Early Voting in WI Supreme Court Race Way Behind 2025
Number of absentee ballots cast so far is 112,000 behind pace set in 2025.
Wisconsin Supreme Court candidates Maria Lazar, left, and Chris Taylor, right. They’re competing for an open seat on the court in the April 2026 election. Angela Major/WPR
In another sign this year’s Supreme Court race is flying under the radar for many Wisconsinites, the number of absentee ballots cast so far is around 112,000 behind the pace set in 2025.
As of Monday morning, the Wisconsin Elections Commission reported 146,583 absentee ballots had been returned in the matchup between liberal Wisconsin Appeals Court Judge Chris Taylor and conservative Wisconsin Appeals Court Judge Maria Lazar.
The returns are a fraction of what they were 12 months ago when former Republican Attorney General Brad Schimel was competing against now-Justice Susan Crawford in a race where ideological control of the bench was at stake. On March 24, 2025, the commission reported that 258,975 absentee ballots had been returned.
Those totals include in-person absentee voting, typically known as early voting. Last year, 123,354 absentee votes were cast early. This year that number is 53,173.
The absentee ballot gap is one of several signs that this year’s Supreme Court race is largely going unnoticed. Another is fundraising. The 2025 court race saw more than $100 million in spending, shattering national records and even featured billionaire Elon Musk flying to Wisconsin to hand out million-dollar checks to encourage residents to register and vote. Donations in 2026 have come nowhere near that amount.
A Marquette University Law School poll this month showed only 12 percent of respondents reported hearing a lot about the Supreme Court race. One year ago, it was 40 percent.
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee emeritus political science professor Mordecai Lee told WPR some elections can be thought of as “sexy” while others are “sort of blah.” Lee said the 2025 election could even be seen as the “Mount Everest of all Wisconsin Supreme Court races.”
“There hasn’t been a lot of news about the race this year. There hasn’t been a lot of spending. There hasn’t been a lot of TV advertising,” said Lee. “And that’s so different from a year ago when, essentially, you couldn’t escape the race, you couldn’t escape from robocalls, you couldn’t escape from mail, from TV advertising.”
That deluge had an effect on people, said Lee. The ads and spending reflected the bareknuckle fight between Republican and Democratic groups over the ideological majority of the Supreme Court.
“You know, maybe the analogy is a schoolyard fight,” said Lee. “Usually the schoolyard is just a place where kids play and have a good time, but when there’s a fight, oh boy, everybody spills out of the building. Everybody comes over from the far reaches of the soccer field, because everybody wants to see the fight, and, in a sense, be engaged in the fight.”
In this race, however, control of the court is not at stake. Liberals have a 4-3 majority, and that won’t change if Lazar wins.
“So maybe the analogy is that the ’25 race was the ultimate schoolyard fight, and that the ’26 example, maybe this is ho-hum. Nobody’s doing anything interesting,” Lee said.
With absentee ballot returns being so far behind last year’s pace, Lee said it’s likely turnout for the April 7 election will lag way behind last year’s numbers. Turnout in the 2025 Supreme Court race surpassed 50 percent of Wisconsin’s voting age population.
Early voting in Wisconsin Supreme Court race way behind 2025 pace was originally published by Wisconsin Public Radio.
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