Polls closed at 8:00 p.m. on Tuesday, April 7 for the 2026 Spring Election.
All voters had the Wisconsin Supreme Court race on the ballot between Judges Maria Lazar and Chris Taylor. While the race won’t flip control of the court, it would help liberals extend their hold, potentially through the end of the decade.
Local races on ballots included county board, some town board and city council seats, mayor, judge, and school boards.
The School Districts of Crandon and Butternut had operational referendum questions on the ballots. Tomahawk also had a tax levy referendum question.
With contested races for mayor, school board, and Wisconsin Supreme Court, Rhinelander was seeing a steady stream of voters throughout the day.
“I would say, compared to last year, it's definitely down, but that's kind of what we're seeing statewide, but it's still much higher turnout than we would usually see back in ‘22 or 2018 kind of those off year, midterm year, April elections,” said Rhinelander City Clerk Austyn Zarda around 3:30 p.m. Zarda did expect more people to come through after work.
The 2025 Spring Election set a new statewide voter turnout record for an April election as millions of dollars were pumped into the Wisconsin Supreme Court election.
There are very few contested races in northern Wisconsin counties, and some don’t have anyone running at all.
Forest County, for example, has 21 county board seats. Only two seats are contested. Eight seats have no registered candidates.
With so many open seats, there could be a fair number of write-in candidates. This could mean waiting longer for results as election workers have to review every ballot, hand count the votes, and document the names that receive the votes.
WXPR will be posting articles with results for key races when final tallies come in. This includes mayoral races, the Crandon School District referendum, and Wisconsin Supreme Court. A reminder, all results are unofficial until certified by the state.
You can see results on each county’s website. Many counties will update as each ward reports, some will post them all at once. (You may need to refresh the page or re-download a results pdf to see the latest results).
Here are the results pages for counties within the WXPR listening area:
