Henry Redman, Wisconsin Examiner

The Wisconsin Elections Commission found that the city of Madison failing to count nearly 200 absentee ballots cast in last year’s November election was the result of a “confluence of errors” and a “complete lack of leadership” in the city clerk’s office, according to a draft report of WEC’s investigation into the incident.

The Madison city clerk’s office told the elections commission in a memo Dec. 20 about the lost ballots from two Madison wards. A bag containing 68 unprocessed absentee ballots from two wards was found Nov. 12 in a tabulator bin, the memo stated. During reconciliation of ballots on Dec. 3, clerk employees found two sealed envelopes containing a total of 125 unprocessed absentee ballots from another ward. The discovery of the missing ballots was announced to the public Dec. 26.

The missing ballots were not enough to change the result of any local, state or federal elections.

WEC’s investigation into the matter was led by the commission’s chair, Ann Jacobs, a Democratic appointee, and Don Millis, the commission’s most recent Republican-appointed chair. The investigation took six months and involved 13 depositions and the review of more than 2,000 documents.

The report on the investigation, which goes to the full commission for approval in a meeting next week, found five counts in which the city’s clerk, Maribeth Witzel-Behl, acted “contrary to” state election law.

Witzel-Behl resigned from her position in April after nearly 20 years as city clerk.

The investigation found that the city exposed itself to mistakes by printing the pollbooks for polling places — the log in which election staff records when a voter’s ballot has been received and counted — three weeks before Election Day. That time frame meant that by the time polls opened on Nov. 5, the record in the book of which voters had already returned their absentee ballot was out of date.

Additionally, the city “failed to track absentee envelopes and bags” meaning that large manila envelopes and courier bags full of absentee ballots weren’t numbered and organized by ward.

“This meant that the polling places would not know how many Courier Bags or Carrier Envelopes to expect and with what seal numbers,” the report states. “Had they been given those numbers, they would have been able to immediately know if they were short a bag or an envelope and could have immediately looked for the missing item.”

According to the report, the most likely explanation for the ballots not being counted at the polling places on Election Day is that they were never delivered to the polls.

Much of the report is a blistering criticism of Witzel-Behl’s leadership and response to the missing ballots, particularly her decision to leave on vacation on Nov. 13 — while the city was still working through the ballot reconciliation process.

“The lack of action by the City Clerk with regard to the found ballots is astonishing,” the report states. “She demonstrated no urgency, let alone interest, in including those votes in the election tally. At the time the Ward 65 ballots were found, the county canvass was continuing, and those ballots could have easily been counted. That would have required the City Clerk to take the urgent action that the situation demanded.”

“Instead, she went on vacation and, per her testimony, never inquired about them again until mid-December,” the report continues. “There was nobody who took responsibility for these ballots. It was always someone else’s job. Rather than acknowledge these significant errors, the City Clerk and her staff either ignored the issue or willfully refused to inform the necessary parties and seek assistance. These actions resulted in nearly 200 lawful voters’ votes going uncounted – an unconscionable result. This profound failure undermines public confidence in elections.”

The report found that Witzel-Behl potentially violated state law by abusing her discretion to run Madison’s elections, printing the pollbooks too early, failing to maintain records on the handling of absentee ballots, failing to properly oversee the staff responsible for counting the absentee ballots and failing to inform the city’s board of canvassers about the missing ballots.

“It was the job of the City Clerk to immediately take action once notified about the found ballots, and she did nothing,” the report states. “It was the responsibility of the Deputy Clerk to take action in her absence, and he did nothing. These ballots were treated as unimportant and a reconciliation nuisance, rather than as the essential part of our democracy they represent.”

If the report is approved by WEC, it will require Madison to certify it has taken a number of actions to correct the problems from November. Those requirements include developing an internal plan delineating which employee is responsible for statutorily required tasks, printing poll books no earlier than the Thursday before elections, changing the absentee ballot processing system so bags and envelopes aren’t lost, updating instructional materials for poll workers and completing a full inspection of all materials before the scheduled board of canvassers meeting after an election.

WEC is scheduled to vote on the report’s findings at its July 17 meeting.

U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden says he’s working on a proposal that would alter two current work authorization programs to make it easier for businesses including farms and hotels to hire immigrant workers.

Van Orden, who sits on the House agriculture committee, told the news outlet NOTUS that he’s working with Trump administration officials on a proposal to alter the H-2A and H-2B visa programs. Both programs currently provide temporary work visas for people working seasonally.

The H-2A program, which is targeted at seasonal farm labor, has frustrated Wisconsin dairy farmers because year-round workers, including in dairy, are not eligible for the program. Immigrant workers comprise an estimated 70% of the labor force on Wisconsin dairy farms.

“Rocks are heavy. Trees are made of wood. Gravity is real. There’s 20 million illegal aliens here that have been floating agriculture, hospitality and construction for decades, and we need their labor,” Van Orden told NOTUS.

Van Orden said the proposal is in line with the Trump administration’s increased immigration enforcement efforts because it doesn’t offer a pathway to citizenship or encourage an increase in unauthorized crossings of the border while making it easier for people to come to the U.S. to work.

“That’s why people come here illegally, because it’s so hard to come here legally,” Van Orden said. “We’re all working towards the goal of making sure that our economy can maintain its relevancy.”

