Lauren Justice
Wisconsin’s Secretary of State Doug La Follette has been moved into a 600-square-foot, windowless office in the basement of the Capitol.
“I’m not happy,” Doug La Follette tells me, just after the handshake. He means it.
Wisconsin’s longtime secretary of state is raging against changes mandated in Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s budget. He’s been forced from his 4,000-square-foot digs on the Capitol Square to a windowless “cubby hole,” as he’s called it, in the basement of the Capitol. The new office, which formerly housed the state treasurer, is about 600 square feet, with an additional 300 square feet of storage space that La Follette dubs “the vault.”
The budget also trimmed two staff positions, leaving just one full-time and one part-time worker. The 75-year-old La Follette, a Democrat, is suing Walker, contending the changes make it impossible for his office to fulfill its duties. He’s hired a private attorney “out of my own pocket.”
Last week, two weeks after the relocation, I stop in unannounced. The part-time staffer, Patricia, sits at a desk in front, surrounded by files from the old office. The full-time staffer, Ann, sits a few feet back. La Follette shows me boxes of unopened letters on the floor. We count eight of them.
“Nine,” Ann corrects. “There’s one over by my desk.”
Over time, most secretary of state duties have been stripped away. But it’s still the official repository of some government records. And it’s still where people get apostilles — certificates required by foreign countries to affirm the authenticity of records that bear official stamps. These are used for everything from business transactions to foreign adoptions to shipping bodies to other countries for burial. (The latter get expedited “for obvious reasons,” La Follette says.)
One visitor who arrives to pick up an apostille confesses to not having heard of this certificate before. Patricia commiserates: “Nobody knows what it is until they need one.”
La Follette says his office annually issues 15,000 apostilles, or “one every seven minutes.” I ask Patricia how many she can do a day. “I hate that question,” she sighs, noting that some can be done simply and others can’t. “Some days 20. Some days 80.”
On this day, Patricia and Ann are calling requesters to say apostilles are now taking nine to 10 business days to process but can be prioritized on request. Just about everyone wants this. A handout from La Follette urges visitors “inconvenienced by the long delay in processing” to contact lawmakers and the press.
An aide to a Republican state lawmaker stops by to inquire about a constituent’s apostille request. “The legislators took away our staff people,” La Follette explains. “We’re far behind.” Later, when the aide returns with additional information needed to prioritize this request, La Follette gives the knife a full twist: “We’re glad to help you, taking time away from [helping] people ahead of you.”
Other work has languished. La Follette shows me a stack of papers from the governor’s office, lying between two ancient contraptions used to imprint the Great Seal of Wisconsin. These include the proclamation of May as “Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome Awareness Month” and papers authorizing the extradition of fugitives from other states. All need to be filed, as time permits. They date back to April, before the staff cuts and move.
La Follette takes me to “the vault,” a room down the hallway with an open door. There’s a sink and refrigerator for use by his staff, amid shelves filled with volumes of statutes and boxes of records: approved apostilles, military appointments, passed legislation from the prior session. La Follette sees a box containing state bargaining contracts. “I forgot we had those,” he says.
At a hearing on LaFollette’s lawsuit in Dane County court last Friday, Pam Rich, an expert in operations management, testified that her multifaceted review showed the office needed nearly two more bodies to meet its workload. The state’s attorney sought to disallow this testimony, challenged the legal ability of La Follette and other plaintiffs to sue, and denied that the office had a constitutional duty to process apostilles.
“Whose duty is it to process apostilles, if not the secretary of state?” asked Circuit Court Judge Rhonda Lanford. There was no clear answer. She promised to review the record and issue a decision soon.
La Follette is hoping the court will conclude more staff is needed and restore the terminated positions. Absent this, he expects to keep falling farther and farther behind. “I see no way to avoid it,” he says.
Editor’s note: Circuit Court Judge Rhonda Lanford is the domestic partner of Isthmus editor Judith Davidoff.
Douglas La Follette
Tenure as Wisconsin secretary of state: 1975-1979, 1983-present
Relationship to “Fighting Bob” La Follette: he’s been called a “second cousin, three times removed”; his great-grandfather was an uncle of the famed Wisconsin governor and U.S. senator.
Other offices he’s sought, unsuccessfully: U.S. congress, 1970; lieutenant governor, 1978; U.S. senate, 1988; governor, 2012. (La Follette was also elected to the state senate, serving a single term, 1973-75.)
Fun fact: he has a master’s of science in chemistry from Stanford and a PH.D. in organic chemistry from Columbia.
