WATERTOWN, Wisconsin – A conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court justice on Thursday accused the state’s highest court’s liberal majority of going “beyond its neutral role” in an election case and acting as a de facto lawyer for the Democratic Party.
The Democratic National Committee’s lawsuit seeks to deny Green Party candidate Jill Stein the right to stand in the Badger State by challenging the legitimacy of her electors.
The court agreed with the DNC’s petition and took the case, with Justices Rebecca Bradley and Annette Ziegler delivering a scathing dissent to the court’s liberal majority.
“The majority goes beyond its neutral role and argues the case on behalf of the DNC, seemingly allowing an expedited review of this original measure,” Bradley wrote.
The legal battle began last week when David Strang, deputy director of operations for the state’s DNC, filed suit challenging Stein’s electoral eligibility, claiming the Wisconsin Green Party does not have qualified electors to field and is therefore violating state election law.
When Wisconsin’s top election officials rejected the complaint, Strang took the case to the state’s liberal-majority Supreme Court, petitioning to remove Stein from the ballot.
Despite the legal challenges, there is ample precedent for Stein’s claim to be eligible to vote. Wisconsin’s Green Party was on the ballot in 2022 when a candidate received 1% of the state’s vote, and Jill Stein received 30,000 votes in Wisconsin in the 2016 presidential election.
And in the Dairyland State, those tiny differences make a big difference. Four of the last six presidential elections in Wisconsin were decided by less than 1% of the vote – or about 20,000.
“This is a last-ditch attempt by a political party to disenfranchise tens of thousands of Wisconsin citizens,” said Rick Esenberg, president and general counsel of the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL).
“A last-minute, unlawful decision by the Wisconsin Supreme Court in favor of the DNC would severely damage the trust that Wisconsin residents place in their elections every day,” he warned.
WILL also noted that the state’s Election Commission rejected the Green Party’s attempt to get on the ballot in 2020. When the party filed an initial challenge in the state Supreme Court in 2020, the majority rejected the request as untimely by a 4-3 vote, claiming the request was too close to the election.
The Wisconsin Greens said they had not yet had the opportunity to seek legal advice but would “fight to the best of their ability” to stop the attempt to “silence dissenting voices in swing states.”
But Stein’s election campaign was a complete success.
“We have legal counsel and we will fight it. We will file a response by the incredibly short deadline of 5 p.m. Friday,” Stein’s campaign manager Jason Call told the Washington Post.
“We appreciate SCOWIS’s dissenting opinion that the time frame set was too short and believe that the time frame was politically motivated by the Court’s liberal majority,” he continued.
“I remind people that Democrats have repeatedly accused Republicans of using the courts to impose the will of a political party. In addition, I want to make it clear to the anti-democratic party that they will face headwinds for their actions, particularly that the Green Party in Wisconsin will now and in the future field candidates in every swing district and for every state-level office.”
“We will do the same in every state where Democrats sue to disqualify us from the ballot. One of our goals now is to punish the anti-Democrats for their use of ‘lawfare’ in elections. The people deserve better from the political system of a democracy,” concluded Stein’s campaign manager.
As Call noted, the court gave the defendants named in the DNC’s lawsuit – including Wisconsin Elections Commission head Meagan Wolf and commission members – until 5 p.m. Friday to respond to the DNC’s objections.
WILL filed an amicus curiae brief with the court in the DNC case on Friday.
Local governments in Wisconsin will begin sending out mail-in ballots on September 19.
