Judge on Wisconsin’s top court accuses liberal majority of acting as Democrats’ lawyer in Green Party ballot-access case
WATERTOWN, Wis. — A conservative justice on the Wisconsin Supreme Court accused the state top court’s liberal majority Thursday of stepping “beyond its neutral role” in an election case, effectively acting as a lawyer for the Democratic Party.
The case the Democratic National Committee brought seeks to block the ballot access of Green Party candidate Jill Stein in the Badger State by challenging the legitimacy of her electors.
The court voted to accept the DNC’s petition and take up the case, and Justices Rebecca Bradley and Annette Ziegler issued a withering dissent to the court’s liberal majority.
“The majority steps beyond its neutral role to lawyer the case on behalf of the DNC, seemingly facilitating an expedited review of this original action,” Bradley wrote.
The legal battle began last week when the state’s DNC deputy operations director David Strang filed a complaint challenging Stein’s ballot access, alleging the Wisconsin Green Party does not have qualified electors to put forward and therefore runs afoul of state election law.
When Wisconsin’s top elections officials dismissed the complaint, Strang took the case to the liberal-majority state Supreme Court with an original action petition to kick Stein off the ballot.
Despite the legal challenges, there is ample precedent for Stein’s claim to ballot access. Wisconsin’s Green Party was on the ballot in 2022 when a candidate captured 1% of the state’s vote, and Jill Stein captured 30,000 votes in Wisconsin in the 2016 presidential election.
And in the Dairyland State, those minute margins make a major difference. Four of the last six presidential elections in Wisconsin were decided by fewer than 1% of votes — about 20,000.
“This is a last-ditch effort by a political party operative to disenfranchise the votes of tens of thousands of Wisconsinites,” said Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL) President and General Counsel Rick Esenberg.
“A last-minute ruling, not based in law, from the Wisconsin Supreme Court in favor of the DNC would severely damage the faith and trust every day Wisconsinites put in their elections,” he cautioned.
WILL also noted that in 2020 the state’s election commission rejected the Green Party’s effort to get on the ballot. When the party filed an original action with the state’s top court in 2020, the majority rejected the petition as untimely by a 4-3 vote, claiming the petition was too close to the election.
The Wisconsin Green Party said it has not had a chance to obtain counsel but it would “fight to the best of their ability” to stop an effort to “silence dissenting voices in swing states.”
But Stein’s campaign came out swinging.
“We are retaining legal counsel and will fight this. We will have a response brief filed by the egregiously short deadline of 5 p.m. Friday,” Stein’s campaign manager, Jason Call, told The Post.
“We appreciate the dissenting opinion of the SCOWIS that the timeline imposed is too short, and our opinion is that the timeline was politically motivated by the liberal majority on the court,” he continued.
“I remind people that using the courts to impose the will of a political party is exactly what Democrats have accused Republicans of repeatedly. Furthermore, I want to impress upon the anti-Democratic Party that they will be facing blowback as a result of their actions, in particular that the Wisconsin Greens will be filing candidates now and in the future in every swing district and for all statewide offices.”
“We will do the same in every state where Democrats sue to keep us off the ballot. One of our goals now is to punish the anti-Democrats for their use of ‘lawfare’ in elections. People deserve better than this out of the political system in a democracy,” concluded Stein’s campaign manager.
As Call noted, the court gave the respondents named in the DNC’s complaint, which includes Wisconsin Elections Commission administrator Meagan Wolf and commission members, until 5 p.m. Friday to respond to the DNC’s challenge.
WILL filed an amicus brief with the court in the DNC’s case Friday.
Municipal clerks in Wisconsin will begin sending out absentee ballots Sept.19.
