(The Center Square) – An increasing number of Wisconsin voter registration information does not match information from the state’s Department of Transportation.
There are more than 41,000 voter registrations in the state without matching Department of Transportation records such as drivers licenses or identification cards, a number that is nearly double the total from 2020, according to Wisconsin Election Commission data acquired by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty.
The data is required by the Help America Vote Act but WILL was denied further information from the databases to verify what the specific discrepancies were.
They include 11,174 registrations without a driver’s license number, up from 4,885 in 2020 and 24,733 cases where a name does not fully match WisDOT information, up from 15,260 in 2020.
“We’re not in any way saying that these 40,000 votes were fraudulent votes,” Lucas Vebber, deputy counsel for the WILL, told The Center Square. “We don’t know that. We don’t even know if these 40,000 names were even voters in the election. We know that they’re on the voter registration list and it’s certainly likely, of course, that some of them voted.
“But we don’t know because we don’t know who voted and we don’t know what all the discrepancies are. It could be something innocuous, it could be something more serious. But our point in the letter is just saying this is serious enough that questions need to be answered and we need a little more transparency here from the government.”
WILL sent a follow-up letter to the U.S. Department of Justice on the issue after urging the department earlier this fall to take a deeper look at the issue.
A Waukesha County judge ruled in an unrelated case earlier this month that the WEC must check voter registration information with state identification information to ensure the voter rolls are accurate but a stay was placed on that ruling until the results of a hearing scheduled for 10:30 a.m. on Friday.
The WEC data showed that the name and date of birth don’t match on 680 registrations, just the date of birth doesn’t match on 3,110 and there were no WisDOT matches found for 2,069 registrations.
WILL has urged the WEC to explain why it has different processed to vet online voter registration information than hand-written forms.
“What are they doing to ensure the integrity of our voter registration list?” Vebber said. “That’s a real good question for WEC. If they have this information, then they are aware of this discrepancy. What are they doing with it? We’d like to know.”
WEC has said that online registrations are blocked if information does not match such as a voter’s name, date of birth, license number or residency but it simply said that a separate process is used for paper registrations.

(The Center Square) – Wisconsin is joining the lawsuit to stop the end of SNAP benefits this weekend.
Gov. Tony Evers said President Trump, however, doesn’t have to wait on the case, that the president could simply give Wisconsin the $115 million needed to cover the state’s food stamp tab in November.
“They can do it. There’s nothing stopping them from doing it. In fact, we’re going to be suing them for not using the funds that they have,” the governor told reporters.
Attorney General Josh Kaul on Monday announced that he is joining 22 other AGs in the lawsuit.
“States have already taken steps to delay the issuance of November benefits, which will significantly harm millions of people who depend on SNAP to put food on the table, including children, seniors, veterans, disabled persons, and other vulnerable individuals struggling to meet their basic food needs,” the AGs wrote in a letter to the president. “The number of people affected, and the length of that delay, will grow each day that issuance files do not go out.”
Kaul and the other attorneys general also asked six questions about using leftover “funds” to cover November’s payments.
Unless Congress reopens the government, or a judge acts by Friday, nearly 700,000 people in Wisconsin won’t get their SNAP benefits on Saturday.
Evers has said in the past that he may look to do something to protect people in Wisconsin from the effects of the federal shutdown, but he never said what. Last week he said that would not include using state money to cover Wisconsin’s food stamp costs.
Evers said food stamps are a federal issue, and said the federal government needs to deal with them.

(The Center Square) – An $8 billion planned Wisconsin data center could receive more than $450 million in local property tax breaks to go along with not having to pay state sales taxes on the construction of Vantage’s new data center in Port Washington.
The project is already the subject of complaints related the placement of transmission lines to power the facility, which is estimated to require as much electricity as the city of Los Angeles once fully operational.
Once completed, the facility is estimated to be worth more than $2.1 billion. But, under the tax increment agreement with Port Washington, the data center would pay property taxes like it is valued at just $121 million for the first 20 years while retaining the extra tax funds.
The agreement does not stipulate what technology will require or what staffing levels will exist in 20 years when the TID agreement ends.
Port Washington’s Common Council is scheduled to vote on the TID creation on Nov. 4 with the Joint Review Board being the final review of the TID on Nov. 18.
Mayor Ted Neitzke told the common council at a recent meeting that the city preferred to have Vantage pay for infrastructure at the site and retain the property tax payments instead of having the city front the money, which the city could not afford.
“That is a risk that they were willing to take that we were not,” Neitzke said.
Port Washington had a combined assessed property value of $1.3 billion in 2024, with the new project having an estimated fully operational assessed value of $2.1 billion.
The state of Wisconsin has a sales tax exemption on construction of qualified data centers good for equipment, construction materials, electricity and more that state leaders are currently considering expanding.
The current exemption has led to $70 million in forgone sales tax in its first two years, far exceeding Department of Revenue estimates.
Many of the usually benefits of a business entering the state – property taxes, sales tax and employment – have already been conceded by the state while questions remain about the impact of energy use at the facilities on consumer electricity prices.
Port Washington is able to create a TID that has a higher value than the rest of its tax base due to a state law passed last year allowing data center TIDs to be created even though they are valued at more than 12% of a municipalities total property tax base.
The city claims that the data center project would not occur without the TID and that the project brings benefits to the municipality including construction jobs over the seven-year construction period, economic activity from those construction workers, employment after the data center is complete, an increased future tax base, increased new construction allowances and both water and sewer infrastructure upgrades.
“While necessary for the project, the costs paid by developer will benefit all utility customers,” the TID documents state.
The agreement does not stipulate how many employees will work at the data center or their pay after the project is complete.
The Center Square was unable to obtain additional comment from Nietzke before publication.

