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WILL Adds Associate Counsel Cory Brewer

Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty

https://will-law.org › will-adds-associate-counsel-cory-b...](https://will-law.org/will-adds-associate-counsel-cory-brewer/)

Cory Brewer is Associate Counsel at WILL. She focuses on legal and policy issues related to K-12 education in Wisconsin.

[### Our Team | Wisconsin Institute for Law ...

Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty

https://will-law.org › our-team](https://will-law.org/our-team/)

... Cory Brewer. Education Counsel. [email protected]. Cory Brewer serves as Education Counsel at WILL. Before joining WILL, Cory worked in private ...

[### Cory Brewer (@CoryJBrewer) / X

X · CoryJBrewer

1K+ followers](https://x.com/coryjbrewer?lang=en)

Focused on school board policy, First Amendment freedoms, parental rights, and academic excellence. Education counsel @WILawLiberty. Views my own.

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1:55](https://www.facebook.com/TeacherFreedomAlliance/videos/parents-rights-are-the-law-at-the-2025-teacher-freedom-summit-cory-brewer-of-wil/1165776295395494/)

Facebook · Teacher Freedom Summit

[PARENTS’ RIGHTS ARE THE LAW: At the 2025 Teacher ... Facebook · Teacher Freedom Summit

1 week ago](https://www.facebook.com/TeacherFreedomAlliance/videos/parents-rights-are-the-law-at-the-2025-teacher-freedom-summit-cory-brewer-of-wil/1165776295395494/)

11:18

YouTube · Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty

[Cory Brewer on WILL's Recent Work to Empower Parents YouTube · Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty

Jan 30, 2023](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=illTh6pDu_8)

Corey Brewer of the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty discusses the Stolen Innocence event and the importance of parental rights in education.

14:58

YouTube · Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty

[Devon and Cory Brewer: WI Parent Shares Her Story, NEW ... YouTube · Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty

May 5, 2023](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Dz-CXCuJBQ)

4 key moments in this video

4:44

YouTube · Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty

[Cory Brewer on The Ingraham Angle for Sun Prairie Area ... YouTube · Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty

Apr 28, 2023](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DU8aDF0W0yU)

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[### Cory Brewer - Education Counsel at Wisconsin Institute for ...

LinkedIn · Cory Brewer

730+ followers](https://www.linkedin.com/in/coryjbrewer)

Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States · Education Counsel · Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty

I am an attorney at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty. I focus on legal and policy issues related to K-12 education in Wisconsin and nationwide.

[### Cory Brewer on X: "School board members, district ...

Twitter · CoryJBrewer

4 likes · 10 months ago](https://twitter.com/CoryJBrewer/status/1856353389480640549)

NEW: We teamed up with @DFIPolicy and @WILawLiberty to create a resource for school board members covering the changes to Title IX and how ...

[### Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty

Facebook · Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty

20+ reactions · 2 years ago](https://www.facebook.com/WILawLiberty/videos/cory-brewer-on-dpi-letter-threatening-legal-action-due-to-bureaucratic-overreach/731316995329825/)

Listen to WILL Associate Counsel, Cory Brewer, on The Vicki McKenna Show to learn more about these issues: https://bit.ly/3yi22SD. Julie Hart ...

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CRYPTO

https://www.mediamatters.org/local-news/local-news-outlets-subscribing-center-squares-wire-service-are-pushing-right-wing

Center Square is filling in a void left by vanishing local newsrooms with right-wing propaganda about school choice, guns, immigration, and elections

WRITTEN BY BEATRICE MOUNT & BEN VAN BLOEM

PUBLISHED 06/20/23

Three years after a dark money-funded conservative website known for posting misinformation rebranded as a local news wire, The Center Square has made its way into newspapers across the country.

In 2019, Watchdog.org, an organization that propagated misinformation and lies that benefitted Republican politicians, rebranded as The Center Square. Since rebranding, the company has operated as a dark money-fueled conservative news wire service writing and distributing right-wing slanted news stories. Their publisher, Franklin News Foundation, has apparently continued to receive funding from the ultra-conservative Donors Trust.

The Center Square provides struggling and underfunded local outlets their stories for free withattribution, unlike larger, more established wire services like the AP which charge licensing fees. This model preys on vulnerable news organizations with vanishing staff and shrinking budgets that need wire articles, like those offered by The Center Square, to fill space. Outlets that use The Center Square do not typically acknowledge the explicitly conservative lean of their work. 

