Bryna Godar, a staff attorney at the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School, said Madison’s argument is “conflating two different things.”
“The Legislature has, in these absentee voting statutes, made clear that it considers absentee voting to be a privilege, in that absentee voting as a method is not constitutionally required, and that the Legislature can impose some additional procedures on absentee voting that it maybe couldn’t impose on in-person voting,” said Godar. “That privileged language does not mean that when you vote absentee, you don’t have a right to have your vote counted.”