(The Center Square) – Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin has resumed scheduling abortion procedures after stopping for a month, according to media reports.
The group stopped providing abortion services Oct. 1, citing Medicaid cuts in a federal funding bill.
“Providing compassionate, high-quality care to our patients has always been our mission – and it always will be,” Tanya Atkinson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin, said in a statement. “Our mission remains firm: to stand for patient care, equity, dignity and safety. Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin will never stop fighting to keep its doors open to as many patients as possible, period.”
Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul and 22 other state’s attorneys along with the Planned Parenthood Federation of America filed a lawsuit in July to challenge funding provisions in the “Big, Beautiful Bill.”
The provisions stopped federal Medicaid funding for services at Planned Parenthood.
“This horrendous policy is not only an attack on Planned Parenthood. It’s also an attack on access to health care,” Kaul said in a statement about the lawsuit. “This reckless policy should be struck down.”

(The Center Square) — Don’t look for Wisconsin lawmakers to do something about the possible end of food stamp benefits in the state.
Food stamp, and other benefits, are set to end nationwide Saturday because of the
federal government shutdown.
Over the weekend, both Wisconsin’s governor and the state Senate president said Congress needs to fix the problem, not the state,
“My heart goes out to people, but this is a federal issue, and I don’t see the state having the resources to do that,” Senate President Mary Felzkowski, R-Tomahawk, said Sunday on UpFront.
Wisconsin’s Department of Health Services said it will cost $114 million each month for the state to cover its food stamp costs.
But Felzkowski is not the only one saying Congress needs to step-up. Gov. Evers said the same thing on UpFront.
“This is something that can be fixed in Washington, D.C., and should be fixed there,” the governor said. “I’m not going to give them advice,” Evers added.
Felzkowski, though, was quick to blame Democrats in D.C.
“I just wish that the Democrats would sign this continuing resolution and vote for it, and let’s move on. They shouldn’t be playing games like this. You don’t hold people hostage over these kinds of issues,” she added.
Nearly 700,000 people in Wisconsin are enrolled in food stamps. Unless
Congress votes to reopen the government by the end of the week, those
people will not see benefits Saturday.

