The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Tuesday slammed the door on a public records request from a conservative activist group seeking guardianship documents identifying individuals deemed incompetent to vote.
In a 5-2 decision, the court ruled that Notice of Voting Eligibility forms completed during guardianship proceedings are closed records under state law because they pertain to findings of incompetency. These are the very documents that tell election officials when someone has been found incapable of understanding the voting process.
Ron Heuer and the Wisconsin Voter Alliance had sought the records from registers across the state. Their argument was simple: these forms are public, and exposing them could help clean up the voter rolls. The court, in an opinion by Justice Janet Protasiewicz, held that the documents fall under statutory protections for incompetency records and are not subject to disclosure.
Justice Brian Hagedorn sided with the court’s liberal bloc in the majority opinion. Conservative Justices Annette Ziegler and Rebecca Bradley dissented, arguing the majority adopted an overly broad definition of incompetency records that improperly shields information about voter ineligibility.
The ruling affirms lower-court decisions and ends years of litigation that began as part of post-2020 election-integrity efforts in the battleground state. The forms in question are standardized court documents used to communicate a judicial finding of voting incapacity directly to the Wisconsin Elections Commission and local clerks.
The decision leaves the records shielded from public view despite these records being directly tied to who can and cannot vote