According to the company, in 2021, their articles had been republished nearly 180,000 times. Center Square articles appearing in daily papers and online news feeds promote right-wing narratives and cite many right-wing think tanks, lobbyists, and policy groups – many of which belong to the conservative State Policy Network, a group of right-wing think-tanks and policy groups that have promoted a highly-partisan agenda in state-level politics for years. The Center Square’s publisher is a member of the State Policy Network. Franklin News Foundation board chair John Tillman and member Charles Mitchell also lead groups affiliated with the State Policy Network.

Center Square articles are saturating local newspahh' 30,000 papers across Illinois’ River Bend region, [published multiple Center Square articles featuring an NRA lobbyist’s response to Illinois gun restrictions — without mentioning that he’s an NRA lobbyist. According to the Factiva database, The Telegraph published at least two articles in April about the Illinois assault weapons and high-capacity magazine ban that quoted Todd Vandermyde. The NRA lobbyist questioned how Illinois would enforce the law or decide who was properly licensed. The articles did not quote gun control activists or inform readers about enforcement mechanisms for similar bans.

cmd

The efforts of the right-wing Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) to force the purge of hundreds of thousands of Wisconsin voters in advance of this year’s critical elections has garnered national attention and sparked a complex legal battle.

The stakes in the case are high. WILL is fighting to have more than 200,000 voters — most of whom reside in heavily Democratic areas — removed from the rolls in a swing state that Trump won by less than 23,000 votes in 2016. And in April, voters in the Badger state will head to the polls to vote in a hotly contested state Supreme Court election and the Democratic primary for president. Wisconsin legislators are also up for election this year, and the control of the legislature will determine who gets to draw the district maps for the next decade.

The case has thrust Wisconsin to the forefront in this year’s voter suppression wars and reflects a larger Republican strategy to tilt the playing field by making it harder for low-income, student, and minority citizens to vote. According to a 2018 report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, “voter roll purges often disproportionately affect African-American or Latino-American voters.”

WILL, the conservative litigation group leading the charge in Wisconsin, is hardly a neutral player in this strategy. Considered the “MVP” of the right-wing infrastructure built in the state over the past decade, WILL’s leaders and funders include many of Wisconsin’s heaviest Republican hitters and have collectively poured at least $12 million into the Wisconsin GOP and its candidates over the past two decades.

WILL’s Voter Purge Case

On October 16, 2019, WILL filed a legal complaint against the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) arguing that the Commission is required by law to remove more than 200,000 voters flagged as “movers” by the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC). ERIC, a project of Pew Charitable Trusts used by 28 states and the District of Columbia, uses official data, such as motor vehicle registrations and U.S. Postal Service addresses, to help states identify people eligible for voter registration and to keep voter rolls up to date.

Based on ERIC’s “mover” database, WEC began sending out postcards in October 2017 to flagged voters directing them to confirm their address or reregister in order to stay on the voter rolls. As a result of that mailing, WEC deactivated 335,701 voters in January 2018. However, flaws in the data and process created significant problems in the 2018 primaries when thousands of voters showed up at the polls, only to find that they were no longer registered. In 2019, WEC concluded that problems with the ERIC database resulted in an error rate of at least 14 percent, causing 46,475 voters to be deactivated even though they never moved.

WEC sent out another 234,000 postcards to voters identified by ERIC’s “mover” database in October 2019, and 209,000 did not respond. However, given the error rate on the 2018 list, WEC decided to wait until after the 2020 elections to deactivate those voters.

WILL claims that state law dictates that voters must be purged from the rolls 30 days after failing to respond to a WEC verification mailing based on “reliable information” that they have moved. WEC contends that because ERIC’s “mover” database is not reliable, they have discretion on how and when to proceed, and have decided to give voters until the spring of 2021 to confirm or update their information.

On December 13, 2019, a lower court judge agreed with WILL and ordered WEC to remove the 209,000 voters from the rolls. On Monday, WEC commissioners were found in contempt for not complying with the Judge’s order. However, the Supreme Court voted narrowly to not take the case on an expedited basis, bumping it instead to an appeals court which granted a stay on the purge order on Tuesday, making it unlikely that anyone will be removed from the rolls before the April primary.

Meanwhile, the League of Women Voters filed suit in federal court to prevent the purge, arguing that it would violate voters’ constitutional rights to due process, and the Republican-dominated legislature asked the federal court to dismiss the League’s action on January 6.

