Four years ago, Wisconsin arguably was the state where Donald Trump came the closest to overturning the election results.
A barrage of lawsuits aimed at invalidating hundreds of thousands of mostly Democratic votes in the crucial battleground sought to take advantage of certain election policies in the state related to absentee ballots that were cast early and by confined or disabled voters, as well as those where election workers completed certain missing information on the envelopes.
The effort made its way all the way to the state Supreme Court, then controlled by conservatives, which ruled by one vote against Trump’s bid to overturn the results.
And yet, heading into the next presidential election, lawmakers in Wisconsin have done little to prevent a similar scenario from playing out again in the event of a close race.
State lawmakers have failed to enact any measures that would serve to clarify the nuances of absentee ballots that Trump, now the presumptive 2024 Republican nominee, attempted to exploit. They also have not closed loopholes that could provide allies of the former president with openings to insert conspiracy theories and misinformation.
And the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which oversees elections in the state, has issued pieces of modest guidance, but remains flooded with partisan attacks and efforts to impeach its top official.
That all stands in contrast to other swing states that were also targeted by Trump allies in the wake of the 2020 election. In Michigan, Democratic lawmakers have implemented broad reforms to election security and ballot counting. And in Pennsylvania, the Democratic governor recently rolled out an election security task force designed to mitigate threats to the vote this year.
But in Wisconsin, many of the same obstacles, questions and gray areas — regarding drop boxes, disabled and elderly voters, ballot processing and, perhaps most importantly, the protection of an election oversight apparatus that has been inundated by threats and attacks — remain unaddressed, alarming election workers and watchdogs in the state.
“Statewide, I don’t see a lot of change,” said Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell, the top election official in Wisconsin’s second-most populous county. “It’s not like something dramatically different has happened here,” added McDonell, a Democrat.
Jay Heck, the executive director Common Cause Wisconsin, the state’s branch of the national nonpartisan government watchdog group, added that the consequences could be dire if the right mix of circumstances were to emerge on or following Election Day.
“It could all explode,” he said.