But now Torres is nervous about what 2025 may bring. A lawsuit threatens to unwind the law against immigration jails, and the attorney general’s directive is still not codified into law, meaning that a new official who is more hostile to immigrants’ rights could quickly undo it. And New Jersey is electing many of its state and local leaders this year in a host of races that will test much more than just candidates’ openness to immigration detention.

“Somehow I have been dreading 2025’s cycle for even longer than I did 2024’s,” Torres told Bolts about New Jersey’s upcoming elections. “It’s not guaranteed that we’re going to get the protections that these communities deserve.”

The coming year indeed carries high stakes for policing and criminal justice, in New Jersey and beyond. There will be roughly 160 elections for prosecutor and sheriff this year. Most are concentrated in just four East Coast states—New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.

Filing deadlines are still months away. But at this early juncture, there are already several elections to keep an eye on including the re-election bids of Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner, the former civil rights attorney turned prosecutor, and Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, fresh off prosecuting Donald Trump. This year will also see important elections for prosecutor in Brooklyn and several Virginia cities, as well as sheriff races in Buffalo and New Orleans. (The full list of prosecutor and sheriff races is available here.)

Sheriffs and prosecutors are central to local criminal legal systems, with wide discretion over a large range of issues from sentencing to detention conditions, so Bolts closely tracks them each year. But criminal justice policy also hinges on offices that have broader purviews. This year, New Jersey and Virginia are selecting their state governments. The partisan or ideological majorities on Pennsylvania and Wisconsin’s supreme courts are also on the line.

Plus, dozens of cities are electing their mayors and city councilors in 2025, including places with major recent conflicts over policing like Atlanta, Minneapolis, and New York City.

Today Bolts is launching its coverage of these races by fleshing out six storylines that will define the cycle.

1. How will two prosecutors emblematic of the reform movement fare against national headwinds?

Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan DA who brought Trump to trial this spring on felony charges of falsifying business records, famously secured 34 convictions against him. With Trump now headed back to the White House, this may well remain the only criminal trial Trump sits through. 

This has earned Bragg the intense enmity of conservatives nationwide, who have attacked his prosecution of Trump, as well as his affinities for criminal justice reforms. In 2024, a Republican prosecutor in Arizona even refused to extradite a suspect to New York, citing Bragg’s politics. When he first ran in 2021, Bragg positioned himself as a reformer and courted progressive voters, though his proposals were not as far-reaching as some of his rivals. 

MAGA fury is unlikely to mean much in a Democratic primary in Manhattan, which is the main hurdle standing between Bragg and a second term this year. Despite the New York Post’s negative coverage of Bragg as responsible for crime, he has touted the decline in shootings, homicides, and property crimes in the borough over his time in office. 

And some local progressives have distanced themselves from his policies. Eliza Orlins, a public defender who ran for DA against Bragg in the 2021 Democratic primary, has criticized him for breaking his campaign promises to scale back the tactics that ballooned incarceration locally, such as heavy prosecution of low-level offenses. “The political landscape has shifted significantly since 2021,” she told Bolts. “However, I think there’s still room to shape the debate—especially in races like the one for Manhattan DA,” she added. “Reformers need to push back against the fear-based narratives and ensure that the real impact of policies like bail reform and decarceration is part of the conversation.”

Just 100 miles away, in Philadelphia, Larry Krasner came to embody the “progressive prosecutor” movement after his 2017 victory. He curtailed prosecutions of low-level offenses, restricted the scope of probation, overturned many wrongful convictions, and clashed with police unions for taking a harder line on officer misconduct.

Krasner also comfortably won reelection four years ago despite a major push to oust him, and then also survived a GOP effort to remove him from office. However, as he now approaches his second reelection race, the national context has changed. Losses by high-profile reform DAs in California have put progressives interested in prosecutor reform on the defensive. Krasner may also face several challengers this year, including local judge Patrick Dugan, who recently divulged that he plans to run. 

Heavy spending against California reformers by the tech and real estate industry was a key factor in their losses in the state. And Krasner might have an even bigger target on his back: Last fall, he tried to stop Elon Musk’s electioneering schemes on Trump’s behalf in Pennsylvania. Musk has recently said he wants to fund campaigns against reform DAs, and he spent heavily in a failed effort to oust Austin’s chief prosecutor last year, fueling speculation of new confrontations between Musk and Krasner this year.

2. Can proponents of prosecutor reform keep or expand their footing in New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia? (Plus, who will even run?)

Even if the other prosecutors on the ballot this year don’t have such national profiles, their fates still matter for local criminal justice policy.

DA Eric Gonzalez is also up for reelection in Brooklyn, which is the biggest county with a prosecutor race anywhere in the nation this year. A self-proclaimed ‘progressive prosecutor,’ Gonzalez has unveiled policies to shield some immigrants from deportation and dropped cases against hundreds of against sex workers, among other reforms, while also facing criticism from the left for not being bold enough. He ran for a second term unopposed in 2021.

In upstate New York, reformers in 2024 got rid of David Soares, one of their more vocal foils. Soares spent years railing against pretrial reforms as DA of Albany County and former president of the state’s DA association. Reformers have a similar opportunity in 2025 in Orange County, where David Hoovler, another former president of the DA association and critic of pretrial reforms, is up for reelection. Also on the ballot are Nassau County DA Anne Donnelly and Suffolk County DA Raymond Tierney, two Republicans who oversee Long Island’s two populous counties and keep calling for the state to roll back its 2020 bail reform.

In Virginia, a group of 11 reform-minded prosecutors formed an alliance in 2020 to advocate for statewide criminal justice reforms like ending mandatory minimum sentences. But the group’s agenda was sidelined when Democrats lost their governing majority in late 2021. 

Several members of this alliance face reelection in 2025. They include Stephanie Morales, the Portsmouth prosecutor who helped spearhead the creation of the reform alliance five years ago and who clashed with police during Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, as well as Ramin Fatehi, the Norfolk prosecutor who faces critics who favor a more punitive approach to prosecution. If they survive this year, they could reprise their statewide advocacy, but that could also hinge on Democrats regaining control of the state government (more on that below).

Finally, roughly a third of Pennsylvania’s counties are electing their DA, including populous Bucks, Westmoreland, and York counties. As is often the case with prosecutors, the first test will be who even files by the March deadline; in the state’s most recent DA races, in 2023, most races saw a complete lack of competition, with candidates running unopposed across the state.

3. Will sheriff races question the harsh status quo on jail deaths, detention conditions, and collaboration with ICE?

The jail in Buffalo, New York, has drawn lawsuits and scrutiny for the mounting deaths of people in custody. When longtime Erie County Sheriff Tim Howard, a named defendant in these lawsuits, retired in 2021, his preferred candidate, Republican John Garcia, narrowly prevailed in the race to replace him. Deaths have steadily continued in the lock-up under Garcia, and local activists say detention conditions have remained just as gruesome as under Howard. 

In the city of Virginia Beach, an investigation conducted this fall revealed that a man died earlier this year due to the way in which he was restrained by sheriff’s deputies. 

And in Monmouth County, New Jersey, the sheriff’s office was hit by a lawsuit in 2024 that alleged that it was covering up drug-related deaths and overdoses in custody.

Each of these three jurisdictions is electing its sheriff this year, which could at least give local advocates a platform to further expose these detention conditions. And similar questions could surface in the other sheriff’s races taking place in New York and Virginia, plus parts of New Jersey. (Note that Pennsylvania also votes for sheriffs but in that state, as well as in some New Jersey counties, jails are run by the county board and the sheriff’s authority is much more narrow.)

Local detention conditions are also worrying advocates in Louisiana, which adopted legislation last year that is set to balloon local jails. New Orleans, which has a long history of deadly conditions, is the only parish to hold a sheriff’s race this year. Sheriff Suson Hutson, who won with the support of many local reformers in 2021, broke with the other state sheriffs who cheered the 2024 legislation and warned that it would create an “unmanageable population explosion in the New Orleans jail.” 

Sheriffs who run jails also have leeway in deciding how much to collaborate with federal immigration agents; for instance, many get to decide whether to rent out their space to ICE to detain people. Amy Woolard, chief program officer of the ACLU of Virginia, who is tracking how this issue plays out across her state’s 38 sheriff’s races this year, says it’s often difficult to even ascertain where sheriff candidates stand on it. 

“I would ask them, point blank, what are their policies and practices for working with ICE; what are their intentions around protecting immigrant communities in their jurisdictions” Woolard told Bolts. “I think having that knowledge is going to help immigrant communities understand what they may be facing depending on where they live.”

4. How will city elections impact policing? 

This year, 23 cities of at least 250,000 people will elect their mayor, a position that often comes with some control over the local police department. 

The most obvious highlight is the mayoral race in New York City, where incumbent and former police officer Eric Adams is preparing to run for a second term while under indictment on federal corruption charges. 

Under Adams, the New York Police Department has been rocked by incessant scandals and resignations, including over corruption and sexual misconduct allegations. Adams has championed more aggressive police tactics such as adding armed officers to public transit and reviving plainclothes police squads. He has already drawn a wide field of challengers, including a pair of progressive state Senators, Zellnor Myrie and Jessica Ramos, who have each been more critical of the NYPD. The possible candidacy of former Governor Andrew Cuomo may still rock the race. 

Then there’s Atlanta, where Democratic leadership remains locked in a battle with local activists over plans to construct a police training center widely known as “Cop City.” Mayor Andre Dickens has championed the proposal and secured the city council’s approval; these officials also blocked a ballot initiative that would have asked Atlantans to weigh in on Cop City. This year, Dickens is running for reelection; all city council seats are on the ballot as well. 

Minneapolis sparked nationwide protests in 2020 after the police killing of George Floyd. Mayor Jacob Frey has agreed to reforms over the years but has drawn scrutiny over their faltering implementation. He has also resisted more ambitious overhauls; he won reelection in 2021 on the same day as voters defeated a proposal to replace the police department, which he vocally opposed. 

Omar Fateh, a progressive state lawmaker who backed the 2021 policing referendum, has announced that he’ll challenge the mayor in 2025 and has signaled that he’ll run to Frey’s left.

Other cities with mayoral elections in 2025 include Boston, where first-term Mayor Michelle Wu promised to reform policing but backtracked on some key commitments like ending a controversial police surveillance center. In Pittsburgh, a mayor who is generally allied with local reformers is up for a second term. In Omaha and Seattle, candidates who ran on growing their local police departments and defeated more left-leaning opponents in 2021 are again on the ballot. Plus, Bolts will track similar dynamics in cities ranging from Buffalo and Cleveland to St. Louis and Oakland. 

5. Will conservatives flip supreme courts in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania?

Just two years after a liberal takeover that paved the way for fairer election maps, control of Wisconsin’s supreme court is again on the ballot this spring. An open race to replace a retiring liberal justice, Ann Welsh Bradley, could flip the court back to the right. 

Conservatives have a similar opportunity in Pennsylvania, where three Democratic justices are up for reelection this year; Republicans need to win two of these seats to secure a majority on the court, and their chances largely depend on whether any incumbents retire.

The stakes around control of these courts are most clear around abortion rights, labor issues, and redistricting. But on criminal cases, these supreme courts also hear individual appeals and decide broader questions like the constitutionality of punishments. In Pennsylvania, cases currently on the supreme court’s docket include a challenge to draconian life sentence schemes and a dispute over an effort by Krasner to vacate a death sentence. 

But the Democratic majority on Pennsylvania’s high court has not delivered consistent wins for criminal justice reformers—for instance, declining to consider the legality of the death penalty.

And Wisconsin’s court, typically split by ideological conflicts, is strikingly uniform when it comes to justices’ professional backgrounds. Five of its seven members are former prosecutors; none is a former public defender. The 2025 front-runners, conservative Brad Schimel and liberal Susan Crawford, have both stressed their prosecutorial experiences as a former attorney general and former deputy attorney general, respectively.

6. Who will come to govern New Jersey and Virginia? 

Voters in New Jersey and Virginia will each elect their next governor and lawmakers this year.

Amy Torres, the New Jersey advocate for immigrant justice, says that, depending on who wins Democratic primaries and then the November elections, she could see New Jersey become more acquiescent toward the Trump administration. Or alternatively, she says, “There’s an interesting opportunity for New Jersey to be the voice of what resistance looks like.” She stressed that her state’s outlook feels especially uncertain due to a legal ruling last year that revamped primary ballots and loosened the control of party machines.

One unusual layer to the governor’s race: New Jersey does not elect local prosecutors, so the discretion to set prosecutorial policies rests largely with the attorney general, another office that itself is not elected but rather appointed by the governor. New Jersey has been under full Democratic control since the 2017 elections. 

Meanwhile, Virginia’s government has flipped back and forth during that time, with major ramifications for criminal justice policy.

In their brief stint running the state from 2019 to 2021, Virginia Democrats abolished the death penalty, banned life without parole sentences for kids, and ended prison gerrymandering, among other changes. But their agenda came to an abrupt halt in 2021 with the election of Governor Glenn Youngkin, a Republican who effectively froze voting rights restoration and parole grants and vetoed other reform legislation. Another Republican, Attorney General Jason Miyares, has also targeted local reformers but lacks legislative allies to preempt their policies. 

These issues are sure to come to a head in 2025. Youngkin is barred from seeking a second term as governor. Miyares is running for reelection as attorney general. And legislative races will decide which party can pursue its priorities, from Democrats hoping to codify voting rights for people with felony convictions to the GOP pushing to ramp up policing of immigrants.

Amy Woolard with the ACLU of Virginia says the 2025 elections could be an opportunity to expand criminal legal reform in her state, but that some of the rhetoric around public safety makes the work tough. “It’s tough to get people to listen to community members inside the legislature. It’s tough to push back against the fearmongering,” she told Bolts.

But she is also excited about a new generation of officials who first came into office in 2023 and whose ranks she hopes expand this year. She said, “They brought with them a kind of excitement, fearlessness, energy around having candid conversations around excessive sentencing, about the racial implications of our criminal justice system.”

The post The Local Elections That Will Define Criminal Justice Policy in 2025 appeared first on Bolts.