In a November 2018 lame duck session, Republicans in the legislature considered moving the presidential primary election to March 2020 to give Walker-appointed Justice Daniel Kelly a better shot at winning his primary contest. The Republican leadership ultimately decided against the idea after city and county clerks united in opposition due to the taxpayer expense and headaches that holding three elections in three months would cause.

Maintaining the state Supreme Court’s right-wing majority, now 5-2, is a top priority for Wisconsin Republicans, a fact surely not lost on WILL’s politically active leaders and funders.

WILL’s Partisan Ties

WILL’s close connection with Justice Kelly — whose 2020 election bid would be directly affected by the outcome of WILL’s lawsuit — and the political goals of its leaders and big funders call into question the group’s nonpartisan motives in aggressively pursuing its voter purge case.

Justice Kelly used to serve on WILL’s legal advisory board, took campaign contributions from two WILL board members last year one week before ruling in favor of WILL in a pending case, and served as president and general counsel of one of WILL’s largest funders, the Kern Family Foundation.

A Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) analysis of campaign contributions maintained by the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign shows that WILL’s staff, board, and major funders have contributed more than $2 million to Wisconsin political candidates over the past 20 years, the vast majority of which went to Republicans.

Six of WILL’s staff and board members together have contributed more than $20,000 to conservative state Supreme Court justices, while none of WILL’s current employees have contributed to the liberal wing of the Court.

WILL board member Michael Grebe–current chairman of the board at the Bradley Impact Fund (BIF) and former chairman of the board at the Bradley Foundation–is deeply tied to the Republican Party. Grebe was campaign chairman for former Governor Scott Walker’s failed presidential campaign in 2015 and chairman of Walker’s 2010, 2012, 2014, and 2018 gubernatorial campaigns.

Before chairing the Bradley Foundation (2002-2016), Grebe was general counsel to the Republican National Committee (1996-2000) and Republican National Committeeman for Wisconsin (1984-2002). Grebe gave $131,800 to Republicans and right-wing judicial candidates, between 1990 and 2019, and $19,240 to the Wisconsin Republican Party between 1997 and 2018.

Diane Hendricks, another Bradley Foundation and BIF board member, who is the largest known individual donor to WILL, has given $4.7 million to the Wisconsin Republican Party between 1998 and 2018, and $801,065 to Republican and right-wing judicial candidates for office in the state between 1991 and 2019. Hendricks was Walker’s top donor, and gave $5 million to his Unintimidated PAC to support his run for president.

Hendricks was ranked 35th among all federal contributors by Open Secrets in the 2018 election cycle with $4.5 million to Republican and conservative candidates, parties, political action committees, 527 organizations, and Carey committees.

Robert and Patricia Kern, whose Kern Family Foundation is a major funder of WILL, are also top Republican donors. Robert gave $268,385 (1997-2019) and Patricia gave $197,695 (2001-2016) to Republican and right-wing judicial candidates for office. Robert also donated $30,500 to the Wisconsin Republican Party.

“Counsel to the Conservative Movement”

WILL, with $1.9 million in revenue according to its latest available tax filing, was founded in 2011 with “major support” from the right-wing Bradley Foundation, an internal grant proposal record states. Since its founding, Bradley and its donor conduit, the Bradley Impact Fund, have provided WILL with 52 percent of its revenue, CMD has found.

“If the Wisconsin Network had an MVP it would be Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL). It is, as founder Rick Esenberg likes to say, counsel to the movement. Nearly all of the organizations of the conservative infrastructure come to WILL for advice,” a Bradley staffer wrote in another internal grant proposal record.

The grant proposal records were analyzed as part of CMD’s investigation into hacked internal Bradley files released online in October 2016. CMD concluded that, “The Bradley Foundation, organized as a tax-exempt ‘charitable’ foundation under 501(c)(3) of the tax code, appears to be pursuing a highly partisan game plan: funding an ‘infrastructure’ on the right that benefits the Republican Party, while at the same time attempting to crush supporters of the Democratic Party.”

Litigation centers, like WILL, were one of eight aspects of “successful state infrastructure,” that Bradley identified for strategic investments. The others were: respected and dynamic leadership, quality think tank(s), investigative journalism, opposition research, receptive policymakers, symbiotic relationship with grassroots groups, and committed local funding support.

