Paul V. Malloy

Malloy graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Business Administration from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1981 and received a J.D.[2] (law) degree from John Marshall Law School (Chicago) in 1985. He was appointed to the bench in 2002 then elected to a full six-year term in 2003. He was re-elected in 2009 and 2015.[3] His current term expires in 2021.

In October 2014, fellow Circuit Court Judge Joseph Voiland described a confrontation in which he and Molloy stood "nearly nose to nose" with Malloy yelling "as loud as I have heard anyone yell before." Malloy admitted yelling but said the dispute was exaggerated given that there was a desk and chair between them. In August 2015, Voiland jailed a woman after a hearing in which Voiland said he didn't believe her. Malloy released the woman after her attorney argued that Voiland didn't establish any legal basis for holding her or provide for her an alternative method to seek release.

Randy Koschnick, the district judge at the time but now the director of state courts, had to intervene at times in disputes between Malloy and Voiland, including in June 2016 after Malloy ordered Court Commissioner Barry Boline not to follow orders issued by Voiland. Voiland, speaking to a state investigator two years later, said he didn't feel safe in his office after that and considered having security cameras installed.[4] In 2018, Voiland contended that the courts and county had historically failed to provide funding for the obligation to conduct home studies in child custody cases. Unable to resolve the situation within the county, Voiland escalated his complaints to the state level.[5] Voiland left the bench after declining to run for reelection in the election of April, 2019.

In 2019, Malloy removed 234,000 voters from the statewide rolls, ruling that state law compelled him to do so.[6] The League of Women Voters, to whom Malloy refused to grant standing to intervene in the case,[7] and the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, which was also denied standing by Malloy, filed suit in federal court to halt the contested purging.[7] Wisconsin's Attorney General Josh Kaul also file a notice of appeal to halt the purging, acting on behalf of the state's Elections Commission which was split 3-3, and requesting a stay of Malloy's order.[8] The issue was brought before the court by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL).[7] The Institute is a right-wing organization mostly supported by the Bradley Foundation, which funds such political causes.[7] The lawsuit demanded that the Wisconsin Election Commission respond to a "Movers Report," generated from voter data analysis produced by the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a national, non-partisan partnership funded in 2012 by the Pew Charitable Trusts. ERIC shares voter registration information to improve the accuracy of voter rolls.[9][10]

The ERIC report tagged 234,039 voters, roughly 7% of all registrants in the state, who it believed may have moved to an address that had not yet been updated on their voter registration forms.[11] Notifications were sent to all those voters that their registration needed to be updated. Sixty thousand of those letters were found to be undeliverable. Twenty three hundred voters confirmed that their registrations were correct and 16,500 had registered at their current addresses. Registrations of those found to be deceased would be removed. The Commission estimated that the verification process would take 12-24 months to complete before action was taken to remove those former voters whose registrations remained unresolved.[11] Despite thin evidence for removal of that extraordinary number of qualified voters, Wisconsin could be forced to comply with Malloy's order.[12] On January 2, 2020, WILL said it asked the circuit court to hold the Elections Commission in contempt, fining it up to $12,000 daily, until it advances Malloy's December 17, 2019 order to purge from the voting rolls hundreds of thousands of registered voters who possibly have moved to a different address. The case was being litigated in a state appeals court, but it was thought that the conservative-dominated Wisconsin Supreme Court would be likely to support Malloy's ruling.[13] Ozaukee County is heavily Republican, having voted for a Democratic presidential candidate only once after 1936 when it voted for Lyndon Johnson in 1964.[14]

The purge was felt to be intentionally targeting voters living in the cities of Madison, and Milwaukee, and college towns, which all exhibit Democratic voting strength.[7] Two of the three plaintiffs in the case heard by Malloy were significant contributors to state Republican party candidates' campaigns, including former state representative and senator, David W. Opitz.[7] Disenfranchisement expert Greg Palast associated the Wisconsin effort at voter purging as being consistent with a national Republican party strategy that had drawn international attention.[15] On January 12, 2020, Malloy held the three Democrats on the stalemated six-member Elections Commission in contempt of court and ordered them to pay a fine of $250 a day until they complied with his order. Malloy demanded that his order be implemented rapidly, saying, "We're deadlocked, time is running and time is clearly of the essence."[16] The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel assessed the list of voters subject to being purged because they were presumed to have moved, finding that about 55 percent of those registrants had been living in municipalities which Hillary Clinton had won in the 2016 election. These were predominantly from college towns and Wisconsin's largest cities, Milwaukee and Madison.[17] In 2016, Trump had carried the state by less than 23,000 votes. After the contempt order was issued, a stay issued later that day by the state Supreme Court upheld Malloy's purge.[17] That was subsequently reversed by an appeals court, which decision was appealed to the Wisconsin Supreme Court by WILL.[18] On April 7, 2020, effective on August 1, 2020, voters ousted Daniel Kelly, a conservative Supreme Court justice, an appointee of Governor Scott Walker, by an unusually large margin of 120,000 votes. Kelly had been expected to be a swing vote in deciding the case.[19] The Wisconsin Supreme Court heard the case about purging of the voter rolls on October 4, 2020, but was not expected to make a decision before the November election.[20]