Republicans grew their legislative ranks in 20 states, erasing Democratic majorities in two critical chambers in Michigan and Minnesota and soaring in a trio of New England states. But Democrats did the same in 11 states. They coalesced with centrist Republicans to flip the Alaska House away from GOP control, broke the GOP’s ability to override vetoes in North Carolina, and scored double-digit swings in Montana and Wisconsin.

Overall, Republicans gained 57 seats out of the roughly 6,000 races on the ballot, Bolts has determined in its third annual review of each state’s legislative elections. 

In 2022, the GOP gained 20 legislative seats, a meager result that deflated their expectations for a Democratic president’s midterms. (Several cycles in the 2010s saw swings that numbered in the hundreds of seats.) Democrats then gained five seats in 2023. 

These legislative results fit a broader pattern of short coattails for Trump: The GOP did not surge downballot as it did in the presidential race. The party secured full control of Congress but Democrats added a seat in the U.S. House and salvaged four U.S. Senate seats in states Trump carried. Bolts also reported that results were also mixed in state supreme court elections.

Going forward, the GOP will enjoy a trifecta—one-party control of both legislative chambers and the governorship—in 23 states, a number that did not change after last month’s elections. Democrats meanwhile will hold a trifecta in 15 states after losing one-party control in Michigan and Minnesota.

That leaves twelve states that will have split governments, though GOP lawmakers will have the votes to override the vetoes of a Democratic governor in two of these. 

This table details the make-up of each of the nation’s 99 state legislative chambers, plus the city council in Washington, D.C., before and after the Nov. 5 elections.

A handful of districts’ results are still not final pending recounts and lawsuits later this month. (This affects seats in Arizona, Colorado, Minnesota, North Carolina, New York, and Washington.) Also, Bolts kept several methodological choices made in the 2022 analysis. Vacant seats are attributed to the party that held them most recently. For the purpose of quantifying a swing and being consistent, Bolts counted lawmakers who left their party since the last election but did not join or caucus with the other party as belonging to their original party. (This affects a handful of seats in New Hampshire, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina.) Lawmakers who outright switched parties are counted as belonging to their new party. 

To dig deeper, here are five takeaways from the 2024 legislative elections.

1. In four states, a party lost the ability to unilaterally pass laws

Democrats in 2022 gained full control of the Michigan and Minnesota governments, huge prizes that they quickly used to adopt a slew of legislative priorities. Bolts covered the passage of voting rights legislation in both states, including an expansion of rights restoration in Minnesota and automatic voter registration for people who are released from prison in Michigan. 

These two trifectas are no more. 

The GOP gained just enough seats to cost Democrats the House in both states: Republicans won an outright majority in the Michigan House, but the Minnesota House ended up in a tie that will force a party-sharing agreement. Democrats will still hold the governorships and Senates in both states, but they won’t be able to pass ambitious legislation on party-line votes. 

Democrats also lost that power in Vermont, where heavy losses in both of the state’s chambers cost them their supermajorities. This means they will no longer be able to pass legislation by overriding vetoes from GOP Governor Phil Scott. Democrats had made liberal use of this ability in recent years, including by increasing property taxes this summer, an issue Scott then seized on to heavily campaign against Democrats. As Bolts reported last year, the Democratic legislature also greenlit requests by several towns to allow noncitizens to vote in local elections. 

The GOP lost the power to legislate at will in just one state: North Carolina. 

While Republicans retained majorities thanks to their gerrymandered maps, Democrats broke the GOP’s supermajority in the state House. That means the GOP won’t be able to override the vetoes of Democrat Josh Stein, who won the governor’s race. 

North Carolina Republicans have responded to the impending loss of their veto-proof majority by ramming through a sprawling bill to gut the powers of the governor’s and change election rules during the outgoing legislature’s lame-duck session. The bill was vetoed by Governor Roy Cooper last week but the state Senate overrode his veto on Monday; the state House vote is still pending as of publication.

In no state did a party gain the ability to pass laws on its own: There is no new state trifecta, and there is no new supermajority for a party hoping to override the vetoes of a hostile governor.

This means that Democrats fell well short of their hopes of gaining control of Arizona for the first time since the 1960s, and of flipping New Hampshire. Instead, they lost ground in both states and also failed to break consequential GOP supermajorities in Kansas and Nebraska.

But in the days following the election, Alaska Democrats announced a new coalition with some moderate Republicans to grab control of the state House from GOP leaders. A similar mostly Democratic coalition has already been running the state Senate since the 2022 midterms.

2. In most states, the Nov. 5 elections preserved the status quo

In many places, the GOP’s great night at the top of the ticket did not trickle down to legislative elections. 

Take Pennsylvania. In 2022, Democrats easily won the elections for governor and for the U.S. Senate races; they also scored double-digits gains in the state House. This year, the GOP flipped the script for statewide races, winning the state’s electoral votes and defeating U.S. Senator Bob Casey. But not a single of Pennsylvania’s 203 House seats changed hands. Democrats defended their narrow majority, 102 to 101 seats.

Overall, 28 of the state chambers that held regular legislative elections this fall saw zero partisan change. That compares to 18 chambers that saw no partisan change in 2022. 

Just seven states experienced a partisan swing of at least five legislative seats this year. That’s compared to the 16 states that saw such a swing in 2022.

Four of the seven were in New England. The GOP made major gains in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. Republicans cemented their majorities in New Hampshire, while in Maine they soared but fell short of flipping the state’s two chambers. And the starkest swing was in Vermont: By winning 25 additional seats, the GOP flipped roughly 14 percent of all the seats on the ballot.

That’s the national record for a swing this year. 

But in another New England state, Connecticut, Democrats grew their ranks in both chambers, adding five seats overall, a feat they’ve pulled off for at least the third consecutive cycle. Here, too, the result went counter Trump’s substantial gains at the presidential level.

The GOP gained five seats in Kansas. Democratic Governor Laura Kelly had campaigned to break the GOP’s supermajorities; instead, Republicans will have an easier time overriding her vetoes going forward. Some GOP moderates have occasionally sided with Democrats to sustain Kelly’s vetoes, for instance in April to narrowly defeat a ban on gender-affirming care. 

In the final two states that saw a large swing, Montana and Wisconsin, it was Democrats who gained. And in both cases, new legislative maps explain the swing, bringing us to our next takeaway.

3. Wisconsin and Montana showcase the importance of who controls redistricting

Following the 2020 decennial census, nearly all states used new legislative maps in 2022, and the results vividly illustrated how the choice between gerrymandering and independent commissions can transform state politics. The 2024 elections offered the same lesson.

In Wisconsin, aggressive gerrymanders locked in huge Republican majorities in both 2011 and 2021, but the GOP’s plan unraveled in the spring of 2023 when liberals flipped the state supreme court. The court struck down the GOP maps in late 2023, forcing fairer districts. As a result, Democrats gained 14 seats across both chambers in last month’s elections—the party’s biggest gain in any state. They narrowed the GOP majorities from 22-11 to 18-15 in the Senate, where only half of the seats were in play, and from 64-35 to 54-45 in the House. 

This will immediately affect governance in Wisconsin: Republicans last year had floated the idea of removing the new state supreme court justice who had secured liberals’ majority on the bench last year, but November’s legislative swings will make similar threats obsolete going forward since the party will no longer have the votes to back it up. 

In Montana, there was no judicial showdown that forced new maps. This was simply the first cycle of state legislative races since the state’s decennial redistricting. Still, the redistricting process last year saw a high-stakes decision: Over the objections of the GOP commissioners, the only nonpartisan member of Montana’s redistricting panel sided with the Democratic commissioners who wanted the new maps to better mirror the state’s overall partisan breakdown. 

Montana Democrats this fall gained 12 legislative seats, breaking GOP supermajorities in both legislative chambers. 

Montana conservatives had also hoped to end the liberal majority on the state supreme court that had struck down their legislative priorities, but they failed to meaningfully alter the court’s balance. And GOP lawmakers will no longer be able to advance constitutional amendments overriding the court rulings they disagree with: Such measures need a two-thirds majority in the legislature.

4. Even in states with little partisan change, the primaries may have changed the game

November settled the balance of power between the two major parties, but that’s only part of the story of 2024. In some states, this year’s legislative elections spell major changes within the ruling party, often due to primaries resolved months ago. 

In Texas, far-right Republicans gained ground during this spring’s primary elections. In total, 13 state representatives were defeated in GOP primaries or runoffs by challengers endorsed by Attorney General Ken Paxton, a close ally of Trump who sought retribution against those lawmakers for voting in 2023 to impeach him over an avalanche of scandals. Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan, who forcefully defended his vote to impeach Paxton during his reelection campaign, barely escaped the AG’s revenge in a May runoff, however it’s unclear whether Phelan can survive a challenge for speaker in a state House that has moved further to the right.

The ultraconservative faction of the Wyoming Republican Party also increased its influence in the state’s primaries this summer. The state’s far-right Freedom Caucus won majorities in both legislative chambers for the first time, and won the leadership elections in late November.

No Democratic-run chamber underwent as big an upheaval. Still, a pair of progressive incumbents lost their reelection bids in Colorado in June, including Elisabeth Epps, an abolitionist activist who was elected to the state House in 2022; the results will cost criminal justice reformers key allies in a chamber where they’ve already struggled. 

Progressives gained ground in Delaware and New Mexico, though, by defeating a slew of centrist Democrats. The ousted incumbents include New Mexico Senator Daniel Ivey-Soto; Bolts reported in 2023 that voting rights advocates faulted Ivey-Soto for the failure of a legislation they’d championed. 

5. What lies ahead?

The Nov. 5 results could trigger further changes in early 2025. Three state senators won congressional races in Michigan and Virginia, and must now vacate their seats in tight chambers. 

In Michigan, Democrat Kristen McDonald Rivet’s resignation will spark a special election in the competitive 35th Senate District. The chamber is currently split 20 to 18 seats for Democrats, so the GOP would gain an even tie if they flip the district. (Still, the Democratic lieutenant governor would be able to break any tied votes in the chamber.)

Similarly, in Virginia, Democrat Suhas Subramanyan and Republican John McGuire are moving to the U.S. House from the state Senate, which is currently split 21 to 19 in Democrats’ favor. The race to replace Subramanyan in District 32nd is more likely to be competitive, according to The Downballot, giving the GOP a chance to tie the chamber in a Jan. 7 special election; a tie would effectively hand Republicans the majority since the GOP lieutenant governor would have the power to break ties.

In mid-November, Democrats chose state Delegate Kannan Srinivasan to run in this race. This triggered another Jan. 7 special election, this time in District 26, Srinivasan’s blue-leaning House seat. Democrats’ control of the lower chamber is just as narrow—51 to 49—so the GOP will have an outside shot at tying the House as well.

Next year will only speed up from there. Other specials are already scheduled, though in chambers that aren’t as tight as in Michigan and Virginia. And in the fall, the entirety of the New Jersey Assembly and Virginia House will be on the ballot alongside the state’s governorships.

The piece has been corrected to reflect the latest results in Oregon, where Democrats ended up flipping a seat in the state House by flipping the 22nd District with late votes.

The post The GOP Came Out Ahead in Legislative Races, But Their Gains Were Modest and Uneven appeared first on Bolts.

Urmanski eventually lost in court, enabling Planned Parenthood to resume its services in Sheboygan. But he has appealed the ruling; if successful, his legal challenge could still criminalize abortion in Wisconsin. 

In the meantime, Urmanski won’t have to test his stance on abortion with the public. Sheboygan County hasn’t had a contested election for DA since 2002, and it won’t have one again this year.  The filing deadline for candidates to run passed earlier this month, confirming that Urmanski won’t face an opponent as he seeks reelection; he’s never faced one in his past bids, either.

In some regards, 2024 is a new era for democracy in Wisconsin: The state supreme court struck down the GOP’s legislative gerrymanders last year, enabling fairer maps, and candidates have rushed to run for the legislature. But that spirit hasn’t carried over into criminal justice elections.

Wisconsinites this year are electing their 71 DAs, powerful county officials with wide discretion over who gets prosecuted to what degree of severity. But voters only have a choice in four of those elections. Across the rest of the state, in 67 out of 71 DA races, just one candidate is running unopposed in both the primary and the general election.

This means that the final result is already known in a startling 94 percent of the year’s DA races, limiting what little public oversight and accountability exists for these powerful offices. These uncontested elections also immediately cut off any public debate that a competitive race could have sparked on issues rocking the state, like police oversight or abortion rights.

“It’s a missed opportunity for the public,” regrets Craig Johnson, a Milwaukee lawyer who is the board president of Wisconsin Justice Initiative, a group that advocates for criminal legal reforms in the state. “It’s a missed opportunity for the community to engage in the kind of conversation and discussion of ideas that would be helpful in trying to move the criminal justice system forward.”

“When someone is uncontested, they don’t tend to appear at candidate forums, they don’t tend to go out and campaign as much,” he said. “The conversation is not as vibrant and as vigorous as it would be if there were two candidates who had different thoughts.”

Even in Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s most populous county, a new prosecutor is poised to waltz into the DA’s office without facing any opposition. Incumbent John Chisholm is retiring, and Kent Lovern, a deputy DA under Chisholm, is the only candidate who filed to replace him. His website as of publication is not specific on policy, promising to be “tough on crime” while looking at alternatives to detention for low-level offenses; Lovern’s campaign did not reply to Bolts’ questions about how he’ll approach the job.

In seven other counties, the sitting DA is similarly retiring with one single candidate running in their stead, typically an assistant prosecutor who’s seeking to replace their boss. 

Fifty-nine incumbents, meanwhile, are running for new terms unopposed in both the primary and general election. 

That all leaves just four contested races: in Kenosha, Waukesha, and Washington counties, as well as in the sparsely populated district that joins Menominee and Shawano counties. 

It’s common nationally for DA races to be uncontested. Still, the scope of this phenomenon in Wisconsin far surpasses what we see elsewhere. Four years ago, over 90 percent of the state’s DA elections drew just one candidate. And an analysis of past election filings by Bolts found that many Wisconsin counties haven’t held a single contested race in decades.

Most of the state’s DA offices—58 percent of the total—have seen no contested DA election in over ten years. That means that one candidate has run unopposed in the last three cycles. 

In many cases, the streak goes back much further: More than one-third of Wisconsin counties have never held a contested DA race over the last two decades—a period that covers seven cycles of DA elections in the state.