WILL has received significant “local funding” from two other major sources, the Kern Family Foundation (KFF) and the Rite-Hite Corporation Foundation, IRS filings show.

The Waukesha-based KFF, with $668.3 million in assets according to its latest IRS filing, has provided WILL with just under $1.5 million in funds between 2012 and 2018. Like Bradley, KFF focuses “on initiatives that have long-term, systemic impact,” which is not surprising considering Bradley’s President and CEO Richard Graber sits on its board of directors.

KFF began when Robert and Patricia Kern sold part of their Generac Power Systems, an international power backup company, in 1998.

The Milwaukee-based Rite-Hite Corporation Foundation sprung off of Rite-Hite, a manufacturing company that WILL President Esenberg previously worked at as general counsel. Esenberg’s former employer, Rite-Hite owner and CEO Michael White, is Chairman of WILL’s board of directors. Rite-Hite’s Foundation has provided $520,000 to WILL between 2012 and 2018.

An internal Bradley spreadsheet detailing matching grants shows that other major funders to WILL include GOP megadonor and Bradley board member Diane Hendricks, who gave $75,000 to WILL in 2014 and possibly more in 2011, when she donated $2 million for “Wisconsin based C(3) efforts”; right-wing operative and director at Empower Wisconsin Eric O’Keefe, who gave $10,000 in 2014; and the late investor and furniture maker George Mosher, who gave $10,000 in 2014.

Outside of Wisconsin, the Walton Family Foundation is WILL’s biggest funder to the tune of $1.5 million between 2014 and 2018. The Waltons continue to profit immensely off their Wallmart empire, which had ...>The State Policy Network (SPN), of which WILL is an associate member, provided it with $98,850 in 2016-2017. A web of right-wing “think tanks,” advocacy groups, and other registered nonprofits in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., Canada, and the United Kingdom, SPN groups play an integral role in getting legislation passed in state legislatures by providing academic legitimacy when called upon to testify at hearings or through the production of “studies.” Many SPN groups now have litigation centers in house thanks to Bradley, which gave $350,000 in 2014 to launch a “https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2017/06/28/talent-market-libertarian-headhunter-koch-bradley-foundation david a zzz === https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/how-right-wing-groups-use-old-law-and-imperfect-data-to-purge-voters-from-statewide-rolls/"... How right-wing groups use old law and imperfect data to purge voters from statewide rolls< zzz Written by Steven Rosenfeld / Independent Media Institute January 21, 2020<...Wisconsin has become early 2020’s Exhibit A for political fights surrounding the updating of statewide voter lists, where escalating court battles over conflicting law, procedures and underlying data could lead to removing thousands of legal but infrequent voters.

The fray’s epicenter is a series of rulings by a county judge against Wisconsin’s bipartisan but deadlocked state election board, which has refused to immediately delete 209,000 voter registrations in a swing state with 3.3 million voters. The conflict may preview legal battles coming to other states. California, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Colorado and Virginia have all received letters from Judicial Watch, a right-wing group, threatening to file suits like the complaint from the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL) against the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC).

WILL’s lawsuit, where two of its three plaintiffs are donors to state Republican campaigns, seeks the immediate removal of 209,000 infrequent voters who were flagged for the WEC by an interstate data consortium run by top election officials. In March 2019, the WEC’s staff recommended taking 12 to 24 months to vet those voters because in 2018 after using the consortium’s analytics, 24,270 inactive but registered voters—or 7 percent of those flagged and delisted—showed up to vote, as a memo from the WEC explained. (Those voters could re-register under a same-day registration law after showing the correct documentation.)

The affected voters, whose numbers were slightly larger than Donald Trump’s 22,748-vote margin over Hillary Clinton in Wisconsin in 2016, were mostly traced to quirks in the state’s driver’s license database where addresses were extracted and used to verify a voter’s status. The bipartisan WEC initially decided to postpone removing the 209,000 voters, but has since split on party lines. (An appeals court has stayed the lower court’s purge order, and the state chapter of the League of Women Voters has filed a federal lawsuit to stop it.)

But Wisconsin is not the only state wrestling with voter analytics. In Georgia, the process used last fall to remove 300,000-plus old registrations (out of 7.4 million statewide) led to 22,000 voters being reinstated in December. The reversal came after Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger moved up the date up for Georgia’s data query by six months, restoring the inactive voters’ status. In Iowa, election officials pressed pause after finding a 100,000-person database that may have incorrectly listed former felons, who cannot vote until they reapply and regain that right.

