Original op-ed penned by former Wisconsin Attorney General JB Van Hollen featured in the Wisconsin State Journal.
The White House has made it clear that it intends to address perceived weak points in our election system, but ultimately the Constitution is clear — that responsibility lies with the states.
Wisconsin is a state that has highly decentralized elections. Why? Because we believe that elections in our state should be administered in our communities, by our neighbors who sacrifice their time for love of country. Each ward reports its results to the county, which compiles the results and submits to the state election authority.
Every single vote cast has a paper record and every election includes audits to verify results. Every machine is tested and certified, and the entire process is open to the public — just ask your local clerk.
All this goes to show that in Wisconsin, we are putting in the work to make sure elections are accurate and safe from tampering so they reflect the will of our citizens. This includes the most local to statewide elections.
But now, the U.S. Department of Justice has requested copies of voter rolls from our state, and the White House has threatened to decree via executive order that electronic voting machines and mail-in balloting should not be used in the 2026 midterm elections.
Not only are proposals like these representative of executive overreach into a clearly delineated state power, but these would also make our elections less secure.
The biggest questions in Wisconsin elections have come from so-called late night “ballot dumps,” a term that in reality is just a reflection of the way in which we tabulate ballots in the most highly populated areas of the state. Locations that utilize a central count facility inherently take a longer time to report results. A central count facility is a location in which ballots are collected from a number of wards due to volume of votes and then processed together.
This requires the transit of ballots to the location and then the process of unfolding and tabulating a much larger volume than, say, somewhere with a smaller population. Thirty-eight municipalities in Wisconsin utilize a central count, most of which are located in highly Democratic-leaning Milwaukee County.
As a result, we’ve seen huge vote swings as those ballots are announced. It’s not nefarious, it’s just math.
Even now, Wisconsin legislators are discussing solutions to this challenge — solutions that will reduce the confusion folks have when they go to bed with vote totals leaning one way, and wake up with a much closer result than they expected.
Pre-processing of mail-in ballots, such as preparing mail-in ballots to be counted the Monday before Election Day, will allow for a smoother tabulation process and quicker results. As it stands now, those ballot can’t be touched until polls open on Election Day. This creates a logjam as tabulators try to catch up on the early ballots — more than 600,000 votes were cast before Election Day in 2024 — while simultaneously dealing with the deluge of votes cast on Election Day.
In Wisconsin, we know our elections can always be improved. Though we know our elections are safe, secure and fair, we’re always working to make sure we are removing even the shadow of a doubt from our results.
If the federal government would like to help improve our elections, they should begin by encouraging states to take on the challenges unique to each state, just as we’re doing here in Wisconsin, and to be a partner in our efforts.
Unilateral declarations that the tools we’ve been utilizing are unsafe or unfair are not only misleading. They also create unnecessary confusion, doubt and distrust in a system we’re constantly working to make better.
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Published: Sep 19, 2025