Former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, who led a widely derided review of the 2020 presidential election, searching for evidence for baseless accusations of fraud, will have his law license suspended for three years, according to a stipulated agreement between him and the state Office of Lawyer Regulation (OLR).

Law Forward, the progressive voting rights focused firm, filed a grievance against Gableman with the OLR in 2023. The OLR filed a complaint against Gableman in November that alleged, among other counts, that he had failed to “provide competent representation” and to “abstain from all offensive personality” and of violating attorney-client privilege.

The allegations against Gableman stemmed from his treatment of the mayors of Green Bay and Madison, whom he threatened with jail time during his review, false statements he made during testimony to legislative committees, violating the state’s open records laws, breaching his contract with Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and, when OLR began investigating him, “making false statements” to the investigators in an affidavit.

As part of the stipulated agreement, Gableman admitted that “he cannot successfully defend against the allegations of misconduct … and agrees that the allegations of the complaint provide an adequate factual basis in the record.”

In a statement, Law Forward’s general counsel Jeff Mandel said that Gableman’s actions “were and continue to be a threat to our democracy and the rule of law.”

“Our justice system can work only if everyone plays by the rules,” Mandell said. “Two years and one month after Law Forward first filed a grievance with the Office of Lawyer Regulation explaining how Gableman’s unethical behavior did lasting damage to the public’s faith in elections, we are glad to see consequences for those who plan and promote overturning the will of the people.”

“Gableman violated his sworn duty to uphold both the U.S. and the Wisconsin constitutions and his obligations as an attorney,” Mandell continued. “He broke more rules than he followed, acting with complete indifference to election law, procedural norms, and the ethical obligations that bind attorneys. With this deal, Gableman stipulates that he misled courts, lied in public meetings, and violated government transparency laws.”

A political action committee associated with Elon Musk is offering Wisconsin voters $100 if they sign a petition “in opposition to activist judges” and another $100 if they refer another person who signs the petition. The petition requires people to provide a name, address, email and phone number — information that will help the group make further contact with voters.

The group, America PAC, has reported spending more than $7 million in support of Waukesha County Judge Brad Schimel’s campaign for state Supreme Court. Musk himself has contributed more than $13 million to pro-Schimel efforts.

During the campaign, Schimel’s opponent, Dane County Judge Susan Crawford, has accused Musk of trying to buy a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Musk’s company, Tesla, recently filed a lawsuit against the state seeking to change Wisconsin’s law about who can operate car dealerships within the state.

Schimel himself has portrayed himself as a “support network” for President Donald Trump if elected to the Court.

Derrick Honeyman, a spokesperson for the Crawford campaign, accused Musk of “buying votes.”

“Elon Musk is trying to buy a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court to secure a favorable ruling in his company’s lawsuit against the state,” Honeyman said. “Now Musk has resorted to buying votes. Brad Schimel has spent his career looking out for wealthy special interests and campaign donors, and Musk wants a justice who will rule in his favor to help his own bottom line. Wisconsinites can see right through this extreme corruption and they don’t want a slimy billionaire like Elon Musk or a corrupt politician like Brad Schimel controlling the Wisconsin Supreme Court.”

The payouts from America PAC mirror an effort the group undertook during last year’s presidential election when it circulated a petition expressing support for free speech and gun rights and gave daily awards of $1 million to voters in swing states that had signed similar petitions.

by Henry Redman, Wisconsin Examiner

March 6, 2025

Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Brad Schimel told a group of canvassers in Waukesha County last weekend that he needs to be elected to provide a “support network” for President Donald Trump and shared complaints about the 2020 election that have been frequently espoused by election deniers.

In a video of the remarks, Schimel is speaking to a group of canvassers associated with Turning Point USA — a right-wing political group that has become increasingly active in Wisconsin’s Republican party.

On the campaign trail, Schimel, a Waukesha County judge and former Republican state attorney general, has repeatedly said he is running for the Supreme Court to bring impartiality back to the body. He’s claimed that since the Court’s liberals gained a majority after the 2023 election, it has been legislating from the bench on behalf of the Democratic party.

ALSO READ: 'Absolutely unconscionable': Ex-Republican demands Trump removed from office after fight

But in more private events and to more conservative audiences, he’s often spoken more openly about his conservative politics.

At the Turning Point event, he said that prior to the 2024 presidential election, the country “had walked up to edge of the abyss and we could hear the wind howling,” but that the Republican party and its supporters helped the country take “a couple steps back” by electing Donald Trump.

Democrats and their “media allies” still have “bulldozers waiting to push into all that,” he said, by bringing lawsuits to stop Trump’s efforts to dismantle federal agencies without the approval of Congress, end birthright citizenship and fire thousands of federal workers.

“Donald Trump doesn’t do this by himself, there has to be a support network around it,” Schimel said. “They filed over 70 lawsuits against him since he took the oath of office barely a month ago, over 70 lawsuits to try to stop almost every single thing he’s doing because they don’t want him to get a win. They’re so desperate for him to not get a win that they won’t let America have a win. That’s what they’re doing. The only way we’re going to stop that is if the courts stop it. That’s the only place to stop this lawfare.”