Thus, in early 2020, there is an emerging trend of the potential disqualification of thousands of infrequent voters in swing states. While partisan claims surrounding these developments often dominate their news coverage, this trend is driven by a confluence of conflicting laws, regulatory precedents and imperfect voter data.

“The voter registration process and the list maintenance process have become incredibly polarizing,” said Matthew Weil, the Elections Project director at Washington’s Bipartisan Policy Center. “Any removal from the [statewide voter] list is now considered by some to be a purge. And any perceived deadweight is considered ripe for fraud. Neither one of those views is right. There should be reasons to remove people. And there are reasons why we don’t want to remove people too quickly also.”

“Part of the problem here is we are using antiquated, outmoded systems,” said Barbara Arnwine, who from 1989 to 2015 ran the nation’s largest Election Day legal hotline and has since founded the Transformative Justice Coalition. “And it [mass removals] is not required under the NVRA [the National Voter Registration Act of 1993]. But even for those states that chose to do it, they are purposely engaging in a process that is fundamentally outdated and ineffective—and has the predictable consequence of removing valid voters from registration lists.”

Weil and Arnwine both said that the NVRA, which was crafted for an era when people used paper registration forms and postcard mail to contact voters, needed updating. But such modernization was not part of House-passed H.R. 1, an election reform package now stuck in the Senate. Thus, today’s partisan litigants who see advantages in using old and sometimes conflicting state and federal laws, their accompanying bureaucratic procedures and imperfect government data, will likely continue to unfold in 2020 to help their political allies.

“Dirty voting rolls can mean dirty elections and Judicial Watch will insist, in court if necessary, that states follow federal law to clean up their voting rolls,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in its January 2 statement threatening more list maintenance suits. “Judicial Watch found major voting list issues in California, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Virginia, and Colorado.”

Ground Zero: Wisconsin

Self-appointed voting list vigilantes are not new. But Wisconsin, which had 2016’s second-closest presidential election margin and has seen some of the past decade’s most bitter fights over voting rules, has not seen a voting list fight for many years. Nor does the state have a history of voter fraud. Instead, its election administration has been seen as a model led by a bipartisan panel that valued civic participation.

Part of that legacy led the state to join an interstate consortium—the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC)—that draws on several state and federal government databases to help officials update their statewide voter rolls, and to identify and then contact eligible but unregistered voters. (Disclosure: Voting Booth’s reporter was part of the Pew Center on the States team that designed ERIC.) More than half the states now use ERIC.

Soon after Wisconsin joined ERIC, its state election board found a unique but deepening problem. Unlike all but one other state in the consortium, Wisconsin’s Division of Motor Vehicles never offered a voter registration option to residents getting a driver’s license. That is because when theNVRA—or so-called Motor Voter law—was passed in 1993 (and primarily required the drivers’ agencies to offer registration), it exempted states with Election Day registration. Wisconsin was a same-day state. Its reward for good behavior had come back to haunt it.

The NVRA also had other provisions and timelines for updating voter rolls, which become bloated after people move or die. The bottom line in 2020 is that people who have not voted since the 2012 presidential election could be removed if they have had no subsequent contact with election officials. The law envisions that contact as responding to postcard mailings—which many people ignore—or showing up and voting.

In 2017, when Wisconsin’s election board sent various public databases to ERIC for data mining, or using redundant records to update the voter files, it ran into an unexpected problem. Because the state DMV did not manage addresses for voter registration purposes, its files did not have some voters’ actual home addresses. (Voter registration must have actual addresses for voters to get a correct ballot.)

“In these situations, the voters may have provided an address in their transaction with the DMV that was different from their voting address, even though DMV asked for their residential address on their forms,” the March 2019 WEC memo said. “These voters were likely unaware that the information provided to the DMV would affect their voter registration status.”

The reason for the incongruity has nothing to do with elections. It was because people who had registered cars for others—such as a family member who lives elsewhere—used their addresses to avoid paying a county car tax. That tax-evading move was what was behind most of the voters who were removed in 2017 but showed up to vote in 2018, said Kevin Kennedy, the former director of Wisconsin’s Government Accountability Board (which preceded the WEC) and who worked in Wisconsin elections for nearly four decades. The ERIC algorithms used to verify the voter rolls could not tie the same address to that individual. Being exempt from the NVRA’s requirement to register voters at its DMVs hid this address snafu.

