Wisconsin Elections Chair Says DOJ Threat To Withhold Funding Is Mistaken
Letter from the U.S. Department of Justices accuses Wisconsin of violating federal election law.
Vote here sign outside a Milwaukee polling place. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.
The chair of Wisconsin’s Election Commission says the U.S. Department of Justice is mistaken after federal officials accused the state agency of breaking a federal election law.
In a letter this week, the U.S. Department of Justice said the Wisconsin Elections Commission is violating the federal Help America Vote Act.
That law requires states to set up their own procedures, so that voters can file complaints about potential violations of HAVA, the letter says.
According to the letter, Wisconsin is not complying with that provision because the state’s elections commission doesn’t hear complaints filed against the commission itself.
But Ann Jacobs, a Democrat who chairs the bipartisan commission, says the letter results from a misunderstanding.
“I think that there’s some confusion on what the WEC does with regards to these complaints and what we’ve done in the past, and hopefully it’s able to get worked out,” Jacobs said in a phone interview Thursday afternoon.
The Wisconsin Elections Commission does hear complaints about alleged violations of election laws, including HAVA. That includes complaints filed against local elections officials.
But, typically, the commission dismisses complaints against the body itself without consideration.
The commission has cited part of a 2022 Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling, handed down by what was then a conservative majority on the state high court.
In that ruling, justices wrote “it would be nonsensical to have WEC adjudicate a claim against itself.”
Jacobs said it would create a conflict of interest if commissioners decide whether complaints against them had merit or not.
“If somebody makes a complaint alleging that the commission has violated HAVA, and demands a hearing under that contention, then you wind up in what would be a very peculiar situation, where the WEC sits as the adjudicative body,” Jacobs said.
She said the situation would put commissioners in an unusual position.
“They’d have to come off the dais and go testify as a witness, and then go back on the dais and say, ‘Oh, do we think we testified inaccurately?’”
Even though the commission doesn’t rule on complaints filed against itself, Jacobs notes Wisconsinites have other options for challenging the body, such as filing lawsuits in state court.
“What the commission has said is, ‘Look, we can’t adjudicate complaints against ourselves,’” Jacobs said. “‘You have all your legal options, and we are not foreclosing any of them. Go ahead.’”
Letter from U.S. DOJ warns that funding could be pulled
The DOJ letter warns that Wisconsin could lose federal funding for elections over the alleged HAVA violations. The state has received $77 million “to date” from federal elections grants, the letter says. That amount appears to reference money awarded to Wisconsin over roughly two decades dating back to 2003, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.
But Jacobs said she doesn’t believe there’s any HAVA-related money that could be withheld from Wisconsin going forward.
“As far as I know … the current budget bill from the federal government does not have any money allocated for state grants for [election] security or the like, as has happened in past years,” Jacobs said. “So as far as I know, there are no pending or intended grants that we would be losing out on.”
A Wisconsin budget committee had been scheduled to vote Thursday on allocating state funding to the WEC.
But the Republican co-chairs of the Joint Committee on Finance announced that they would push back consideration of that budget section because of the DOJ’s letter.
“Out of caution, we think we’re just going to wait and see,” said state Sen. Howard Marklein, R-Spring Green. “We need to analyze this and see what implications there may be for our elections commission.”
The letter to the WEC was signed by an assistant attorney general and a deputy assistant attorney general in the DOJ’s civil rights division.
It also copied several officials who are based in California and aren’t affiliated with the Wisconsin Elections Commission. Those officials sit on California’s Interscholastic Federation and appear to have been included because of a copy-paste error.
Last week, the U.S. DOJ sent letters to members of that state’s Interscholastic Federation to announce the launch of a federal investigation into whether a California state law violates federal Title IX protections. That California law allows transgender students to play on sports teams that are consistent with the student’s identifying gender.
Wisconsin elections chair says US DOJ is mistaken over threat to withhold federal funds was originally published by Wisconsin Public Radio.
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