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. 

The post Wisconsin’s Supreme Court Runoff Takes Shape as Referendum on Abortion and Democracy appeared first on Bolts.

But voters by and large rejected election denier candidates while embracing measures that expanded access to the ballot in places like Michigan and Connecticut. Outside of elections, states and municipalities saw big policy shifts around democracy and voting procedures—some of it expanding voting access, like North Carolina restoring the voting rights to tens of thousands people on probation and parole, and a lot of it threatening to curtail and criminalize voting, like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s new elections police force. 

In the coming year, expect these fundamental conflicts around democracy to remain at the forefront, so we here at Bolts have identified ten key questions that will shape these issues in 2023. They range from the continued threat of election denialism in state governments to the power of state supreme courts over the gerrymandering of congressional maps—and Bolts will be watching it all for you. 

1. How will the election deniers who won secretary of state act once in office?

Election deniers largely failed in their efforts to take over election administration offices during the midterms, with the exception of four candidates in deeply red states—Alabama, Indiana, South Dakota, and Wyoming. As they now prepare to enter office as the elections chief of their respective states, these incoming officials will have the clout to push for significant changes to election procedures.

The stakes are clear in: Alabama

Wes Allen, who won the secretary of state race in Alabama, already seems to be making good on his promise to remove the state from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a national organization that assists states in maintaining accurate voter rolls and has become a target of right-wing conspiracies. Shortly after he was elected, he released a statement saying that he informed the organization that he would end Alabama’s membership as soon as he is inaugurated in January. 

Member states—including Alabama—have relied on the ERIC program to detect voter fraud. Outgoing secretary of state John Merril defended the system, saying that the program helped Alabama detect 12 instances of voter fraud in 2020. Despite this, Allen has said that the state will be able to maintain its own voter rolls using drivers license records, death records, and change-of-address information from the US Postal Service. 

Also keep an eye on: In South Dakota, Monae Johnson has expressed her distrust of vote tabulation machines and has already said she would encourage county election officials to do a hand-count audit of election results. In Wyoming, Chuck Gray has maintained that he wants to ban ballot drop boxes. 

2. Where will conservatives ramp up policing of elections and expand criminal statutes around voting? 

Trump’s lies about fraud fueled a raft of GOP-crafted state laws creating new election-related crimes or increasing existing criminal penalties around voting. As Bolts has reported, those laws are part of a larger effort in red states to police elections and criminalize voting under the pretense of cracking down on fraud. That includes an entire new state agency designed to investigate elections in Florida. Heading into 2023, conservatives are already gearing up to set up new tripwires that could ensnare more people in the criminal legal system.

The stakes are clear in: Texas 

The last time the Texas legislature gaveled into session in January 2021, it was less than a week after a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol that had been fanned by many top GOP officials in the state—including Attorney General Ken Paxton, who aided in the legal efforts to overturn the 2020 election and even rallied Trump supporters in Washington D.C. hours before they rioted on Jan. 6. Conservative leaders then used Big Lie rhetoric to make ‘election integrity’ a top priority, ultimately ushering in the passage of Senate Bill 1, a sweeping elections law that raised new threats of criminal penalties around assisting voters and election workers. 

Now Texas Republicans are once again pointing to the most recent elections to justify more policing of elections. GOP lawmakers say problems voters experienced at the polls around Houston on election day—polling places that opened late and shortages of ballot paper—inspired them to file a bill that would direct the secretary of state to appoint state police officers as “election marshals” to investigate voting. Republicans have also proposed legislation ahead of the session that would impose harsher penalties for election crimes and expand Paxton’s ability to initiate prosecutions for voter fraud. 

Also keep an eye on: The administration of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis this summer arrested people for allegedly voting when they were barred from doing so, despite evidence that state officials told them they were eligible. Judges have since tossed out some of those cases, but many remain to be adjudicated in 2023—and Florida’s new election police force has the authority to launch new prosecutions. Other cases involving people prosecuted for voting are ongoing elsewhere in the country, such as Crystal Mason‘s in Texas.

3. Will more states curtail felony disenfranchisement or enable voting from prison? 

In 2022, 4.6 million Americans were barred from voting due to a felony conviction—a number that’s high but also considerably down from just four years ago, before a wave of reforms ended or curtailed felony disenfranchisement in more than ten states. Will more states join the efforts to restore people’s voting rights in the coming year?

The stakes are clear in: Oregon

Since 2018, the states that have expanded the franchise have largely acted to restore the rights of citizens who are already out of prison. In states that had already done that, activists have focused on also enabling people to vote from prison, though so far those bills have mostly stalled. (After a milestone 2020 reform, D.C. joined Maine and Vermont as the only places that strip no one’s rights.) Such a push failed in Oregon earlier this year. But a new legislative effort on the issue is coming in 2023, a state advocate confirmed to Bolts. 

The stakes are also clear in: New Mexico 

New Mexico is a rare blue state that bars people on parole and probation from voting, and a bill to enfranchise anyone who is not incarcerated failed last year in chaotic circumstances and mutual recrimination among Democrats. Voting rights advocates told Bolts that they would try again; they have a short window in early 2023 given the state’s brief legislative session.

Also keep an eye on: Other states where bills to end or curtail felony disenfranchisement have been considered in recent years or may be introduced this year include Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Minnesota. Inversely, in Kentucky, the fate of an executive order announced by Democratic Governor Andy Beshear in 2019 that has restored the voting rights of most people who have completed their sentence may hinge on the results of the governor’s race in November.

4. Which states will further ease ballot access and voting procedures?

From automatic voter registration to universal vote-by-mail, specific policies meant to ease ballot access have snowballed in recent years, largely in Democratic-run states. In 2023, which states play catch-up and what new proposals emerge that push existing boundaries further?

The stakes are clear in: Connecticut

Connecticut is close to shaking off the distinction of being the bluest state in the nation with no in-person early voting. In November, residents approved a ballot measure that amends the state constitution to authorize in-person early voting, but the state legislature must adopt legislation to set up such a system before it can go into effect and change anything about how elections are actually run. In advance of the 2023 legislative session, lawmakers and advocates are now debating how long the early voting period should be, with disagreements already emerging between some officials and the state ACLU, which is pushing for a longer window.

The stakes are also clear in: Washington, D.C.

The city council of Washington, D.C., held a hearing in 2022 on a proposal that could, should it move forward next year, redefine common assumptions about the need for voter registration. The bill, as Bolts‘s Alex Burness reported in September, would mail ballots to people it knows are eligible, even if they are not registered. “Traditionally, registration has been used as a way to keep people from voting,” the bill’s chief sponsor told Bolts.

