There Is Nothing Equal About This Amendment. Vote No on November 3.

On November 3, Wisconsin voters will see a question on their ballot that is easy to misread.

It asks whether the state constitution should be amended to prohibit governmental entities from "discriminating against, or granting preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin" in public employment, public education, public contracting, or public administration.

Sounds reasonable. Maybe even familiar. Isn't discrimination already illegal?

Yes. It is. And that is exactly the problem with this amendment.

Wisconsin and federal law already prohibit discrimination. What this amendment actually does (what it is designed to do) is make it unconstitutional for government to use any equity-based tool to address the deep, persistent disparities that those laws alone have never been able to fix.

This is not an anti-discrimination measure. It is an anti-equity measure. And Embolden WI opposes it.

What Gets Lost If This Passes

The amendment applies broadly: to the UW System, technical colleges, every public school district, every local government. The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, which helped advance this measure, has been explicit about the goal: ending diversity, equity, and inclusion programs across Wisconsin's public institutions.

Here is what that means in practice.

Health equity programs designed to address higher rates of chronic illness, maternal mortality, and disease burden in Black and brown communities could be challenged or eliminated.

Education programs including K-12 equity accommodations, targeted scholarships, UW admissions support, and curriculum designed to serve diverse learners could be dismantled.

Community programs that use equity-based eligibility, including Head Start, food banks, homeless shelters, and domestic violence services, could lose their legal standing.

Workforce and contracting initiatives for women, the Wisconsin Supplier Diversity Program, and contracts for certified minority-owned businesses would be threatened.

What is gained? Nothing.

What is lost? Sixty years of progress: the tools Wisconsin has built to give more people a fair shot.

This Is What We Do at Embolden WI

I want to be clear about why this is personal for us.

Embolden WI exists because communities already have the power to create change. What they often lack is the infrastructure, resources, and support to act on that power. We exist to close that gap.

ECCHO, our two-year civic leadership program created for and by BIPOC women and non-binary leaders in Dane, Milwaukee, and Rock counties, is built on the premise that the people most affected by inequitable systems should be the ones shaping change. ECCHO participants design and lead their own community health and civic engagement projects. Programs like ECCHO exist because equity-conscious investment made them possible. This amendment would make that logic unconstitutional.

PATCH centers young people, particularly young people facing the greatest barriers, as leaders in health care design. It works because it starts from the reality that not everyone enters the health care system on equal footing. This amendment would prohibit public systems from starting from that same reality.

And through our fiscal sponsorship platform, we support eleven community-rooted partner initiatives, from improving maternal health outcomes for immigrant families, to advancing Parkinson's disease policy, to building civic power in Wisconsin's Kinyarwanda-speaking community. All of them are doing work that targets people and communities who have been systematically left out. All of that work becomes harder, and in some cases impossible, if this amendment passes.

We Have Seen This Before

This is not a new idea. Michigan passed a nearly identical amendment in 2006. Researchers have studied what happened.

Diversity in University of Michigan admissions declined. Representation in public employment for women and people of color dropped. Contracts with minority-owned businesses fell. The gap did not close. It widened.

Wisconsin's amendment authors, when pressed, admitted they conducted no research on existing programs or the real-world consequences of eliminating them. None. They proposed a permanent constitutional change that would affect millions of Wisconsinites, without doing the homework.

That is not governance. That is a statement.

Equality Is Not the Same as Equity

Here is the argument you will hear in favor of this amendment: government should treat everyone the same. No preferences. No special consideration.

It sounds fair. But it is not.

Treating everyone the same in a system that has never treated everyone the same does not produce equal outcomes. It preserves the gap. It encodes the starting line as the finish line.

Equity means ensuring that people have what they need to have a genuine shot, not just a formal one. When a Black woman in Wisconsin is significantly more likely to die in childbirth than a white woman, telling hospitals they cannot consider race in designing support programs does not make her safer. It makes the system more comfortable with her risk.

That is what this amendment asks Wisconsin to do. To make government systems more comfortable with the disparities that exist, rather than equipped to address them.

What You Can Do

Vote no on November 3.

Tell the people in your life what this amendment actually does, not what the ballot language implies. Share this post. Talk to your neighbors. Let the League of Women Voters, the ACLU of Wisconsin, and other organizations fighting this know they have your support.

And if you want to understand more about what is at stake for health equity in Wisconsin, and the community-driven work that depends on policies like the ones this amendment would eliminate, I hope you will take a few minutes to learn about what Embolden WI and our partners are building.

We are going upstream. We are building the conditions where fewer people are pushed into the river in the first place.

This amendment would dam that work. We are voting no.

For more information, please connect to and follow the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin and access their Anti-Equity Constitutional Amendment on the November 3rd Balow Educational Toolkit