Instead, Wisconsin had an older state law on its books for voter list maintenance. That law required removing voters “upon receipt of reliable information” within a month. That deadline and ERIC’s list of 209,000 infrequent voters (most of whom had moved or died) was cited in the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty suit. In suburban Ozaukee County north of Milwaukee, a GOP stronghold, Circuit Court Judge Paul Malloy cited that state law as he repeatedly ordered the mass purge to proceed. Malloy has since held the WEC in contempt for not acting, including issuing penalties and additional fines for its three Democratic members. (An appeals court stayed his rulings.)

WILL’s argument is typical of right-wing lawsuits targeting voter registration lists. It alleges that various vague harms that “impair” or “threaten… the legal rights and privileges” of its plaintiffs. On the other side of this partisan lens are voting rights activists who say that no list maintenance process can ever be error-free, and cite errors made by ERIC in Wisconsin and Maryland. (ERIC’s defenders say these problems come with managing any large and fluid list, and note that ERIC has helped to identify and to register more than 5 million new voters nationally.)

Broad Swipes, Local Remedies

But all of these arguments and details—which come from a conflicting mix of laws, bureaucracy and porous data—obscure some bigger points, said Justin Levitt, a professor of constitutional law at Loyola Law School and former staff attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Voting Section.

“There are only a few states where nonvoting is still used to trigger the NVRA removal procedure, and they tend to be [citing] legacy laws from decades ago when ham-handed approaches to list maintenance were more common,” he said. “The vast majority of states only start the NVRA process when there’s some affirmative evidence of ineligibility, which is a little more like using a scalpel rather than a chainsaw to do surgery.”

In other words, activist right-wing law groups are targeting an imperfect landscape surrounding the way voter rolls are updated. And the most likely impact—should they prevail in court—could be disrupting or discrediting the 2020 voting process in swing states. But it is hard to estimate the magnitude of their impact apart from noting thousands of voters could be affected in states with close elections.

“We don’t have great data on how many of the registrations at issue in these battles correspond to voters who are still eligible,” said Levitt, who added that the remedy for voters was checking their registration status two months before Election Day. “Purges unquestionably affect voters. But this is an area where voters have more control than other aspects of election administration.”

Kevin Kennedy noted that any incorrectly purged Wisconsin voter could re-register on Election Day, when people have to present proof of residency and a photo ID. While unsuspecting voters might not have all those documents with them, he said that the state does accept emailed bills as proof of one’s addresses.

“If anything, it’s actually gotten better because you can do it electronically,” said Kennedy. “You can show your electronic bills. [But] they are not always the best for students, because sometimes their bills are at their parents’ house.”

Stepping back, the former state election director said the fray over voter rolls was a sign of how hard-fought 2020’s election cycle would likely be in his state.

“In Wisconsin in 2020, the big thing besides the voter purge issue will be a voter turnout issue,” Kennedy said. “The Democrats are saying they need to mobilize voters. They can look back to last April and see they were clearly out-mobilized in the state Supreme Court race. It was supposed to be a non-partisan race, but clearly had partisan motivations going on there. You’re not going to see Republicans sit back. They will redouble their efforts.”

Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, the American Prospect, and many others.

This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

==

==

? Wisconsin: A trio of rulings from three separate Wisconsin courts on Monday and Tuesday has resulted, for now, in a halt to a conservative group’s effort to require the state to remove 209,000 voter registrations from the rolls.

On Monday, a lower court judge, who had previously ordered the purge to go forward, held Democratic election officials in contempt for not proceeding with the removal. These officials, who’d asked the judge, Daniel Malloy, to issue a stay while they appeal, pointed out that Malloy’s order had not specified a deadline by which they were obligated to act.

Later that same day, the state Supreme Court declined to expedite an appeal requested by the plaintiff, a conservative organization called the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty. WILL had hoped that the Supreme Court, which is dominated by right-wing jurists, would give it a friendly reception, one but conservative justice who’s up for re-election this year recused himself and another sided with the court’s two liberals in declining to fast-track the case. That resulted in a 3-3 tie, meaning the plaintiff’s request was rejected.

Finally, on Tuesday, the state’s intermediate Court of Appeals stayed Malloy’s decisions: both his order directing the purge to proceed and his contempt ruling. That amounted to a victory for voting rights advocates, who, if they cannot halt the purge, at least want to delay it until after November’s elections.

