Frankenstein veto

A Frankenstein veto occurs when an American state governor selectively deletes words from a bill, stitching together the remainder (à la Victor Frankenstein) to form a new bill different from that passed by the legislature.

The practice arises from the power to veto individual words in a bill passed by the legislature rather than the bill in toto. It became particularly prominent in Wisconsin, where a 1930 amendment to the state constitution gave the governor the power to veto parts of a budget. This power was used by governors of both parties "to create spending or to redirect tax funds in ways never approved by the Legislature" by "string[ing] together pieces of separate sentences to create a single new sentence...."

For instance, in 2005 Governor Jim Doyle used selective deletion to transform "a 272-word section of the Legislature's budget into a 20-word sentence that took $427 million from the transportation budget and gave it to public schools." The same technique was used the following year to raise the levy limits on local governments from 2% to 3.86%.

In 2008, the constitution was amended to place certain restrictions on the Frankenstein veto. With those changes, the governor of Wisconsin still has far greater veto powers than any other governor in the United States of America. The Wisconsin State Journal, in response, stated that "no Governor should be allowed to veto all but a couple dozen words and figures across reams of text in state budgets to unilaterally create law from scratch." The New York Times called the practice "a legislative twist on the game of Mad Libs."

Example
Governor Jim Doyle's 2005 veto removed the following struck text from a transportation bill:

These removals reduced the text to read:

Curtailing
Wisconsin had previously eliminated an even more extreme version—dubbed the "Vanna White veto"—in 1990 "when they prohibited state leaders from deleting individual alphabetic letters and numerical characters in a bill to change the intent of the legislation" in response to its controversial use by then-Governor Tommy Thompson.

An amendment to the Wisconsin Constitution passed in 2008 sought to curb the practice even further, but its prohibition on "crossing out words and numbers to create a new sentence from two or more sentences" left intact the Governor's power to "cross out words within a sentence to change its meaning, remove individual digits to create new numbers or delete entire sentences from paragraphs." This loophole has allowed the practice to continue, albeit less frequently. One prominent example occurred in 2023 when Governor Tony Evers exercised his veto power to extend revenue increases for Wisconsin public schools until 2425; he did this by changing the line "for the 2023–2024 school year and the 2024–2025 school year" into "for 2023–2425" ("for the 2023– 2024 school year and the 20 24 –20 25 school year ").