Wisconsin GOP's 'fake' election probe plagued with blunders: 'It doesn't seem like they know what they're doing'

Wisconsin Democrats are calling on Republicans to shut down a "fake investigation" into Donald Trump's election loss after the judge overseeing the review admitted he doesn't understand "how elections work."

The probe, which was authorized by the state legislature's GOP majority, has been marked by glaring errors, blunders and incompetence. Democratic attorney general Josh Kaul, along with voting rights advocates and elected officials, said former judge Michael Gableman's oversight has been laughable, reported the Washington Post.

"It's terrible for democracy in the state," said Madison mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway, a Democrat. "It's corrosive. It undermines confidence in our elections, and it's deeply insulting to our municipal clerks and poll workers. … The thing that should give everybody some confidence is the fact that our elections are not being run by people like attorney Gableman."

Gableman, a former state GOP official, suggested in November that the election might have been stolen from Trump, although multiple court rulings and local recounts upheld Joe Biden's win in Wisconsin by nearly 21,000 votes, but the ex-judge leading the latest probe claimed over the weekend that election laws were "not properly followed," although he didn't describe any examples and recently admitted he didn't understand much about elections.

"No one can call elections laws common sense," he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. "Once you understand them, it may be common sense, but it's not intuitive, and so most people, myself included, do not have a comprehensive understanding or even any understanding of how elections work."

Gableman last week denounced that newspaper's coverage and compared it to the work of Nazi Germany's minister of propaganda, but local officials say the ex-judge's requests for information have been contradictory, haphazard and overly broad.

"Our attorneys have been back and forth with their team trying to understand what they want, because their request was so incredibly broad," said Rhodes-Conway. "Every time we communicate with them, it seems to change."

Election experts say Gableman and his team's lack of understanding shows through their work, which the state's Democrats believe is intended to undermine the election process and justify Trump's election lies.

"It doesn't seem like they have any rules or know what they're doing," said Matthew Weil, director of the Bipartisan Policy Center's Elections Project. "I don't think they're going to do anything to improve confidence in the process."