled millions into committees running attack ads against his opponent. Wisconsin Democracy Campaign estimates $13.7 million has been spent supporting Kelly or attacking his opponents. Protasiewicz’s allies have spent nearly $11.2 million on her behalf.

“Dan Kelly is raising significantly less money than Janet Protasiewicz,” Keith said. “But Dan Kelly also has gotten substantially more outside money support.”

Illinois billionaire Richard “Dick” Uihlein has funneled at least $4 million into the Fair Courts America PAC that he controls.

The PAC spent at least $5.4 million on advertising attacking Kelly’s opponents including during the primary. And it’s only one of several committees that has spent millions in advocacy and attack advertising in the Wisconsin race. His wife, Elizabeth Uihlein, gave $500,000 to the Wisconsin Republican Party during the campaign.

While donors face caps on direct donations to campaigns, PACs can receive unlimited contributions. And critics say they often blur rules designed to create a firewall between a candidate’s campaign and committees raising unlimited cash.

“They can do whatever they want,” Keith said. “But the limit on them is that they can’t coordinate with the candidates, because then it becomes not independent spending, it becomes a contribution to the candidate.”

In practice that’s often a wink-and-a-nod arrangement between a candidate and wealthy backers, Keith said.

“I see candidates not raising the amount of money you would expect them to raise,” Keith said of direct donations, “which suggests to me that they have a reason to think that they don’t need to raise as much money as candidates in the past have raised.”

Even so, Kelly’s campaign has tried to single out his opponent as beholden to outside interests.

“Janet Protasiewicz is D.C. liberals’ flavor of the week because they know she would be the most openly partisan judicial activist Wisconsin has ever seen,” Kelly campaign spokesperson Ben Voekel wrote in a statement to Wisconsin Watch. “While (she) relies on out-of-state mega donors and state party bosses to fund her campaign, Justice Kelly is proud to have the support of grassroots activists across the state of Wisconsin.”

‘Billionaires on the left, billionaires on the right’

Observers like Rothschild lament that the race is being run on cash from a relatively small cadre of donors on each side.

“It looks like it’s boiling down to a race to see whether (state Democratic Party chair) Ben Wikler can speed dial billionaires faster than Richard Uihlein can transfer money into his misnamed Fair Courts PAC,” Rothschild said. “And that’s not how our democracy is supposed to function.”

Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, a conservative pro-business group, has spent more than $5.8 million through its public advocacy arm on political ads, according to the Brennan Center’s tracking. Because it runs “issue ads” that don’t explicitly advocate for or attack a candidate, they are not required to register as a campaign group or disclose their funding.

A Better Wisconsin Together Political Fund, a coalition of labor unions and progressive social advocacy groups, has spent more than $5 million on ad buys attacking Kelly’s stance on abortion and other issues.

That’s how organized labor gets around the $18,000 spending cap on direct contributions to Supreme Court candidates. Major national unions like American Federation of Teachers have contributed $500,000, while the International Union of Operating Engineers PAC has forked over $300,000 to A Better Wisconsin Together.

The Monona-based political fund has also received at least a quarter million dollars from Lynde Uihlein, a more liberal cousin of Richard Uihlein, whose family’s wealth can be traced back to the Schlitz beer dynasty. That’s on top of the $400,000 Lynde Uihlein gave to the state Democratic Party.

Just south of the border, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker — a billionaire from a prominent hotel chain dynasty — recently donated $20,000 directly to the Protasiewicz campaign and cut a $1 million check to the Wisconsin’s Democratic Party.

The nominally nonpartisan race is flush with party cash. Filings show the state’s Democratic Party has spent more than $9.3 million to support Protasiewicz’s campaign. She pledged to recuse herself from any cases brought to the high court by Democrats. Kelly’s campaign has received more than $578,000 from the state Republican Party and various county committees.

A change of state law in 2015 removed caps on donations to parties and allowed parties to make unlimited contributions to candidates.

Wisconsin Watch reached out to more than a dozen ultra-wealthy donors who cut $20,000 checks to the Protasiewicz or Kelly campaigns.

Only a handful replied. None were willing to comment.

The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with WPR, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.

Mega donors fuel record-shattering $45M Wisconsin Supreme Court race 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.