Wisconsin
Judge mulls what constitutes a valid witness address for voting
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — A Wisconsin judge considered Tuesday whether to make clear that local election officials can accept absentee ballots missing parts of a witness’ address, the latest legal fight in the battleground state where Republicans oppose the acceptance of partial addresses.
The case was brought by the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin last fall, weeks before the midterm election. The crux of the lawsuit, and another similar pending case, rests with how much of a witness address needs to be present in order for an absentee ballot to count.
Wisconsin law says if the witness address is missing, the ballot can’t be counted. But state law does not define what constitutes missing. The bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission hasn’t said what constitutes a missing address. But it has issued guidance on what constitutes an address, saying it must contain three elements: a street number, street name and municipality.
“There’s no definition of missing out there, which means (the election commission) is failing the clerks, it’s failing the people of Wisconsin by not determining what it should mean for purposes of ballot counting,” argued Dan Lenz, an attorney for the League of Women Voters.
The Republican-controlled Legislature argues that an address is “missing” if any one of those three elements is not present. The League of Women Voters asserts that only ballots completely missing an address, not just one part of it, should not count. The league argues that the state’s 1,800-plus local election clerks are making different decisions about what constitutes an address, adding that could lead to ballots being tossed in one place while being counted in another.
The Legislature asked the judge to dismiss the claim seeking a court order defining what constitutes a missing address. The Legislature argues that local elections clerks, not the state elections commission, should have been the ones sued.
Dane County Circuit Judge Nia Trammell said Tuesday following brief oral arguments that she intends to issue a written ruling within a month.
In 2016, the elections commission said that local election clerks could fill in missing information address information to ensure the ballots are counted. But a judge in September sided with Republicans and ruled that election clerks aren’t allowed to fill in missing information. Waukesha County Circuit Judge Michael Aprahamian did not rule on what constitutes an address, leading to the League of Women Voters lawsuit.
The league is represented by Fair Elections Center and Law Forward, law firms that have represented liberal groups suing over voting rights in Wisconsin.
Trammell and another Dane County judge refused to take emergency action in the weeks leading up to the November election to clarify the absentee ballot address issue, saying it would cause confusing heading into the election.
A similar lawsuit is pending, brought by the liberal group Rise Inc., which encourages students to vote. The suit seeks a ruling that partial addresses must be accepted on absentee ballots.
Very few ballots are returned in Wisconsin with missing or incomplete witness addresses.
The Legislative Audit Bureau in 2021 reviewed nearly 15,000 absentee ballot envelopes from the 2020 election across 29 municipalities and found that 1,022, or about 7%, were missing parts of their witness addresses. Only 15 ballots, or 0.1%, had no witness address.
New York
Trump drops appeal, ending legal fight over state AG probe
NEW YORK (AP) — Former President Donald Trump has abandoned efforts to revive his federal lawsuit against New York Attorney General Letitia James — the second time he’s halted legal action against her after a judge last week fined him and his lawyers nearly $1 million for filing frivolous cases.
Trump’s lawyers and James’ office agreed Tuesday to a stipulation ending an appeal that had sought to reverse a judge’s decision to dismiss the lawsuit. Trump, a Republican, sued James, a Democrat, in December 2021 in an attempt to block her from investigating him and his businesses.
Trump sued James again in the wake of her September lawsuit alleging that he and his company, the Trump Organization, misled banks and others about the value of his assets, including golf courses and hotels bearing his name, in a practice she dubbed “The art of the steal”— a twist on the title of his book “The Art of the Deal.”
Trump dropped that lawsuit last week after a federal judge in Florida, Donald M. Middlebrooks, accused him of a “pattern of abuse of the courts” for filing frivolous lawsuits for political purposes, including what he said was a bogus lawsuit against Trump’s 2016 rival Hillary Clinton and others.
James’ case against Trump is pending. She wants a judge to fine Trump $250 million and permanently ban him from doing business in the state. The trial is scheduled for October.
“I am pleased that Donald Trump has withdrawn both of his pending actions against my office,” James said in a statement Tuesday. “As we have shown all along, we have a legitimate legal case against him and his organization, and we cannot be bullied or dissuaded from pursuing it.”
Trump’s lawyer, Alina Habba, said the appeal “was voluntarily withdrawn for strategic purposes.”
U.S. District Judge Brenda Sannes threw out Trump’s original lawsuit against the New York attorney general in May 2022, allowing her civil investigation to proceed. Sannes wrote at the time that case law bars federal judges from interfering in state-level investigations and that there was no evidence to support his contention that James targeted him out of political animus.
Trump’s since-withdrawn second lawsuit, filed in November, sought to prevent James from having any oversight over the family trust that controls his company. Trump initially filed that case in state court in Florida, but it was later moved to federal court.
Trump’s Florida complaint rehashed some claims from his dismissed federal lawsuit against her, irritating Middlebrooks, who wrote in a December order: “This litigation has all the telltale signs of being both vexatious and frivolous.”
This week has been rife with Trump-related legal developments.
On Monday, court officials say, the Trump Organization paid a $1.6 million penalty levied as part of its tax fraud conviction last month in Manhattan for helping executives dodge personal income taxes on lavish job perks.
On Tuesday, a judge in Georgia heard arguments as he weighs the public release of a special grand jury’s final report on its investigation into possible illegal interference in the 2020 presidential election by Trump and his allies. He said he would keep the report private for now.