(The Center Square) – A group of Wisconsin lawmakers are working on legislation to enable sports wagering throughout the state, but the law could meet legal opposition since the Wisconsin Constitution states “the legislature may not authorize gambling in any form” outside a few exceptions, including bingo, raffle games, pari-mutual racing and some forms of lottery.
The new legislation would change the state’s legal definition of a bet by stating that bet does not include a sports wager by a person “physically located in this state using a mobile or other electronic device if the server or other device used to conduct such event or sports wager is physically located on a federally recognized American Indian tribe’s Indian lands.”
A bet that fits the state statute definition of “bet” is currently a misdemeanor offense in Wisconsin.
While the proposed Wisconsin hub-and-spoke model has already been approved in Florida, Wisconsin has a different constitution with different definitions that would need to hold up in court if challenged.
Lucas Vebber, deputy counsel for the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, has looked into the details of how Wisconsin went from a state that doesn’t allow gambling to one that earns revenue each year through gaming compacts with tribes in the state.
“This is a huge industry, obviously, in Wisconsin,” Vebber told The Center Square. “But the way we got there is just an interesting narrative of kind of this legal back and forth. People kind of forget that sometimes and I just like to point it out and how this all came to be.”
Vebber was clear that he and WILL are not planning a lawsuit on the legislation.
But he detailed the history of legal gaming in the state, from the original ban to amendments in the 1960s and 1980s to allow the exceptions to the law to the federal Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, gaming compacts negotiated in 1991 and 1992 by Gov. Tommy Thompson and then a state constitutional amendment that banned most gaming in 1993.
After a challenge, the compacts were allowed to continue because they were approved before the amendment and they were allowed to be amended themselves in the future, including to allow for sports wagering on tribal lands several years ago, something the new legislation would expand upon.
“The question is does that violate Article 4, Section 24 of the constitution, which is pretty clear that the Legislature doesn’t have any authority enact any bill that authorizes gambling in any form,” Vebber said.
He noted that the opposing viewpoint could be that wagering is already authorized and this legislation is just changing the definition of where that occurs.
“It’s something that I don’t think have ever been contested … certainly not in this context, that I am aware of,” Vebber said.
The cleaner way to avoid legal challenges would be to create a new constitutional amendment to allow for sports wagering. But that would have to pass two different Legislatures and then go to a statewide vote.
The new legislation states “this bill does not authorize gambling on its own; it only is one part in a multi-step process to create the legal framework necessary for Wisconsin to participate in mobile sports wagering under tribal compacts,” it reads. “Gaming compacts between states and tribes need to be federally approved by the U.S. Department of Interior before going into effect.”
That means which sports wagering companies are able to work with the tribes on statewide mobile wagering and what level of shared revenue will come from the expanded sports wagering is still to be determined.
Each of the tribes has a compact currently in place with the state where the state earns a percentage of tribal gaming revenue.
The bill estimates it will bring hundreds of millions of illegal bets into legal sportsbooks in the state, stating the change “generates new revenue through tribal gaming compacts and reduces consumer risk from offshore operators.”
In 2024, the state received more than $66 million in shared revenue payments with nearly $66 million in 2023 and nearly $57 million in 2022.

(The Center Square) – Another month of rising prices is not scaring people away from buying a house in Wisconsin.
Wisconsin Realtors released their housing report for September, showing prices are up almost 9% over September of last year.
“Both statewide existing home sales and prices rose by solid margins in September. Compared to September 2024, closings increased 6.9%, and median prices rose 8.7% to $337,000,” the report stated.
That $337,000 median price is actually slightly lower than the median price in August. The association said the median price tag was $338,000 to close out the summer.
The association said there are more homes for sale, and more homes selling compared to this time last year. But the September report notes that sales since January have been a bit more sluggish.
“On a year-to-date basis, the growth was more modest, with sales up 2% relative to the first nine months of 2024, and median prices up 5.2% to $326,000 over that same period,” the report stated. “We’re still in a seller’s market with just four months of supply statewide,
but it’s good to see our listings continue to improve. Higher inventories should help drive sales growth and moderate prices in the months ahead,” Realtors board chair Chris DeVincentis said in a statement.
Once again prices and sales are regional, and the Madison and Milwaukee areas drove both.
The median price for a home in south central Wisconsin, including Madison and Dane County, continues to be the highest at $389,900. Southeast Wisconsin comes in second with a $350,000 median price tag.
Southeast Wisconsin led the state in sales. Thirty-four percent of the homes sold in September of 2025 were sold in southeast Wisconsin.
Northeast Wisconsin saw the second most sales, with 21% of closings in. September. South central Wisconsin saw just over 18% of sales in September.
“We’ve seen some nice improvements in the 30-year fixed mortgage rate over the past couple months, and it was good to see rates finally fall below 6.5% in September. Hopefully these rate improvements continue for the remainder of this year and into 2026,” Realtors CEO Tom Larson said in a statement.

