The column below reflects the views of the author, and these opinions are neither endorsed nor supported by WisOpinion.com.
Wisconsin voters are often asked simply to “trust us” when it comes to our elections. It is a lot to ask of people who have spent a decade managing national scrutiny and criticism, dealing with recounts, audits and litigation, and hearing conflicting claims about how our votes are counted. The security of Wisconsin elections does not rest on anyone’s assurances. It rests on concrete safeguards, and voters deserve to know exactly what they are.
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.
Then there are the ballot machines. Every vote in Wisconsin, including those done on voting machines, produces a paper ballot serving as the official record of the vote. The tabulators counting those ballots are not connected to the internet in order to prevent any potential for hacking. This process is shown in depth in every municipality across the state during the required public test. In the 10 days before Election Day, every municipality in the state must hold a public test of voting machines, open to any interested citizen, and these tests can provide critical insight into what actually happens behind the scenes on election day. If you have questions about how the process works, these public tests provide an open forum to ask your questions of county and municipal clerks who run elections here in our state.
This fact – elections being run by our municipal and county clerks – sets our state apart in a way designed to beat fraud. Our elections are not run from Washington, or even from Madison. They are run by your municipal clerk, in more than 1,800 cities, towns and villages, and power over the process is deliberately spread widely. Your friends and neighbors are the people who take care of your ballot after it is cast, not government bureaucrats interested in putting a finger on the scale. This diffusion of power makes it incredibly difficult for bad actors to cheat on a scale necessary to change outcomes in our elections.
After every election, results are canvassed at the municipal level and again at the county level, where boards of canvassers review results, reconcile the number of ballots against the number of voters who participated, and compare totals against the printed records before certifying anything. The counting of our elections does not depend on any single official, machine or office being infallible — it depends on successive checks by different people at different levels of government.
None of this means mistakes never happen. They do, and when they do they deserve to be acknowledged and corrected, not explained away. These safeguards are designed to identify and correct mistakes. When an error slips through, officials owe voters a clear explanation and concrete steps to prevent it from happening again. A mistake, by itself, is not evidence of fraud.
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.
The Democracy Defense Foundation Board, including former Attorney General JB Van Hollen, former Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, former U.S. Represntative Scott Klug, and former Democratic Party of Wisconsin Chair Mike Tate is a bipartisan body committed to promoting Wisconsin’s election integrity.
