The Wisconsin Supreme Court hid how Wisconsin strips disabled citizens of their votes.
The steel-man runs through the cross-ideological majority that produced it. Conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn joined the court’s four liberal justices to form the five-justice majority — documentary evidence that the privacy interest at stake is weighty enough to command agreement across the bench’s ideological divisions. Guardianship proceedings require the state to evaluate a person’s cognitive and medical capacity, and these evaluations involve profound intrusions into private medical realities. Justice Janet Protasiewicz, writing for the majority, held that Wis. Stat. § 54.81 — the Wisconsin guardianship-records confidentiality statute directing that “court records pertinent to the finding of incompetency are closed” — covers the Notice of Voting Eligibility forms. On this reading, the forms are inextricably tied to the underlying incompetency proceedings; opening them would expose individuals experiencing a period of profound vulnerability to public harassment.
The audit begins where the steel-man ends. The Court has conflated the privacy of a medical evaluation with the opacity of civic disenfranchisement.
Ron Heuer, who leads the Wisconsin Voters Alliance, is executing a voter-purge operation against disabled citizens, and the operation began before this ruling. Since 2020, Heuer has filed thirteen identical lawsuits in thirteen Wisconsin counties seeking the same forms to cross-reference guardianship rolls against voter registration lists. The Walworth County decision is the latest documented instance of this operation, not an isolated case.
When a Wisconsin court places a citizen under guardianship, it executes a transfer of legal personhood. When that guardianship includes revocation of the right to vote, the state is performing an act of civic death. The administration of that civic death is a public function. The records of who has been disenfranchised by the state are public facts, even if the underlying medical evaluations remain sealed. The legislature closed the records of the medical finding. The majority extended that closure to the civic consequence — adopting, as Justice Annette Ziegler and one other dissenting conservative correctly identified, an “overbroad and unworkable” definition that “runs counter to the statute’s language, scheme and the presumption of open government.”
The majority’s decision successfully blocks Heuer’s specific predation. Across the thirteen counties, the Alliance will not obtain the forms. But the Court chose to block the purge by sealing the administrative records of the disenfranchisement itself. The state of Wisconsin now administers the revocation of fundamental democratic rights in the dark. There is no public mechanism to verify whether the state is accurately distinguishing between disabled citizens who retain the right to vote and those who have lost it. The purge is stopped. The machinery of civil death remains opaque.