By a 5-2 vote, on January 17, 2025, the Wisconsin Supreme Court vacated a District II Court of Appeals decision holding that county registers in probate must provide, in response to requests under Wisconsin’s public records law, copies of Notice of Voting Eligibility (“NVE”) forms—court records relating to determinations of the competency of individuals to vote that are otherwise sealed from the public and protected from disclosure by Wisconsin law. In Wisconsin Voter Alliance v. Secord, 2025 WI 2, the supreme court addressed the appeal of Kristina Secord, the register in probate for Walworth County, of a District II Court of Appeals holding that Wisconsin’s Public Records Law, Wis. Stat. § 19.31, overrides the privacy protections contained in Wisconsin’s guardianship statutes, Chapter 54, and more specifically, the exemptions from public disclosure in Wis. Stat. § 54.75.
The District II Court of Appeals had held that the circuit court erred in dismissing the petition for writ of mandamus filed by the Wisconsin Voter Alliance (“WVA”) and Ron Heuer, WVA’s president, whose request for NVE forms Secord had denied under the Public Records Law. Wisconsin Voter Alliance v. Secord, No. 2023AP36, unpublished slip op., ¶41 (Wis. Ct. App. Dec. 27, 2023). In so holding, District II reached a different conclusion on the same issue than the District IV Court of Appeals, which had previously held (in the appeal of another public records request for NVE forms that WVA and Heuer had served on a different county’s register in probate) that NVE forms fall within the statutory exemption from the Public Records Law provided in Wis. Stat. § 54.75. Wisconsin Voter Alliance v. Reynolds, 2023 WI App 66, 410 Wis. 2d 335, 1 N.W.3d 748.
For now, at least, Reynolds remains controlling law in Wisconsin, and consequently, NVE forms are protected from disclosure under the Public Records law by the exception contained in Wis. Stat. 54.75.
The issue, however, is not fully resolved, as in WVA v. Secord, the majority declined to reach the merits of whether the NVE forms are exempted from public records requests by section 54.75. Instead, the supreme court held that District II erred by violating the rule announced in Cook v. Cook, 208 Wis. 2d 166, 560 N.W.2d 246 (1997). Justice Protasiewicz wrote for the majority that “while the court of appeals is comprised of four districts that sit in different parts of the state, it is a unitary court, not four separate courts”; “[o]fficially...
