The next forum will take place in Hazel Green on Saturday, July 26th, beginning at 12:00 noon. Lunch will be served. The location is the Hazel Green Opera House, 2130 N. Main Street, Hazel Green.”
Five aspirants seeking to take on Howard Marklein in the 17th Senate District in November 2026 met July 12 in Dodgeville at a candidate forum. Corrine, Sam, Lisa, Matt, Jenna
Here are the results of a straw poll taken at the Wisconsin Senate District 17 forum of people considering a run against Howard Marklein held in Dodgeville on July 12, 2025. We were delighted to have five people interested, and in the turnout this event generated (over 50 people in attendance, not including the forum participants and organizers).
To score the ranked choice votes we used software available through www.rcv123.org, a nonprofit organization devoted to educating the public on ranked choice voting and providing tools for communities, schools and individuals to use to conduct ranked choice voting.
We asked people to rank their top three candidates; some ranked all five. Forty-seven people voted. Ranked choice voting provides a way for voters to vote for their first choice without feeling like they are “throwing away their vote” if it’s unlikely their candidate can win. If no candidate achieves more than 50% of the vote on the first round, the person with the fewest votes is eliminated and the voters who had their first choice eliminated have their 2nd choice vote counted as a first choice, and so no. Please keep in mind these results are a mere snapshot in time and a small sample size, reflecting the audience impressions of this one event. Many were seeing the potential candidates for the first time. Note that it took four rounds for any candidate to get beyond the 50% threshold.
