Trump administration accuses Wisconsin of violating federal election law
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — The Trump administration has accused the Wisconsin Elections Commission of failing to provide a state-based complaint process for voters bringing allegations against the commission itself, calling that a violation of federal law and threatening to withhold all federal funding.
But the commission's Democratic chairwoman said Thursday there is no federal funding to cut and she disputed accusations raised in a Department of Justice letter a day earlier, saying it would be nonsensical for the commission to determine whether complaints against it were valid.
'What they're asking is, if someone files a complaint against us, we're supposed to hold a hearing to determine if we messed up," Ann Jacobs said. 'That is not functional.'
It marks the second time in a week that the Trump administration has targeted election leaders in battleground states.
Last week, the Justice Department accused North Carolina's election board of violating federal law by failing to ensure voter registration records of some applicants contained identifying numbers.
The latest letter from the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division accused Wisconsin of violating the Help America Vote Act for not having a state-based administrative complaint procedure to address alleged violations by the state elections commission of the 2002 federal law.
Actions by the Wisconsin Elections Commission 'have left complainants alleging HAVA violations by the Commission without any recourse,' attorneys for the Justice Department wrote. 'With no opportunity or means to appeal, complainants are left stranded with their grievances.'
The elections commission just received the letter and has no comment while it is being reviewed, spokesman John Smalley said.
But Jacobs, chairwoman of the commission, said the commission can't decide complaints against itself. Jacobs said that position was backed up by a 2022 ruling by the Wisconsin Supreme Court when it was controlled by conservatives.
'It appears that they're like, 'How dare you follow state law,'" Jacobs said. "I don't know what it is they want us to do.'
According to the letter, Wisconsin has received more than $77 million in federal funding from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission and the Justice Department threatened to stop any future payments. But Jacobs said that money was allocated years ago and the state currently receives no funding from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission and none is proposed, leaving nothing to cut.
Nonetheless, the letter could put state funding in jeopardy.
Republican leaders of the state Legislature's budget committee delayed a scheduled Thursday vote on how much state funding the Wisconsin Elections Commission will receive over the next two years.
'Out of caution, we think we're just going to wait and see,' the committee's co-chair Sen. Howard Marklein said. 'We need to analyze this and see what implications are made, maybe for the entire Elections Commission, and what impact that may have on the budget.'
___
Associated Press writer Todd Richmond contributed to this report.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
San Francisco Chronicle
an hour ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
California will do anything to protect immigrants — except build them housing
Over the past several weeks, hundreds of thousands of Californians have taken to the streets to protest the Trump administration's increasingly authoritarian efforts to deport the state's undocumented population. There's a moral imperative behind these protests; the vast majority of the people being targeted by federal agents are law-abiding workers with no criminal records. There's a practical one, too: This state cannot function without its migrant workers, particularly our agricultural sector. It isn't just that undocumented workers will accept lower wages than their American counterparts. Farming is hard, skilled labor. Absent changes to federal immigration policy that would allow and incentivize more migrants to come here legally, California doesn't have the trained workforce it needs to feed itself and the nation. (We accounted for 41% of the country's vegetable sales in 2022.) And so, Californians and our politicians have rightly gone to battle with President Donald Trump. Yet as supportive as this editorial board is of these efforts, we'd be remiss if we didn't call something out: This state needs to become as passionate about housing our essential workers as it is about fighting Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It's been just over two and a half years since the deadly shootings in Half Moon Bay put the Dickensian living conditions of California's farmworkers — the vast majority of whom are undocumented — on the national radar. For decades, California had allowed its migrant workers to live in overcrowded, mold-filled housing with bacteria-ridden drinking water. That's if it housed them at all. What's changed? Not nearly enough, according to San Mateo County Supervisor Ray Mueller, whose district includes the site of the 2023 massacre. Building housing on farmland in his district has proven to be a logistical challenge amid drainage issues, sewage concerns and access to drinkable water. Yet trying to build worker housing off-site hits an even more intractable roadblock. 'The coastal community is, by a large majority, supportive of farmworkers,' he said. 'The opposition you run into is around density.' San Mateo County is hardly unique in this regard. In Marin County, for instance, an effort to build housing for the workers, many undocumented, being displaced by the closure of ranches in the Point Reyes National Seashore has been met with a lawsuit by NIMBY groups. This is, of course, unacceptable. And yet, state and local rules still too often empower obstructionism. Mueller said the arduous progress San Mateo County has made in building farmworker housing was mostly achieved using emergency powers that streamlined the usual permitting processes. 'The state was wonderful in getting our project moving,' Mueller said. 'We just need to do that at scale across the state.' We're nowhere close. In 2024, California lawmakers passed a measure to exempt farmworker housing up to 150 units from review under the California Environmental Quality Act. However, this streamlining applied to only two counties: Santa Clara and Santa Cruz. A bill in the state Legislature, AB457 from Assembly Member Esmerelda Soria, D-Merced, would expand those streamlining measures to Fresno, Madera and Merced counties. Over 40% of the state's land is used for agriculture. We're never going to get anywhere with a drip-drop of county-by-county CEQA carve-outs. Assembly Member Damon Connolly, D-San Rafael, told the editorial board he'd be supportive of an effort to expand CEQA streamlining to his district and perhaps even statewide. But even that wouldn't be enough, Mueller said. For many Bay Area farming communities, the California Coastal Commission has its own separate and arduous permitting process. Without streamlining bills to cover this and CEQA, little progress will be made. And now an even greater challenge comes from the Trump administration. Farmworker-specific housing makes easy pickings for federal raids. Mueller says he fears his efforts to build new farmworker housing may have inadvertently 'put a target on the back' of the people he's spent years trying to help. This fear isn't theoretical. Gov. Gavin Newsom's office recently issued a press release saying that federal deportation authorities requested and received the addresses and immigration status of Medi-Cal recipients after the state expanded health insurance benefits to low-income undocumented workers. Tailored government efforts for the undocumented risk creating a paper trail that puts them in danger. 