When Schimel was the state attorney general, he lobbied the Republican-controlled Legislature to create the position of solicitor general under the state Department of Justice to help him file lawsuits against Democratic policies enacted by then-President Barack Obama. Republicans cut the position after Democrat Josh Kaul defeated Schimel in the 2018 election.

During his time in office Schimel joined a lawsuit with the state of Texas to have the Affordable Care Act declared unconstitutional. After the suit was successful in a Texas court, he said, “I’m glad he did this before I left office, because I got one more win before moving on.”

Kaul withdrew the state from the lawsuit after taking office in 2019, and the the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the suit by a 7-2 vote.

But, in his Turning Point remarks, Schimel accused his opponent, Dane County Judge Susan Crawford, of participating in the kind of “lawfare” that is being used against Trump now.

“My opponent is an expert on lawfare,” he said, citing her work as a lawyer against the state’s voter ID law and support from liberal billionaire donors.

Crawford campaign spokesperson Derrick Honeyman said that Schimel’s comments show he’ll be a “rubber stamp” for the Republican party.

“Brad Schimel’s latest remarks are no surprise, especially coming from someone who’s been caught on his knees begging for money and is bought and paid for by Elon Musk,” Honeyman said. “Schimel is not running to be a fair and impartial member of the Supreme Court, but rather be a rubber-stamp for Musk and a far-right agenda to ban abortion and strip away health care. Schimel has recently been caught behind closed doors saying the Supreme Court ‘screwed’ Trump over by refusing to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and these latest remarks are all part of a pattern of extreme and shady behavior from Schimel. Wisconsin deserves a Supreme Court Justice who answers to the people, not the highest bidder.”

Schimel’s campaign has received millions in support from political action committees associated with Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, who has been leading Trump’s effort to slash government programs.

Earlier this week, the Washington Post reported that Schimel told a group of supporters in Jefferson County that Trump had been “screwed over” by the Wisconsin Supreme Court when it ruled against his effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election. In his remarks in Waukesha, he highlighted a number of talking points popular with many of the state’s most prominent 2020 election deniers. He blamed decisions by the Supreme Court for allowing those issues to persist.

“There were a string of other cases that the Supreme Court refused to hear before the election that impacted the election that year unquestionably,” Schimel said.

Schimel pointed to the issue of special voting deputies in nursing homes as a major problem.

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, officials known as special voting deputies who normally go into nursing homes to help residents cast absentee ballots were unable to enter those facilities.

Republicans have claimed that decision allowed people who should have been ineligible to vote because they’d been declared incompetent to cast a ballot. Conspiracy theorists have pointed to affidavits filed by family members of nursing home residents that their relatives were able to vote. Only a judge can declare someone incompetent to vote, however.

The issue led to the Republican sheriff of Racine County to accuse members of the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) of committing felony election fraud and became a target in former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman’s widely derided review of the 2020 election.

Schimel also blamed the election commission’s decision to exclude the Green Party’s candidates from the ballot that year for Trump’s loss. WEC voted not to allow the party on the ballot because there were errors with the candidate’s addresses on the paperwork. The party sued to have the decision overturned, but the Supreme Court ruled 4-3 against the party because it was too close to the election.

While conservatives held the majority on the Court at the time, Schimel blamed liberals.

“Well, that was with three liberals and a conservative getting soft headed,” Schimel said, referring to Justice Brian Hagedorn, who frequently acted as a swing vote when conservatives controlled the Court.

Schimel added: “Those billionaires from around the country said, ‘What if we could get four liberals on the court? Then we don’t have to fool a conservative into doing something stupid.’ And then they did it in 2023. They bought that election, and they stole the Wisconsin Supreme Court, and they put us in chaos ever since.”

Mike Browne, a spokesperson for progressive political group A Better Wisconsin Together, said Schimel is willing to say anything to curry favor with right-wing supporters and financial backers.

“Brad Schimel has extreme positions like using an 1849 law to try to ban abortion, supporting pardons for violent January 6 insurrectionists, endorsing debunked 2020 election lies, and shilling for Elon Musk,” Browne said. “His bungling attempts to try to talk his way out of it when he gets called out don’t change the fact that time and again we see Brad Schimel on his knees for right-wing campaign cash instead of standing up for Wisconsin or our rights and freedoms.”

The Schimel campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

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.

by Henry Redman, Ohio Capital Journal

February 21, 2025

Kayakers on Wisconsin’s Lake Superior coastline rely on data collected by buoys operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to determine if conditions are safe enough for a weekend paddle or if the swells and wind could spell danger on a lake famous for wrecking much larger watercraft.

ALSO READ: 'Gotta be kidding': Jim Jordan scrambles as he's confronted over Musk 'double standard'

Surfers in Sheboygan use buoys on Lake Michigan to figure out if the city is living up to its name as the “Malibu of the Midwest” on a given day. Anglers on the shores and on the ice all over the lakes rely on the buoy data to track fish populations.

Freighters sailing from Duluth, Minnesota and Superior use NOAA data to track weather patterns and ice coverage.

Wisconsin’s maritime economy provides nearly 50,000 jobs and nearly $3 billion to the state’s gross domestic product, according to a 2024 NOAA report, but in the first month of the administration of President Donald Trump, the agency is being threatened.

