Wisconsin residents will vote Tuesday on two proposed amendments to the state constitution that could reshape how elections are run in the state — but voters, and many election officials, don’t know exactly how the broadly written proposals would be interpreted by state election officials and the courts. Election officials said the second proposal could have especially unpredictable consequences. That one seeks to ban anybody besides election officials from performing “any task in the conduct of any primary, election, or referendum.” How strict would that ban be? Would it mean that election officials couldn’t hire private companies to print ballots or assemble voting machines? Or that they couldn’t ask other city workers to set up polling sites? Officials and experts aren’t sure. “It’s a very poorly written provision because it is so vague,” said Mike Haas, Madison’s city attorney and the former administrator of the Wisconsin Elections Commission. He said the wording used in the amendment isn’t defined in state law. Do you have feedback on Milwaukee NNS's reporting? Take our survey to let us know how we're doing! Differing interpretations could play out in lawsuits if the measure is enacted. The two Republican-written ballot questions coming before voters Tuesday are largely a response to 2020, when private groups and outside consultants got involved in funding and assisting election administration across the state and country in the midst of the pandemic. The first proposed amendment seeks to prohibit the use of private grants or cash donations for election costs. That stems from a national GOP backlash to millions of dollars in election administration grants awarded in 2020 to communities around the country, including more than 200 jurisdictions in Wisconsin. The grants, from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, flowed primarily through the Center for Tech and Civic Life, a nonprofit. The second, the proposal that seeks to restrict election-related tasks to election officials only, is meant to address a situation related to outside grants that arose in Green Bay in 2020, when the city worked with a consultant who had ties to outside funders. If the proposal is interpreted broadly, it could force major changes to elections in a swing state during a presidential election expected to spur high turnout. That amendment could be interpreted to ban some non-election municipal workers from helping with voting-related tasks, such as city police escorting workers transporting ballots or the IT department providing cybersecurity for voter registration systems, Haas said. The proposal could also ban outside workers from transporting voting machines or troubleshooting election equipment, he added. Some proponents of the amendment say the worries are overblown. “We do not believe that the proposed amendment covers either printers who print the ballots or the companies that manufacture voting machines,” said Rick Esenberg, president of the conservative law firm Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, which frequently files lawsuits over questions of election administration. He added that he didn’t think it would prevent non-election city workers from setting up polling sites, either. But if it did, it’s not clear what election officials would do instead. “All of those employees of those companies are doing things that, if they didn’t perform those, we would not be able to conduct the election,” Haas said. Questions about whether the proposal applies to private vendors building voting machines, printing ballots and programming them would likely end up being the subject of a lawsuit, said Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell, an elected Democrat who oversees elections in Wisconsin’s second most populous county. “It’s sort of nuts,” he said about the proposal. “It is so unclear and, honestly, unthought-out that it would be up to a judge to decide these things.” Other election officials also said the effort to prevent a repeat of the Green Bay situation creates unanswered questions and may go too far. “The intent is a good thing,” said Marathon County Clerk Kim Trueblood, a Republican, about the proposal. “I just think there needs to be a little bit more clarification on some of the details.” The first ballot question is meant to prohibit grants such as those awarded by CTCL in 2020, which added up to more than $10 million to communities around Wisconsin. Grants were awarded to any eligible community that applied, CTCL said, but most of the dollars in Wisconsin went to Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay, Racine, and Kenosha — the state’s largest cities and Democratic strongholds. The amendment’s sponsors, Sen.