Even in the counties that have experienced some competition, it’s still infrequent: Out of the seven election cycles from 2004 to 2024, roughly two-thirds of Wisconsin counties have seen no more than one contested election. 

And this isn’t just a dynamic in the sparsely populated parts of the state. Three of Wisconsin’s ten most populous counties have held no DA race with multiple candidates since at least 2002. None has held more than two.

And this isn’t just a dynamic in the sparsely populated parts of the state. Three of Wisconsin’s ten most populous counties have held no DA race with multiple candidates since at least 2002. None has held more than two.

Overall, one fourth of Wisconsin residents live in counties that have had no contested DA race since at least 2002.

“It’s a problem for democratic accountability, given DAs have so much power, when there isn’t a choice for voters in the vast majority of counties,” said Amanda Merkwae, director of advocacy at the ACLU of Wisconsin. “If residents of a county are fighting for transparency and accountability with the DA’s office, the primary avenue of democratic accountability is through an election every four years and having a choice at the ballot box.” 

For Merkwae, the ongoing litigation around abortion rights in Wisconsin is a stark example of the powers of prosecutors. “Depending on some decisions that are pending, if there is a gray area in the law, it’s functionally up to DAs whether to criminalize someone for accessing reproductive health care,” she said. “There are so many issues outside of what people typically think of when they think of the power of a prosecutor within the criminal legal system.”

Wisconsin, for instance, has been ground zero for baseless conservative conspiracies about the 2020 presidential race, with some Republicans endorsing aggressive investigations into the election officials who oversaw the results. “When you think about election conspiracies and baseless allegations of voter fraud, it is the DA who has the power and discretion to potentially endorse those conspiracies with prosecutions,” said Merkwae.

Eric Toney, the Republican DA of Fond du Lac County, is known for aggressively prosecuting election crimes since the 2020 presidential election and the conservative conspiracies about the result. He also sought the ouster of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, and aligned himself with the investigations of former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, a far-right figure now on the outs with the state’s Republican leadership. 

Toney is running for reelection unopposed this year for the third consecutive four-year cycle.

Prosecutors in Wisconsin also are responsible for making sure there are consequences for police misconduct but often ignore that oversight function. An investigation by Wisconsin Watch last month revealed that many DAs fail to track or adequately maintain “Brady lists” of police officers with a history of lying or misconduct. 

Under Urmanski, the Sheboygan County DA’s office filed dozens of criminal cases last year that relied on the testimony of police officers with such a Brady determination, according to the Sheboygan Press. The office has also repeatedly tried to seal the police records showing misconduct when those officers appear in cases. Earlier this year, a local judge rebuked Urmanski’s office for routinely making these requests to shield police misconduct records from public scrutiny.

“At what point does the public have a right to know about this pattern of misconduct of police officers in this community that rises to the level of being exculpatory?” Samantha Bastil, the local judge, said at a criminal hearing in December. Bastil, a former prosecutor, said during the  hearing that she had never seen a policy of sealing police misconduct records so routinely in her time working in the criminal legal system. Urkmanski did not respond to a request for comment.

Merkwae hoped for contested elections as an opportunity for the public to ask DAs about their commitment to police accountability. She also wants prosecutors to revise their bail policies to reduce the state’s ballooned local jails, where people are detained in dismal and often deadly conditions. “Even spending a few days in jail can have devastating, long lasting consequences for folks who are presumptively innocent, both for them and their families,” Merkwae said.

But state Republicans have attacked rules around pretrial detention in Wisconsin as too lax, successfully championing a referendum last year to make cash bail more restrictive.

Republicans have also assailed the outgoing DA in Milwaukee, Chisholm, over the case of Darrell Brooks, who drove a car through a Christmas parade in Waukesha County in 2021 while he was out on bond, killing six people. Chisholm has long touted his efforts to reform the county’s bail system and reduce incarceration, even if Milwaukee’s brutal local jail during his tenure has regularly been over capacity. After the Christmas parade attack, Chisholm said that the bail amount his office had recommended for Brooks in an earlier assault case was “inappropriately low” and not consistent with internal policies.

For Johnson, of the Wisconsin Justice Initiative, the response to such “sensational crime news” underscores why it’s difficult to persuade people with an interest in criminal justice reforms to run for DA. “You can expect to be attacked, you can expect to have every decision second-guessed, and you can expect probably to be recalled if there’s a decision that people disagree with,” he told Bolts. 

“If you’re a prosecutor and you recommend a low bail on somebody, and that person pulls out and commits a bank robbery or shooting or something, it is going to get headlines,” he said, adding that it’s difficult to get similar coverage when reforms are successful. “If a person arrested on a burglary charge has mental health issues, and instead of being sent to prison, they’re put into some sort of program that gets them community-based mental health services, and as a result they connect up with a good program, they succeed, they go on to live a crime free life, that’s not going to be a big story. That’s going to be a quiet success.”

Darrol Gibson, the Wisconsin state director of Run for Something, an organization that recruits progressive candidates to run for local office nationwide, told Bolts that he’s always eager to find people who want to change the system and come from different communities than the average politician. But he says it’s particularly hard to find such candidates in DA elections, especially when it comes to recruiting candidates of color.

“Our justice system has not been kind to communities of color,” Gibson said, pointing to the record rates of incarceration for Black people in Milwaukee and in the state. “For me to fill this role, what do I have to put myself through to change the system? … Am I participating in the same system that I’m trying to fight against?”

Still, Gibson said he encourages people to think of the broader impact their candidacy could have even if they don’t prevail. He told Bolts that whenever he meets a candidate, he asks them, “What do you want to do in this election? What issues do you want to bring forth, what things we want to push your opponent to speak on and to take a stance on and hold him accountable to?” 

Contesting elections isn’t just winning elections, he said, it’s about “moving the way people think and perceive what is possible.”

The post For Wisconsin Prosecutors, Elections in Name Only appeared first on Bolts.

But Ramos, who directs the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, an organization that promotes good government, says he may not volunteer in the future if voters approve Question 2, a constitutional amendment on the state’s April 2 ballot. “This thing gets passed, and I’d be very afraid to do that again,” he told Bolts.

The measure would require that only “an election official designated by law may perform tasks in the conduct of primaries, elections or referendums.” It can easily read as an innocuous codification of existing statute, and it has generated no campaign spending on either side of the issue since Republican lawmakers chose to place it on the ballot late last year.

Among advocates for voting rights and for well-resourced election administration, however, this under-the-radar proposal is alarming. A slew of lawyers, elections experts, and nonprofit leaders tell Bolts Question 2 is written so vaguely as to invite lawsuits over what constitutes a “task” and what, exactly, it means to help “conduct” an election. 

They fear this confusion will have a chilling effect on the many non-governmental groups and volunteers who assist in election administration. If it passes, the measure is set to go into effect this year, ahead of November’s presidential election in which Wisconsin is again considered a critical swing state.

Victoria Bassetti, an expert on election law who has been involved in Wisconsin politics for three decades, believes this amendment would call into question the legality of any number of actions that these volunteers and outside organizations routinely perform in aid of the nearly 2,000 county and municipal clerks who run Wisconsin’s elections. 

“It adds pretty substantial burdens and legal doubts onto the shoulders of hardworking local election administrators, who, faced with this new provision, are going to see help that they previously relied upon fade away, are going to face substantial litigation risks, and are going to be unable to call upon expert advice and help from a variety of fields, including IT, security, and ballot design,” said Bassetti, a senior advisor at States United Democracy Center, a nonpartisan group that advocates for ballot access. 

“I do feel like people are treating it like an afterthought, but Question 2 is a big deal,” said Eileen Newcomer, who leads voter education efforts for the League of Women Voters in Wisconsin, “and the way that this question is phrased does lead to a lot of uncertainty about how it would be enforced.”

This measure appears alongside Question 1, a related constitutional amendment that would ban election offices in the state from accepting or spending money donated by outside, non-governmental groups. Both measures are part of the continued fallout of the 2020 presidential election, and the conspiracies about widespread election fraud that have characterized Republican politics—especially in Wisconsin—ever since. Democratic state lawmakers unanimously opposed placing Questions 1 and 2 on the ballot, arguing that the state should better finance elections before restricting outside aid.

Question 1 responds to a controversy that emerged in the fall of 2020, when a previously low-profile nonprofit called the Center for Tech and Civic Life distributed about $350 million, donated by billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, to local elections offices around the country to assist in election administration at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. These local offices, many underfunded and understaffed already, were scrambling at the time to outfit poll workers with personal protective equipment, establish drive-through voting, and process record levels of mail-in ballots.

Republicans were and still are outraged at the influx of cash, and have argued consistently that the donors intended to benefit liberal areas and boost turnout by Democrats, despite a lack of evidence of such favoritism or interference. Three and a half years on, this country’s response to the donation has been resounding: 27 states, most of which went for Donald Trump in 2020, have adopted bans on private funding for election administration. It would now hardly be groundbreaking if Wisconsin passes a ban of its own and becomes the 28th. (Wisconsin would have already joined this list, but for a veto by Democratic Governor Tony Evers in 2021.)

While Question 1 confronts outside money, Question 2 would affect the outside labor that goes into making elections run smoothly. 

Among many examples of people who could arguably run afoul of the law if Question 2 passes, elections experts told Bolts, are representatives of voting-machine companies who commonly help troubleshoot during elections. And what about outside organizations who perform routine data analysis for local elections offices? Newcomer said that such work helps clerks decide how to spend limited resources—where to establish polling places, how to disperse staff, and so on.

Said Sam Liebert, a former clerk in three different small Wisconsin communities, “Some of these clerks are in towns and villages of 100 or 200 people, and they run elections out of living rooms and kitchens, and they have their 8-year-old daughters helping lick envelopes to send out absentee ballots. Where does this stop?”

Liebert, who now directs the Wisconsin branch of the national nonprofit advocacy group All Voting is Local, was leading elections in a town of about 12,000 people outside of Milwaukee during the 2020 cycle, and he said he relied on the assistance of folks who, under Question 2, could be seen as lacking the legal authorization to do that work in the future.

About 3,000 people in his town had requested absentee ballots that year for the November general election, and Liebert said he and his small staff could not alone have gotten the ballots sent out on time. He called in help from the town’s Parks and Recreation director and foreman, he said, and from technicians who are normally tasked with cleaning and maintaining park bathrooms and infrastructure. “We had an assembly line, getting ballots into envelopes and mail machines and getting them stamped,” Liebert said.

Wisconsin law already vests in local elections officials the power and responsibility to hire and train poll workers, and to discharge them if they break the law. Republicans who control the state legislature want to build upon this and turn the policy into a constitutional provision that could only be undone with another statewide vote.

But the law also has specific rules for who does and doesn’t qualify to be a poll worker; state statute lays out residency requirements and commands that workers undergo training before assisting in elections.

Should Question 2 pass, experts told Bolts, local clerks would have to be careful in deciding whom to call upon for help, and in making sure to remember to swear in as a poll worker anyone who performs a “task” of election administration—lest they slip up and find themselves lead characters in lawsuits. 

But it won’t be enough, Bassetti said, for clerks to simply err on the side of caution by administering an oath of office whenever they fear they’re in a gray area. She said many would not meet the standards set by state statute, listing a wide range of workers she fears would be affected: “the IT consultant who’s there to help you troubleshoot, the security person who’s there to help you, the friendly school person who wants to help you organize things, or the ballot-design person helping you fit 17 things onto one sheet of paper,” among others.

During debate over the measures in November in the state Senate, Republican Senator Eric Wimberger argued this step was made necessary by foul play in Green Bay in 2020. Faced with extraordinary demands to execute an election amid a raging pandemic, the Green Bay city council created an ad hoc elections committee, which agreed to take $1.6 million from the Center for Civic and Tech Life, and also invited the guidance of several outside experts who helped the city plan for and hold its general election that year.

Green Bay’s clerk, however, clashed with that outside aid and wound up resigning, arguing she’d been marginalized by city leaders who favored outside expertise over her own.

The election was carried out without any reported irregularities. In a report issued in April of 2021, Green Bay’s city attorney absolved the city of any wrongdoing in the administration of the 2020 election, and furthermore found that the outside aid was much-needed. The report details intense challenges in Green Bay leading up to the election, with city officials overwhelmed and ill-equipped. “There was no way for the City to react to the changes brought on by the pandemic without the infusion of funding,” the report stated.

Three years after that report, the Green Bay episode remains the subject of Republican conspiracy theories, and is a primary motivator for Question 2 supporters in the legislature. Wimberger, who represents Green Bay, alleged from the Senate floor that in 2020 “activists orchestrated the fall election and acted as a city clerk would act, though paid by [the Center for Civic and Tech Life], including managing staff and having access to ballots.” He went on to suggest that the outside aid made Wisconsin’s 2020 election results untrustworthy. “Whether the actual ballots were altered or advantages went to one side remains unclear,” he said. “Suspicions remain.”

During that same Senate debate, Democratic legislators argued that Wisconsin Republicans were putting the state in an impossible position by both declining to substantially increase funding for local elections and limiting the ability of local administrators to seek help.

“You can’t have it both ways,” Democratic Senator Mark Spreitzer said. “You can either provide public funding for elections, or you can let clerks go out and find the resources they need to cover the gap. But you can’t choose neither.”

Advocates told Bolts the vagueness of Question 2 in particular could prove to be a feature, not a bug, for Republicans: by creating new avenues to prosecute people in election administration, they create opportunities to sow distrust and chaos.

“This only plays into the narrative that our system is broken, by making it more broken,” Liebert said. 

That narrative has taken hold in prominent corners of Wisconsin politics. For one, court documents recently showed, lawyers in Wisconsin were central to Donald Trump’s effort to create a “cloud of confusion” in attempting to overturn election results in 2020. Since then, some law enforcement officials in Wisconsin have tried to use the powers of their office to investigate the elections, as Bolts has reported.

And election deniers continue to have sway in Wisconsin. A fake elector for Trump sits on the state’s election commission; another, Bill Feehan, is running for office in LaCrosse County in April. Trump supporters are also now trying to force a recall of Robin Vos, the staunchly conservative sitting Republican speaker of the Wisconsin House, over concerns Vos hadn’t done enough to help them decertify the state’s 2020 results. 

