We have a super important election coming up tomorrow, April 1, in Wisconsin. The partisan composition of Supreme Court hangs in the balance, which may affect redistricting and many other things important to democratic and liberty-mind Badgers.
Moreover, there is a ballot measure concerning election integrity—Wisconsin Question 1: “Require Voter Photo ID Amendment.” I want to be clear about the ballot measure, since people are often confused by them: the referendum asks voters to amend the state constitution to mandate photo identification for voting (with exceptions allowed by law).
Concerning the referendum, it should go without saying that election integrity is of vital importance for the sake of democratic governance. However, not everybody is on board with democracy in this state (indeed, across the nation).
Wisconsin’s 2020 election was fraught with problems. There were legal fights over drop boxes and voter rolls. The state witnessed aberrant voter spikes associated with absentee voting. And there were procedural missteps (I will leave to one side the missteps). Voter ID was at issue in this case—and will continue to be an issue until we require them.
On November 3, 2020, over 265 thousand voters claiming “indefinitely confined” status to bypass photo ID requirements, with over 54 thousand cast by those who’d never shown ID in prior elections. The Wisconsin Elections Commission encouraged drop boxes, but this policy was later ruled illegal by the state Supreme Court in 2022—obviously too late to affect the outcome of the election.
The evidence indicates that 20 thousand extra Biden votes were linked to the use of drop boxes in Democratic-leaning cities. The margin between Biden and Trump was less than two-thirds of a percentage point, with Biden flipping the state by with fewer that 23 thousand votes (Trump won the state in 2016 and would again in 2024).
Wisconsin needs statewide voter ID. Indeed, all US states need statewide photo IDs to vote. As I have shown on my blog, states without voter ID heavily favored Kamala Harris in 2024. Harris drove up her popular vote count in those states, despite only winning only 508 of the 3,144 counties and county equivalents across the United States. Democrats can arguably only be competitive if states maintain lax voting rules and procedures. This is especially true now that the party is more unpopular than it has ever been (at least as long as we have been polling on the question).
Equally pressing is the matter of redistricting. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has been making the rounds proclaiming that the “only way” to fix Wisconsin’s “gerrymandered” congressional lines is to elect Crawford to the Wisconsin supreme court. In other words, if Democrats keep their 4-3 progressive majority, then they can gerrymander Wisconsin’s electoral map to favor Democrats.
If this happens, Republicans could lose two seats, potentially affecting Republican representation in the House. If Democrats regain control over the House in the 2026 midterm elections, it is almost certain that they will impeach Trump (again). The race between Crawford and Republican Brad Schimel isn’t just about judicial philosophy (which I will come to in a moment)—it’s a proxy war over who controls the state’s electoral maps and thus political power for years to come.
Democrats who are reading my remarks are making the same argument. We all recognize what’s at stake. Indeed, Democrats can take everything I say here and simply argue the other side—which I am providing in my remarks.
Currently, Wisconsin congressional maps remain under the 2022 Johnson v. Wisconsin Elections Commission decision, a ruling that upheld maps that were drawn by Evers and approved by a then-conservative court under a “least change” approach. This agreement favored Republicans with a 6-2 edge in the state’s eight US House seats. It is noteworthy that Biden’s 2020 “win” in Wisconsin came with those maps.
In January 2024, the Elias Law Group (enlighten yourself about this aggressive lawfare org if you don’t know about Marc Elias, a truly despicable figure) asked the court to revisit these maps. The justices declined to hear the case in March of that year (Protasiewicz abstaining because she wasn’t on the court in 2022). The 3-3 deadlock left the maps intact for 2024.
As for judicial philosophy, two matters are worth considering. The first regards the sentencing of violent offenders.
In 2020, Democratic candidate for the Wisconsin supreme Court Susan Crawford, currently a trial judge, sentenced a man convicted of assaulting a child to just four years when prosecutors sought ten. The details of the case are disturbing. Kevin Welton was convicted of three felonies: two counts of first-degree sexual assault of a child and one count of attempted first-degree sexual assault. The charges stemmed from incidents in 2010 and 2018 at a Middleton athletic club swimming pool, where Welton touched the genitals of a six-year-old girl and a seven-year-old girl (twice on the same day in 2018).
Prosecutors requested ten years in prison plus five years of supervision. Welton’s attorney sought probation. The maximum possible sentence was one hundred years. Whether we think a life term is appropriate or not, four years in prison and six years of extended supervision for molesting two little girls is unacceptable. That Welton committed these assaults eight years apart makes clear that he is a life-course persistent threat to children. Keep in mind, these convictions only cover the times he was caught. How many other children did Welton molest? How many will he molest when he gets out?
In another case over which Crawford presided, a felon convicted of assaulting a little girl multiple times, received only two years when he could’ve faced up to sixty. Curtis O’Brien repeatedly perpetrated first-degree sexual assault of a child. He was convicted in 2021 of assaulted a girl multiple times between ages five and six from 2012 to 2014. The prosecutor sought fifteen years (ten years confinement and five years supervision). To be sure, O’Brien had already served over two years in jail pre-sentencing (during which time he could not molest anymore children, I hasten to note), and these were perhaps justifiably credited toward his term, but only two years? This means that post-sentencing, he served less than two additional years.
O’Brien was released on September 3, 2024. A child predator is on our streets thanks for Crawford’s leniency. Progressives may object to public concerns noting that O’Brien is mentally retarded. So? That may very well explain why he is so incorrigible. It’s not a child’s fault that a man is retarded.