Also keep an eye on: Voting rights advocates in New York are pushing many reforms to ease registration and strengthen local administration. As Democrats take power in Michigan, they are eying possible legislation on election procedures and they will be in charge of implementing a voting rights package that Michiganders adopted in November. And Delaware lawmakers are back to square one after the state supreme court struck down their voting reforms this fall. 

5. Will more states pass voting laws restricting ballot access?

This year’s was Georgia’s first federal election since the passage of Senate Bill 202, a sweeping voting law passed by Republicans that introduced new restrictions to voting such as stricter ID requirements for absentee voting, restricting the availability of ballot drop boxes, and making it illegal to offer people standing in long voting lines food or water. The law, as Anoa Changa reported for Bolts, also created a critically short four-week runoff election period. But Georgia is not alone: SB 202 implemented a slew of measures that Republicans nationwide have used as a template for legislative changes, and more may come in 2023.

The stakes are clear in: Ohio

Republicans in the Ohio legislature pushed through a new bill this month tightening voter ID requirements for in-person voting, shortening the period for absentee voting, and limiting the number of ballot drop boxes per county to just one. The bill, which was originally intended to get rid of certain election days, was expanded to include these other provisions just before it was passed in both houses. The bill is now on Republican Governor Mike DeWine’s desk; Democrats have signaled they will bring a lawsuit next year if he signs it.

Also keep an eye on: Pennsylvania Republicans are eying stricter voter ID laws as a priority in the upcoming session. Since they lost control of the state House in November, they may be hard pressed to find the votes to succeed; but Republicans are looking to take advantage of multiple vacancies in the chamber to keep control until the spring, a chaotic situation that may give them a legislative window. In Texas, lawmakers have already pre-filled 66 bills having to do with election administration, some of which would shorten early voting and purge voter rolls. 

6. Will states change their rules around ballot initiatives? 

Facing popular referendums to enshrine abortion rights in state constitutions or expand healthcare access, Republicans in many red states have tried to change the goalposts to make ballot measures harder to pass, including this year in South Dakota and Arkansas. Expect more states to try to raise the threshold for passing voter-initiated reforms next year. 

The stakes are clear in: Ohio 

Republicans in the Ohio legislature have been rushing to change the rules for constitutional amendments since activists began discussing a potential ballot measure to solidify legal protections for abortion in light of the state’s criminal ban. While abortion activists used the ballot initiative process to protect abortion rights in neighboring Michigan, the vote didn’t clear 60 percent, the new threshold Ohio Republicans now want to set for such changes in the future. 

The stakes are also clear in: Missouri

In Missouri, GOP lawmakers have filed nearly a dozen bills to increase requirements for ballot initiatives in the state—from raising the signature requirements to get a proposal on the ballot to increasing the threshold for approval from a majority to 60 percent. Those proposed changes come on the heels of voters legalizing recreational marijuana via the ballot initiative process in November and discussions among abortion rights advocates about pursuing a ballot measure to challenge the state’s criminal abortion ban. 

7. How will the politics of state supreme courts affect mid-decade redistricting?

While redistricting typically takes place at the start of the decade, new majorities in state courts can shift the balance of power and trigger new rounds of map drawing.

The stakes are clear in: Wisconsin

Wisconsin is extremely gerrymandered, making it very unlikely that Democrats could win the legislature this decade under present maps. Could they get state courts to force fairer maps, as their peers in Pennsylvania did last decade? At the moment, conservatives enjoy a 4-3 majority on the Wisconsin supreme court, which ruled on those ideological lines last year to effectively preserve the skewed maps in effect during the 2010s. But a supreme court race looms in April that could transform state politics: Should a liberal candidate gain the seat, it would flip control of the court and likely change its outlook on the Republican gerrymanders.

Also keep an eye on: The GOP swept state supreme court races in North Carolina and Ohio in November, wins that are likely to deliver newly-robust conservative majorities and re-open the floodgates of gerrymandering in each state. For different reasons, both states are required to redraw congressional maps by the 2024 or 2026 cycles, and now the Republicans who control the redistricting process will get to do so under friendlier judges than over the past two years. 

8. Will Harper vs. Moore throw a wrench in redistricting and other democracy debates?

If you are reading this, odds are you’ve heard of the “independent state legislature” theory, a largely obscure legal doctrine just twelve months ago that is now on the brink of receiving the blessing of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ultraconservative majority. If not, Cristian Farias’s primer in Bolts has you covered: this is the “feverish idea is that state legislatures should have complete and unfettered control over how federal elections are run and regulated, shielded from the oversight of state courts,” Farias wrote in March. Since then, the U.S. Supreme Court took a case, known as Moore v. Harper, that tests this doctrine, and heard it on Dec. 7.

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

The Supreme Court could rule in the case anytime between January and June, falling anywhere between a repudiation of the theory to an embrace of its strongest form, which would unleash state legislatures to regulate federal elections as they please. During the Dec. 7 hearing, court watchers observed that some conservative justices did not seem to support the theory’s strongest iteration but may be willing to fashion a weaker version. 

Also keep an eye on: Depending on how the justices rule, the outcome could unleash GOP lawmakers to ramp up voter ID rules, restrict voting procedures, or draw new maps without worrying about intervention from their state courts in places like North Carolina or Ohio where state judges have been a thorn on their side has been an issue for them. The conservative justices could also make it tougher for a new majority on the Wisconsin supreme court, should liberals flip it in April (see above), to have any effect on the congressional map. But if the justices is affirm some version of the independent state legislature theory, the consequences could also be felt in blue states where judges have constrained Democratic legislatures: Just over the past year, for instance, New York’s highest court struck down Democrats’ gerrymander of the state in 2021, and Delaware’s highest court threw out new laws enabling same-day voter registration and no-excuse mail voting—all moves that may be called into question by Moore v. Harper.

9. Will other cities move on democracy vouchers?

In 2022, Oakland, California, followed in the footsteps of Seattle in offering residents a novel way to more actively participate in local elections. Voters in November approved a ballot measure for a Democracy Dollars program, giving every Oakland voter four $25 vouchers to donate to a candidate of their choice in future city and school board elections. 

As Spenser Mestel reported for Bolts in July, the idea behind the program is to engage more voters, encourage a more diverse set of candidates, make political giving more transparent, redistribute power to poorer and less white areas, and combat the power of special interests. 

The stakes are clear in: California municipalities

Advocates elsewhere in California are looking to Oakland as an example. Los Angeles and San Diego have each had their respective campaigns for democracy dollars in place for some time, and in a recent editorial in the Los Angeles Times, the editorial board offered up these vouchers as one of several tools that could be used to restore LA voters’ confidence in local government shaken by the racist comments made city council leaders on a leaked tape. 