The win is only temporary, though: The state Supreme Court’s refusal to expedite the case does not guarantee that the court will stop the purge if the case eventually reaches them. A separate federal lawsuit opposing the purge remains ongoing.

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A single county judge in Wisconsin has ordered the purge of over 200,000 names from the state’s voters rolls. More than 90% of those names are not in the county where the judge presides. In fact, the number of names the judge ordered stricken is over twice the whole population of his county.

As reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Judge Paul Malloy acted on a request from just three voters who were backed by a conservative organization, while ignoring both the state election commissions and the League of Women Voters, nether of which were allowed to testify. The center of the case was a letter that the elections commissions sent out to voters it believe may have moved. However, that letter was sent only a month earlier, and the elections commission intended to give voters until 2021 to correct any information.

But Malloy didn’t give the commission, or the voters, that chance. Instead, he ordered the names removed in advance of the nexts election. To get an idea of how big a deal that is, Donald Trump won the state of Wisconsin by just 23,000 votes. In fact, it’s that kind of margin that has Republicans out hunting for cases like this in which they can make it impossible for everyone to vote. 

In fact, Malloy seems to have done even more than the conservative group “Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty” asked. The original request was for an injunction requiring election officials to remove voters who had not responded in 30 days. Instead, Malloy issued a “writ of mandamus” ordering the purge and threatening any election commissioner who refused to cooperate.  

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WI IS A SWING STATE 2016 RECALL QUASHED?

Koch Network and Christian Right Celebrate Apparent Hagedorn Victory in Wisconsin Supreme Court Race

By David Armiak — Right-wing Judge Brian Hagedorn leads Judge Lisa Neubauer by less than half a percent.

Read more >>

4/19

The Koch brothers’ astroturf operation, Americans for Prosperity (AFP), and Wisconsin Family Action (WFA) are exuberant over Brian Hagedorn‘s apparent razor-thin victory over Lisa Neubauer on Tuesday for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Hagedorn is winning by less than 6,000 votes, or less than a half a percent, the Associated Press is reporting. If the margin holds, Wisconsin law allows for a recount, but Neubauer would have to foot the bill.

Hagedorn has declared victory in the race, but Neubauer has not conceded and is considering a recount. The eventual winner will replace longtime Supreme Court Justice Shirley Abrahamson who announced her retirement last year.

If the Kochs’ Hagedorn is elected, the Wisconsin Supreme Court will move one seat further to the right with a 5-2 majority.

Kochs, Christian Right Rejoice

Hagedorn’s biggest supporter in terms of money was the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC), which took out $1.3 million in TV and digital ads. The RSLC funnels millions in corporate money into state campaigns, and counts tobacco companies, the US Chamber of Commerce, the Judicial Crisis Network, pharmaceutical giants, and Koch Industries among its top funders.

But it was the Kochs and the Christian Right group Wisconsin Family Action who are credited with Hagedorn coming out on top. AFP spent over $200,000 on canvassing efforts and mailings. According to its State Director, Eric Bott, AFP talked to more than 750,000 voters and sent out over 1.5 million targeted mailings in the seven weeks up to the election.

“There’s no question our engagement made a huge difference,” Bott said.

WFA spent more than $25,000 on mailings and brochures for Hagedorn as well. WFA thanked AFP for its efforts and extended “a hearty congratulations and thanks to Brian and his family for their hard work and steadfast commitment to staying the course despite the unjust attacks on their personal lives and their religious beliefs,” in a press release following the election.

One Wisconsin Now revealed that Hagedorn founded a school that prohibits anyone working there from being in a same-sex relationship and could expel students who identify as LGBTQ.

The *Milwaukee Journal Sentinel* also exposed an old blog Hagedorn wrote from 2005 where he addressed his “fellow soldiers in the culture wars,” stating that “the idea that homosexual behavior is different than bestiality as a constitutional matter is unjustifiable.”

Following the revelations of his hateful stance towards the LGBT community, the Wisconsin Realtors Association revoked its endorsement of Hagedorn saying, “The real estate related issues that served as the basis for our endorsement have been overshadowed by other, non-real estate related issues — issues with which we do not want to be associated and that directly conflict with the principles of our organization and the values of our members.”

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which often funnels money to right-wing candidates through the Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, followed suit, according to the Journal Sentinel.