The second concerns Ever’s agenda of including boys and men in female sports. While Crawford is steering clear of a definitive public stance on that matter, her alignment with progressive views suggests that she would support “inclusive policies” for boys and men who identify (for whatever reason) as girls and women.
In contrast, Schimel, who served as Wisconsin’s Republican state attorney general from 2015-19, has promised to uphold tough sentencing for predators, as well as protect female sports. Allowing males to compete against girls and women in competitive sports is one of the most insane ideas ever to cross America’s cultural and political landscape. It’s a make or break matter.
There’s another matter I must discuss. In March 2020, Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers (whom I regrettably advocated and voted for in 2018) issued a stay-at-home order in March of 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic. He closed “nonessential” businesses and restricted public gatherings. In April, he extended his initial order to last until May 26. I was furious.
The Republican-controlled legislature challenged the extension and, in May, the Wisconsin Supreme Court, thanks to its conservative majority at the time, ruled 4-3 that the extension was “unlawful, invalid, and unenforceable.” The court argued that, by effectively creating an emergency rule without legislative approval, the extension exceeded the administration’s authority.
Chief Justice Patience Roggensack rightly opined that, while the governor could act swiftly in emergencies, he was not entitled to wield indefinitely emergency powers. Indeed. We don’t need a dictator running the state. Sadly, the court left local ordinances in place, but the court’s decision nonetheless compelled Evers to negotiate with the legislature for any future statewide measures. That’s a big win for democracy.
(In a May 15, 2020 Facebook post, I wrote: “In this moment in history, conservatives are the safeguard of our liberties. Progressives simply cannot be trusted to protect the fundamental freedoms that make us American.”)
The propaganda campaign currently underway in this state is crazy. The media is obsessed with Elon Musk’s spending in the Wisconsin election. They’re telling you to vote for Crawford to strike a blow against the oligarchy. What they aren’t telling you is that the oligarchy is behind Crawford’s campaign. And these oligarchs are not the not the grand defenders of liberty that Musk the entrepreneur is. Moreover, their millions are making it possible for Crawford to outspend Schimel by a considerable lot.
According to her own campaign, Crawford has amassed 24 million dollars from June 2024 to mid-March 2025. The New York Times reported only a few days ago that, to that point, these dollars have come from 113 thousand donors, averaging about $212 per donor. This way of averaging obscures the fact that large contributions, funneled through the Democratic Party, are coming from, among other wealthy political activists, billionaire venture capitalists George Soros and Reid Hoffman, as well as the fanatical Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker (quite wealthy himself—and weird like his brother). This is why Bernie Sander’s campus tour against oligarchy is such duplicitous bullshit. Democrats are the party of the corporate state and the transnationalist project.
Among the many reasons why the April 1 election is so important to get right, these are three I want to arm folks with:
First, election integrity is vital to the preservation of free and democratic states, especially considering the mass influx of illegal aliens under the Biden regime. Democrats will raise the specter of voter suppression, appealing to the canard that black and other minority voters don’t have access to IDs.
In addition to the party’s need for lax election rules and procedures, this fallacious claim is an expression of its long-standing paternalistic (and frankly racist) attitude towards black citizens and other minorities (paternalism is in the DNA of the Democratic Party). However, poll workers need to confirm for the sake of equality and fairness that any individual showing up to vote is who he says he is and ensure that he only votes once. Just as banks, DMVs, and other organizations and departments require ID to verify the identity of those seeking services, the identity of those casting votes must be checked and verified.
Second, public safety is a civil and human right. Citizens have the right to be safe in their communities; public safety is one of the primary functions of government. Communities can no longer afford progressives judges allowing predators to freely walk our streets victimizing us and our loved ones. We had crime under control in this country (for decades, at least comparatively) until wealthy donors like Soros began changing judicial philosophy by staffing the courts with progressive judges, actions justified by woke cooptation of “social justice” rhetoric.
Third, Democrats are technocrats who have little respect for democracy or individual liberty and only selective concern for women’s rights (never forgot all those years between Roe and Dobbs when Democrats could have rendered in statute reproductive freedom but didn’t in order to fearmonger over the composition of the Supreme Court to raise campaign dollars).
Evers put Wisconsin citizens in lockdown for months. He would do it again if he had the chance. The people are authoritarians.
As for women’s rights, in April 2024, Evers vetoed Assembly Bill 377, which would have banned students from competing on school sports teams of the opposite gender. (Shockingly, Evers’ February 2025 budget proposal replaced “mother” with “inseminated person.” That’s what this man thinks of women.)
Trump’s Executive Order 14201, signed in February 2025, which I detail on my platform Freedom and Reason, banned males from girls’ sports nationwide, compelling the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association (WIAA) to align its policy with that of the federal government. Although Evers could do nothing about it (since his veto power applies only to state legislation), he nonetheless opposed Trump’s EO. That’s just the wrong stance.
Fortunately, Republican control over the legislature means Democrats lacked the votes to reverse the WIAA’s compliance with Trump’s order. But that will only remain true if we keep Democrats away from power by voting against them. I never thought I would see the day when Republicans would stand up for the rights of girls and women, but here we are. If one is committed to women’s rights, one must vote accordingly. It’s a matter of principle. The rational man puts principle before partisanship. Party loyalty is a corrupting force.
“Elections have consequences,” folks say. Indeed. If we want to keep the freedom train going in Wisconsin and across the nation, voters should vote for Brad Schimel and vote “Yes” on Question 1.
freedom and reason 