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s School of Freshwater Sciences, UW-Madison’s Sea Grant and UW Extension’s National Estuarine Research Reserve use funds through NOAA grant programs to study the state’s two Great Lakes.

Faculty at universities across the state receive NOAA money to study weather forecasting, severe droughts and precipitation on the Pacific Ocean. NOAA helps the state Department of Administration manage more than 1,000 miles of coastline and funds local efforts to control erosion and prevent flooding. A previous NOAA project worked with the state’s Native American tribes to study manoomin, also known as wild rice, to help maintain the plant that is sacred to the tribes and plays an important ecological role.

All of that research could be at risk if cuts are made at NOAA.

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — named for an internet meme of a shiba inu (a breed of Japanese hunting dog) first made popular more than a decade ago — has set its sights on NOAA. In early February, staffers with DOGE entered NOAA’s offices seeking access to its IT system, the Guardian reported. A week later, the outlet reported that scientists at the agency would need to gain approval from a Trump appointee before communicating with foreign nationals. The agency has been asked to identify climate change-related grant projects.

To run the agency, Trump has nominated Neil Jacobs as NOAA administrator. Jacobs was cited for misconduct after he and other officials put pressure on NOAA scientists to alter forecasts about 2019’s Hurricane Dorian in a scandal that became known as “Sharpiegate.” Trump has also nominated Taylor Jordan as the assistant Secretary of Commerce overseeing NOAA. Jordan previously worked as a lobbyist for private weather forecasting agencies that would benefit from the dismantling of NOAA — which runs the National Weather Service.

A suggested Trump administration plan for NOAA was laid out in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint. The plan calls for NOAA to “be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories,” because it has “become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.”

Sara Hudson, the city of Ashland’s director of parks and recreation, says the community is dependent on Lake Superior year round and funding from NOAA helps the city manage its coastline. She says the city has about $1.2 million in grant funding that could be affected by cuts at NOAA. The city’s total 2024-25 budget is about $2.4 million.

“With the funding that Ashland has, we really don’t have a lot of access to be able to do coastal resiliency or coastal management projects,” she says. “So we rely on grants to be able to do extra.” Among the affected projects, she says, could be coastal resiliency projects that help maintain public access to a waterfront trail along Lake Superior, projects to help improve water quality including the Bay City Creek project and work on invasive species and promoting native species within public lands.

Even if Trump and Musk are trying to erase climate change research from NOAA’s mandate, the effect of a warming climate could have dire consequences for Ashland’s lake-based economy, according to Hudson. Hundreds of businesses on Lake Superior can’t survive if the tourism season ends in the fall.

“For a community that relies on winter and every year sees less winter, economically it could be devastating,” Hudson says. “We need to have tourism 12 months out of the year. And if our winters go away, that really, that’s going to be a pivot to us. But our winter … that’s the only way our businesses can stay alive here.”

The Great Lakes provide drinking water for about 40 million people across the United States and Canada. Organizations like the National Estuarine Research Reserve are funded by NOAA to help make sure that water is healthy.

“We’re doing things like tracking algae blooms and changes in water quality that are really important for tourism and fishing and drinking water,” Deanna Erickson, the research reserve’s director, says. “On Lake Superior we’re working in rural communities on flood emergencies and emergency management and coastal erosion; 70% of the reserve’s operational funding comes through NOAA, and that’s matched with state funds. So in Superior, Wisconsin, that’s, you know, a pretty big economic impact here we have about a million dollars in funding for our operations.”

Eric Peace, vice president of the Ohio-based Lake Carriers Association, says that cuts to NOAA could have drastic effects on Great Lakes shipping because the data collected by the agency is crucial to navigating the lakes safely.

“On Lake Michigan, those buoys are critical to navigation safety, because what they do is provide real time data on wind, waves, current water temperatures, etc,” he says. “And our captains use those extensively to avoid storms and to find places to transit and leave.”

Further north on Lake Superior, real-time reports on water conditions are crucial because of how dangerous the lake can get.

“I was stationed on a buoy tender in Alaska, and I’d take the 30-footers that you get up there over the 10-footers you get on Lake Superior, because they’re so close together here,” says Peace, who spent more than 20 years in the U.S. Coast Guard. “They’re all wind-driven, and they’re dangerous. Couple that with icing and everything else, you have a recipe for disaster.”

The DOGE mandate for NOAA scientists to stop communicating with foreign nationals could have a significant impact on Great Lakes shipping because the agency coordinates with the Coast Guard and a Canadian agency to track ice conditions on the Great Lakes.

“That is one area that would be detrimental,” Peace says. “We wouldn’t have that ice forecasting from the Canadians. We would have to assume control of that completely for our own sake.”

U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin recently introduced a bipartisan bill with a group of senators from seven other Great Lakes states to increase funding for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. The initiative involves 12 federal agencies, including NOAA, to keep the lakes clean. In a statement, Baldwin said she’d work to fight against any efforts that would harm Wisconsin’s Great Lakes.

“Republicans are slashing support for our veterans, cancer research, and now, they are coming after resources that keep our Great Lakes clean and open for business — all to find room in the budget to give their billionaire friends a tax break,” she said. “Wisconsin communities, farmers, and businesses rely on our Great Lakes, and I’ll stand up to any efforts that will hurt them and their way of life.”

Ohio Capital Journal is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com.

