Marking the latest legislative runaround against gubernatorial veto power — quite literally — Wisconsin voters adopted two of three Republican-authored constitutional amendments in Tuesday’s election.
The amendments that passed ban government and public educational institutions from discriminating against or expressing preferential treatment for people based on race, ethnicity, nationality or sex — a measure expected to end diversity, equity and inclusion programs — and limit the governor’s use of the partial veto to raise taxes. A third amendment that would have prevented public officials from banning gatherings in places of worship during emergencies failed.
To amend the Wisconsin constitution, lawmakers must pass resolutions during two consecutive two-year legislative sessions before putting the questions to voters. GOP legislators have employed the strategy in recent years with measurable success.
Even within a divided government split along party lines, voters nonetheless approved Republican-authored proposals that Democratic Gov. Tony Evers presumably would have vetoed or, in the case of religious gatherings, did veto.
Including Tuesday’s referendums, voters have now approved nine of 12 constitutional amendments during Evers’ eight years in office.
Conservative backers say the latest amendments “hold government accountable” while opponents say the amendments restrict efforts to improve conditions for underserved communities and limit the executive branch’s check on legislative power.
Prohibiting race- or sex-based discrimination
Chloe Braverman, a University of Wisconsin-Madison junior, expressed frustration with the amendment questions on the ballot, particularly one that bans preferential treatment in public education and in government hiring and contracting based upon race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin.
Braverman said the authors framed the question “weirdly” and suggested Republicans worded it to persuade voters to greenlight the change. The amendment passed with 56.4% voting in favor and 43.6% against.
The measure targets initiatives aimed at increasing diversity and assisting marginalized groups, which the amendment’s authors have said obstruct values like fairness, equality and merit. Using categories like race and sex as a basis for righting historical wrongs, they say, is actually an attempt to rectify “past discrimination” with “more discrimination.”
“Old wounds cannot be healed by inflicting new ones,” said Sen. Steve Nass, R-Whitewater, one of the referendum’s architects.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which deemed unconstitutional the use of race in college admissions, helped motivate the Wisconsin amendment’s authors.
After the proposed ballot measure passed along party lines earlier this year, interest groups sought voter support.
The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty launched a six-figure campaign to encourage voters to back the amendments.
Opponents like the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin said they did the best they could with limited resources to explain the measures’ ramifications. League Executive Director Debra Cronmiller said the amendment could undo 60 years of civil rights progress for women and minorities.
“On its surface, it looks good,” Cronmiller said. “It’s trying to create equality, which means giving everybody the same thing. But in the United States, where we have had systemic discrimination since our inception, we need equity so we can provide people the resources that they need to have an equal opportunity for success.”
She likened the difference between equality and equity to giving all people a set of shoes. Giving everyone the same pair simply wouldn’t work. To fit all needs, people require different sizes.
“If the first time you’re reading the question is today, when you get to your polling place, you will be misled by the question,” Cronmiller said. “You will likely vote yes.”
Voters in at least six other states — Arizona, California, Michigan, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Washington — enacted similar bans between 1996 and 2012.
Wisconsin’s is essentially a “carbon copy” of the others, noted Sterling Knoche, an attorney with the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s State Democracy Research Initiative.
The U.S. Supreme Court determined Michigan’s amendment was constitutional after it was challenged. That reinforces the sense that Wisconsin’s prohibition would likewise withstand judicial scrutiny.
The scope of the change depends on how lawmakers and courts interpret the words “preferential treatment” and “discrimination,” said Emily Lau, also an attorney with the State Democracy Research Initiative. For instance, groups might be treated differently in a way that isn’t preferential or discriminatory, or if there is a justifiable government interest in doing so.
The playing field to resolve these issues will likely be the courtroom.
Even before voters approved Tuesday’s amendment, WILL began suing higher education institutions in Wisconsin over the existence of diversity scholarships and programs that serve underrepresented students.
“All laws must be colorblind to ensure the American Dream for all individuals; otherwise, America will devolve into a racialized society with some racial groups punishing others based on perceived historical grievances,” Dan Lennington, WILL’s vice president and deputy attorney, testified at a public hearing in support of the new amendment in 2025.
This year, WILL scored a victory before the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which found an undergraduate financial aid program for minority students was unconstitutional.
More recently, its attorneys filed a suit against the Wisconsin Higher Educational Aids Board in hopes of striking down a Wisconsin law that requires the Medical College of Wisconsin to “make every effort to ensure” minority students comprise at least 5% of the institution’s total enrollment to qualify for state funding. WILL claims this is a race-based admissions quota.
Beyond race- or sex-based hiring, promotion or admission preferences, the amendment could have a chilling effect on other forms of targeted outreach to underserved communities in ways not yet anticipated.
