The Wisconsin Supreme Court will be the next player in the high-stakes game of legal pingpong over the future of 209,000 names on the registration rolls.
The conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, which has been fighting since last fall to get those people stricken from the roster of eligible voters, is asking the state's highest court this week to reverse an appeals court ruling from last week that said there should be no such removal.
The dispute is the most intense voter purge fight now underway in an undeniable presidential battleground. Donald Trump's margin of victory in the state was less than 23,000 last time — or about one-ninth the number of voters now in dispute, most of whom are identified with addresses in Democratic precincts. And Wisconsin's 10 electoral votes are central to the strategies of both parties this fall.
"Wisconsin deserves clean elections in 2020," Rick Esenberg, the president of the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, said in announcing the appeal.
"I think that this decision is a win not only for the voters who were close to being purged, but also for democracy," said Josh Kaul, the state's Democratic attorney general.
A decision by the state Supreme Court not to get involved (it's bypassed opportunities to intervene so far) would be a decisive win for voting rights advocates. But if the justices decide to hear the case, and end up reversing the 4th District Court of Appeals to decree that the names should get dropped, the voters will put their hopes in a separate lawsuit being pressed on their behalf in federal court by the League of Women Voters.
The dispute got started last fall after 209,000 registered voters were flagged by a computer algorithm as having changed their residences. The state Board of Elections, with an equal number of Republicans and Democrats, decided unanimously that — since such computer runs in the past had mistakenly tagged thousands of voters as having moved away — any purge should be delayed until after this November's election to allow any errors to be identified without disenfranchising people.
That's when the conservative legal foundation sued, arguing state law did not give the board that sort if discretion. The law requires deactivating the registrations of people who don't respond within a month to notices saying there is reliable information they have moved out of state.
A judge in Ozaukee County, a heavily Republican suburban area north of Milwaukee, ordered the voters immediately removed. When the state board deadlocked on how to respond, he ordered them fined and held in contempt.
On Friday, three judges on the appeals court unanimously took the opposite position — essentially ruling that state law leaves it up to local elections clerks to decide when to deactivate voters, and provides no role for the state elections board.
"In interpreting the Wisconsin Statutes, courts may not rewrite the plain language of the statutes the Legislature has enacted," the judges wrote. "Acceptance of the arguments of plaintiffs would cause us to rewrite statutes enacted by the Legislature, and that we cannot do."
The decision will allow for the thousands of voters to stay on the rolls for at least the next five weeks, when Democrats will award 84 delegates in the April 7 presidential primary.
And even if a voter has their registration deactivated, they may register again, even on Election Day when they show up at the polls, assuming they have the necessary proof of identity and residency.
The initial computer run produced a list of 234,000 inactive voters, but that number has been reduced about 10 percent by people who have proven their eligibility and residency.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.