David Canon, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Wisconsin, joined several others interviewed for this story in predicting that the exact boundaries set by Question 2 will have to be clarified in court, should the amendment pass. He identified several types of routine elections work that could feature in lawsuits challenging election results.

For example, Canon said, “What about helping disabled voters? Under state law a disabled person can have someone take them to the polling place and be with them when they vote. I think there will be a lot of people in the gray area who will have to be sorted out by subsequent litigation.” 

This would all be avoided, of course, if Question 2 fails—but Wisconsin politicos told Bolts they’d be shocked by that outcome. In the absence of organized opposition, many of them said, the amendment should appeal to a wide swath of voters who take its language at face value and may miss the intentions of the measure’s authors. 

“You have some folks that were pushing both of these constitutional amendments that are looking to try and sow seeds of doubt on our elections,” he said. “There’s going to be a lot of throwing things at the wall to see what sticks, by folks who’ve been pushing to poke and prod, and who’ll poke and prod some more now.”

The post Ballot Measure May Scare Away the People Who Help Run Wisconsin Elections appeared first on Bolts.

After court rulings in December struck down several states’ electoral maps, from Michigan to New York, what districts will millions of people even vote in later this year? How prepared will local election offices be after suffering harassment for years? Will the Voting Rights Act (VRA) still stand as a tool for civil rights litigation in the wake of an ominous ruling that came in late 2023? Who will even be running elections in North Carolina and Wisconsin, two swing states that are experiencing an intense power struggle?

Our team at Bolts has identified a dozen key questions that will shape voting rights and democracy this year. This is born less of a desire to be comprehensive than to offer a preliminary roadmap for our own coverage.

That’s because, while some questions that matter to 2024 will come down to federal decisions—likely starting with decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court on Donald Trump’s prosecutions and presence on the ballot, and on the VRA’s fate—a lot will hinge on the policies and politics of state and local governments: your county clerk in charge of organizing Election Day, your county board that decides where to put ballot drop boxes, your lawmakers tweaking the rules of ballot initiatives, your secretary of state wielding the power to certify results. (Be sure to explore our state-by-state resources on who runs our elections and who counts our elections.) 

These are the officials we will be tracking throughout the year to help us clarify the local landscape of voting rights and access to democracy during a critical election year. 

1. How will federal courts affect voting rights and the 2024 election?

A maelstrom of major legal cases on voting rights and the 2024 election are currently working their way through the legal system, and many are heading straight toward the nation’s highest court.

The stakes are clear in: The U.S. Supreme Court

SCOTUS is set to hear several cases that will affect one presidential candidate: Donald Trump. The first is whether Trump will be allowed to appear on the ballot in several states. Colorado’s state supreme court disqualified him from the primary ballot in late December, ruling he was ineligible due to the Fourteenth Amendment because he engaged in an insurrection on January 6. (Maine’s secretary of state came to a similar conclusion one week later.) Trump has appealed the Colorado decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, though the justices have not yet announced whether and when they will hear the cases; their ruling is likely to also shape how other states do, amid the former president’s protests that his removal would unduly disenfranchise millions. The Supreme Court could also decide at least five other cases that touch Trump, including the shape of his Atlanta trial on charges that he tried to subvert the 2020 election in Georgia.

Also keep an eye on: SCOTUS may decide any major litigation that emerges in the aftermath of the November elections. But it’s also set to consider plenty of non-Trump voting rights cases this year, including several that may further gut the VRA. One devastating blow for the landmark civil rights law may come from a case out of Arkansas, where a federal appeals court ruled that private groups and individuals cannot bring VRA challenges. If the Supreme Court upholds this ruling, legal experts say it would make the law largely unenforceable. As the VRA continues to be weakened, some states have adopted state-level voting rights acts to reinforce its principles; debate may resume in Michigan and New Jersey this year over such legislation.

Federal appeals courts have also recently rejected other VRA claims, including in a case in which civil rights groups in Georgia challenged the state’s election system for its public utility commission as racially discriminatory. If the high court upholds the ruling, it would have major implications for the statewide elected utility commission in neighboring Alabama as well.

2. How will state election maps change by November?

Nearly four years after the decennial census that kicks off redistricting, election maps across the country remain in flux, and major legal and political battles are set to unfold this year. At stake is not just who will have power in each state, but also whether people get to vote under fair maps.

The stakes are clear in: Wisconsin

Wisconsin Republicans enjoy large legislative majorities that are effectively election-proof thanks to their gerrymandered maps, but 2023 began to unravel their hold on power. Liberals flipped the state’s supreme court in April after a heated campaign during which Janet Protasiewicz, the winning candidate, called the legislative maps “rigged.” And in late December, the court issued a 4-3 ruling, with liberals in the majority, striking down the legislative maps.

But there’s still a long way to go before voters can get fairer maps in November. The court set up a process to draw new remedial maps, but left the door open for lawmakers to try first. The state’s GOP speaker has largely backed off his earlier threats to impeach Protasiewicz but still has not ruled it out. And Democratic groups must decide whether they’ll also sue over the congressional map and whether to do so in state court.

Also keep an eye on: A federal judge ordered Louisiana to draw a new congressional map by late January to stop diluting the power of Black voters, but lawmakers may stall. Michigan needs to redraw its legislative maps after another federal ruling found that 13 districts violated the Voting Rights Act. New York is also in the midst of a fresh round of congressional redistricting after Democrats won a court battle in December, though it remains to be seen whether the process ends up producing minor tweaks or an aggressive Democratic gerrymander. And from Texas to Florida, there’s still active litigation in many states alleging that maps are unlawful. 

3. How well will local election officials and offices be prepared to handle the election?

The country’s elections workforce has been decimated in the past few years, amid a deluge of threats and harassment stemming from coordinated efforts by some Republicans to attack and undermine local and state administrators, as well as funding challenges. The capacity of these local offices will now be seriously tested in 2024. 

The stakes are clear in: Nevada

Nevada has suffered acutely since 2020 from election-worker brain-drain. Not a week into 2024, these woes have already deepened: Jamie Rodriguez, the elections chief in Washoe County (Reno), the second most populous county in the state, announced her resignation on Tuesday. Rodriguez’s predecessor, Deanna Spikula, herself stepped down in 2022 after some residents smeared her as a “traitor” and threatened her office. In an interview with Bolts last year, Cisco Aguilar, Nevada’s Democratic secretary of state, warned of where he sees this all heading: “If we don’t take care of the human component,” he said, “these elections are going to be nowhere near where we want them to be or expect them to be, and that’s only going to deteriorate the credibility of elections overall.”

Also keep an eye on: Election officials have similarly resigned en masse in recent years in many states, from Colorado to Pennsylvania, leading many to worry about the amount of experience lost. And while election workers are crucial, so is election infrastructure. Aging voting equipment presents a projected multi-billion-dollar problem. Look to Louisiana, for example, to see why this is worth worrying about: That state’s voting machines are nearly 20 years old. They break down often and, when they do, elections administrators struggle to obtain the parts to fix them. One local elections chief told Bolts her office is “barely hanging on”— a statement many of her counterparts around the country have echoed.

4. Who will actually run the 2024 elections?

It’s tough enough for election offices to prepare for the 2024 cycle amid all the personal overhaul they’ve experienced since 2024. But in some of the nation’s most important battleground states, election rules and administrators are in limbo going into this critical year. 

The stakes are clear in: Wisconsin

Wisconsin Election Commission administrator Meagan Wolfe became a target for right-wing conspiracists in the wake of the 2020 election, and GOP lawmakers resolved to oust her last year. After a complicated set of maneuvers, Senate Republicans voted to remove her from the position in September, but a judge later ruled that vote had no legal effect for now. Wolfe has not stepped down from her position even though her term has technically expired. This political and legal imbroglio has created huge uncertainty over who will actually administer Wisconsin’s elections this year. Adding to the limbo: Wisconsinites in April will elect some of the local officials who will then run the state’s August and November elections. 

Also keep an eye on: North Carolina Republicans were primed to oust the director of the state’s State Elections Board, Karen Brinson Bell, thanks to a new law they passed last year. The law changed the structure of the board so that it no longer has a Democratic majority, instead creating an even split between parties, and it entrusted the GOP legislature with resolving ties; this would likely set up Republicans to oust Bell and usher in new leadership. But a state court in late November blocked the law in a preliminary ruling, a legal dispute set to resolve this year. 

5. What happens if any election officials try to stall or halt certification?

After losing the 2020 presidential race, Donald Trump asked state and local officials to stall or stop the election’s certification, hoping to overturn state results and convince his congressional allies to accept his slates of fake electors. If Trump loses the presidential race again this fall and repeats that strategy, would he find allies who are willing to disrupt the process and have the authority to stop it? Be sure to bookmark our nationwide resource on who counts elections since answering this difficult question requires a keen understanding of the mechanisms of power in every state, which Bolts will track throughout 2024. 

The stakes are clear in: Michigan

The recent revelation by the Detroit News that Trump personally pressured members of the Wayne County (Detroit) Board of Canvassers in 2020 was no surprise given what was already known of his actions that year. But it was a reminder of the critical role these local bodies play in Michigan: Boards of canvassers are divided equally between parties, which leaves Democrats particularly vulnerable to shenanigans in a populous stronghold like Wayne. 

Since 2020, the Michigan GOP has replaced their local election officials with people who have defended subverting elections. Republicans on the statewide board of canvassers have also shown they’re willing to go along with such maneuvers. Still, Michigan has new legal standards clarifying that canvassers lack the discretion to reject valid results; in 2022, Democrats defended their majority on the state supreme court, the body that would be called on to enforce such standards.

Also keep an eye on: Election deniers lost most of their bids to take power in swing states in 2022, but there are plenty of other spots to watch. Officials with a history of delaying election certification won reelection last year in Pennsylvania, though Democrats solidified their hold on the state’s supreme court. Trump allies will run local election offices in swing states such as Arizona and Georgia, heightening the potential for havoc. And a fake Trump elector from 2020 has a seat on the Wisconsin Election Commission, the body that runs elections in a key battleground state.

6. How easy will it be for voters to vote by mail?

If you want to vote by mail in this year’s elections, will you need to provide an excuse to get an absentee ballot? Will you have easy access to a drop box to drop off your ballot? What are the odds your mail ballot gets tossed on a technicality? That all depends on your state, the bills your lawmakers are crafting, and may even hinge on the decisions of your local government. 

The stakes are clear in: Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania has one of the nation’s most decentralized systems when it comes to mail voting procedures. As Bolts reported this fall, county officials there have a startling amount of discretion on how to deal with deficient ballots, whether to install drop boxes, and even whether to have armed law enforcement guarding them. Democratic wins in November’s local elections are likely to preserve the status quo in the most populous counties. But democracy advocates are pushing for better procedures on how voters can fix mistakes, and more robust requirements for drop boxes; they’ll be waging this battle both statewide and county by county throughout 2024.

Also keep an eye on: Since the 2020 presidential race saw an explosion of mail voting during the pandemic, many states have revised their rules—some to make it harder, others to expand its availability. The 2024 cycle will be the biggest test yet for how these laws impact turnout. For instance, Democrats in Michigan this year passed new laws that make it easier to vote by mail and set new requirements for drop boxes. Inversely, Georgia Republicans’ restrictions on mail voting, adopted in 2021, just survived their latest court challenge in October. In Mississippi, a new state law that criminalizes helping people with absentee voting is currently blocked by a federal court ruling. Meanwhile in Wisconsin, Democrats are hoping that their new majority on the state supreme court enables voters to use ballot drop boxes, a practice the state disallowed in 2022.

7. Will more states ease voter registration?

By requiring citizens to register to vote, states have erected a barrier between voters and the act of voting. But some have pushed boundaries in recent years, finding ways of shifting the burden of registration onto the state or eliminating unnecessary deadlines or paperwork, with some proposals questioning whether we need registration at all. This will be another critical year to watch how states ease or curtail access to this fundamental right.

The stakes are clear in: New Jersey

Almost half of states allow voters to register on the day of an election—a major convenience for any of the countless people in those states who may otherwise have missed a deadline. Liberal as it is, New Jersey is not among the states with this option, mainly because of opposition from its Democratic state Senate president. The state is weighing the policy afresh this year.

Also keep an eye on: Oregon and Colorado have been badgering the Biden administration for years to allow states to automatically register people to vote when they sign-up for Medicaid; if the feds acted on this,  hundreds of thousands of people would be registered to vote. Other states are considering new laws that would set up or expand automatic voter registration, including applying it to new state agencies, including Ohio, where organizers are pushing for a November initiative; and California, where proposed legislation would likely end up with more people on voter rolls; as well as Maryland and New Jersey, where progressives hope to copy Michigan’s recent first-in-the-nation move to automatically register people to vote as they exit prison.

8. How will states keep changing felony disenfranchisement laws? 

Each state sets its own laws governing whether—and to what extent—people with previous felony convictions lose voting rights, and the national landscape on this front is ever-changing; 2023 alone saw landmark voting rights restoration in New Mexico and Minnesota, plus dramatic rollbacks in Virginia and Tennessee. The United States has long stood out among democracies worldwide for how aggressively it denies voting rights to people with criminal records, and that won’t change in 2024: an estimated 4 million citizens will be blocked from the ballot, but upcoming legal cases and political decisions could affect that number.

The stakes are clear in: Mississippi

A panel of judges on the federal Fifth Circuit appeals court issued a shock decision last summer that struck down Mississippi’s extraordinarily harsh disenfranchisement rules, which strip hundreds of thousands of people of their voting rights for life. (An estimated 11 percent of the state’s adult population can’t vote, currently a national record.) But when the state appealed that panel ruling, the full Fifth Circuit agreed to reconsider it, voiding the prior decision and setting up a major legal showdown this year. If plaintiffs win again, it would bring about one of the most significant expansions of the franchise in a given state in recent history. But don’t bank on that, as voting rights advocates have been bracing for defeat.

The stakes are also clear in: Virginia

Virginia Democrats have been sharply critical of Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin’s 2023 decision to reverse his predecessors’ policy of automatically restoring people’s voting rights. Having just seized control of the legislature, they say they’ll now look to bypass Youngkin by referring to voters a constitutional amendment to remove rights restoration power from the governor’s office. That process would take multiple years to reach the ballot, though.

