Wisconsin

Every April — odd and even years — Wisconsin elects judges, municipal officers, school boards, and county executives on a nonpartisan ballot; every November of even years it elects the partisan slate. One courthouse holds a sheriff elected in November and an executive elected in April, and the Supreme Court can only change hands in spring.

Municipal clerks — every city, village, and town — administer the polls, the most decentralized system in the nation. The state commission posts no results at all; election night belongs to 72 separate county clerk sites.

Wisconsin's 1,245 towns hold an annual town meeting where the assembled electors — not the board — set the levy and authorize borrowing. Board seats are filled only in odd Aprils. A model expecting a council and an even-year cycle finds neither.

7,161 wards are the legal geography, but municipalities combine them into reporting units by resolution — 3,603 last cycle — so ward-level results may not exist, and annexation churn redraws boundaries faster than federal files refresh.

Watertown sits in two counties; Wisconsin Dells sits in four. A county rollup splits these cities into fragments that look like separate places.

The legislative maps were struck and redrawn in February 2024; this is their first midterm, with Senate control genuinely in play across the 17 odd-numbered districts. The congressional map survived its 2025–26 challenges and still runs on the 2021 lines, with litigation pending for after the cycle.

No party registration exists, and unlike Ohio or Indiana, the ballot a voter chooses in the open primary is selected in secret — no record is created. Party affiliation cannot be derived from any field, ever.