(The Center Square) – Thursday’s committee hearing looking at the sexual misconduct investigation process for Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction included plenty of questions but no DPI superintendent.
Jill Underly was instead at Indiana University to collect a distinguished alumni award, which led to criticism from committee leaders and a pair of Republican candidates for governor.
“Not only was the superintendent absent from the hearing, she was absent from our state,” Rep. Amanda Nedweski, R-Pleasant Prairie, said after leading the informational hearing in the Assembly Committee on Government Operations, Accountability and Transparency.
Underly was invited to a Nov. 4 informational hearing in front of the Senate Committee on Education and Deputy State Superintendent Tom McCarthy said that she planned to appear in front of the Joint Legislative Audit Committee at 9 a.m. on Nov. 5.
McCarthy and a pair of DPI employees answered questions in Underly’s place.
“I’m disappointed that Dr. Underly is not here,” Rep. Mike Bare, D-Verona said as the meeting began. “… She should be.”
The hearing began with comments from Kenosha Chief of Police Patrick Patton, who added context about the difficulty of pinpointing charges against teachers who cross ethical lines with students, advocating for a grooming law and for a change current law involving sexual misconduct by a school staff person after a teacher was able to avoid the charge by changing schools.
Patton was asked whether he believes sexual misconduct from teachers and school staff is a growing issue.
“I think this has been a historically underreported problem,” Patton said.
DPI representatives then detailed their investigative work and how teachers are often offered the option of permanently revoking their teacher license in order to end an investigation.
McCarthy, however, admitted that process was not in statute nor could they prevent a teacher from later asking for the license to be reinstated. He also said that there are jobs within schools, like some paraprofessional roles, that do not require licenses.
DPI representatives said that revoked licenses are noted in a national database but that school districts and the public cannot access that database, only state education departments can.
Lawmakers also pointed the finger at Gov. Tony Evers, previously the DPI superintendent, for his lack of response to the stories and legislative inquiries into the department’s investigative process.
“Gov. Evers has said nothing,” Congressman and Republican candidate for governor Tom Tiffany said at a press conference outside the Wisconsin Capitol after the hearing. “Not a word.”
Fellow Republican governor candidate Josh Schoemann again called for Underly to resign.
Underly posted a brief video in response to the inquiries, saying the “safety, dignity and well-being” of Wisconsin children is her top priority.
“At DPI, we investigate every complaint we receive,” Underly wrote. “Decisions are guided by evidence, due process, transparency and a commitment to protecting kids.”

(The Center Square) – More people are asking more questions about how Wisconsin’s public school managers handle investigations into teachers accused of grooming or sexual misconduct.
The Institute for Reforming Government announced that it has filed a public records request with the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction “seeking to uncover details surrounding the Department’s handling of teacher licenses for educators accused of misconduct and
grooming.”
IRG is just the latest to press DPI for answers about The Cap Times investigation and The Center Square’s follow up stories into teacher grooming. That investigation found that 200 teachers over a five-year period were allowed to walk away from a grooming or sexual misconduct investigation by simply resigning.
Some of those teachers found their way back to classrooms and schools.
“Every parent in Wisconsin places enormous trust in our schools and educators, and that trust is broken when misconduct is swept under the rug,” Jake Curtis, director of IRG’s Center for Investigative Oversight, said. “Our request demands transparency and oversight. The public has the right to know whether DPI’s leadership intentionally allowed abusers to remain in classrooms or turned a blind eye when they were quietly shuffled to other districts.”
Curtis said Wisconsin’s state superintendent, Jill Underly, needs to answer questions about DPI’s investigations as soon as possible.
She won’t be answering those questions today.
Underly has committed to a celebration at her alma mater Indiana University today, instead of attending the Wisconsin Assembly’s hearing on the investigation, DPI’s failures, and three pieces of legislation aimed at protecting students from predatory teachers.

(The Center Square) – Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction Superintendent Jill Underly will not attend hearing this morning on how her department investigates sexual misconduct and grooming allegations against teachers and school staff, according to Rep. Amanda Nedweski, R-Pleasant Prairie.
Underly will instead be at Indiana University to receive a distinguished alumni award from Indiana’s College of Arts & Sciences.
Nedweski scheduled the hearing to obtain information after a series of stories from Madison’s Capital Times showed flaws in the DPI’s process of investigating sexual misconduct and grooming cases.
“Parents deserve transparency from Wisconsin’s top education official,” Nedweski wrote. “The @CapTimes report is deeply unsettling — families deserve to know their kids are safe in school.
“At no point did Underly or her team even try to reschedule the hearing date with my office.”
DPI responded Friday in a letter claiming the Capital Times should correct its story related to 200 investigations from 2018 to 2023 into teachers for sexual misconduct and grooming were shielded from the public.
Nedweski announced she will introduce three bills related to protecting students from grooming and sexual misconduct since the report, including a specific grooming law modeled after laws from Illinois and Wisconsin.
Wisconsin’s Senate Committee on Education also requested answers from Underly in a letter, along with her presence at a committee hearing.
Five Wisconsin U.S. Congress members sent a letter to Underly requesting a thorough investigation into DPI’s process.
“Rather than covering up these allegations, each incident should be thoroughly investigated and, if verified, the public and the student’s parents should be informed,” the congressmen wrote. “We echo many of the same questions that members of Wisconsin State Legislature have asked in a recent letter to Superintendent Jill Underly and request that you and the Superintendent hastily answer the letter in its entirety.”