Also keep an eye on: At a recent city council meeting in Evanston, Illinois, officials discussed democracy vouchers as one of two new proposals for using government dollars to fund campaigns. The discussion was tabled until February, when the proposals will go up for a committee vote. 

10. What is next for local initiatives to expand voter eligibility? 

Cities around the country are experimenting with ways to broaden their electorate. In recent years, some have passed reforms allowing non-citizen residents to vote in local elections, and others have tried extending the franchise to 16- and 17-year-olds. Watch for more of those efforts next year as well as pushback from conservative groups. 

The stakes are clear in: Massachusetts 

Several Massachusetts cities have in recent years passed ordinances allowing both 16-and 17-year olds and noncitizens with legal status to vote in local elections. But to implement those reforms, the cities must get approval from the governor and the Democratic-run legislature, which have so far ignored their requests. As Bolts reported this year, proponents of expanding the franchise have hoped that a breakthrough in Boston would help push state leaders to finally act. Last month, Boston’s city council overwhelmingly passed an ordinance giving 16- and 17-year-olds the right to vote in municipal elections, and GBH News reports that council members who also support noncitizen voting are pressing for the city to take up that issue next.

The stakes are also clear in: California

Conservative activists in California have sued to block expanding the franchise in the state since San Francisco voters in 2016 approved letting noncitizen residents vote in local school board elections. This past summer a judge struck down the ordinance, ruling that it violated the state constitution. While the courts allowed noncitizens to vote in the November election as the city appealed, it could be the last time depending on how the legal challenge shakes out. Meanwhile, Oakland seems willing to join the fight, with voters overwhelmingly approving a resolution last month that also seeks to allow noncitizens to vote in school board elections. 

Also keep an eye on: Other legal fights over expanding the franchise include Washington DC’s attempt to allow noncitizens to vote in local elections, which the DC council passed in October but Republicans in Congress have already vowed to block. New York City is also currently appealing a trial court ruling this summer that struck down the city’s attempt to authorize close to 900,000 noncitizen residents to vote in local elections. In Vermont, two cities implemented noncitizen voting in local elections, and where the incoming secretary of state says she supports expanding voting eligibility. 

The post Ten Questions that Will Shape Democracy and Voting Rights in 2023 appeared first on Bolts.

Jamie told Wisconsin Watch that the couple was motivated by a desire to help re-elect Donald Trump when they registered to vote for the first time in 2020. But they listed their P.O. Box, unaware that Wisconsin law makes it a felony to register with anything other than a residential address. The Wellses ultimately became two of five people Fond du Lac County District Attorney Eric Toney charged earlier this year with “falsely procuring voter registration,” which carries a punishment of up to three and a half years in prison and a fine of $10,000 each. 

According to a criminal complaint Toney filed this past February, Jamie insisted that the offense “didn’t matter anyways” because she’d voted for Trump, who lost. But she also told a detective on the case “he should be looking at the election in Wisconsin because the election was cheated and ‘they took it away from Trump.’” 

Toney, the Republican nominee for Wisconsin attorney general this year, has run for statewide office in large part on “prosecuting more election fraud than anyone in Wisconsin.” 

His actions and aggressive stance as DA have added a veneer of law enforcement credibility to the groundswell of baseless conspiracy theories about elections that have circulated in the Wisconsin GOP since Trump’s loss in 2020. If he wins, Toney would assume even larger authority to pursue investigations and press criminal charges, potentially spreading his agenda statewide in one of the nation’s most critical swing states.

Toney has also taken steps to distance himself from the Big Lie as a way of appealing to more moderate voters. “I’ve been the most vocal Republican statewide candidate opposed to decertification, saying there was no widespread voter fraud that would overturn the results of the election here in Wisconsin,” Toney said in a debate early this month after his Democratic opponent, incumbent Attorney General Josh Kaul, accused him of “fanning the Big Lie.” 

But Toney has associated himself with Wisconsin conservatives at the front row of election conspiracies. He recently attended a fundraiser alongside Michael Gabelman, a former state supreme court judge who released a widely-discredited report calling for decertifying the 2020 election; Toney supported Gableman’s purported investigation. He has also joined in conservative attacks against the state’s bipartisan elections commission and sought to remove its members.

Toney didn’t respond to requests for comment about the prosecutions for illegal registration or his campaign for attorney general.

The AG election in Wisconsin has drawn attention from national Democrats for its potential ramifications on abortion rights in the state. Kaul joined a lawsuit attempting to block a 1849 law banning all abortions in Wisconsin after this summer’s Dobbs ruling. Toney called the lawsuit “a political stunt with dubious legal standing” and has since received endorsements from anti-abortion groups for pledging to enforce the state’s abortion ban and saying he would prosecute instances of abortion even for pregnancies that resulted from rape. Toney has also said a Republican AG’s office would be better suited to bring abortion prosecutions to avoid the discretion of local DAs.

“From touting bogus claims of election fraud, to refusing to rule out prosecuting abortions even in cases of rape and incest, it is clear that Eric Toney will say or do anything to win, including pander to the extreme far-right,” Democratic Party of Wisconsin Rapid Response Director Marnie O’Malley said in a statement to Bolts.

Toney has joined Big Lie evangelists like Christopher Schmaling, the Republican sheriff of Racine County, in calling for the prosecution of Wisconsin Election Commission members (WEC) who, because of the coronavirus pandemic, voted to relax requirements for how ballots were handled in nursing homes ahead of the 2020 election. 

The Wisconsin sheriff’s groundless claims of fraud around voting in nursing homes have helped fuel a larger conservative war on the WEC, and they were included in the report released to Republican lawmakers earlier this year by Gableman, who called for shuttering the WEC and transferring its duties to local election clerks. After the Racine County DA declined to bring any charges, Toney echoed Schmaling’s allegations and filed a complaint with Democratic Governor Tony Evers, seeking removal of the WEC members. Toney also asked for the matter to be referred to another county DA’s office, like his, or a special prosecutor, for criminal charges.

Toney has brought his tough talk toward election officials to the campaign trail. His campaign website says he’s “fighting to hold the Wisconsin Election Commission Board accountable for their actions in 2020.” All around the country, local and state elections officials have reported being harassed and threatened by people who believe the conspiracies about the 2020 election, and they have left their positions in droves.

Kaul, the current AG, has argued that Toney’s stances on the WEB or Gableman call into question whether the GOP nominee would defend the results in 2024, should Trump or another candidate seek to overturn an election again. 

Kaul has also criticized Toney’s prosecutions over P.O. Box registrations as being fueled by politics, which Toney has in turn called hypocritical. Toney points to the incumbent’s prosecution of a conservative activist who ordered absentee ballots for two other people to try and bolster his argument that it’s too easy to violate state election laws. 

