Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.Wisconsin election officials are alarmed by a request from onetime presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr.

Kennedy filed the lawsuit against the Wisconsin Elections Commission earlier this month in Dane County, arguing independent candidates are treated unfairly because they operate under different deadlines from party-aligned candidates when it comes to ballot access.

With Election Day still weeks away, many Americans have already begun casting their ballots, thanks to expanded early voting options. This shift, which saw over 100 million people voting early in 2020,

If approved, the hand count rule would make Georgia the only state in the U.S. to implement such a requirement as part of the normal process of tabulating results, according to Gowri Ramachandran, the director of elections and security at New York University's Brennan Center for Justice,