Also keep an eye on: Progressives in California, Massachusetts, and Oregon hope to go further and altogether eliminate felony disenfranchisement this session, enabling anyone to vote from prison. (This is already law in Maine, Vermont, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C.). Inversely, Tennessee stepped up restrictions on rights restoration in 2023, and now requires people to pay new application fees; 2024 will be the new system’s first major test.

9. Will sheriffs, prosecutors and other law enforcement officials step up policing and intimidation around elections?  

Trump’s lies about the 2020 election inspired right-wing officials across the country to launch special law enforcement units to root out and punish election crimes. They also fueled crackdowns in states where GOP officials had spread the myth of widespread voter fraud long before Trump, leading to a raft of laws creating new election-related crimes or increasing existing penalties around voting. Some GOP law enforcement officials have partnered with far-right election denier groups that are ramping up their own efforts to police voting ahead of Trump’s attempt at re-election. 

The stakes are clear in: Texas

Bolts reported last year that the elected sheriff and DA in Texas’ Tarrant County, home to Fort Worth, were launching a new law enforcement task force to investigate and prosecute voter fraud. Phil Sorrells, the DA, ran with Trump’s endorsement in 2022 and won on promises to ratchet up policing of elections. The sheriff, Bill Waybourn, has become a right-wing celebrity for his fealty to Trump while also facing mounting criticism at home for a spike in deaths and other scandals at the county jail he oversees. 

Political pressure over baseless claims of fraud have already disrupted the running of elections in Fort Worth; Tarrant County’s widely respected elections chief stepped down last year after months of harassment from election deniers, which included racist attacks about his heritage. And election deniers have claimed without evidence that Waybourn’s close reelection win in 2020 suggests there was fraud. (Waybourn is up for reelection again this year.) That all sets the stage for even more allegations and investigations in a county with a long history of harsh and questionable prosecutions for voter fraud during a critical election year.

Also keep an eye on:  Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in 2022 established the country’s first statewide agency dedicated solely to investigating election crimes, which quickly resulted in a series of arrests of people with prior felony convictions accused of voting illegally—many of whom have said the government had told them they could vote and whose prosecutions have since fizzled. Bolts has also reported how sheriffs in the swing states of Arizona and Wisconsin have bolstered election conspiracies and partnered with leading purveyors of election conspiracies to increase policing of elections. 

10. Where, and how, will the assault on direct democracy continue?

Many Republican-run states have curtailed the ballot initiative process in recent years, looking to limit citizens’ ability to put new issues on the ballot. After the GOP failed to derail an abortion rights initiative in Ohio in August, Bolts hosted a roundtable with democracy organizers who all said they expected the assault on direct democracy to continue unabated in 2024, fueled by conservative efforts to protect abortion bans and fight off redistricting reforms.

The stakes are clear in: Missouri

Reproductive rights advocates have turned to the only tool at their disposal in red states: directly asking voters to protect abortion rights. In Missouri, organizers have already had to fight off their attorney general’s effort to sabotage such a measure. In 2024, they’ll also have to contend with GOP proposals to change the rules and make it harder for voters to approve initiatives. One bill, filed by a GOP lawmaker for the 2024 session, would create a new requirement for initiatives to receive a majority in half of the state’s congressional districts in order to pass. Because the state’s map is gerrymandered to favor Republicans, this would force a progressive ballot initiative to carry at least one district that’s far more conservative than the state at large—a tall order for the abortion rights measure to meet. 

Also keep an eye on: Republicans are eying changes to state law in other states like Oklahoma to block abortion rights measures. In Arkansas, where the GOP passed a law last year that made it much more difficult to get a measure on the ballot, the coming year will test what space the law has left for organizing efforts. And democracy advocates in Idaho and Ohio expect Republicans to look for new maneuvers to restrict the initiative process.

11. What will happen to DAs and judges targeted for removal in southern states? 

Conservative officials in southern states have in recent years created, expanded, or ratcheted up the use of state powers to oust local DAs who make policies they disagree with—such as declining certain low-level charges or ruling out abortion prosecution. They have also targeted high-court judges over their decisions and statements.

States to watch: Georgia and Texas 

Republican anger toward local prosecutors reached a fever pitch in Georgia last year with Fulton County DA Fani Willis’ decision to investigate and ultimately prosecute Trump for his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. As Bolts reported, Georgia Republicans established a new board with authority to oust DAs over their charging decisions, though the law has so far been tied up in court. Similarly, after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision triggered a near total criminal abortion ban in Texas, GOP lawmakers there pushed through legislation expanding powers to oust local DAs who said they would refuse to prosecute abortion and other cases, a law that may be turned against some local officials this year. 

Also keep an eye on: Florida, where the governor has broad power to remove and replace local elected officials, DeSantis has ousted two local prosecutors over the past two years, and voters will get to weigh in on who should occupy those offices for the first time since. Residents of St. Louis will also vote for the first time since the removal of their elected prosecutor by the Republicans in the Missouri state government. And Tennessee Republicans have stepped up efforts to sideline Memphis’ new Democratic DA. There are similar efforts to target judges, like the only Black woman justice on North Carolina’s supreme court, for removal. 

12. How will localities innovate to boost participation in democracy and local elections?  

Even as some places tried to make voting more difficult, 2023 also saw many states and cities experiment with new strategies to expand the franchise and encourage more participation in democracy. This year’s elections will see some of the first fruits of those efforts, as well as other places possibly following suit. 

The stakes are clear in: Municipalities experimenting with noncitizen voting

Boston’s city council in December passed an ordinance to allow noncitizens with legal status to vote in local elections, a landmark win for progressives who’ve championed this issue locally for years, as Bolts reported in 2022. But the Massachusetts legislature would need to authorize Boston’s reform, which may come to a head this year. Boston’s move comes as other cities have adopted noncitizen voting. Last year, Burlington became the latest Vermont locality to allow noncitizen voting in local elections, giving more members of the state’s growing immigrant communities a say in things like school boards and municipal budgets. Washington, D.C. passed a similar ordinance last year, though a lawsuit was filed last year challenging the measure, a battle likely to continue into this year.

Also keep an eye on: Other innovations to increase participation are set to take effect this year, and will face their first tests. Michigan allowed 16 and 17-year-olds to pre-register to vote before their 18th birthday,  while New York passed a law requiring high schools to distribute registration and pre-registration forms to students. Colorado and Nevada recently expanded voting access on Tribal lands. New York also just moved some local elections to even years to boost turnout, a reform that may inspire proposals in other states on an issue that is gaining steam around the nation.

Correction: The article has been corrected to reflect where Trump appealed his disqualification from the Maine ballot.

The post Twelve Questions Shaping Democracy and Voting Rights in 2024 appeared first on Bolts.

Workman sat on West Virginia’s supreme court in 2018—one of the three Democratic justices in the court’s majority—when Republican lawmakers decided to impeach that entire court. The GOP had flipped the legislature in 2014 for the first time in decades, and it had seized the governorship in 2017; only the supreme court stood in the way of one-party rule in the state. 

“All of a sudden, we had this right-wing legislature wanting to impeach everybody,” she recalls, “and they wanted in my opinion to get rid of us so they could put their own.”

When Workman read this summer that Protasiewicz may be impeached, shortly after her victory flipped Wisconsin’s high court to the left, she was struck by the parallels with what she herself went through. “The Wisconsin situation is a complete power grab to undermine democracy,” she told Bolts. “It shocks me because it even goes further than the one that I experienced.” 

She added, “It’s this whole thing that’s scary going on in this country, that if you can’t defeat people’s votes then you do it in some other way.” 

Protasiewicz won Wisconsin’s supreme court election in April, giving liberals a 4-3 majority on the court, their first in 15 years. But Republicans began to float impeaching Protasiewicz before the results were even known. The party has already locked down control of the legislature, using aggressive gerrymanders to protect itself from election defeats. It has also deflated the powers of the Democratic governor, Tony Evers, undercutting his authority to appoint people to executive branch positions. 

But by electing Protasiewicz, voters threatened the GOP’s hold on power by opening the door to an anti-gerrymandering ruling by the court. Just days after Protasiewicz was sworn-in, voting rights groups filed two lawsuits asking for the state’s legislative maps to be struck down as unconstitutional gerrymanders. 

Speaker Robin Vos, former Governor Scott Walker, and other Republicans have demanded that Protasiewicz recuse herself from these cases or else risk impeachment. They say comments she made while running—she notably called the state’s current legislative maps “rigged”—mean that she has “prejudged” the cases. Candidates in Wisconsin routinely share views on issues or are attached to political parties, though, and the Wisconsin Judicial Commission dismissed complaints filed by the GOP that her statements violated ethics rules.

Vos, who leads the Assembly, where impeachment proceedings would start, is still pushing forward this month. Thanks to the large majorities the state’s gerrymandered maps have delivered the GOP, his party currently holds enough seats to impeach Protasiewicz in the Assembly and then convict her in the Senate if all Republican lawmakers hold together.

Removing Protasiewicz would go far beyond the legal guardrails for impeachment laid out in the state constitution. Legal experts in Wisconsin say a plain reading of the document undermines the Republicans’ case against Protasiewicz.

But these legal barriers may not constrain the GOP. Constitutional protections are only as strong as the will to enforce them. Republican lawmakers may try to blow past them even if there is little legal justification, because at that point it’s uncertain at best who or what could stop them. 

Most notably, the allegations against Protasiewicz do not seem to fit the circumstances under which Article VII of the state constitution contemplates impeachment: It reserves it for “corrupt conduct in office, or for crimes and misdemeanors.” Protasiewicz is not accused of criminal conduct, she has yet to do much of anything “in office,” and she faces no allegations of bribery or personal gain, which is traditionally how corruption was defined. 

“It’s a difficult fit with the historical understanding of corrupt conduct in office,” says Chad Oldfather, a professor at Marquette University Law School. “You are talking about a justice being impeached before even hearing or deciding a case,” says Doug Keith, senior counsel in the Brennan Center’s Judiciary Program, a national program that tracks state courts. “This is not how impeachment has been used, or how I would expect it to be used.” 

In fact, Wisconsin has a separate procedure, known as “removal by address,” allowing lawmakers to remove judges for “misconduct”—a broad category that would better fit the GOP’s charges against Protasiewicz. Republicans lack the votes for the far higher threshold that this procedure requires in the Assembly (two-thirds, rather than a simple majority).

But Keith added that this may not matter in practice to how this confrontation unfolds, saying, “it’s a separate question of what would happen if the legislature followed through on this.” 

Miriam Seifter, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School, also says she does not think that the allegations against Protasiewicz meet the constitutional standards of impeachment, but she too warns that lawmakers may decide they don’t care, betting that no one will check them.

“That is one of the precarious aspects of this situation,” says Seifter, “once one legal actor does not adhere to the constitution, it’s hard to predict the rest of the legal trajectory.”

A lawsuit would likely follow Protasiewicz’s impeachment, but it’s unclear whether any judge would agree to even consider if the charges against her fit the circumstances laid out in Article VII. Courts have typically deferred to lawmakers on impeachment, treating it as a “political question” that is not subject to judicial review, Oldfather and several other legal experts told Bolts. Still, Oldfather also said there is no telling how that question would go in Wisconsin because there’s virtually no precedent in Wisconsin’s court system. (No public official has been impeached in Wisconsin since 1853.) 

Even if courts agreed to review the articles of impeachment, the core effect of the GOP’s actions is to affect who sits on the highest court—targeting who gets to even interpret the constitution in the first place. Protasiewicz recused herself this month from a lawsuit asking the state supreme court to block attempts by the legislature to impeach her, signaling that liberals have already lost their edge on the supreme court for cases that touch on her removal.

“It’s a legal question that’s to a greater extent than most floating in this sea of politics,” says Oldfather on the matter of whether impeachment is an appropriate response to the accusations against Protasiewicz.

Vos, the state Speaker, did not respond to a request for comment on these constitutional concerns. On Sept. 13, he said he was setting up an advisory panel made up of former supreme court justices to consider when a justice can be impeached. One of the members is a former conservative justice and former Republican lawmaker who donated to Proasiewicz’s opponent.

West Virginia’s GOP in 2018 similarly tested the bounds of their power once they had the votes. “Impeaching the entire court was entirely political,” says Robert Bastress, professor at the West Virginia College of Law, “it was motivated by Republicans who had just recently taken over the legislature, and they were flexing their muscle.” 

The overhaul of West Virginia’s supreme court dates back to 2018, when Chief Justice Allen Loughry, a Republican, was federally indicted on fraud and witness tampering charges that stemmed from allegations of him using state funds for his personal enjoyment and spending excessive amounts of money on furnishing his office. A concurrent fraud scandal also engulfed Justice Menis Ketchum, a Democrat. By mid-2018, Ketchum had pled guilty in a federal case and resigned, and Loughry was suspended from the court. 

But Republicans also went after the remaining members of the supreme court, alleging in part that they were all responsible for the court’s insufficiently clear ethics policies. 

“They had very good reasons for impeaching two of the justices—two of them were convicted of federal felonies—there were no grounds for impeaching the other three,” Bastress says. 

Workman stood her ground after her impeachment and fought the proceedings until a panel of state judges blocked the Senate from holding a trial and ruled that the legislature was violating procedural requirements in its impeachment proceedings. The state Senate, which by then had acquitted the GOP chief justice and was gearing up for a trial against Workman, fought the ruling but the U.S. Supreme Court let it stand. As a result, Workman got to stay on the court, though she then chose not to seek re-election in 2020. 

But by the time a court intervened to stop West Virginia’s impeachment trials, another Democratic justice, Robin Davis, had already chosen to resign rather than let the proceedings against her drag out. To replace Davis, Governor Jim Justice appointed Evan Jenkins, one of the state’s Republican U.S. representatives. 

“What the legislature was attempting to do was to stack the court with what I would call their puppets,” Davis told Bolts. “They were hell bent on getting control of the court.” She says she did not want to participate in what she viewed as “a very unfair, highly political proceeding.”

Unlike West Virginia in 2018, Wisconsin is a closely divided swing state with obvious stakes for national politics, making it likely that a judicial impeachment would receive far more attention and become a magnet for fundraising and political activism. That also gives Democrats an additional avenue to respond: activating public opinion.

In an interview with Bolts, Ben Wikler, chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, stressed that he is focused on putting pressure on Republican lawmakers. Democrats have also launched a multimillion-dollar campaign to air ads on this situation. 