'It is clear that we must reassess our programs to ensure we are doing all we can to protect the personal information of our community,' incoming state Senate President Pro Tem Monique Limón, D-Santa Barbara, told the editorial board. We don't have the answer to this quandary on the health care front. But California can do something for migrant workers as it relates to housing — something Limón and too many other California politicians have been reluctant to do. Make it easier to build. AB457 is an admission from legislators that CEQA creates onerous and unnecessary impediments to development. Yet housing streamlining bills such as SB79 from San Francisco state Sen. Scott Wiener, which would exempt developments near transit from CEQA review, provided they comply with local affordable housing mandates and other criteria, are receiving immense political pushback. Undocumented renters in California have virtually the same rights as everyone else in the private rental market under the Immigrant Tenant Protection Act. And landlords are prohibited from disclosing, or typically even asking about, immigration status. But without an adequate housing supply, those protections go to waste. Can most undocumented workers afford to buy a shiny new condo? Almost certainly not. But they could potentially move into older units that open up when other renters decide to buy. And they certainly could benefit from the development of new mother-in-law units — such as those that might have been built had cities like San Diego not just rolled back their accessory dwelling unit laws in the face of community opposition. If California is willing to fight the federal government to keep its undocumented residents here, it should also be willing to fight to ensure they don't live in squalor.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Iran's options against foreign aggression include closing Strait of Hormuz, lawmaker says
DUBAI (Reuters) -Iran could shut the Strait of Hormuz as a way of hitting back against its enemies, a senior lawmaker said on Thursday, though a second member of parliament said this would only happen if Tehran's vital interests were endangered. Iran has in the past threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz to traffic in retaliation for Western pressure, and shipping sources said on Wednesday that commercial ships were avoiding Iran's waters around the strait. "Iran has numerous options to respond to its enemies and uses such options based on what the situation is," the semi-official Mehr news agency quoted Behnam Saeedi, a member of the parliament's National Security Committee presidium as saying. "Closing the Strait of Hormuz is one of the potential options for Iran," he said. Mehr later quoted another lawmaker, Ali Yazdikhah, as saying Iran would continue to allow free shipping in the Strait and in the Gulf so long as its vital national interests were not at risk. "If the United States officially and operationally enters the war in support of the Zionists (Israel), it is the legitimate right of Iran in view of pressuring the U.S. and Western countries to disrupt their oil trade's ease of transit," Yazdikhah said. President Donald Trump is keeping the world guessing about whether the United States will join Israel's bombardment of Iranian nuclear sites. Tehran has so far refrained from closing the Strait because all regional states and many other countries benefit from it, Yazdikhah added. "It is better than no country supports Israel to confront Iran. Iran's enemies know well that we have tens of ways to make the Strait of Hormuz unsafe and this option is feasible for us," the parliamentarian said. The Strait of Hormuz lies between Oman and Iran and is the primary export route for Gulf producers such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Iraq, and Kuwait. About 20% of the world's daily oil consumption — around 18 million barrels — passes through the Strait of Hormuz, which is only about 33 km (21 miles) wide at its narrowest point.
Axios
an hour ago
- Axios
Gen Z's stunning partisan split
America's youngest voters are far likelier to vote Republican than their older siblings. Why it matters: Generation Z may be better understood as two distinct sub-generations — divided, in large part, by how they experienced the shock of COVID-19. Stunning stat: The latest iteration of the Yale Youth Poll found extraordinary 18-point partisan gap between younger and older members of Generation Z. When asked whether they'd pick a Democratic or Republican candidate in the midterm elections, voters age 22–29 favored Democrats by 6.4 points, while those age 18–21 favored Republicans by 11.7 points. Zoom in: Rachel Janfaza — a youth political analyst and writer of The Up and Up, a newsletter about Gen Z — breaks down"Gen Z 1.0" and "Gen Z 2.0" based on how old they were during pandemic lockdowns and the rise of TikTok. Gen Z 1.0 graduated high school before COVID. They quarantined in college dorms or apartments with friends and came of age during President Trump's first term — shaped by the Women's March, gun control rallies, and the Black Lives Matter movement. Gen Z 2.0 was in high school or middle school during lockdowns, isolating at home with family and cut off from peers. The backlash to COVID-era policies pushed many younger voters right. And because they entered adulthood under President Biden, "counter-culture" often meant aligning with MAGA, Janfaza says. Between the lines: Older Gen Z-ers came of age on platforms like Instagram and Twitter. Younger Gen Z-ers are native to TikTok. 9% of young adults said they got their news from TikTok in 2020, according to Pew Research. By 2024, that figure had surged to 39%. Trump's campaign seized on that shift early, reaching young voters on TikTok months before Biden or then–Vice President Harris. Many younger men were already plugged into content from MAGA-friendly figures like Theo Von, Joe Rogan and Dave Portnoy, who went on to host Trump on their platforms. Zoom out: As a whole, Americans under 30 still lean Democratic. But the partisan split within Gen Z came into sharp focus during the 2024 election. White men under 20 voted for Trump at higher rates than their late-20s counterparts — and even more than white Baby Boomer men, according to research from Democratic polling group Blue Rose Research. What to watch: Since taking power, Trump has lost significant ground with 18 to 29-year-olds in particular, according to an analysis of polls by data journalists G. Elliott Morris.