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.

At a town hall event in La Crosse Thursday evening, former President Donald Trump gave long, often rambling responses to questions from voters and former Democratic U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard.

The event started more than an hour late because Trump’s rally earlier in the afternoon in Michigan ran long and more than once during his responses he mused that he didn’t know it was a town hall until right before. Trump spoke for about 30 minutes, taking about six questions.

Gabbard, who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 before dropping out and endorsing President Joe Biden, opened the event by saying it was an exciting week because “two former Democratic candidates for president have endorsed Donald Trump to be president of the United States,” referring to herself and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who ended his independent campaign for president last week.

Gabbard never polled at more than 2% in any state in her campaign and Kennedy switched his party affiliation before primary voting started earlier this year.

In her first question, Gabbard told Trump about her own personal history as she and her husband tried unsuccessfully to have a child through in vitro fertilization (IVF). Ahead of the event, Trump had announced a proposed policy for his administration in which the government would cover, or force insurance to cover, the costs of IVF.

After that policy announcement, Democrats quickly pointed out that Republicans across the country have acted to block access to IVF. Challenges to IVF began after the U.S. Supreme Court, including anti-abortion justices appointed by Trump, overturned Roe v. Wade. They also pointed out that Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, voted against a bill that would have protected IVF access.

In response to Gabbard’s question about IVF, Trump talked for nearly ten minutes, touching on Social Security; Michigan’s car industry; the so-called “fake news” media; the political views of his opponent Vice President Kamala Harris’ father and a shipbuilding contract in Marinette.

“I didn’t know about your situation, and it’s tough stuff, right?” Trump said. “Life is pretty tough. It can be beautiful, but it can be difficult. We are doing something with IVF, because IVF, as you know, for friends, people you know, it’s really worked out very well. For a lot of people, it gave them a child when they would not have had a child. And I told my people I wanted to look at this a couple of weeks ago.”

Trump then segued directly into a new topic before returning to the question about IVF: “And as you know, we have no taxes on a thing called tips. You know that? And I said, Tell me, we did three things. We did that, and we did no tax for seniors on Social Security benefits. We want to have that. And I’ve been seeing a lot of IVF, and I kept hearing that I’m against it, and I’m actually very much for it. In fact, in Alabama, where the judge ruled against it, and I countered the judge and came out with a very strong statement for it. And the Alabama [Legislature] they were amazing. The Legislature approved virtually my statement. I mean, full IVF, and it’s really gone — it’s terrific. And I said, so, with the tips and with the Social Security, no taxes on Social Security, I said, maybe for IVF, and I’ve been looking at it, and what we’re going to do is for people that are using IVF, which is fertilization, we are, government is going to pay for it, or we’re going to get or mandate your insurance company to pay for it, which is going to be great. We’re going to do that. Well, it’s big. And you know what? We want to produce babies in this country, right? We want to produce babies. So I think it’s going to be something we told we sort of announced it a little bit.”

Without taking a break, Trump then moved on to talk about the rally he had just attended: “We were in a great place, Michigan. We all love Michigan, right? We’re going to bring back the car industry, and we’re going to get a lot of it back to Michigan. They’ve been taking our cars away. They’ve been taking our manufacturing away over years, over decades. And if you look at it today, it’s a shell of what it was years ago, but we’re going to bring it back. Mexico is right now building massive car factories, actually being financed and built by China. They think all their cars back into our country — it’s not going to happen. That’s not going to happen. Oh, listen to that. That is not going to happen. But so much, so many things have gone wrong in the car industry. The union leadership has been horrible. I think I’m going to win by 85% the union but because we’re bringing back and we’re gonna have electric cars, but we’re gonna have gasoline powered cars, and we’re gonna have hybrids, we’re gonna have every kind of car. We’re not gonna go with just that. But I just felt that it would be a good place to announce it. And we did sort of the announcement there a little bit, and now we do the big announcement tonight in front of all of these television stations, all of the fake news, they’re all over the place. They’re all over the place. I don’t know what’s going on.”

Then Trump moved directly to his statement that he didn’t know about the town hall format in Wisconsin: “We don’t even know, I was saying because we’re doing this, and I finished, and I figured I was going to come here and we’re going to make a speech. I had a speech all set for you. I was ready. They said, ‘Sir, you’re actually doing a town hall.’ I said, ‘Oh, nobody told me that.’ I said, ‘Who’s doing it?’ They said, Tulsi. I said, ‘Well, that’s at least good news. She’s been, I’ve been a fan of hers for a long time after,’ so I’m in the plane and looking over some material, and we’re going to give you a hell of a speech tonight. We’re set to give you one hell of a speech. They said, ‘No sir, it’s a town hall.’ I said, ‘Why doesn’t somebody tell me this stuff?’ And I don’t even have any idea who we’re doing it for. I don’t know is it for a network or what? I see a lot of television all over the place, so maybe it’s on all of them.”

Trump then segued into a critique of the his opponent’s CNN interview, which was airing at the same time he was speaking, after it was taped earlier in the day: “But I did get to see the strangest thing today. I looked at the news conference of Kamala. I call her comrade, comrade, comrade Kamala. She’s a — you know that she’s a Marxist. Her father was a Marxist before her, so she was brought up in the family tradition, and she really is and this country is not ready for a Marxist. We don’t want a Marxist as a president.”