Toney’s invective against the WEC represents just one of the GOP attacks on the state’s bipartisan elections commission. A conservative group also sued to overturn WEC guidance that expanded the use of drop boxes for absentee ballots ahead of the 2020 election, resulting in a ruling this summer by the conservative majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court that effectively outlawed nearly all drop boxes in the state and made it illegal for anyone, including family members, to submit another person’s completed ballot.

Along with the state elections commission, another bogeyman for Toney’s campaign is protests against the police. One of his campaign videos features footage from demonstrations in 2020 with a dramatic voiceover saying, “Wisconsin is under siege by a woke mob.” He has criticized Kaul’s office for opening an investigation into the Kenosha officer who shot and paralyzed Jacob Blake in August 2020 and for advocating for various policy changes like de-escalation training and revised use-of-force standards. 

Toney has claimed Kaul’s handling of Blake’s shooting convinced him to run for attorney general, saying in an interview with PBS Wisconsin, “To have an attorney general that’s not standing with our law enforcement, I could not sit back and watch that continue.”

Toney mirrors a larger movement in conservative politics to criminalize voting and elections. More than two dozen states have enacted, expanded or increased the severity of election-related criminal penalties since the 2020 election, according to a recent analysis by States Newsroom. States like Florida have ramped up policing of elections this year, while election denying activist groups in states like Texas have escalated private efforts to monitor voting. 

But Toney’s prosecutions in Fond du Lac, which remain pending, still stand out compared to how other DAs in the state have handled similar cases. In La Crosse County, the DA declined to prosecute 16 cases where voters used UPS stores as their address, telling the Milwaukee Journal  Sentinel, “We decided it was not an intentional plan to fraudulently vote.” An investigation by Wisconsin Watch found over 100 people registered to vote at a UPS store address, yet only Toney in Fond du Lac County chose to prosecute people. 

The fraudulent registration cases Toney is prosecuting also came from an unusual source: tips by an election denier and self-styled vigilante named Peter Bernegger, who in April was fined more than $2,400 by the WEC for filing “frivolous complaints.” In addition to targeting people who registered at P.O. Boxes, Bernegger, who was previously convicted of bank and mail fraud for deceiving investors in two startup companies, also used state open records laws to gather millions of copies of ballots to hunt for election crimes—although he offered no proof earlier this year when called by a Republican-led Assembly panel to testify about “fake votes” in the 2020 election.  

Ion Meyn, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School, accused Toney of basing the prosecutions on a bad-faith reading of the existing statute. 

“I find it a total abuse of prosecutorial discretion that undermines democracy,” Meyn told Bolts. He said Toney seems to be pushing for election crimes prosecutions to make a political point, which he called unethical and disqualifying for state office. “Using the criminal system against defendants for your own personal gain is the worst type of abuse of discretion,” Meyn said.

The post The Prosecutor Who Wants More Power to Investigate Elections appeared first on Bolts.

This guide walks you through how concretely the 2022 midterms will shape abortion access. 

We identify nine questions that touch on reproductive rights that state and local elections will decide, and the critical battles that will help answer them. The guide successively covers the meaning of state constitutions, the viability of new laws, and matters of law enforcement.

This guide is just one small slice. The elections mentioned, which cover 21 states, are by no means exhaustive: There are many other races playing out along similar lines for offices that will wield power over these issues for years to come. Still, we hope to give you a taste of the enormous range of powers held by state and local officials, and some of the ways that candidates on all sides are getting creative in how they’d use these in the wake of the Dobbs decision.

What are the candidates running for prosecutor saying in your county, if there’s an election? What about those running for sheriff and attorney general, governor and judge? The very need to ask these questions underscores the magnitude of the loss of federal protections, though local and state conflicts over the issue are by no means new; and that means many candidates already have long histories and some ideas when it comes to how they will approach abortion access.

1. Will voters affirm or reject state constitutional protections for abortion access?

Never have there been more referendums on abortion than this year. In six states, voters will weigh in directly on the issue, and more indirectly in a seventh, and the results could establish new bulwarks against the right’s efforts—or else open the door to new restrictions.

These stakes are clear in: Kansas’s August referendum… 

In a landmark ruling that’s now styming Kansas conservatives, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that the state constitution’s equal protection clause protects access to abortion. But voters will soon decide whether to adopt a constitutional amendment, championed by Republicans, that would overturn that ruling and lift its protections; the election is scheduled for the lower-turnout August primary. 

… and a likely Michigan referendum in November.

Pro-choice organizers in Michigan this week submitted more than 700,000 signatures on behalf of a constitutional amendment that would enshrine abortion rights, far more than the amount needed to get the measure on November’s ballot. If enough signatures are verified, voters will decide the fate of the state’s pre-Roe abortion ban. A progressive win here would be one of Election Night’s defining stories since it would protect access to abortion in a populous swing state, one where governance has long been out of reach for Democrats due to GOP gerrymanders. (That may change this year too.)

Also keep an eye on:

California and Vermont already enable access to abortions, but this fall they could become the first states to explicitly codify the right to abortion and contraception in their state constitutions. 

Inversely, Kentucky conservatives are championing an amendment that would say that the state constitution provides no protections for abortion. Kentucky courts have not affirmed such a right, so this referendum would not overturn existing protections. Still, pro-choice groups have asked judges to do so; that door would all but close if the amendment passed. In Montana, voters may decide that a fetus born alive counts as a legal person. Finally, and more indirectly, Alaska holds a referendum, as it does every ten years, on whether to hold a constitutional convention that may change the state constitution; this matters because the Alaska Supreme Court has ruled that the state constitution’s privacy clause protects abortion access, and some conservatives who favor an abortion ban in Alaska hope for a ‘yes’ win to overturn that precedent.

2. Will new state judges affirm abortion rights, or strike down abortion protections?

State supreme courts are critical battlegrounds for reproductive rights. Nearly a dozen have established that their state constitutions recognize abortion rights. But that landscape is in flux as progressive and conservative litigators aim for new rulings. Upcoming judicial elections will tip the scales in many states; most states elect supreme court justices this year.

These stakes are clear in: Michigan’s supreme court elections…

Governor Gretchen Whitmer and pro-choice organizations want Michigan courts to strike down the state’s pre-Roe ban and find a right to access abortions in the state constitution; the state’s supreme court has yet to rule, and its makeup is a question mark. Democrats enjoy a 4-3 majority on the court, but one justice from each party (Richard Bernstein, a Democrat, and Brian Zahra, a Republican) is up for re-election. Republicans must carry both seats to flip the court.

… and a supreme court election in Montana.

