‘Crying wolf again’: Election experts say Wisconsin is prepared to avoid conspiracies

Four years ago, in late September of 2020, the concerns that then-President Donald Trump would not accept the results of the election if he lost began to become more concrete. The COVID-19 pandemic had caused a massive boost in the use of absentee voting and Trump had warned his supporters not to use the voting method.

Then, in the days after the election when the result remained in doubt, conspiracy theories began to spread around the country. In Wisconsin, Trump supporters complained of a “ballot dump” in Milwaukee that flipped the result for Joe Biden (actually the surge in absentee ballots had just made it slower for election workers at the city’s central count location to tally the votes).

“There’s been a travesty at the ballot box,” one voter told the Wisconsin Examiner on Nov. 6, a day before Biden was declared the winner. “We’re seeing unbelievable numbers of ballot harvesting, voter fraud, election fraud and nothing’s being done to correct the situation in cities like Detroit, Philadelphia and Atlanta.”

That same weekend, a Wisconsin attorney and the Trump campaign began to shape a plan. That plan — created as Trump’s final legal avenues to overturn the election results ran out — would soon become the fake elector scheme, in which Republicans in Wisconsin and six other states where Biden had won cast false slates of electors for Trump. The plot underpinned the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, urged on by Trump, as Congress attempted to certify that Biden had in fact won the election. Trump’s supporters used the fake elector scheme to argue that the certification should be stopped so that the fraudulent electoral votes could be counted.

In the months after the election, multiple reviews, audits and investigations were launched, searching for the voter fraud that Trump and his supporters baselessly claimed had stolen the election from him. By June, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos had tasked state Rep. Janel Brandtjen (R-Menomonee Falls) and former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman with running their own investigations into the election. Gableman and Brandtjen ultimately joined calls for the election results to be decertified and drew massive amounts of criticism.

Gableman’s review ran for more than a year, racking up legal fees and keeping public records hidden, without finding any evidence of fraud. Brandtjen, who was at the time the chair of the Assembly’s elections committee, repeatedly invited conspiracy theorists to testify, giving a platform to debunked claims of wrongdoing.

After Gableman’s review ended, state Rep. Tim Ramthun ran a Republican primary campaign for governor entirely on a platform of election conspiracy theorism. Election deniers in Wisconsin state government along with local activists Peter Bernegger of New London (previously convicted of fraud) and Harry Wait, of Union Grove (charged with felonies after illegally requesting absentee ballots), as well as former Menomonee Falls Village President Jefferson Davis became the core of the state Republican Party’s election denying wing — with allies in the Legislature and a sizable number of voters on their side.

But despite the hold that election conspiracy theories have on a subset of Wisconsin Republicans, elections experts say the state is prepared for 2024 and unlikely to see a repeat of the 2020 effort to overturn results.

“It’ll be a case of crying wolf again,” Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause Wisconsin, says. “All of this was done in 2020 to no effect, with no evidence.”

Laws and rules have been changed or clarified; election officials and others have spent countless hours repeatedly sharing factual information about how the voting system works; the two attorneys central to planning the false elector scheme have been charged by the state Department of Justice with felonies, Wisconsin’s fake electors have agreed as part of a settlement deal that they tried to falsify the results of the election and that they will not serve as Trump electors in the future, and Trump no longer has the element of surprise.

Mandell says he thinks the small fringe of election deniers in Wisconsin will make baseless accusations while Heck says he’s looking out for efforts to discourage people from voting and staying vigilant against disruptive observers at polling places and central count locations where absentee ballots are tallied. But generally, the two say they’re confident clerks, election officials and legal observers are prepared.

“There’s no doubt that there continue to be things thrown at the wall, but I think we’re in a much better place than we were four years ago or even before that,” Jeff Mandell, general counsel at the voting rights-focused nonprofit firm Law Forward, says. “When I think about threats to this election, there are, of course, things, both in Wisconsin and around the country, that we continue to hear. And we are thinking through and preparing for those things, but I regard those as really low likelihood problems. And so while we’re doing everything we can to be ready, in case one of them does rear its head in Wisconsin, I’m pretty skeptical that one will.”

Leading up to the election, Republican politicians continue to make false claims about the system. Last week, U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany and a number of county sheriffs held a press conference to attack the use of absentee ballot drop boxes and warn of attempts by non-citizens to vote. Republicans in Congress have tied the passage of a federal spending bill to the SAVE Act, which outlaws voting by noncitizens in federal elections, something that is already a felony carrying penalties of imprisonment and deportation and which data shows happens incredibly rarely.

“This just doesn’t happen,” Mandell says. “It is already illegal under state law. It is already illegal under federal law. The consequences are tremendous. And so I would actually say that I think some of this carping about this fictitious idea of non-citizen voting is just evidence of how much election denialism has been marginalized because there’s almost nothing left for them to talk about.”

Earlier this year, the Wisconsin Supreme Court overturned a previous decision, once again allowing the use of drop boxes for returning absentee ballots. A number of election clerks in Republican parts of the state have decided not to use the method because of unsubstantiated warnings that they are vulnerable to fraud and “ballot harvesting,” the alleged practice of political groups rounding up and returning hundreds of absentee ballots at once.

The national Republican party has promised to send more than 100,000 volunteers to serve as election observers. During the last election, a number of Wisconsin’s most prominent election deniers had the police called on them for disrupting voting during the Democratic primary in an August special election for state Senate. They promised to be back in November.

In the small town of Thornapple in Rusk County, the U.S. Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against local officials for repeatedly refusing to use electronic voting machines and instead hand counting ballots. The lawsuit argues the town must use machines that allow voters with disabilities to vote. Election conspiracy theorists have regularly called for the hand counting of ballots over concerns that electronic machines — which aren’t connected to the internet — are susceptible to hacking. Election officials say that hand counting adds the threat of human error and voting machines are much more accurate.

In other states, voting rights advocates have warned that Republican members of election boards and other agencies central to the certification of election results may step in and refuse to certify the election if Trump loses. Mandell says that Wisconsin’s decentralized voting system helps defend against that threat.

Each municipality has a board of canvass responsible for certifying the local election results, which then get sent to the county boards of canvass and then on to the state. Mandell says that the role played by local officials Wisconsin means someone denying the certification would be tossing out the votes of their friends and neighbors. That’s an important safeguard, he says.

“You’re talking about folks not saying ‘I am skeptical of elections,’ or ‘I don’t like election machines,’ or some other nonsense,” he says. “You’re talking about people saying ‘I want to throw out my friends’ and neighbors’ votes. I don’t want my spouse’s vote to count or my family’s votes to count.’ And I think people are understandably and correctly reticent to say such a thing.”

Wisconsin Examiner is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Wisconsin Examiner maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Ruth Conniff for questions: info@wisconsinexaminer.com. Follow Wisconsin Examiner on Facebook and X.