Harris’ parents divorced when she was 8 years old, and she was raised primarily by her mother.

“And she destroyed San Francisco,” Trump continued. “She destroyed California, and we’re not going to let her destroy our country. I’ll tell you it’s not going to happen. So, but just to finish, so, for some reason, she doesn’t want to talk to anybody, so she’s either not the smartest light in the ceiling — trying to be nice here. I want to be. They say, ‘Be nice.’ To be nice, you know, it’s hard to be nice when somebody is destroying your country and wants to destroy your country. It’s hard to be like, ‘Guys, but, but …’ she is. She was a terrible vice president. She was a terrible border czar, worst in history, probably not just in this country, but the border.”

Trump then moved directly to his talking points on the border. “You know, millions and millions of people, I say 20 million plus have poured through the border during their term. I had the safest border in the history of our country. They have the most unsafe border in the history of the world.”

Border crossings dropped markedly in July, to levels lower than during some periods in the Trump administration.

Trump also repeated false claims about other countries emptying their jails and mental institutions to send migrants to the U.S. “I don’t know if you saw the news today, Tulsi, they had a group of a lot of them, Venezuelan people with lots of machine guns taking over a building someplace. I’m looking, I’m saying, Where is that? They went in and they took over a building. This is just the beginning. They’re taking their criminals from all over the world, not just South America, not just Venezuela, which you’ve been reading about, all over the world. They’re taking their criminals and they’re dumping them into the United States, Kamala. That’s Kamala is allowing it to happen. And they actually want to actually, they want to give them papers, they want to make them citizens, and they want to give them your Social Security. They want to give them your Medicare, and your Social Security will collapse under her.”

Trump then segued to Social Security: “I’m the one that’s going to protect the Social Security, but they’re coming. I will tell you, as I did for four years, and there was no age increase, there was not anything they’re going to protect. You know, they destroy you with inflation, and then they want to destroy your Social Security … not going to happen. But this is going to be the most important election in the history of our country. So I just want to say that it’s an honor to be with you tonight. It’s a forum that’s very different, because I have no idea who the hell is broadcasting it, but all we’ll do is we’ll talk because we’re friends. I love this state. I gave them Marinette. We gave them a very big, you know, Tulsi, we have a ship contract. And as you know, we gave Marinette guards, but we gave them a tremendous contract. They wanted her all over the country. I said, we’re going to get it for Wisconsin, and it’s a big one, and they’re doing a great job, I understand. So we got that, and we’re going to have a good time tonight. So let’s go.”

After Trump’s lengthy introductory remarks, a woman from Cameron said her son had just started trade school and that she was still an undecided voter but worried about the effect on the country of illegal immigration.

Trump opened his response by talking about how immigrants take “Black jobs.”

“The people that I’m talking about, they’re pouring in at levels never seen before,” he said. “They’re coming in by millions and millions, and a lot of them are taking the jobs for the Black population, the Hispanic population, and unions are going to be very badly affected.”

A student at UW-La Crosse asked about Trump’s plans to bring down inflation and help young people buy homes. Trump’s response touched on election conspiracies and said he was going to make America the “energy capital of the world.”

“I’m supposed to be nice when I talk about the election, because everybody’s afraid to talk about it. ‘Oh please sir, don’t talk about the election, please,’” he said. “You know, if you can’t, if you can’t talk about a bad election, you really don’t have a democracy, if you think about it, right? But what they did, Tulsi, is they took, they took the oil production. The oil started going crazy. That started the inflation. Then they went back. They said, go back to where Trump was. The problem is that we would have been three times that level right now. We would have been so dominant over Russia and Saudi Arabia. Look, Saudi Arabia, Russia, lot of oil. We would have had more. You know, we had something in Alaska, ANWR, that we, that I created. I mean, Ronald Reagan wanted it. You remember, Ronald Reagan wanted it. They all wanted it. And I got it approved. Nobody was able to get it approved. I got it approved. And they, the first week in office, they turned it back. They said, No, it’s the biggest site possibly in the world. Could be bigger than Saudi Arabia. Well, we’re going to start that up. We’re going to become the energy capital of the world. We’re going to pay down our debt, and we’re going to reduce your taxes still further, and your groceries are going to come tumbling down, and your interest rates are going to be tumbling down. And then you’re going to go out, you got to buy a beautiful house. OK, you got to buy a beautiful house. That’s called the American dream.”

When asked about crime, Trump used the topic as a chance to tee off on Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota.

“He is weird,” Trump said, referencing a common attack Walz has made against him. “I’m not. He’s a weird guy. He’s a weird dude. You know, see, they always have sound bites. And one of the things is that J.D. and I are weird. That guy is so straight, J.D. is, so he’s doing a great job, smart, top student, great guy, and he’s not weird. And I’m not weird. I mean, we’re a lot of things, we’re not weird, I will tell you. But that guy is weird. Don’t you think? You know he called, he signed for and this is — who would think that this is even happening in our country? — with men playing in women’s sports and all of this. But he has it. He has it at a level that nobody can believe a bill that every boy’s bathroom will have tampons. Hence his name, Tampon Tim.”