Montana’s supreme court, unlike Michigan’s, has already affirmed that the state constitution protects abortion. But conservatives are asking the high court to overturn that ruling—at the same time as they’re working to push the bench further right. In a heated judicial election this fall, they are backing Jim Brown, a former counsel for the state’s Republican Party, over Justice Ingrid Gayle Gustafson, an incumbent who was appointed by a Democratic governor. 

Also keep an eye on:

The partisan majority of supreme courts is on the line in three other states—Illinois, North Carolina, and Ohio—with a combined seven elections between them. These races may be decisive in future cases that touch on abortion rights. Of the three, North Carolina stands out: Abortion remains legal there but the situation could rapidly shift if the GOP makes further gains (see below), making it critical for Democrats to maintain their supreme court majority.

In Kentucky, pro-choice advocates hope to get courts to affirm a right to abortion in the state constitution but a fervently anti-abortion lawmaker is running for a seat on the supreme court. Similarly, conservatives hope to oust a moderate supreme court justice in Arkansas. Finally, eleven justices face retention elections (meaning a yes-or-no vote on whether they should stay in office) in Florida and Kansas, where state jurisprudence is especially fragile right now.

See also: Your State-By-State Guide to the 2022 Supreme Court Elections

3. Will states elect governors who will veto new abortion restrictions?

In some places where abortion remains legal, all that’s standing between virulently anti-abortion legislatures and new restrictions is the veto pen of a pro-choice governor. But for how long?

The stakes are clear in: Pennsylvania’s governor race.

Abortion rights have survived in this state despite Roe’s fall because the GOP legislature has to deal with the veto power of Governor Tom Wolf, a Democrat who supports abortion rights. But this status-quo is precarious: Wolf is term-limited and Republicans have nominated far-right lawmaker Doug Mastriano, who has long fought access to abortion, to replace him. The contrast is stark between Mastriano and the Democratic nominee, Attorney General Josh Shapiro, who has opposed new abortion restrictions for decades.

Also keep an eye on:

The Democratic governors of Kansas and Michigan, Laura Kelly and Whitmer, have each used their veto pen to block anti-abortion bills passed by GOP lawmakers. But that shield could soon disappear: Each is up for re-election this fall. That said, each state’s situation is complex: Michigan already has a ban on the books, but Governor Gretchen Whitmer wants state courts to strike it down; in Kansas, the right to an abortion is protected by a court ruling that voters may overturn this summer.

Inversely, Democrats could break the GOP’s control of Arizona and Iowa by flipping these state’s governorships. Arizona’s legal landscape on abortion is in flux, while Iowa’s high court overturned abortion protections in June, opening the door to new restrictions. In New York, where Republican Lee Zeldin would be the first governor opposed to abortion rights in at least 50 years, access would remain broadly protected but Zeldin has signaled he’ll look for ways to chip away.

4. Will states elect legislatures that want to restrict or protect abortion?

Governors are only one part of the puzzle when it comes to new laws; legislative control is just as fundamental. Simply put, will each chamber be favorable or hostile to abortion rights—and if they disagree with their governor, will lawmakers have the votes to override a veto?

These stakes are clear in: North Carolina’s legislative elections.

North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat who supports abortion rights, is sure to be in office through 2024. At the moment Republicans, who control the legislature but lack veto-proof majorities, cannot get restrictions past him. Will that change this fall? If November is very rough for Democrats, the GOP could make enough gains to sideline Cooper.

Also keep an eye on: 

Republicans have failed to override Kansas Governor Laura Kelly’s veto of anti-abortion bills, but even if Kelly wins a second term, they may have an easier time next year if they grow their legislative majorities. Republicans also have outside shots at seizing control of Nevada, New Mexico, and Minnesota state governments if they manage to flip both the governorship and legislature. In the first two states, abortion is currently legal but not protected by state courts; in the third, a court ruling protects abortion but the GOP may still push for some new restrictions.

Inversely, legislative gains by Democrats could protect abortion in Pennsylvania and Michigan, where the party has a stronger shot than it has in decades thanks to fairer maps. Finally, keep an eye on Democratic primaries in Maryland and Rhode Island, where progressive groups like Pro-Choice Maryland are targeting Democrats who oppose abortion. This can matter even where Democrats have supermajorities (as in Maryland) if they need to override a Republican governor’s veto.

5. Will cities and counties empower law enforcement to enforce bans or investigate pregnancy outcomes?

Besides changing state constitutions and laws, proponents of reproductive rights face a vast host of challenges having to do with how to mitigate the harms of existing bans, and that includes the threat of arrest, prosecution, and incarceration. First up are the sheriffs and police chiefs in charge of arresting and investigating people. A few police chiefs and sheriffs in blue-leaning areas like New Orleans have said they would not enforce abortion bans. How might this play out in the midterms? Police chiefs are typically appointed by city governments (which often have more leeway to direct police practices than they utilize), while sheriffs are directly elected.

The stakes are clear in: Wisconsin’s sheriff elections.

The sheriff of Dane County (Madison) put the question of abortion enforcement at the center of Wisconsin’s sheriff elections when he said he would not enforce the state’s 1849 ban on abortion. “Our sheriff’s office has a very strict budget with regards to our time and where we decide to put things,” Kalvin Barrett, a Democrat, told Bolts. He is now running for re-election against Republican Anthony Hamilton, who did not respond to Bolts‘s questions about his position on the issue. Bolts reached out to other candidates running for sheriff in the state. In Milwaukee, the state’s most populous county, all three candidates echoed Barrett’s stance and said they would not use the department’s resources to investigate abortion cases. (All are Democrats.)

In Eau Claire County, where three candidates are running, only Democrat Kevin Otto told Bolts that he would follow Barrett’s footsteps. “I would not enforce the laws on abortion because of the lack of resources and interference into a person’s health matters,” he said. Otto’s Democratic opponent David Riewestahl said it was too early to definitively answer the question, while Republican candidate Don Henning replied he would “investigate complaints as they arise.” 

Also keep an eye on:

Many cities in states with severe abortion restrictions (or that risk having them soon) will elect their municipal governments this year, and the role that their local police departments play in enforcing abortion bans should be central issues. Those cities include Little Rock, Arkansas, Tallahassee, Florida, and Lexington and Louisville, Kentucky.

6. Will counties elect prosecutors who have pledged not to charge abortion cases?

Prosecutors have historically enjoyed vast discretion over what cases to charge, which has made them a highly visible line of defense against the criminal consequences of bans. Already, dozens of prosecutors have said they won’t press charges in cases that involve abortions. As a result, reproductive rights are a major fault line in a host of upcoming elections that pit candidates who say they would enforce restrictions—and candidates who say they’ll decline cases. 

