Recent Ruling on State's Legislative Maps Raise Questions About Recall Effort Against Assembly Speaker

Friday, January 12th, 2024 -- 8:00 AM

(Molly Beck, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel) A state Supreme Court ruling ordering new legislative maps in Wisconsin is raising questions about whether a new effort to recall Assembly Speaker Robin Vos could take place before new district boundaries are drawn.

According to Molly Beck with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the December ruling declaring the state's legislative maps unconstitutional banned state election officials from "from using the current maps in all future elections."

Some legal experts say this likely affects a group of largely Racine County residents who on Wednesday launched a recall campaign against Vos in the 63rd Assembly District.

"That language is pretty categorical, so my sense is that no recall election could be held until new maps are adopted or the court takes some other authorizing action," Robert Yablon, a professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School who specializes in election and constitutional law, said.

Rick Esenberg, president and chief counsel of the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, said he also believes the ruling in the redistricting case prevents election officials from holding a recall election.

"I’d think a recall election in the Speaker’s current districts could not be conducted and signatures collected from persons who reside outside his new district presumably couldn’t count in determining whether an election can proceed in a new district (should his current one be changed)," Esenberg said in a statement to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

But Chad Oldfather, a law professor at Marquette University, said he's hesitant to conclude the redistricting ruling bars the recall effort. For one thing, the question wasn’t one the court was considering in Clarke, and courts are generally pretty reluctant to consider themselves bound by statements in past decisions that incidentally relate to some future situation they didn’t have in mind at the time," he said.

"In other words, if someone during the course of the writing of the Clarke opinion had said 'what about recall elections?' there’s a very good chance the court would have added something to the effect of 'except recall elections.'

But that presumably didn’t happen because that’s not what anyone had on their mind." Oldfather said the state's electoral processes ought not to bar voters from recalling elected officials under the current maps.

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