(The Center Square) – The definition of grooming in a new law being proposed in Wisconsin will include influence from a 2021 Illinois law and a 2024 law passed in Florida, according to the bill’s sponsor.
Rep. Amanda Nedweski, R-Pleasant Prairie, spoke with News Talk 1130-WISN on Wednesday, asking questions on behalf of The Center Square about Nedweski’s proposal, which she has begun pushing after a series of stories from Madison’s Capital Times showed flaws in the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction’s process of investigating sexual misconduct and grooming cases.
DPI said in a Friday statement that grooming and professional boundary violations aren’t included in current statute in the definition of immoral conduct, “limiting our agency’s ability to obtain critical pieces of information.”
But the statutory definition of immoral conduct is “conduct or behavior that is contrary to commonly accepted moral or ethical standards and that endangers the health, safety, welfare, or education of any pupil.”
“I would beg to differ,” Nedweski said in her Wednesday radio interview. “I might say ‘Gee, I think grooming and professional boundary violations certainly are contrary to commonly accepted moral and ethical standards.’
“I’m concerned that the state’s superintendent of schools is saying maybe they don’t fall under that standard. It’s very concerning and I’m hoping to get an answer on that tomorrow.”
The Illinois grooming law, dubbed Faith’s Law, passed the Legislature unanimously in 2021 before being signed into law by Gov. JB Pritzker.
That law requires school districts to create a code of conduct for teachers to protect students from misconduct and also includes the requirement of a resource guide for parents that must be posted on the school’s website and listed in the school’s handbooks.
The definition is “when he or she knowingly uses a computer online service, Internet service, local bulletin board service, or any other device capable of electronic data storage or transmission, performs an act in person or by conduct through a third party, or uses written communication to seduce, solicit, lure, or entice, or attempt to seduce, solicit, lure, or entice, a child, a child’s guardian, or another person believed by the person to be a child or a child’s guardian, to commit any sex offense … to distribute photographs depicting the sex organs of the child, or to otherwise engage in any unlawful sexual conduct with a child or with another person believed by the person to be a child.”
The Florida law passed the House unanimously, the Florida Senate amended it and it passed unanimously and then 11 representatives voted against the final bill because it changed the word “grooming” to “harmful communication to a minor.”
“We’re going to do the best we can to have a comprehensive definition of what grooming is in the statute once we introduce the bill and then we will have different levels of penalty for different types of interactions,” Nedweski said, noting that seven or eight states already have “good laws” on the topic that Wisconsin can learn from.
She said there are multiple advocacy groups that can conduct professional development for teachers are the correct professional boundaries.
Attempts by The Center Square to reach DPI the Wisconsin Education Association Council were unsuccessful.

(The Center Square) – The expectations are not high headed into the Wisconsin Assembly hearing on teachers grooming students, and the state’s response.
Rep. Amanda Nedweski, R-Pleasant Prairie, told News Talk 1130 WISN on Wednesday that she has not heard from State Superintendent Jill Underly, who has been invited to headline the hearing, and hasn’t heard much more from the state’s Department of Public Instruction.
“We got some answers. I think we’ll hear them again in the hearing,” Nedweski said of her discussions with DPI managers. “[They were] not necessarily acceptable answers.”
Nedweski is holding an informational hearing Thursday to get answers about the number of teachers who have voluntarily surrendered their teaching licenses to avoid DPI investigations into grooming or sexual misconduct charges.
The Cap Times recently broke a story that 200 teachers over five years were allowed to walk away, while sometimes being able to return to teaching a few years later.
Nedweski said that news made it clear that there is something wrong in how the Department of Public Instruction handled those cases and how it informed parents.
“I think that there is a complete and total lack of accountability on [DPI’s] part to explain why they haven’t been straightforward with the public as to what they’ve been doing with these cases,” Nedweski explained.
Underly’s only comments on the grooming investigation came Friday in an open letter. In it, she complained that The Cap Times piece ignored the limits DPI faced, but Underly said she supports any effort to update DPI’s “legal framework.”
“I welcome a long overdue discussion about the need to both modernize our licensing systems, and update existing statutes to clarify, broaden and deepen the limited statutory authority the DPI has in these serious matters,” Underly wrote.
Nedweski said that’s too little, too late.
“Where were these calls for updates to laws and systems long ago?” Nedweski asked. “Why all of a sudden now because there was a report by The Cap Times? That’ll be a question. If this was such a problem for you all along, why didn’t you ask for help before? If you needed money in the budget for updating systems for teacher licensure and to fund investigators for teacher misconduct, why didn’t you ask for it in your budget request earlier this year?”
Nedweski’s hearing before the Assembly Committee on Government Operations, Accountability, and Transparency is set to begin at 11am on Thursday.