Trump then started falsely claiming that in Minnesota and other states run by Democrats, babies can be “executed” after they’re born.

“You sit the mother down and the father down, you sit them down, and you talk, and the baby is born, and you make a decision what to do,” he said. “He meant, do you execute the baby after birth? And according to what they have passed a legislation in Minnesota, they’re allowed to execute the baby after birth. And this guy is a participant, and that’s why she picked him, because she is, in fact, a Marxist slash communist. Remember, I’d say all the time, our country will never be socialists, right? We will not have a socialist. Well, I was right. We skipped socialism. We went to communism. This woman has to be stopped.”

When asked by Gabbard about foreign policy issues, Trump praised Viktor Orban, the far-right Hungarian prime minister.

“Viktor Orban, a very strong leader from Hungary, prime minister of Hungary. They asked him recently about what’s the problem in the world,” Trump said. “A few years ago, during my time, we had, no we didn’t have Israel being attacked. We didn’t have Russia attack in Ukraine. And they asked him, Why is it so bad now the Middle East is on fire? So many places are on fire, and there are plenty places that could very well and very quickly catch on. What’s the problem? He said, ‘You have to bring Trump back as President of the United States. You will have no problem. He single handedly kept things.’ And it’s true, and I could do it with telephone calls by being smart, but literally, he said you have to bring Trump back.”

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.

American Stewards of Liberty (ASL), a right-wing anti-conservation group, named Wisconsin in its 2024 strategic plan, stating it wants to stop federal funding of the recently established Pelican River Forest conservation easement.

With the help of U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, the organization was heavily involved in the local effort to block the easement, going as far as drafting a letter officials in Forest, Langlade and Oneida counties sent to state and federal agencies opposing the easement on the grounds that it was approved without “coordination” with local government.

ASL regularly promotes the legal theory of coordination in which any efforts to conserve land must be done with the approval of local officials, yet the theory has been widely discredited by legal experts, including Wisconsin’s former Republican Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen.

The Pelican River Forest easement, the largest conservation project in Wisconsin history, was repeatedly thwarted by Republicans in the state Legislature who are sympathetic to ASL’s beliefs, including Sen. Mary Felzkowski (R-Irma). Under the project, 56,000 acres of land owned by the Conservation Fund have been put into an easement, protecting the land from development and excessive use of resources in perpetuity. The project was completed earlier this year using federal money.

Under the easement, the Pelican River Forest will remain a working forest for logging, yet not to the extent it might have been logged had it not been conserved. The easement will prevent efforts to mine the area but it will remain available for recreational uses. Local ATV and snowmobile clubs have retained access to paths through the forest.

Earlier this month, the first organized event in the Pelican River Forest took place, with mycologists from across the upper midwest coming to the area for the Wisconsin Mycological Society Foray in which 270 species of fungi were foraged, identified for research purposes and — for edible species — cooked to be served to attendees.

After the project’s completion, ASL remained active in the state and its ideas have remained influential among county board members in the area around the forest. In April, ASL’s executive director, Margaret Byfield, spoke at a meeting of the Great Lakes Timber Professionals Association. At that appearance, Byfield railed against federal efforts to conserve land, claiming they’re just efforts by Democrats to “control” the country’s rural residents.

This summer, the county boards in the counties where the forest sits have begun rewriting their comprehensive land use plans with the explicit aim of stopping future efforts at creating conservation easements and promoting both more development and more opportunities for extractive industries such as logging and mining to take place.

ASL recently posted its 2024 strategic plan to its website before deleting it shortly after it went up. A copy of the plan was obtained by the Wisconsin Examiner. In the plan, the organization states it wants to “identify and support local leaders in areas under attack by the environmental community and administrative agencies.”

ASL-2024Plan

The organization, which is based in Texas and has traditionally focused on western states where the federal government owns much more of the land, specifically names Wisconsin as a focus for the next year.

“ASL is actively working with counties in Utah, New Mexico and Wisconsin to stop federal actions that are attempting to eliminate or significantly reduce the productive use of the natural resources,” the plan states. “In Wisconsin, it is to stop the federal funding of a conservation easement that will permanently restrict 56,000 acres of forest land from being fully utilized.”

The strategic plan also touts ASL’s involvement as a contributor to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a nearly 1,000-page document outlining policy plans for a potential second term of former President Donald Trump. Project 2025 includes plans to fire thousands of civil servants across government agencies. The ASL plan states the organization is “serving to help develop executive and secretarial level policies that restore property rights for the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture that will be ready to be implemented under the next conservative administration.”

Charles Carlin, director of strategic initiatives for Gathering Waters, a non-profit aimed at promoting the state’s land trusts and conserving natural areas, previously told the Examiner that ASL doesn’t understand Wisconsin.

“Groups like ASL don’t know Wisconsin and they don’t know our values. Wisconsin is the proud home of conservation champions across the political spectrum who know how caring for our land and water increases economic opportunity while ensuring that our kids and grandkids have clean air and water as well as wild places to play,” he said.

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.

The Republican National Convention (RNC) in Milwaukee brought 50,000 visitors to the city, but a variety of factors led to lower-than-expected business activity in the city’s downtown area. Many local residents in the largely Democratic city stayed away. Security fences surrounding the convention center made it difficult for delegates to get to bars and restaurants just outside the secure zone. And during the convention, some of the more than 4,000 extra law enforcement officers who came from states all over the country shot and killed a man more than a mile from the convention’s security perimeter.

