Wisconsin Democrats just took another loss in court, and this one stings because they walked right into it.
The state party’s gubernatorial primary was already in serious trouble heading into Wednesday. Now a judge has closed the book on their last-ditch legal effort, and the ruling makes clear the damage was entirely self-inflicted.
Here’s how it unraveled. The Democratic primary field kept shifting after absentee ballots had already gone out to voters. Candidates dropped out mid-stream. David Crowley, the party’s fallback after Lt. Governor Sara Rodriguez’s campaign collapsed, re-entered the race after having already exited it. By the time things settled down, more than 117,000 Wisconsin Democrats had already returned their mail-in ballots, many of them cast for candidates whose status had since changed.
The Wisconsin Democratic Party’s response was to go to the Wisconsin Elections Commission and demand a do-over. The ask: let voters rescind their already-returned ballots and cast new ones. The WEC said no, pointing to state law that plainly prohibits it. So the party sued.
As originally reported, Dane County Circuit Judge David Conway dismissed the lawsuit on Wednesday. His reasoning was straightforward. He cited the same statute the WEC had already applied, quoting its plain language directly: “The unambiguous language of the statute does not allow a voter to spoil an absentee ballot after it is returned.”
That quote alone tells you everything about how strong the party’s legal argument was.
One detail here matters a great deal. Dane County is home to Madison, one of the most reliably Democratic communities in the country, as blue as anywhere in California or New York. When a judge from that county rules against the Wisconsin Democratic Party on what he calls unambiguous law, the party didn’t lose a close partisan call. They lost a clear one.
WisDems Chair Devin Remiker framed the ruling as an attack on mail-in voting, calling it an effort to “suppress” absentee ballots. That framing doesn’t hold up. The law being enforced here exists precisely to protect the integrity of the absentee process. A ballot that can be recalled and recast whenever a primary field shifts isn’t really a ballot at all. It’s something closer to a suggestion.
The party created this problem by allowing their primary field to become unstable after ballots were already in voters’ hands. The courts didn’t manufacture the chaos. They just declined to clean it up on the party’s terms.