“Our number one goal in the first phase of this fight is to make sure that every Wisconsin voter knows Republicans are threatening to overturn the election, and to encourage them to contact their legislators to let them know how they feel about it,” Wikler says. “It’s going to remind voters exactly why they voted for Democrats in the midterms and threw out Trump in the first place, which is that the Wisconsin Republicans are a clear and present danger to democracy.”

Politically-speaking, Democrats’ strongest asset in the confrontation over their new supreme court majority is the governor’s mansion: If Republicans manage to remove Protasiewicz, Evers would have the power to appoint a new justice to fill the vacancy, and he would presumably pick another liberal-leaning justice to replace her.

Vos and his allies may still be thinking it’s worthwhile to float impeachment because the threat alone could persuade Protasiewicz to bow to their demand and recuse herself on at least redistricting cases; Protasiewicz has not at this stage indicated what she would do. In addition, if they do impeach and convict Protasiewicz before Dec. 1, it would trigger a special election in 2024, giving conservatives a shot to flip back the court next year. 

Still, even if there is an election in 2024, Evers’ interim appointment would sit on the court for long enough that the court would have time to strike down gerrymanders.

To tie Evers’ hands, Republicans may turn to a very aggressive maneuver. If the Assembly impeaches Protasiewicz, it would suspend her and therefore deprive liberals of their majority until the Senate holds a trial that results in either an acquittal or conviction. But the Senate could indefinitely delay trial on the articles of impeachment and keep Protasiewicz sidelined without allowing Evers to appoint a replacement. The state constitution sets no timeline for how quickly the Senate has to take up articles of impeachment. 

“It’s one of those situations where the constitution assumes good faith, regularity of proceedings, and doesn’t spell it out,” Oldfather says.

Protasiewicz could still try to sue to force a resolution, some legal observers say. But here again, she and state Democrats also have political leverage that may prove more important than possible lawsuits. 

At any moment, Protasiewicz could break the logjam by resigning, allowing Evers to appoint a replacement even if at a personal cost to her. In a bizarre twist due to the particularities of state law regarding the timing of elections (there can be no more than one supreme court seat on the ballot on any given year), if Protasiewicz resigned on or after Dec. 1, Evers’ replacement appointee would get to serve until 2031 without facing an special election (seats on the court are currently scheduled for re-election each year from 2025 to 2030)—hardly an appealing prospect for the GOP. 

Seifter, the University of Wisconsin professor, also envisions a scenario in which Evers could claim the authority to appoint a justice if the Senate is delaying a trial.

“It’s hard to say how the courts or other actors will respond in this unprecedented situation,” says Seifter. “For example, the governor could declare that the legislature’s inaction creates a temporary judicial vacancy, or a court—whether the high court or a lower court—could reject the holdup as an encroachment on the judicial function. There isn’t clarity at this point on who would have the final word.”

Republican lawmakers this week also introduced articles of impeachment this week against the state’s elections chief, Meagan Wolfe, whom they have been aiming to fire all summer. The charges against Wolfe stem largely from conspiracies about the 2020 presidential election that have been debunked. Either Protasiewicz or Wolfe would be the first Wisconsin official impeached in roughly 170 years.

Such extraordinary events, if they unfold in coming months, may also ratchet up what other politicians are willing to consider in other states. Republican lawmakers in Montana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania in recent years have talked about impeaching state supreme court justices whose decisions they disliked, but have ended up not moving forward. 

“You see states learning from one another and adopting the strategies that legislators have found successful in other states to gain an upper hand in their courts,” says Keith of the Brennan Center. “And so if this happens in one state, I would not be surprised to see other states follow.”

The post With Impeachment Push, Wisconsin GOP Tests Bounds of Political Power appeared first on Bolts.

As the administrator of the Wisconsin Election Commission, Meagan Wolfe is the nonpartisan manager of the office that advises and aids Wisconsin’s 72 county clerks and nearly 2,000 local election officials. 

Wolfe is widely respected by local clerks and election experts from both parties. But she has become a target for right-wing conspiracy theorists touting false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump, and Republican lawmakers who want to appease their base have turned her into a convenient scapegoat.

After state senate Republicans made clear earlier this summer that they were unlikely to confirm her for another four-year term, the commission’s Democrats moved to block a procedural step to allow that vote to happen at all. Now, to keep Wolfe in office past her term expiration on July 1, Democrats are banking on the courts to uphold the precedent of a controversial ruling that they had decried and Republicans cheered just a year ago.

This unprecedented and unpredictable situation is the result of Republicans’ yearslong attacks on the state’s election governance—and could undermine Wisconsin’s ability to run a smooth election in 2024, when it could well be the state to determine the next presidential election.

Wolfe’s employment status will likely be decided at the state supreme court—which is set to flip to a liberal majority on Aug. 1—adding another layer of uncertainty and practically ensuring that the process will drag on for months before any resolution.

Republicans’ barrage of partisan attacks on Wolfe and her office have already depleted staffers’ morale and could lead to a staff exodus that saps the office of crucial institutional knowledge ahead of what will be a supercharged presidential election in a crucial battleground state. Two sources told Bolts that the Wisconsin Election Commission’s head of information technology recently announced she was leaving—and they’re worried others may decide to depart as well.

“My fear is that the uncertainty around Meagan is going to create uncertainty around her staff and what their future could look like. Some of them have already been through a ton, just like all of us, with 2020. And maybe this might just be the last straw,” Milwaukee County Election Commission Executive Director Claire Woodall-Vogg told Bolts. “That really scares me.”

And there’s no good solution in the offing.

If Wolfe is forced out, the commission will have to scramble to find an adequate replacement for a highly specialized, incredibly difficult, and closely scrutinized job that few competent administrators would want given the partisan fury that it draws. But if the courts rule that Wolfe can stay in her job through the next election even though her term has expired, it gives Republicans an easy foil if they narrowly lose the state’s presidential election next year.

“Either way, we’re screwed,” warned Jay Heck, the executive director of the good-government group Common Cause’s Wisconsin chapter.

A Badgered State

The fight over Wolfe’s reappointment is just the latest dust-up in a long-running battle over election administration in Wisconsin. Republicans have been crying foul over the state’s election system for years, using their gerrymandered supermajorities in the state legislature to repeatedly change the rules and oust nonpartisan officials they thought were biased against them. That partisan sniping got supercharged during and after the 2020 election, when many embraced President Trump’s claims that the state’s election had been stolen from him in spite of numerous investigations that proved that was false.

This tension began building more than a decade ago. In 2007, following a bipartisan legislative campaign finance scandal, lawmakers of both parties teamed up to create a Government Accountability Board (GAB) composed of retired state judges to oversee the state’s elections. 

That board drew national praise from good-government groups for its nonpartisan setup, which—unlike many states where elected or appointed partisans run elections—helped inoculate it from the day’s politics. But Republicans became disenchanted, then furious, when the board approved an investigation into whether then-Governor Scott Walker, a Republican, illegally coordinated with outside groups during his 2012 recall election. That investigation dragged on for years before it was ended by a controversial decision by the conservative-dominated Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2015. 

Walker and Republican lawmakers soon passed legislation to dissolve the board and replace it with the Wisconsin Election Commission. It was modeled in part on the Federal Election Commission, with three appointed Democrats, three appointed Republicans and a majority required to make any decisions—meaning that it was designed to deadlock on controversial issues.

The commission’s first administrator was a holdover from the GAB, and Republicans accused him of favoring Democrats, pushing him out of that role at the beginning of 2018 as part of a flurry of partisan power-grabs right before Walker left office after losing to Democrat Tony Evers.

Wolfe was, at the time, Republicans’ choice for an administrator they thought would treat them fairly. She had already spent years working for the state on elections at that point, first at GAB then WEC, and was promoted to interim administrator by a unanimous vote by the committee’s six members that spring. 

The GOP-run Senate unanimously confirmed her to a full four-year term a year later.

Since then Wolfe has earned accolades from local election clerks from across the political spectrum.

“I couldn’t tell you whether she’s a liberal or conservative in all the years I’ve worked with her,” former Wisconsin Republican Sen. Kathy Bernier, a former local election clerk who regularly worked with Wolfe during her time in the legislature, told Bolts.

Fond du Lac County Clerk Lisa Freiberg, a Republican, said Wolfe “puts everything and more” into the job. 

But Republican legislators were enraged that the commission, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, expanded voting procedures for the 2020 presidential election—and the commissioners and Wolfe soon became targets of conspiracy theories that they had intentionally rigged the election against Trump.

One specific policy changing nursing home voting practices became a central theme of the GOP conspiracy theory that the election was stolen. Wisconsin law mandates that voting deputies are supposed to visit nursing homes to help residents vote and make sure everything is on the up-and-up, but because most nursing homes banned all visitors during the peak of COVID-19, the commissioners waived that rule and encouraged absentee mail voting instead.

Racine County’s Republican sheriff claimed intentional voter fraud, alleging that a handful of nursing home residents who had been declared incompetent to vote by judges had cast ballots anyways. The county’s Republican district attorney declined to bring charges but many Wisconsin Republicans still accused the commissioners of willfully misinterpreting the law . 

President Trump soon added the allegations to his conspiracy fodder, falsely claiming that Wisconsin nursing homes had sent in “thousands and thousands and thousands of crooked votes” in campaign speeches.

Republicans even went after their own committee members, bullying GOP commissioner Dean Knudson into stepping down from the commission for, in their view, siding too often with Democrats. They replaced him with Wisconsin Elections Commission Chairman Don Millis. 

And they turned on Wolfe as well. Chris Kapenga, the Republican Senate President, demanded in late 2021 that Wolfe and all of the WEC’s commissioners resign.

Michael Gableman, the archconservative former state supreme court justice who was commissioned by Republican legislative leaders to investigate the 2020 election, and who repeatedly pushed false conspiracy theories as part of that process, called for the commission to be dismantled. And he singled Wolfe out for her appearance.

“Black dress, white pearls—I’ve seen the act, I’ve seen the show,” Gableman said during a 2022 radio interview, comparing Wolfe’s outfits to Hillary Clinton’s.

But Wolfe was not even a member of the commission. Her job was to carry out the decisions determined by its members, all while providing guidance to local officials, helping them overcome challenges, making suggestions and implementing the commissioners’ instructions as they tackle any policy decisions and legal interpretations themselves.

“All the complaints that I’ve heard about drop boxes, special voting deputies, all of that—none of those were Meagan’s decision,” Millis told Bolts. “My concern is that she has become a lightning rod for people who are angry with the decisions of the commission.”

Putsch and Shove

It became clear this spring that state Republicans wanted Wolfe gone by the end of her term in June. 

According to state law, the commission gets to select an administrator, but the Senate must then confirm them. Kapenga told the Associated Press in mid-June that “there’s no way” that the Senate would vote to give her another term. He promised he would “do everything I can keep her from being reappointed.” 

Wolfe responded in an open letter to Wisconsin’s election clerks in mid-June making the case for why she should get another term. 

“It’s clear that enough legislators have fallen prey to false information about my work and the work of this agency that my role here is at risk,” she wrote. “There is no substitute for my decade-plus of experience in helping run Wisconsin elections at the state level. It is a fact that if I am not selected for this role, Wisconsin would have a less experienced administrator at the helm.”

To help Wolfe stay in office, the three Democrats on the commission turned a recent supreme court precedent they strongly disagreed with to their advantage.

Last summer, the supreme court, which had a conservative majority at the time, ruled in a 4-3 decision that a Republican appointee who refused to leave office when his term ended could stay in the job indefinitely. The extraordinary ruling validated Republican efforts to stymie Evers, the Democratic governor who took office in 2019, and prevent him from installing new appointees at the head of the state’s agencies.

Democrats were furious at the time. But this summer they decided to test the precedent to let Wolfe stay in office by virtue of her prior term, rather than ask the GOP Senate to approve a new term. When the board met to vote to re-appoint Wolfe in late June, the three Democrats abstained from the vote. Even with all three Republicans voting for Wolfe, that left the commission without a majority, halting the nomination rather than sending it to the Senate.

“It’s a terrible decision. But it is a decision, right? Like, it’s the final answer on this,” Democratic commissioner Ann Jacobs told Bolts, referring to the 2022 state Supreme Court ruling. “So that appears very specifically to deal with the situation we found ourselves saying with the elections commission.”

Republicans slammed the Democratic commissioners for circumventing the normal process.

“It’s just highly hypocritical and that makes it harder to revive confidence in our elections,” Millis said.

Senate Republicans responded by essentially pretending the committee’s deadlock vote didn’t happen and voted to take up her reappointment when the chamber reconvenes in September. But their interpretation that the commission’s 3-0 vote with three abstentions meant that Wolfe’s reappointment had been approved for the Senate to review flies in the face of the law’s actual language, which requires a majority of the 6-member commission to approve, not simply a plurality, or majority of those voting. 

Millis, the commission’s Republican chair, ruled that the commission’s vote to reappoint Wolfe had failed even though he supported it.

Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu has privately admitted as much. He acknowledged in an email he sent to conservative activists in mid-June that was obtained by the Wisconsin State Journal that because of the state supreme court’s recent precedent, “If WEC doesn’t reappoint Wolfe or a replacement, the senate would have no power to get rid of her through the confirmation process.”

What’s Next?

It’s unclear where the process goes from here. Spokespeople for LeMahieu and Kapenga declined to make them available for an interview, or answer questions about Senate Republicans’ plans to try to remove her from office.

The most likely scenarios are that Republicans will either file a lawsuit to try to get the courts to determine that Wolfe can no longer stay in her job because the commission didn’t confirm her for another term, or they’ll try to remove Wolfe on their own with a Senate vote, in which case Democrats will go to court.

The conservative majority that ruled to allow appointees to stay in office indefinitely will no longer exist in just a few days. Liberal judge Janet Protasiewicz will be sworn in to a ten-year term she won in April, giving the court a left-leaning majority for the first time in a generation. This means that the three liberal justices, who last year ruled against allowing people to stay in office past their terms, are now in the court’s ideological majority. 

But there’s no guarantee that the members of the court won’t reverse themselves now that the shoe is on the other foot. Judges can side with their side’s best political interest even if it conflicts with their prior legal reasoning. Protasiewicz has yet to weigh in on the matter. 

