WISCONSIN – With days to go until the 2026 midterm elections, there is no better time for a reminder of the layers and layers of protections in place to prevent fraud and keep Wisconsin elections safe and secure. The Democracy Defense Foundation – Wisconsin, a bipartisan board of former elected officials and state leaders, co-signed an opinion piece posted on WisOpinion highlighting the protections in place to give Wisconsin voters confidence heading into Tuesday’s voting.
Check out the full piece HERE and see below for excerpts:
Start with who can vote. Wisconsin voters have been required to show photo identification to cast a ballot for fifteen years and a constitutional amendment was passed with nearly 70% voter support just two years ago, enshrining this law into our state constitution. Wisconsin is one of only five states in the nation with voter ID laws added to the constitution, while 31 others have some form of ID laws passed into statutory law. Wisconsin voters also added an amendment barring non-citizen voting in all elections to the constitution joining seven other states – Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina – in passing these constitutional measures in 2024.
Next, the voter list. Election officials routinely maintain Wisconsin’s voter rolls — not as a one-time cleanup but as continuous work. County and municipal clerks track voters who have died or moved away closely, moving those individuals to inactive status for record-keeping purposes rather than simply deleted. A clean list is not about keeping people from voting; it is about making sure ballots go to eligible voters at their current addresses. There are requirements inactive voters must fulfill to be eligible to receive a ballot, so when you hear whispers about there being more voters on the rolls than eligible voters, know tracking in this way makes our ballots more secure – by ensuring individuals registered elsewhere are unable to vote in Wisconsin elections and influence our outcomes.
…Our message to Wisconsin voters this fall is not “trust us.” It is this: come see for yourselves. Attend your municipality’s public equipment test. Ask your clerk how absentee ballots are handled. Watch a canvas. Read the results reports your local election office produces. Public tests and canvasses give voters the chance to see important safeguards at work.
Wisconsin elections are safe and secure — not because anyone says so, but because the evidence is there for anyone willing to look. Confidence in our elections should be earned. In Wisconsin, it can be.
More information on the Democracy Defense Foundation can be found at https://www.
Media Contact: Justin Giorgio, jg@k2andcompany.com