These issues were already present before Dobbs, as zealous prosecutors investigated pregnancy outcomes, as Bolts reported in June. Just last month, a conservative California district attorney lost his re-election bid after prosecuting two women who had experienced stillbirths.

The stakes are clear in: Maricopa County’s prosecutor race (Phoenix)…

Four years after questioning Christine Blasey Ford during Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Rachel Mitchell is now the chief prosecutor of Maricopa County in Arizona, home to 4.5 million people. If courts greenlight the state’s new restrictions on abortion, Mitchell has said she would enforce them. But Maricopa is holding a special election this year, which adds further uncertainty since presumptive Democratic Julie Gunnigle has ruled out pressing criminal charges, as Bolts reported in May in partnership with The Appeal. “As Maricopa County attorney I will never prosecute a patient, a provider, or a family for choosing to have an abortion or any other reproductive decision,” Gunnigle said. “Not now, not ever.”

… and in the prosecutor’s race in Florida’s Pasco-Pinellas (St. Petersburg) counties… 

Florida’s Pasco and Pinellas counties, which share a state attorney, have not had a contested election for prosecutor in 30 years despite being home to a combined 1.5 million residents. And what a time to have one: Their judicial district hosts a special election, much like Maricopa, and the two contenders are at odds on whether to enforce the state’s existing ban on abortions after 15-weeks. (Florida laws may soon get harsher still.) Democrat Allison Miller, a local public defender, says she will not prosecute people providing or obtaining an abortion, unlike Republican incumbent Bruce Bartlett, appointed to the job by Governor Ron DeSantis.

… and in the Texas DA elections.

A group of Texas DAs issued a joint statement this spring vowing to not prosecute abortion. And though just a portion of Texas counties vote for a DA this year, November’s elections will shape whether that group grows or shrinks. Democratic DAs who signed that statement are running for re-election in Bexar and Dallas counties. And in two populous counties that have trended bluer, Democrats are hoping to flip the DA offices. “I will not allow the persecution of our neighbors by cynical politicians bent on establishing a theocracy in Texas,” Kelly Higgins, the Democratic nominee in Hays County, wrote on Facebook after the Dobbs decision. In Tarrant County, where a staunchly punitive incumbent is retiring and former President Trump has gotten involved on behalf of the GOP nominee, Democratic nominee Tiffany Burks told Bolts she “does not have any plan to prosecute women or anyone who facilitates an abortion, doctors or whomever.”

Importantly, the discretion of Texas DAs may be strongly tested by conservatives going forward, as lawmakers and the attorney general are working out ways to kneecap these local officials.

Also keep a eye on:

Iowa’s most populous county (Polk, home to Des Moines) is sure to have a new prosecutor come next year, and Democratic nominee Kimberly Graham told Bolts in June she would not prosecute cases linked to abortion; the state supreme court in Iowa struck down abortion protections in June, plunging reproductive rights in the state in greater vulnerability. In Shelby County (Memphis), one of the few staunchly blue counties in Tennessee, Republican DA Amy Weirich has pointedly rejected the idea of issuing a blanket policy on not enforcing abortion ban; Steve Mulroy, her Democratic opponent in the August election, has said prosecutions “should be extremely low priorities” and he has assailed Weirich for lobbying for a harsher law.

See also: Which Counties Elect Their Prosecutors in 2022?

7. Will states elect attorneys general who want to interfere with local prosecutors?

Prosecutors are imperfect bulwarks since any policy they set is at the mercy of the next election, but also because conservatives have mechanisms at their disposal to supersede DAs—and they are plotting to set up more. Chief among them: Attorneys general. In some states, they have the authority to bring criminal charges on their own, and if not to bury providers under civil lawsuits. 

But this authority can cut both ways. Pro-choice candidates are signaling how they too would try to use the powers of this office for the opposite end, namely to stop the prosecution of abortions. When the conservative DA of California’s Kings County prosecuted two women over stillbirths, for instance, Attorney General Roy Bonta blew up the cases through media appearances and convinced a judge to reopen a case.

The stakes are clear in: Michigan’s attorney general election…

While a series of Michigan prosecutors have ruled out prosecuting abortion, they face a major obstacle: The Michigan attorney general’s latitude to step in is greater than in many other states. Democratic incumbent Dana Nessel has ruled out doing so, but she’s up for re-election and her likely general election opponent, Matt DePerno, has indicated he is in favor of enforcing bans.

… and the Arizona attorney general election.

Kris Mayes, Democrats’ likely nominee for Arizona attorney general, wants to go a step further: She is not just ruling out prosecuting people herself, but she also proposes stopping others from doing so. She says she would use her office’s supervisory authority over all local prosecutors, an authority that is broader in Arizona than elsewhere, to direct all of Arizona’s county attorneys to not enforce bans on abortion. But the Republican candidates in this race largely oppose abortion rights; were they to win, they may flex their power and try to supercede Democratic prosecutors who are refusing to bring criminal charges. Either way, legal questions about the extent of the attorney general’s authority will remain, likely leading to more clashes.

Also keep an eye on: 

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, is among the country’s most militant officials in restricting abortion and has vowed to help local prosecutors enforce the state’s harsh laws; he may also bring ruinous civil lawsuits against providers. His opponent Rochelle Garza could not be more different. She has worked on defending access to abortion as an attorney and says she would set up a reproductive rights unit in the office if she wins, which is always a tough proposition for a Texas Democrat—though Paxton’s own criminal indictments may give her an additional opening. In Georgia and Ohio, two states that are looking to implement severe restrictions, Democratic nominees Jen Jordan and Jeffrey Crossman are also speaking on the issue; Jordan says she would issue legal opinions to undercut local prosecutors who are bringing criminal charges, for instance, and Crossman refuses to defend the law in court. Their Republican opponents, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr and Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost (who responded skeptically to a 10 year-old rape victim who sought an abortion), are currently defending abortion restrictions in court.

8. Will states elect governors who promise clemency?

In states that have already banned or severely restricted abortion, a pro-choice governor, on their own, won’t shield people from arrest and prosecution. But some governors may at least have the authority—by themselves or through appointees to a board, depending on state rules—to issue clemencies for people who are convicted of violating criminal codes.

The stakes are clear in: Wisconsin’s governor race.

Democratic Governor Tony Evers has said he would grant clemency to anyone convicted under the state’s 1847 ban on abortions. But Evers is up for re-election this fall, and his GOP opponents have made it clear they support enforcing the ban. 

Also keep an eye on: 

Wisconsin governors have broader discretion than most to grant clemency; many other states dilute that power considerably. 

