Wisconsin election officials have found that the former Madison city clerk broke five election laws during the 2020 presidential election.

It turns out that the uber-battleground of Wisconsin is a great window into the electoral deficiencies of both major parties.

The U.S. Department of Justice is seeking the voter registration lists of several states — representing data on millions of Americans — and other election information ahead of the 2026 midterms, raising fears about how the Trump administration plans to use the information.

The city of Madison has three weeks to review an order on how to prevent election officials from repeating a mistake they made in the November 2024 election, when they failed to count nearly 200 ballots.

The review was not a criminal investigation and there will be no referrals for prosecution on the asserted violations, Commission chair Ann Jacobs said.

"Money buys ads, but as we've seen far too often in Wisconsin, it can't buy wins," Schoemann adviser Ben Voelkel said. "It takes hard work and authenticity to earn voters' support, not just slick ads."

Sixty percent of local election officials expressed some level of concern, a survey by the Brennan Center for Justice found. The center, a left-leaning pro-democracy institute, surveyed 858 officials between mid-April and mid-May.

A “confluence of errors” including unlawful actions by the former clerk in Wisconsin's capital city led to nearly 200 absentee ballots not being counted in the November presidential election, an investigation by the state elections commission released Wednesday concluded.

The state Legislature has paid $26.2 million to outside law firms on high-profile cases related to redistricting and the Gableman investigation.

In the following months, the DOJ has followed up with a series of letters and requests to around a dozen states, including battleground states Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, and Wisconsin. Other states targeted for voter rolls include Alaska, Minnesota, Florida, Oklahoma, New York, New Hampshire, and Colorado, per the Washington Post .