But WILL has already highlighted other “racially discriminatory” programs that it believes the amendment would prohibit, including Wisconsin Department of Health Services grants to improve health outcomes among non-whites and non-Asians, equity training programs for teachers supervised by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction and the city of Milwaukee’s Office of African American Affairs.
Wisconsin voters may come to find the bill’s intended outcomes fail to emerge.
Like Wisconsin voters, Californians amended their constitution in 1996 to prohibit “discrimination or preferential treatment by the state and other public entities.”
But years of research following the change indicated that disparities in hiring, contracting and college admissions persisted, and even increased, especially among Latino Americans and women. Now the state is making its fifth legislative attempt to reduce the scope of the amendment in light of lingering educational achievement gaps.
The California Legislature recently authorized a ballot proposition to be presented to Californians in 2028 that would exclude public education from the prohibition, with the sole exception of college admissions.
Narrowing the partial veto
This isn’t the first time voters have chipped away at the Wisconsin governor’s partial veto, which affords the executive some of the most expansive powers to alter budgetary line items of any of the 44 states that allow the practice.
Wisconsin’s constitution enables the governor to approve a budget bill “in whole or in part,” and governors of both political parties have used it to great effect.
Following particularly contentious partial vetoes by Republican Tommy Thompson and Democrat Jim Doyle, the electorate twice amended the Wisconsin constitution to prevent similar actions. Governors can no longer create new words by striking individual letters or create a new sentence using two or more sentences.
More recently, former Republican Gov. Scott Walker used his partial veto in 2017 to bar school districts from raising taxes for energy efficiency projects from one year to 1,001 years.
Evers uncapped his partial veto pen in the 2023-25 budget to raise school revenue limits from a span of two years to 402 years. The veto authorized school districts to raise taxes, but didn’t directly do so. School boards get to decide whether to use their new authority.
In response, Republicans advanced the question as a constitutional amendment, and voters narrowly approved it 50.7% to 49.3%. It doesn’t retroactively apply to Evers’ veto, but would prevent a similar veto from occurring again.
What distinguished Tuesday’s ballot referendum from the prior two concerning partial vetoes was not setting limits on the technical format a partial veto can take, Knoche said, but rather its underlying purpose — in this case anything that raises taxes or fees.
“This is another chapter in a long book on the governors creatively and expansively using their powers,” he said. Then their power gets “incrementally constrained by the Legislature that’s not happy with the increase.”
Democratic lawmakers who opposed the amendment observed that maintaining the governor’s authority to increase funding by partial veto enables the executive branch to intercede when the Legislature insufficiently invests in state priorities.
Banning bans on religious gatherings
On Election Day, Hannah Warren, a 36-year-old lifelong Kenoshan and school counselor, was most determined to weigh in on a constitutional amendment barring the government from banning religious gatherings or closing places of worship during states of emergency.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit Wisconsin, the Evers administration’s “Safer at Home” order limited what businesses and activities could remain open in an effort to curb the spread of the virus. The order limited religious gatherings to fewer than 10 people.
Warren’s church in Bristol followed public health officials’ directives to temporarily halt in-person services. She is “a stickler for following the rules” and respected her pastor’s decision, but she watched friends drift away to other congregations “who weren’t following the government’s advice to a T.”
The Wisconsin Supreme Court later struck down the restrictions, while legislators also passed a bill that would have prevented public health agencies from preventing religious gatherings to control COVID-19. Evers vetoed the measure.
In retrospect, Warren believes the lockdown hurt her congregation.
“I think it would be nice for the government not to have their hands in the innards of everyone’s day-to-day,” she said.
The majority of voters on Tuesday disagreed. It failed with 52% of voters opposed to 48% in favor.
The constitutional amendment would have expanded the restrictions on government authority even more than the original bill did by broadening it to cover any type of emergency.
At least 20 states have passed similar legislation, either protecting religious gatherings or places of worship during states of emergency, often defining religious services as an “essential service.”
But State Democracy Research Initiative attorneys note that the proposed amendment didn’t include definitions for key terms like “places of worship” or what it means to “forbid gatherings” or “order the closure of.” That generates ambiguities, which set Wisconsin’s proposal apart from most other state reforms.
Tyler Hake, 29, came to the McFarland Municipal Center Tuesday evening to cast a ballot in favor of the amendment.
Hake declined to identify his partisan affiliation, but expressed concern over widespread political polarization in an era where a shared agreement over facts and truth feels elusive.
“It’s important that everyone has their opinions and is able to practice those things freely” without “forcing things upon other people,” he said. “As the country moves forward, it’d be nice if people were more on the same page.”
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