Still, at least one other state is electing a governor who will have somewhat direct authority to issue pardons: Ohio. Republican Governor Mike DeWine faces Nan Whaley, Dayton’s Democratic mayor, who is an abortion rights supporter and says she would veto new restrictions. She did not respond to a request for comment on clemency powers. The issue has also come up in Arizona, where the governor shares power with a clemency board. Democrat Marco Lopez has said he would support pardoning people convicted over abortions; Katie Hobbs, the other Democrat in the race, supports abortion rights but did not reply to a request for comment on clemency. 

Kentucky’s Democratic governor, who has broad authority over pardons and is only up for re-election in 2023, has not said how he would use his own clemency powers.

9. Will new judges bless gerrymanders that would lock in anti-abortion majorities?

Before overturning Roe v. Wade, this conservative U.S. Supreme Court also refused to rein in partisan gerrymandering. And there’s a direct connection to abortion rights: The GOP in many states has drawn maps that lock in legislative control, making it extraordinarily difficult for pro-choice majorities to emerge even if most residents vote for them. A few state courts have guarded against this dynamic—but their judgements are now on the line.

The stakes are clear in: North Carolina and Ohio’s supreme court elections.

These two states’ supreme courts have each struck down GOP gerrymanders, though Ohio lawmakers have for now circumvented those rulings. But new court majorities may emerge in November—five justices will be elected across the two states—and re-open the floodgates of gerrymandering, as Bolts reported in March. Friendlier courts could enable the GOP to draw maps that last the full decade and enshrine anti-abortion majorities. (Note that, while North Carolina is sure to have new congressional maps by 2024, it will be tricky for Republicans to justify drawing new legislative maps before the end of the decade due to legal idiosyncrasies, but they may try if they think they’ve secured a high court would rubber stamp their maneuver.)

And there will be no rest for the weary. Virginia Governor Glenn Younkin indicated that he may push for severe restrictions if the legislature were favorable to it, which has already marked the state’s elections for the state Assembly and Senate in the fall of 2023 as critical for abortion.

The post Your Guide to Local Elections Where Abortion Is on the Line This Year appeared first on Bolts.

Standing at a podium with large screens behind him blaring “ELECTION INTEGRITY”, Schmaling warned that the allegations might be difficult to follow at first. “This isn’t your typical criminal investigation, it’s complex—to be quite frank, it’s a bit challenging to understand at first,” he told the room full of reporters. But Schmaling promised that by the end of his office’s presentation, the public would “see firsthand that the election statute was in fact not just broken, but shattered by the members of the W.E.C., the Wisconsin Elections Commission.” 

Schmaling and Michael Luell, a sergeant in the sheriff’s office who had investigated a complaint about election malfeasance, spent more than an hour running reporters through a PowerPoint presentation, outlining what they claimed was devastating proof that state election commissioners had committed a crime. At first, the press event, which the sheriff’s office streamed live on its Facebook page, sounded more like a civics lesson than a criminal case, as Schmaling explained the makeup of the state’s election commission—six commissioners serving staggered five year terms, appointed by either legislative leaders or the governor. 

Schmaling and Luell eventually pointed to changes made by the election commission in response to the coronavirus pandemic leading up to the 2020 presidential election, which relaxed requirements for how ballots were handled in nursing homes. The sheriff claimed their investigation had uncovered several local nursing home residents who voted even though their families believed they were too old and no longer had the capacity to cast a ballot. Schmaling, an unabashed supporter of Donald Trump and one of many sheriffs who refused to enforce public health orders during the pandemic, pointed to family members who had gathered inside the office for the press conference, but said they wouldn’t be speaking to reporters. “They’re not here to answer your questions, but rather to put a face on the election law that was broken,” Schmaling said. 

Schmaling, a longtime veteran of the department who was first elected to his post in 2010, forwarded his allegations to multiple district attorneys in Wisconsin, and called on the state’s attorney general to open an investigation into election crimes at nursing homes. Higher authorities all refused to take up Schmaling’s recommendations, cutting the criminal investigation short, yet his allegations have gained traction elsewhere—they were cited in a report commissioned by state Republicans that recently called for decertifying the 2020 presidential results. 

Schmaling’s efforts signal the uniquely aggressive role sheriffs around the country may play in efforts to criminalize routine election procedures in the lead-up to 2022 and 2024. Conservative adherents to the constitutional sheriff movement were among the first to fully embrace the myth of the Big Lie, and many other Trump-aligned sheriffs have followed suit in deploying their powers. 

Unlike lawyers, judges, and legislators, county sheriffs have extensive powers to investigate any allegations, seize documents and voting machines and, if they deem necessary, use force or threats of force to gain compliance. 

In many regions, especially more rural areas, sheriffs are enmeshed in the voting process, in charge of securing voting locations and protecting ballots when they are transported to be counted. Throughout the country, they also exert a great deal of control over whether people held in jail have access to ballots. The United States also has a long history of sheriffs and others in law enforcement committing egregious acts of violence against Black voters—hence why many recoiled when Trump vowed to send sheriffs and other cops to watch the polls. 

Trump-aligned sheriffs who target election administrators compound pressures that have been driving people out of the profession. The Big Lie has ratcheted up misinformation around local elections systems, driving up threats and harassment against local election workers. According to a recent poll of election workers by the Brennan Center for Justice, one in five say they will probably quit before the 2024 presidential election.

Many of the officials who will be in power during the next presidential race will be decided in the 2022 midterms, when voters in more than 1,000 counties will elect their sheriffs. Schmaling himself is up for re-election this year in Racine County, a swing county just south of Milwaukee that twice voted for Barack Obama before narrowly voting for Trump in the last two presidential elections. (Wisconsin’s filing deadline is in June, and local elections can be late to take form.)

After Trump’s 2020 loss, one of the first sheriffs to make headlines with a frivolous voter-fraud investigation targeting election workers was Sheriff Dar Leaf, who just weeks before had secured re-election entirely unopposed in Barry County, Michigan. 

An ex-shooting instructor and gun enthusiast, Leaf has a history of supporting militia groups, including the men accused of participating in a plot to kidnap the state’s governor; two of the men charged in the case were recently acquitted at a trial where missteps by the federal law enforcement loomed over the proceedings (a mistrial was declared for two others).  Leaf tried to rally Michigan sheriffs to seize voting machines throughout their counties and sent a private investigator to interrogate long-time election workers amid Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud following the 2020 election. No charges were filed, and the Barry County prosecutor said there was “no evidence” of crimes.