Hagedorn and other influential right-wing leaders in the state, such as Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty’s Rick Esenberg, framed the anti-LGBT Hagedorn revelations as attacks on “religious tolerance.” Esenberg, who donated to Hagedorn, regularly brings cases in front of the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

WFA riled its base to support Hagedorn, claiming he had been “viciously and unjustly attacked,” and warning of dire results if he lost the election and liberals won the next 2020 Supreme Court election. If that happens, there will be a “deluge of cases…against faith-based adoption agencies, cases against Christian florists and photographers,” said WFA President Julaine Appling. “You could probably kiss aspects of voter ID, or concealed carry, or right-to-work, or portions of Act 10 goodbye.”

Two hours prior to polls closing, WFA attempted to motivate Twitter followers by adding that Neubauer was endorsed by “pro-abortion” Planned Parenthood and “pro-LGBT” Human Rights Council.

WFA has been active in pushing a Christian Right agenda in the state for years, as the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) reported last year in *Conquering the Courts: The Religious Right’s Fight to Rig the Rules and Undermine Judicial Independence*. WFA is an affiliate of the Family Policy Alliance, a national network of 40 groups in 38 states that spends millions to influence state legislation and elect socially conservative candidates.

In 2006, WFA partnered with Family Research Institute of Wisconsin and Focus on the Family to spend heavily on a media campaign for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. The amendment passed but was overturned in 2014 when the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals declared the marriage ban unconstitutional.

In 2008, WFA and Wisconsin Right to Life worked together to unseat Louis Butler on the Supreme Court, which resulted in the election of Michael Gableman.

WFA also played a big role in former Governor Scott Walker’s dark money operation in 2011 and 2012, channeling $1.2 million in cash from Wisconsin Club for Growth and Citizens for a Strong America into recall elections.

http://www.prwatch.org/news/2017/06/13256/WILL-voucher-study-bradley-funded-groups

A recent foray into education "research" by the Bradley Foundation's Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL) is a case study not only in politically motivated research, but also in how the Bradley-funded echo chamber operates to inflate questionable claims and stave off critics.

The Milwaukee-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation is perhaps best known for its advocacy of private and religious school vouchers. Bradley was instrumental in creating the nation's first voucher "experiment" in Milwaukee in 1990. A new cache of internal Bradley documents has come to light, which pull back the curtain on the $835 million organization and its efforts to advance school privatization, attack teachers unions and construct right-wing "infrastructure" nationwide.

The study in question is one that WILL released on March 1, 2017, purporting to show students in Milwaukee's private and religious voucher school program outperforming students in Milwaukee's public schools. Had WILL's conclusions been accurate, they would have contradicted consistent research findings from the last two decades showing Milwaukee voucher students fared worse or no better than their public school counterparts and several very recent studies showing voucher students throughout the nation faring extremely poorly.

Instead, the release of WILL's study showed that when one Bradley-backed organization speaks, numerous others rise up to echo it, and some mainstream news outlets are snookered by the noise.

The Center for Media and Democracy documented recently that the Bradley Foundation has poured at least $3.65 million into WILL since 2011. It has also received support from the Walton Family Foundation in 2014-2015, $585,000 according to IRS filings. Bradley funded WILL primarily to be a "litigation center" to aid the fight over school vouchers, to attack public sector unions and to backstop Wisconsin's right-wing infrastructure. For instance, Bradley notes, "WILL has represented School Choice Wisconsin in various actions against the Department of Public Instruction," (WILL, GPR, 11/10/15). And WILL filed an amicus brief in Duncan v. Nevada supporting the universal voucher program providing taxpayer money for private and religious schools, struck down by that state's highest court.

But Bradley's favorite litigation team is "morphing" into a think tank, say the Bradley documents, and producing studies on education. The stakes are high. The Bradley Foundation has spent untold millions supplementing Milwaukee voucher schools and advancing school vouchers in cities and states in partnership with the Walton's and Betsy DeVos' American Federation for Children. With DeVos now the head of the U.S. Department of Education, any study touting purported benefits of vouchers will be seized upon as Gospel by DeVos and Trump in their effort to expand vouchers nationwide.

Not "Apples to Apples"

WILL's March 1 report, Apples to Apples: The definitive look at school test scores in Milwaukee and Wisconsin, authored by WILL research director Will Flanders who has a PhD in political science, compared, for a single school year (2015-16), the average levels of student proficiency in math and English in K-8 schools and the averaged ACT college entrance exam scores for schools' high school juniors.

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