Wisconsin's Constitution will have a new amendment to provide more rights to victims of crime during prosecutions after voters overwhelmingly supported the idea in Tuesday's spring election.

The amendment, known as Marsy's Law, is set to pass with 76% of votes in favor already counted with 25% of precincts reporting results Tuesday.

Lawmakers first adopted the Marsy's Law amendment in 2017 and again in 2019 before it moved to voters in the April 7 election.

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The amendment is named after Marsy Nicholas, who was killed in California in 1983, and the campaign to amend state constitutions to enact more protections for crime victims is funded by her brother, Henry T. Nicholas III.

Marsy Nicholas was murdered by an ex-boyfriend who had been stalking her. A week after her death, the ex-boyfriend confronted Nicholas' family in a grocery store, at a time when they did not know he had been released on bail.

Henry Nicholas is the former CEO and co-founder of the technology company Broadcom Corp. and has been accused of crimes himself.

The amendment is similar to others that have been passed in Illinois, California, North Dakota and South Dakota, along with several other states.

The campaign in Wisconsin drew more than $743,000 in spending since May 2018, according to the Facebook ad library. The campaign is in the top 20 of spenders on ads for Facebook in the U.S., the report shows.

Supporters, like Teri Nicolai, who was brutally attacked by her husband in 2004, said the amendment will help give victims a voice during court proceedings and protect their privacy. There is also hope that more victims would report crimes — such as sexual assault — if they were guaranteed more protections under the state constitution.

But despite the high spending and support from victims of crime throughout the state, opponents said adding the amendment to the constitution could be dangerous and that the wording on ballots was misleading. The Wisconsin Justice Initiative has been setting forth some of the strongest opposition.

"It's a really bad idea. It amounts to a wholesale alteration of our criminal justice system," said Dennis Grzezinski, a lawyer representing the Wisconsin Justice Initiative.

The Initiative has even gone as far as to add a tab labeled "Marsy's Flaws" to its website, with a list of the contested portions of the amendment.

The organization unsuccessfully tried to have the amendment removed from the ballot before the April 7 election.

Monday's results come nearly a week after election day — a delay required by a federal court ruling to allow clerks have more time to count an unprecedented number of absentee ballots for an election that was nearly called off over fears of voting at the polls during a pandemic.

Gov. Tony Evers issued an executive order April 6 that would have moved the spring election to June 9 in an effort to prevent more illness and deaths from COVID-19, but hours later, the conservative majority of the state Supreme Court put the election back on track.

Then a U.S. Supreme Court ruling determined at the last minute that absentee ballots had to be postmarked by April 7 to be counted, but many voters never received their ballots and had to choose between heading to the polls or forgoing their vote.

In a separate ruling, a federal judge prohibited local election officials from reporting results before 4 p.m. on April 13, making it one of the strangest elections in state history.

The so-called Marsy's Law amendment appeared on the ballot as such:

"Additional rights of crime victims. Shall section 9 m of article I of the constitution, which gives certain rights to crime victims, be amended to give crime victims additional rights, to require the rights of crime victims be protected with equal force to the protections afforded the accused while leaving federal constitutional rights of the accused intact, and to allow crime victims to enforce their rights in court?"

Laura Schulte can be reached at leschulte@gannett.com and twitter.com/SchulteLaura.