On the surface, Schmaling’s 10-month investigation into allegations of election crimes in Racine County has at least the trappings of legitimacy. The root of his claim rests on a complaint by Judy Westphal-Mitchell regarding her elderly mother Shirley Westphal, who was in the fall of 2020 a resident at Ridgewood Care Center. (In the press conference, Luell refused to give Judy and Shirley’s last names, but they were identified in investigation documents released by the sheriff’s office and in the media.) Westphal-Mitchell, suspected that her mother had been coerced into voting, and went to the sheriff’s office after both the election commission and local prosecutor’s office reviewed her complaint and declined to take action.

In non-pandemic times, Wisconsin election rules assign special voting deputies (SVD) to assist with collecting absentee ballots in nursing homes and residential care facilities with five or more registered voters ; this is a practice in a number of states but is by no means required nationwide. Such SVDs typically go in bipartisan pairs to avoid any appearance of impropriety. 

In March of 2020, Wisconsin’s election commission voted unanimously to suspend the SVD rules for in care facilities and, instead, directed nursing home employees to assist residents with voter registration and absentee ballots, a move commended by disability and elder rights groups. The commission later affirmed the directive ahead of the presidential election, with election clerks in every county receiving instructions on how to send absentee ballots to residential facilities in lieu of SVDs.

Schmaling argued that election commissioners had committed a felony by improperly casting aside SVD requirements. WEC members argued otherwise. After the sheriff’s press conference, elections commission chair Ann Jacobs said, “He is completely and totally wrong.”  A nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau later agreed that the WEC broke the law in discarding SVDs, but did not find any widespread fraud or abuse that resulted from the decision. 

Schmaling’s investigation, despite resulting in no charges, seems poised to throw more gasoline onto a common conspiracy theory in election fraud circles: the idea that older people, portrayed here as helpless, are taken advantage of during the voting process. As Luell framed the issue during the sheriff’s office presentation, “We can all embrace the idea that voting is good…but [this is] preying on people in cognitive decline.”

In Luell’s rendering, Westphal-Mitchell’s mother was victimized by health care workers who persuaded her to vote even though, as Luell put it, “she was giving up on life.” Luell said he then contacted the families of 42 other residents at Ridgewood to ask if their relatives had “cognitive difficulties” and whether they voted (Luell was somewhat vague about how many people he actually contacted during his investigation, but confirmed during his presentation that he did not contact any of the Ridgewood residents directly). Luell said people from seven other families expressed concerns that an elderly relative had improperly voted in the 2020 presidential election.

These claims seem to take advantage of general stereotypes that older people have cognitive difficulties that impede their ability to vote. Legally, elderly people are permitted to vote, a right that can only be taken away in Wisconsin by a specific court finding of “adjudicated incompetence.” Westphal-Mitchell claimed that she had power of attorney over her mother, but everyone seems to agree that her mother could still legally vote, even if, as Westphal-Mitchell alleged in her complaint, her mother “was not up to date on news or current events” and saw “helicopters and other flying objects” that weren’t there. In other words, family members, doctors, and law enforcement cannot independently assess whether a person can vote, even if that person forgets what they ate for breakfast, forgot people’s names, and only cared about Snickers’ bars—all of which were descriptions of older people that Luell included in his PowerPoint slides. 

Casting such aspersions on older voters, portraying them as victims when they have not expressed a desire to be identified as such, is a common tactic for people who are looking for voter fraud, says Nina Kohn, David M. Levy Professor of Law at Syracuse University College of Law and Distinguished Scholar in Elder Law with Yale Law School’s Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy. 

“The fact that an individual is a resident of a long-term care facility is in no way, shape, or form determinative of their ability to vote,” Kohn said. “Only a court of law can remove a person’s right to vote.” The suspicion cast on elderly voters, she said, “really seems to be potent ageism and ableism,” and “says a lot more about what people’s beliefs are about these institutions and what’s going on” than about voting processes themselves.

Kohn points out that WEC regulations were designed to ensure that older citizens are provided access to vote, not to discourage them from voting because of perceived mental defects.  “Especially when election officials aren’t helping residents vote, it is critical that staff step up to do so,” Kohn said. “We shouldn’t be condemning staff for doing the right thing.  In fact, federal law requires nursing homes to help their residents exercise the right to vote.” In a 2006 article, Kohn emphasized that “gate-keeping” by healthcare workers or relatives is “neither legally permissible nor political desirable,” adding that “attitudes and beliefs,” such as screening residents for mental capacity or the type of stereotypes that Luell relied on, “may translate into the active disenfranchisement of residents.”

Barbara Beckert of Disability Rights Wisconsin explained via email that she was “very disturbed by the videos and by the entire investigation” in Racine County. “Residents of long-term care facilities have the same right to vote as any other citizen,” she Beckert said, “whether they are cognitively impaired or unimpaired.”

Schmaling asked Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul to open a state-wide investigation into his allegations of improper voting by people in nursing homes. Kaul, a Democrat facing a tough re-election campaign this year, did not take up the case and has been critical of other claims of widespread election-related crimes. The Racine County District Attorney also declined to prosecute members of the election board as well as nursing home workers who assisted residents with the absentee ballots.

As Schmaling faces re-election this year, his investigation continues to fuel panic about the state of elections in Wisconsin. Last summer, Republicans commissioned an investigation by a former state supreme court justice, Michael Gableman, who said state election officials “stole our votes” days after Trump lost in 2020. In a 136-page report last month detailing his findings, Gableman pointed to Schmaling’s investigation as one of several reasons to decertify the 2020 election—an impossibility—and shutter the WEC, transferring its duties to local election clerks. 

In his report, Gableman says, “systematic problems with voting in elder care facilities [was] an issue that was also recently blown wide open by the Racine County Sheriff,”other vague, uncorroborated reports of people voting in care facilities who allegedly shouldn’t have—a determination disputed by advocates and unsupported by other evidence. Gableman’s report also inspired a series of videos by Erick Kaardal of the right-wing Thomas More Society in which he asks elderly voters hypothetical questions about candidates as a way to imply that they were unfit to vote. For example, in one video, Karrdal asks an elderly woman, in the presence of her daughter, hypothetical questions about nonexistent candidates. In another, he interviews an elderly man reclined in a La-Z-Boy chair.

Janet Zander, the Advocacy & Public Policy Coordinator for the Elder Law & Advocacy Center, said there was no serious problem with absentee voting in nursing homes during the 2020 election. She is more concerned about the impact of investigations like Schmaling’s and the baseless claims of election fraud it has helped bolster—not just in the legislature, but within care facilities during future elections. 

“Imagine now, there have been these workers in care facilities who have assisted people to vote, and they end up being a front page story in some community,” Zander said. “Are you going to really be the one who stands first in line and says, ‘Oh, I’ll be the helper today.’ Nobody wants to touch that with a 10 foot pole for fear they’re going to be accused of coercing somebody.”

Correction: This story initially misstated the election commission vote to suspend SVD rules

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