“I will take my shots with the court, rather than at the Senate,” Democratic Commissioner Mark Thomsen said during the hearing where the Democrats abstained from voting on Wolfe’s renomination..

Jacobs, another Democratic commissioner, admitted to Bolts she does not know how the court will rule. “I don’t know the answer to that. I don’t think anyone does. We’re all just sort of dealing with this unusual situation we find ourselves in,” Jacobs said.

“It’s hard for me to predict what’s going to happen,” Millis, a Republican commissioner, said. “I have no grand strategy. This is sort of unprecedented.”

If Wolfe is removed, the six commissioners would have to execute a rapid job search for her replacement who would remain in the position for a year, likely through the 2024 elections. But the law stipulates that commissioners only have 45 days to find, hire and then vote to appoint a temporary replacement. If they fail to do so or can’t agree on a replacement, the choice would go to the Republican-controlled Joint Committee on Legislative Organization, which includes Republicans who have lobbed baseless attacks against Wolfe.

Wolfe declined to be interviewed for this story.

Freiberg, Fond Du Lac County’s Republican election clerk, told Bolts that she’d recently had a 50-minute phone conversation with Wolfe, who she considers a friend. She said Wolfe kept wondering: “Am I going to have a job tomorrow?”

But Freiberg said in spite of that uncertainty, she knew that Wolfe would continue to put “nothing less than 100 percent into her day-to-day job”—as long as she was still employed.

And if she’s forced out?

“It’s gonna be hard to find anyone qualified to do it. It is a difficult job,” Millis told Bolts. “The worst-case scenario is we’re in some sort of limbo for months.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the position that Wolfe was promoted to. She was made interim election administrator by a commission vote in 2018.

The post Wisconsin’s Election Office In Limbo After GOP Tries To Force Out Its Director appeared first on Bolts.

Their cursed streak ended on Tuesday. Janet Protasiewicz, a Milwaukee judge who ran with Democratic support, won the seat of a retiring conservative justice after a heated campaign that pulverized national spending records.

Her victory hands liberals a majority on the supreme court for the first time since 2008. They will keep it until at least 2025, when Justice Ann Bradley’s term expires. 

Protasiewicz easily beat her conservative opponent, former Justice Dan Kelly. She leads by 11 percentage points as of Wednesday morning, a feat powered by huge margins and comparatively strong turnout in Milwaukee and Madison’s Dane County, the state’s two urban cores.

Turnout in Dane County on Tuesday was at least 50 percent higher than in 2019, when conservatives scored a narrow win to retain the court. In past elections, liberals fell short due to paltry turnout among their base; off-year races tend to favor more conservative candidates. But the issue of abortion dominated the campaign this year and likely helped mobilize voters in Protasiewicz’s favor. She heavily featured her support for reproductive rights in her campaign ads, while anti-abortion groups rallied around Kelly.

“I always said we have to hit rock bottom before people realize what’s going on here, and I think we’re there,” Christine Sinicki, a Democrat who represents Milwaukee in the state House, told Bolts last week. “If they can strip away our rights to control our own healthcare, what’s next?”

Now the court’s flip could pave the way for abortion rights to return to Wisconsin. The newly-liberal majority makes it far more likely that the court strikes down the state’s 1849 ban when it hears a lawsuit that is working its way through state courts, much like other state courts have done since the fall of Roe last summer. 

As conservatives have solidified control on the federal judiciary, civil rights organizations have looked toward state courts and state constitutions as an alternative pathway of litigation. “State courts are getting so much attention because they can—and often do—interpret their own state constitutions in ways that differ from federal constitutional doctrine,” says Miriam Seifter, the co-director of the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin-Madison law school. 

“State constitutions typically contain more rights than the federal constitution, and they prioritize democracy,” she added. 

Democrats hope that the new supreme court majority also changes course on matters relating to ballot access and voting rights. Last year, the conservative justices issued a 4-3 ruling that banned the use of drop boxes. They also required that the state use a “least change” approach when redistricting, dashing Democrats’ hope of moving away from the heavily skewed maps that locked them out of power through the 2010s.

As a result, Wisconsin districts are among the nation’s most gerrymandered. Its legislative maps virtually guarantee that Republicans will secure majorities in the state Assembly and Senate, even if Democratic candidates get more votes. While Democrats hold other statewide offices, like governor and attorney general, they have also been constrained to winning just three congressional districts out of eight in this divided state. 

But while gerrymandering has made the GOP’s stronghold on Wisconsin’s state government largely election proof, the supreme court race gave Democrats a rare opportunity to crack this wall. State advocates have already signaled that they will challenge the current maps, which Protasiewicz has called “rigged,” based on provisions in the state constitution.

“There’s really only one path in the next several years to undo the most extreme gerrymander in the country, and that’s the April supreme court race in Wisconsin,” Ben Wikler, head of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, told Bolts earlier this year. 

If the newly liberal court majority forces new maps, it may help Democrats compete for legislative power in the state. It would also affect the national battle for Congress in 2024.

Republican lawmakers have signaled that they will use their gerrymandered majorities to fight the court. Several Republican said in the run-up to Tuesday, before Protasiewicz even won, that they would consider impeaching her and removing her from office.

The GOP needs a supermajority in the state Senate to pull off that move and the resignation of a longtime Republican senator late last year left them one vote short. The special election to replace her was also held on Tuesday in a red-leaning district in the Milwaukee suburbs, and Republican Dan Knodl narrowly prevailed, handing the GOP sufficient votes to impeach and remove public officials on party-line votes. 

Such a move may be politically and constitutionally explosive but Republican lawmakers may be largely insulated from electoral consequences as long as they head off any new judicially-ordered maps that curb their power in the statehouse. In Ohio last year, prominent Republicans similarly considered impeaching their chief justice after she voted to strike down GOP-drawn gerrymanders in 2022 but she was already set to retire that year.

Should there be a vacancy on Wisconsin’s supreme court, the governor is entitled to appoint a new justice. The governor through January 2027 is Democrat Tony Evers. Republicans have also floated targeting other officials like Milwaukee’s prosecutor; no public official has been impeached in Wisconsin since the 1850s, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Liberals on Tuesday also scored another judicial win, this one for the Appeals Court, with labor lawyer Sara Geenen ousting conservative incumbent Bill Brash. Democrats won other local elections from Racine to Outagamie County.

The supreme court race saw extraordinarily levels of spending, more than tripling the previous national record set by a judicial race. Billionaires donated millions in support of both candidates, and outside groups poured in money as well, taking advantage of lax campaign finance rules. 

Judicial elections in Wisconsin are technically nonpartisan, but political parties are heavily involved on behalf of the candidates. Kelly, who was appointed to the supreme court in 2016 by then-Republican Governor Scott Walker, has close ties to the GOP and advised the party on a proposed scheme of installing fake presidential electors after the 2020 election.

Kelly amassed a record that was broadly hostile to civil rights and friendly to prosecutors and law enforcement while on the court between 2016 and 2020, when he was ousted by liberal challenger Jill Karofsky. During that campaign, Kelly demonized Karofsky as a danger to public safety. Three years later, he recycled that same playbook against Protasiewicz—once again unsuccessfully. 

Republican advertising lambasted Protasiewicz over crime, alleging that as a judge she offered too lenient sentences against defendants. “Law enforcement’s hands are tied when judges like Janet Protasiewicz refuse to hold dangerous criminals accountable,” one sheriff, Dodge County’s Dale Schmidt, says in a Kelly ad. (In Chicago, just south of Wisconsin, another prominent candidate who anchored his campaign on law enforcement support also lost on Tuesday.)

Last week, Kelly was endorsed by another Republican sheriff, Racine County’s Christopher Schmaling. A prominent far-right figure, Schmaling has threatened local election administrators with prosecution since 2020, amplifying the efforts by many conservatives to spread false conspiracies about Donald Trump’s loss in the state. 

Election deniers have harassed public officials like Green Bay Mayor Eric Genrich, a Democrat who has faced an ethics complaint and a recall effort for accepting an outside grant to help run the 2020 elections during the pandemic—as did hundreds of localities across the state of Wisconsin and around the nation. 

Genrich was also on the ballot on Tuesday, running for re-election in Green Bay, the state’s third most populous city, against a Republican challenger. He prevailed, riding the coattails of Protasiewicz’s strong performance in the region.

Editor’s note: The piece was edited on April 5 with the result in Wisconsin’s legislative special election. 

The post Liberals Flip the Wisconsin Supreme Court After Fifteen-Year Wait appeared first on Bolts.

In the church vestibule, someone had put out free “Justice 4 Wisconsin” spice packets from the outspokenly progressive spice company Penzeys, which is headquartered in the Milwaukee area and has trademarked the phrase “Season liberally.” “Wisconsin’s Republicans lie and cheat, and when we stay silent they win,” says the messaging on the packet. “Speak out for Justice, our environment, a fair playing field for all, and the importance of voting April 4.”

The event itself was nonpartisan and the candidates’ names were barely mentioned. Instead, the panelists discussed how they grapple with getting out the vote in underserved Milwaukee communities that are struggling with gun violence, underfunded schools, and food deserts.

They lamented the challenges of organizing in Milwaukee given some state conservatives’ undisguised hostility toward the voters of color who make up the majority of the city’s population. Most recently, a GOP member of the Wisconsin Elections Commission bragged to other Republicans in a January email about a successful voter-suppression campaign “in the overwhelming Black and Hispanic areas” of Milwaukee; the commissioner, Bob Spindell, refused calls to step down and has not been disciplined.

“There’s so many needs pressing our community today. When we talk about disparities in this country, Milwaukee leads the nation,” said panelist Sharlen Moore, who co-founded the local youth leadership program Urban Underground in 2000. To energize voters, “we got to get back to the block” and build community with neighbors.

Another panelist, 20-year-old activist Deisy España, shared a message that she said resonates with her peers, many of whom—like España—have immigrant parents who cannot vote. “I tell them they’re voting for their parents,” she said.

After the town hall, attendee Deborah Thompson told Bolts that in her neighborhood of Heritage Heights, a small middle-class, majority-Black community about six miles northwest of the church, she is talking with her family, friends and Bible study group about voting on April 4.

“Democracy is a big concern of mine because I do see it as under threat,” said Thompson, who is 75. To encourage people to vote, she first brings up the erosion of voting rights and the loss of ballot drop boxes, which the state supreme court disallowed last year in a 4-3 ruling. 

“If I feel safe enough, then I’ll bring up women’s rights,” she added.

Tuesday’s election will settle if conservatives keep a majority on Wisconsin’s supreme court or if it flips to the left, and all of those issues hang in the balance. Amid an outpouring of national attention and spending, the urgent questions the race will decide have dominated the campaign and its coverage. Will the state’s abortion ban from 1849 survive a legal challenge, will Wisconsin end up with fairer electoral maps for the rest of the decade, will voters regain access to drop boxes? For people who are volunteering their time on this race, these stakes are as enormous as they are self-evident.

But they also face a difficult reality. This momentous showdown is taking place in an off-year, springtime, low-turnout election, far from the energy that greets a presidential race.

Mobilizing people to come out in elections that aren’t synced with national cycles is always a challenge, and there’ve been efforts across the country to move their time. “Historically these spring elections have extremely low turnouts. This election is going to be all about who gets the people out to vote,” Christine Sinicki, a Democratic Assembly member who represents the southernmost parts of Milwaukee and some adjacent suburbs along Lake Michigan, told Bolts. 

Roughly 960,000 people statewide cast ballots in the first round in February that decided which two judicial candidates would move on to next week’s general election. That’s a huge drop from November 2020, when nearly 3.3 million Wisconsinites voted for president. It’s an especially pressing headache for liberals: The drop-off is far more prevalent in Milwaukee, an engine of Democratic politics, than in the outer ring of conservative suburbs that power Wisconsin’s GOP candidates.

As a share of all registered voters, turnout in February was 26 percent in Milwaukee County and 33 percent in the WOW counties. Within just the city of Milwaukee, it reached only 22 percent.

In Wisconsin’s nail-biters, these shifts can make all the difference. And now, control of the state’s supreme court hinges in part on whether organizers in Milwaukee persuade and help enough city residents to vote.

Restrictions that have been blessed by that same court, like the ban on drop boxes, have not helped. A Republican law adopted in 2018 also cut back early voting in Milwaukee from nearly six weeks to two weeks before an election. That makes it harder for working families in Milwaukee to find time to vote, Sinicki said. “There’s a lot of people out there working two jobs who just can’t get there on Election Day.”

Even within the city of Milwaukee, turnout is not spread evenly. According to an analysis by Marquette University researcher John Johnson, Milwaukee’s overall voter turnout in recent years has declined, with the biggest losses in low-income and predominantly Black and Latinx areas. That pattern held in the first round in February: Turnout varied wildly, from roughly 5 percent of registered voters in some wards to roughly ten times that rate in more affluent neighborhoods.

In the ward that contains St. Gabriel Church of God in Christ, turnout reached only 12 percent in February—down very precipitously from where it stood in the November midterms, 51 percent.

LaToya White, another panelist in the town hall, pointed to the disparities felt by residents on the north side of Milwaukee, especially younger people. “Being an organizer, you’re in the community every day, and you see our youth,” she said. “They feel like they’re left out.”

White works at Wisconsin Voices, a community organization that promotes civic participation; she saw “amazing” engagement here last fall but this has not carried into the judicial race. “This election is so quiet,” she said. “A supreme court race to them, they don’t see how important this is and don’t know that this election here is one of the most important out of the next ten years.”

In a race where so much is at stake, organizers and party representatives aren’t sticking to one issue to energize voters.

“A lot of people until recently I don’t think understood the importance of the supreme court and how important it was to our day-to-day lives and our rights,” Sinicki said. “People are finally waking up. I always said we have to hit rock bottom before people realize what’s going on here, and I think we’re there. If they can strip away our rights to control our own healthcare, what’s next?”

A lawsuit against the state’s abortion ban is working its way through state courts, and Janet Protasiewicz, the liberal candidate in the race, has campaigned on her personal support for abortion rights. Last week, in her only public debate with her conservative opponent Daniel Kelly, Protasiewicz said, “If my opponent is elected, I can tell you with 100 percent certainty, that 1849 abortion ban will stay on the books.” 

