Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 30. Sunrise is 7:01 and sunset is 5:17 for 10 hours 16 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 58.9 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1950, the Stasi, the secret police of East Germany, is established.
On January 21, this libertarian blogger contended that the City of Madison Argues Wrongly on Absentee Ballots by contending that those ballots were a privilege, not a right. From that post: “This is an occasion when a lawyer, representing a public client, undermines the rights of those that the public client is, itself, obligated to represent. Always a mistake, always a serious mistake, and always a mistake requiring a genuine remedy. An immediate remedy would be for the City of Madison to withdraw its line of defense. A later remedy would be for a court to reject that defense if it is not withdrawn.”
Unsurprisingly, just about everyone, including the founder of a conservative public interest law firm, saw the error of Madison’s legal position:
The Wisconsin Elections Commission, filing its first ever friend-of-the-court brief, challenged Madison’s controversial legal argument that it should not be financially liable for 193 uncounted ballots in the 2024 presidential election because of a state law that calls absentee voting a privilege, not a right.
The argument presented by city officials misunderstands what “privilege” means in the context of absentee voting and “enjoys no support in the constitution or case law,” the commission wrote in its filing Tuesday, echoing a similar rebuke by Gov. Tony Evers last month.
“Once an elector has complied with the statutory process, whether absentee or in-person, she has a constitutional right to have her vote counted,” the commission said.
That both the commission and the governor felt it was necessary to intervene in the case should underscore “both the wrongness and the dangerousness of such a claim,” commission Chair Ann Jacobs, a Democrat, told Votebeat.
[…]Meanwhile, Rick Esenberg, the founder of the conservative group Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty — which cited the same 1985 law in its 2021 effort to ban ballot drop boxes — said on social media that Madison’s legal argument was likely going too far.
“Madison is correct in noting that absentee voting is a privilege and not a right in the sense that the legislature has no obligation to permit it at all,” Esenberg said. “BUT if it does and people choose to cast their ballot in the way specified by law, it doesn’t seem crazy to say that Madison has a constitutional obligation to count their legally cast vote.”
See Alexander Shur, Wisconsin Elections Commission challenges Madison’s argument on absentee voting (‘A rare court filing adds to the growing condemnation of the city’s defense against a lawsuit seeking monetary damages for votes that weren’t counted in 2024’), Wisconsin Watch, February 4, 2026.
This is a clear legal issue (the law can and has created a right) but muddy legal representation. The City of Madison’s position was too quick in its effort to shield the city from damages in a voters’ lawsuit without considering the implications of that position.
Legal representation that doesn’t show foresight of implications and counter-arguments is weak (in this case, embarrassingly weak) representation.
Pigs, grizzlies, and humans share this one skincare secret: