The Vanna White veto was a Wisconsin partial-veto technique that let the governor strike individual letters out of an appropriation bill so the surviving letters spelled entirely different words, producing law the legislature never wrote. Named after the Wheel of Fortune host who reveals letters on a game board, it was banned by a 1990 constitutional amendment that prohibits the governor from creating a new word by rejecting individual letters in an enrolled bill.1Justia. Wisconsin Constitution Article V – Executive Section 10 The underlying partial veto power, however, is still considered the broadest in the country, and Wisconsin governors have kept finding new ways to rewrite budget language through subtraction.
How the Letter-Striking Worked
Wisconsin’s constitution lets the governor approve appropriation bills “in whole or in part,” with the approved portion becoming law.1Justia. Wisconsin Constitution Article V – Executive Section 10 Before 1990, governors read “in part” to mean they could strike anything on the page: paragraphs, sentences, single words, individual letters, individual digits. The Vanna White veto pushed that reading to its limit. A governor could draw a line through selected letters inside a word so the remaining characters spelled something else. Repeated across a paragraph, the technique could shrink 121 words to 22 and give the passage a meaning the legislature had never approved.2Wisconsin State Legislature. The Wisconsin Governor’s Partial Veto
The practical effects were extreme. Three struck letters could turn “cannot” into “can,” flipping a prohibition into a permission. Deleting a prefix could invert a word. Dates and dollar figures could be reshaped by removing digits. Because the edits happened after passage, lawmakers had no chance to debate the resulting text. The governor was writing new statutes by deletion.
Who Used It
Governor Anthony Earl introduced the technique in 1983, applying it to the biennial budget. In one instance, Earl reduced a five-sentence paragraph about appeals of municipal waste disposal decisions to a single 22-word sentence that redirected those appeals from the Public Service Commission to the courts.3Wisconsin State Legislature. The Wisconsin Governor’s Partial Veto after Bartlett v. Evers The nickname stuck during this period.
Governor Tommy Thompson then used the power on a much larger scale. He applied 290 separate partial vetoes to the 1987–89 biennial budget, and 457 to the 1991 biennial budget, a single-bill record that still stands.4Wisconsin State Legislature. The Wisconsin Governor’s Partial Veto after Bartlett v. Evers In one case, the legislature authorized detaining certain juveniles for “not more than 48 hours.” Thompson vetoed “48 hours” and struck letters and words from a neighboring sentence so the text read “ten days,” more than tripling the detention limit through letter-level editing. He also stripped conditions from spending provisions, converting restricted funds into discretionary ones.
The 1990 Amendment That Banned It
In April 1990, Wisconsin voters approved an amendment to Article V, Section 10 stating: “In approving an appropriation bill in part, the governor may not create a new word by rejecting individual letters in the words of the enrolled bill.”1Justia. Wisconsin Constitution Article V – Executive Section 10 The measure passed with about 60.5 percent of the vote.5Ballotpedia. How Wisconsin’s Partial Veto Power Has Evolved Through 95 Years of Ballot Measures The Vanna White veto, as Earl and Thompson had used it, was finished.
Governors adapted. Rather than rearrange letters inside a word, they began striking whole words and sentences from different parts of a bill and reading what remained together to form new provisions. Critics called this the Frankenstein veto because it stitched together fragments the legislature never intended to combine. A second amendment in April 2008 blocked that move too, barring the governor from creating “a new sentence by combining parts of 2 or more sentences of the enrolled bill.”1Justia. Wisconsin Constitution Article V – Executive Section 10
What the Governor Can Still Do
The two amendments closed two specific loopholes. Everything else survived. The governor can still strike entire words, sentences, paragraphs, or pages from an appropriation bill, and can still delete individual digits inside numbers.1Justia. Wisconsin Constitution Article V – Executive Section 10 Two recent examples show how much room remains.
In 2017, Governor Scott Walker changed a program deadline from 2018 to 3018 by striking a single digit, extending the provision by a thousand years. In 2023, Governor Tony Evers went further. The legislature had passed a per-pupil school revenue increase “for the 2023–24 school year and the 2024–25 school year.” Evers struck the “20” and the hyphen from “2024–25,” leaving “2023–2425,” and a two-year increase became a 402-year one.6Wisconsin Court System. LeMieux v. Evers Neither move violated the 1990 or 2008 amendments because neither built a new word from letters or a new sentence from sentence fragments.
The Digit-Striking Question in LeMieux v. Evers
The 400-year veto was tested in LeMieux v. Evers, decided by the Wisconsin Supreme Court on April 18, 2025. In a 4–3 decision, the court upheld the veto. Challengers argued that 402 years is not “part of” two years, so the edit exceeded the governor’s authority to approve a bill “in part.” The court rejected that reading, finding it misapplied an earlier precedent that concerned write-in vetoes, a practice no longer at issue.6Wisconsin Court System. LeMieux v. Evers
The court also confronted whether striking digits to form a new number ran afoul of the 1990 letter-in-words prohibition. The majority held that the amendment “plainly does not prohibit the governor from striking digits to create new numbers,” reading its text as limited to letters in words.6Wisconsin Court System. LeMieux v. Evers Reshaping dollar amounts, dates, and numerical thresholds by removing digits is therefore still permitted.
The Limits That Remain
Two hard rules bind the governor. No new word can be formed by deleting letters from existing words. No new sentence can be assembled by combining fragments of separate sentences. Beyond that, the surviving text after a partial veto must, under the standard from Wisconsin Senate v. Thompson (1988), amount to “a complete, entire, and workable law.”1Justia. Wisconsin Constitution Article V – Executive Section 10
The partial veto reaches only appropriation bills, not ordinary legislation. In practice that limit is narrower than it sounds, because Wisconsin’s biennial budget is an omnibus measure covering nearly every area of state policy. A legislative override requires a two-thirds vote of the members present in each house.1Justia. Wisconsin Constitution Article V – Executive Section 10 The Vanna White veto itself is gone, but the tool it exemplified — rewriting a bill by cutting characters out of it — is still in the governor’s hand, now aimed at digits rather than letters.