For reproductive rights advocates, anger over the ban is tied in with concerns about democracy in Wisconsin. There is no plausible path for Democrats to overturn it legislatively because Republicans have maintained ironclad control over Wisconsin’s legislature thanks to the heavily gerrymandered electoral maps they have drawn. The maps are widely considered some of the most skewed in the country. Sam Munger, an election consultant and panelist at the town hall, said the maps have “rendered voting largely irrelevant.”

But the supreme court election is a statewide race, so it offers Wisconsinites the opportunity to vote outside the confines of those gerrymanders. Protasiewicz has called the state maps “rigged” and many Democrats hope that a liberal court could strike them down. 

Protasiewicz’s supporters talk up the election’s implications for the future of voting rights. The Democratic Party of Wisconsin held a “Voting Rights Panel” in mid-March on Milwaukee’s north side to address issues of gerrymandering and voter suppression, in the presence of prominent Democrats like former Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes, who lost the U.S. Senate race last fall.

Conservatives are mobilizing around the same issues. Wisconsin’s leading anti-abortion groups have rallied around Kelly. 

Scott Presler, a young, pro-Trump conservative from Virginia and founder of the Super PAC Early Vote Action, has spent the last couple of weeks in Wisconsin, door-knocking and making appearances to get out the Republican vote for Kelly, with the long-term goal of advancing what he calls “election integrity” in swing states to ensure a win for Trump in 2024. On a March 16 episode of Steve Bannon’s War Room show, Presler called the April 4 election “one of the most consequential elections in Wisconsin history” because of the state supreme court’s control over voter access issues like ID and proof-of-residency requirements.

“If the liberals are able to win on April 4, we will have unmanned drop boxes in Milwaukee and Madison going into the 2024 election,” he warned. The morning after the first day of early voting last week, Presler took to Twitter to celebrate strong turnout numbers in conservative Waukesha County and to call on people to vote in a string of counties that did not include Madison and Milwaukee.

Other Republicans are also treating Milwaukee, where Protasiewicz serves as a local judge, as a foil for the rest of the state. That’s a frequent campaign tactic for the GOP in Wisconsin. Some are already floating impeaching her over her work as a Milwaukee judge if she wins. (On the same day as the supreme court race, a special election for a state Senate seat will decide if the GOP has the Senate supermajority it would need to remove a state official on a party-line vote.)

The judicial race is ostensibly nonpartisan but Democratic groups are backing Protasiewicz and Republican groups are supporting Kelly, a lawyer who used to sit on the state supreme court and has a long history in conservative politics.

Money has poured into the race, reflecting national interest but also lax campaign finance rules that allow for massive expenditures. Total spending in the supreme court race is already near $45 million with a week to go, according to WisPolitics, which triples the national record for a judicial election.

That includes at least $15 million in independent spending since Jan. 1, according to the Wisconsin Ethics Commission. Groups supporting Protasiewicz have a slight edge in spending as of publication, but far more of the money on the liberal side has gone directly into the candidate’s campaign coffers. Billionaires George Soros and J.B. Pritzker, the Illinois governor, are among the largest liberal donors, while conservatives include megadonors Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein and Federalist Society co-chairman Leonard Leo. People and groups with ties to the efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election have also donated millions to help Kelly. 

But as the panelists of the St. Gabriel Church town hall attested, that noise isn’t heard equally in all parts of the state. 

After the March 18 town hall, a few groups of volunteers left to canvass nearby. They handed out nonpartisan fliers that listed general election and early voting information.

Milwaukee resident Jodi Delfosse, 55, took a stack of fliers and walked up and down a nearby block knocking on doors. It was a finger-numbing 16 degrees and the weather switched disorientingly between blizzard-like snow and clear sunshine every few minutes. She was met mostly by Ring security systems, with residents answering the door through their intercom, and a few face-to-face interactions. In a friendly voice, one resident told her through a closed door to leave the flier outside because “I’m not dressed.”

These obstacles to reaching voters door-to-door was one reason Linea Sundstrom started Supermarket Legends, a nonpartisan Milwaukee voter advocacy group that is run exclusively by volunteers, mostly retirees. They pass out informational literature and register voters outside local supermarkets and food pantries, at bus stops, on college campuses and on public sidewalks or outside any business that gives them permission.

“Everybody has to eat, and what we’re trying to do is go where people are instead of expecting them to come to us,” she told Bolts. The group’s flier for the supreme court race does not advocate for a candidate but identifies issues with a series of questions, such as “Is the 1849 abortion ban right for Wisconsin today?” and “What regulations are right for tap water?”

Supermarket Legends focuses on low-turnout areas and wherever “people don’t have a lot of resources,” Sundstrom said. They pay attention to where other groups are working and “try to fill in the gaps.” Right now, she said, the biggest gap is on the near-south side, a predominantly Latinx area where voter turnout outside of major elections is typically very low. 

Sundstrom described her group’s work in a ward where only 29 people voted in February, which is only 6 percent of registered voters. “One person standing in front of El Rey Supermarket on the south side can talk to 60, 70 people an hour, face to face,” Sundstrom said. 

Sylvia Ortiz-Velez is a Democratic lawmaker who represents the Wisconsin Assembly district with the highest share of Latinx residents in Wisconsin. Two weeks out from the runoff, she was canvassing her constituents in Milwaukee’s Polonia neighborhood, which is located about three miles south of the El Rey supermarket. Voter turnout is reliably higher in this neighborhood—26 percent in the primary—as is household income.

Going door to door is a way to reach the registered voters who regularly vote because they are the “lower-hanging fruit” of any get-out-the-vote campaign, she said. Plus “you learn a lot about what’s landing.”

At one house, the barrel-chested 64-year-old who opened his door to Ortiz-Velez already had his mind made up about the two candidates. “Get rid of ’em both. They’re wishy-washy. We need law and order,” he told her. He was wearing a National Latino Peace Officers Association T-shirt. He said Protasiewicz is too soft on crime, echoing GOP attacks. He called Kelly, who was paid by state Republicans to advise them in a covert scheme to overturn the 2020 election, “a crook.”

Then he added: “The one thing I like about (Protasiewicz) is giving women their rights.”

This comment surprised Ortiz-Velez. “In my district, abortion might come up, but it might not come up. It’s not something I would lead with,” she told Bolts. “Most of the people in our community make maybe $35,000 per year and work very hard for their families and they’ve always had to do a lot with less.” If she has time, she said she’ll “absolutely talk” with voters about gerrymandering, rigged district maps and voter access.

Here in Polonia, Ortiz-Velez made sure to mention that Protasiewicz is homegrown—she grew up on the south side, her parents are buried in a nearby cemetery and she attends a Catholic church about eight blocks away.

As she walked, she consulted a canvassing app on her phone called MiniVAN. It tells her the name, age and voting history of registered voters on the block. 

“Back in the day we put this all on index cards,” she said.

Ortiz-Velez has been canvassing in the district for over 20 years. Some things have not changed. “My father was an evangelist and he always told me, ‘Smile, smile, smile,’” she said outside one house while waiting for an answer at the door.

The post “This Election Is So Quiet”: Inside the Scramble to Mobilize Milwaukee in a High-Stakes Judge Race appeared first on Bolts.

The suspense on Tuesday rested largely on which of the two conservatives would make it to the runoff. Kelly, who finished narrowly ahead of local judge Jennifer Dorow, with 24 to 22 percent, was Democrats’ preferred opponent due to his arch-conservative record, connections to Donald Trump, and re-election loss three years ago, and at least one liberal organization spent heavily in the run-up to the primary to hurt Dorow’s chances.

But Protasiewicz’s dominant showing became a story of its own. She finished with 46.4 percent of the vote, more than the two conservatives combined, with another liberal-aligned candidate, Everett Mitchell, coming in a distant fourth. Overall, the two liberals combined for 54 percent of the vote, with 46 percent going to the two conservatives. Judicial elections are ostensibly non-partisan in Wisconsin, but parties are heavily involved and the state bench is deeply polarized, with reports that one altercation between justices turned violent last decade.

Should Protasiewicz prevail in April, it would flip control of the court to the left for the first time since 2008. 

This would have huge ramifications for abortion, redistricting, ballot access, and a host of other issues that are often decided by courts, including, potentially, the fate of presidential elections in 2024 and beyond. 

Heavy gerrymanders have enabled the GOP to lock down control of the Wisconsin legislature with majorities largely impervious to shifts in the popular vote, an advantage the party has used to dilute the authority of the state’s Democratic governor and deny him routine appointments. The state also has no popular initiative process, so progressives cannot put measures on the ballot to protect abortion or voting rights, as they have in neighboring Michigan. 

For years already, Democrats have eyed this spring’s supreme court race as their rare opportunity to crack the GOP’s iron-clad and largely election-proof control on state government.

“There’s really only one path in the next several years to undo the most extreme gerrymander in the country, and that’s the April supreme court race in Wisconsin,” Ben Wikler, head of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, told Bolts. 

Democrats hope that a supreme court with a newly liberal majority may strike down the state’s current political maps. This is what happened last decade in Pennsylvania after Democrats flipped control of the court, which later imposed mid-decade redistricting. If Wisconsin’s congressional map is redrawn, it may sway several seats. New legislative maps, if they make Democrats competitive, could also open the door to a swath of other policy changes.

“As long as Republicans can lose the popular vote but still control majorities, democracy essentially doesn’t exist in Wisconsin,” Wikler said. “But if the conservative dominance of the supreme court ends, the entire apparatus could unravel. Ideas that have enormous popularity in Wisconsin could become law,” he added, mentioning Republican lawmakers’ refusal to expand Medicaid as provided by the Affordable Care Act.

A spokesperson for the state Republican Party did not reply to a request for comment.

Both candidates have made their views on redistricting clear. Protasiewicz has called the maps in place in the state “rigged.” Kelly said this week that he would oppose a court intervention against them. 

Both sides of the spectrum have also cast this supreme court election as a de facto referendum on abortion rights in the state. 

The state has an abortion ban, adopted in 1849, that was triggered into effect by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last summer to overturn Roe vs. Wade. Democratic officials in the state are now suing to strike it down, and the case is expected to be heard by the state supreme court after a new justice joins it. 

Gracie Skogman, a spokesperson for Wisconsin Right to Life, which endorsed Kelly in January, told Reuters, “This is Wisconsin’s Roe moment.” Asked what she meant by this remark, Skogman told Bolts, “In the same way that the Roe decision prevented pro-life legislative efforts to fully protect preborn life, a state supreme court decision that finds a right to abortion in our state constitution could have a similar effect.” 

Protasiewicz has campaigned explicitly on her support for reproductive rights. “I believe in a woman’s freedom to make her own decision on abortion,” she says in one ad. A liberal majority, should she join the court, would be likely to overturn the state’s abortion ban, as state courts have done in Kansas and South Carolina.

Republicans are denouncing Protasiewicz as a “left-wing activist,” with Kelly saying on Tuesday that she would replace the rule of law with “the rule of Janet.” They have also attacked her as too lenient on crime. This is a near-exact repeat of their unsuccessful playbook against Jill Karofsky, the liberal contender in the state’s last supreme court race in 2020.

And they will have the same flag-bearer as they did that year. Kelly, who at the time was a sitting justice and was endorsed by Trump, lost that race to Karofsky by ten percentage points. And while he faults Protasiewicz for signaling how she will rule on key issues, Kelly has an intensely right-wing record.

A former president of the local chapter of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal organization, Kelly has a long history of statements that fan the flames of the culture wars. He criticized the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to legalize same-sex marriage by writing that this “will eventually rob the institution of marriage of any discernible meaning.” He has said affirmative action and slavery are morally equivalent. He called Barack Obama’s presidential win a victory for “the socialism/same-sex marriage/recreational marijuana/tax increase crowd.”

And he has called Medicare and Social Security forms of “involuntary servitude,” Isthmus reported.

After then-Governor Scott Walker appointed him to the court in 2016, Kelly was a reliable member of the court’s conservative bloc, for instance authoring a decision in 2017 that struck down a local ordinance in Madison banning guns in public transit. He also consistently ruled in favor of prosecutors and against defendants.

Before and after his stint on the supreme court, Kelly worked and counseled prominent conservative organizations in the state. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported last week that Kelly had advised the Republican Party on matters related to elections in late 2020, including in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. 

The former chair of the state Republican Party told the congressional committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol that Kelly was part of “pretty extensive conversations” about conservative efforts to install fake electors that would vote for Donald Trump despite the Republican’s loss. Kelly’s team has denied supporting the scheme and has said attorneys should not be blamed for their clients’ views.

The state supreme court in December 2020 was bitterly divided when it rejected Trump’s bid to reverse his loss in the presidential race in a 4-3 vote. 

Since then, Wisconsin has remained a hotbed for election denialism, a movement in large part overseen by Michael Gableman, a former supreme court justice, and fears remain about similar efforts to overturn a presidential election in the future. Karofsky, the supreme court justice who ousted Kelly three years ago, wrote an article in Slate last week denouncing the harassment she has experienced since her vote rejecting Trump’s lawsuit.

Fueled by this confluence of issues, a slew of organizations, PACs, and billionaires injected millions into the race in the run-up to Tuesday and are preparing to spend far more over the next six weeks. Wisconsin stands nearly alone in the spotlight this year as one of only two supreme court elections this year, alongside Pennsylvania’s this fall, after a far busier 2022. 

It’s also led to increased public attention. Turnout on Tuesday was just a sliver of the turnout in the 2020 presidential election and the 2022 midterms, but it also soared—by 30 percent—compared to the most recent primary for a supreme court election three years ago. The turnout surge was far higher in liberal Dane County, home to Madison.

“The explosive turnout for the progressive candidates in the state Supreme Court primary demonstrates the intensity of Wisconsinites’ desire for reproductive freedom and democracy,” Wikler told Bolts.

The winner of Wisconsin’s runoff will replace conservative Justice Patience Roggensack, who is not seeking re-election, and secure a ten-year term. If Protasiewicz wins, liberals will have a majority on the court until at least 2025, when liberal Justice Ann Bradley’s term expires. 

But if Kelly prevails, keeping the court in conservative hands, liberals won’t have another chance to flip it until conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley’s term ends, in 2026. 

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