Agreeing to hold the convention was a controversial decision among Milwaukeeans, who debated if the potential economic effect was worth inviting thousands of representatives of a party that has spent years demonizing the city. On Friday, as those visitors streamed out of the city and its regularly scheduled summer programming of street festivals, bike rides and beer gardens got back underway, the debate continued, with locals still wondering if the disruption was worth it.

Over the weekend leading to the convention’s opening on Monday, the signs of change were apparent. The security footprint established around the Fiserv Forum — where the RNC was held — created long lines of congested traffic in the downtown area. Helicopters piloted by military and law enforcement agencies circled overhead day and night. Coast Guard boats, mounted with M240 Bravo belt-fed machine guns, patrolled the Milwaukee River and police saturated the nearby streets.

On Tuesday morning the outlook for the rest of the week wasn’t dire. Mayor Cavalier Johnson, speaking to the Wisconsin Examiner in his office at City Hall, said that local festivals had benefited from RNC-sponsored events, and that Milwaukee was getting a lot of positive attention.

“There’s been minimal issues reported, that’s what I found out in my briefings from the Milwaukee Police Department (MPD),” Johnson said. “Folks are engaged — the people who are here — and I’ve had a chance to talk to a number of them from across the country, and really around the world even, if you include the foreign press. They’ve all been impressed with Milwaukee. Many have said that they will look forward to coming back and spending time in the city. And that’s good.”

For four straight days, images of Milwaukee appeared around the globe.

But business and restaurant traffic in the downtown area was down, failing to offer the massive economic boost that had been promised. Johnson suspected that was due to delays in the arrival of former President Donald Trump, who just a few days before the convention began, narrowly avoided an assassination attempt by a gunman armed with an AR-15 style rifle at one of his rallies in Pennsylvania. The assassination attempt cast a shadow over the city as the RNC began. And yet, early into the RNC’s second day, Johnson said most of the convention attendee’s appeared to be enjoying themselves.

“These are Republicans coming from around the country who are coming here and are experiencing Milwaukee,” Johnson said. “They are all having a great time. I don’t know how many Republicans I’ve talked to who have said this is a fantastic city, it’s a remarkable city. They are actually on the ground here and experiencing Milwaukee for what it is. So I’m hopeful that, you know, their experience would also then translate to Republicans who are in-state as well.”

Johnson stressed that, “a strong, thriving, growing Milwaukee ultimately is good for the entire state of Wisconsin.”

But Gary Witt, the President and CEO of the Milwaukee-based Pabst Theater Group — who ahead of the convention had lamented the lack of reservations from RNC attendees at local businesses — told the Examiner the effect of the convention was “muted,” saying it was similar to 2020 when the Democratic National Convention, planned to be held in Milwaukee, was canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I think the disappointment there is we got caught up in a giant sales pitch,” Witt said. “We’re a city that’s incredibly needy for big events to happen here. This should not in any way deter us from trying to get those big events to happen here, but we should not just blindly walk our way into those events without understanding the potential.”

The city, Witt added, “just open arms accepted the reality that it was going to be this $200 million investment,” when “it turns out the pie was not even really served as a net result. The experience for the majority of downtown, the similarity to the DNC would be that the RNC was eerily similar to the pandemic, restaurants and bars with no activity whatsoever. The DNC and RNC had one thing in common, the one thing in common is they both created scenarios that were near pandemic like.”

Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley also expressed hopes that the RNC would help raise the county’s profile. “This is a great opportunity for us to showcase our community and all the great things that we have to offer for folks, no matter what background they come from, or where they come from,” Crowley told the Wisconsin Examiner, in an interview Tuesday morning. “We have a great outdoor space scene, great beach, great food scene as well.”

But Witt said he thinks the effect of the four-day advertisement for the city was less than powerful. Because downtown Milwaukee didn’t have enough hotel rooms for all convention attendees, many stayed in hotels as far away as Madison and were unable to hang around after convention events ended for food and drinks in the city. Plus, the security situation because of the assassination attempt kept downtown “closed tighter than a Tupperware lid,” which encouraged attendees to remain behind the black metal gates of the hard security perimeter.

“I think it was incredibly muted and not at all what anyone would have hoped it would have been,” Witt said. “I don’t think it’s the fault of the mayor or the city of Milwaukee, it’s the fault of the RNC and the scenario the city was dealt with at the convention, much like we were dealt with the DNC.”

With Milwaukee being a historically Democratic city, some city residents wondered why it was chosen to host the RNC. Not long before the convention began Republican nominee Donald Trump told Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives that Milwaukee is “a horrible city.”

At the state-level, Milwaukee has long suffered from its strained relationship with the Republican-controlled Legislature. That dynamic defined negotiations over a local sales tax and shared revenue funding from the state. By the end of those negotiations last year, Milwaukee was allowed to avert fiscal catastrophe in exchange for reversing certain police reform policies passed after 2020. The city’s Fire and Police Commission, one of the oldest citizen-led oversight boards nationwide, was forced to surrender its powers to set policy for the police department as part of the funding deal with the state Legislature

Citing things like the sales tax deal, increases to shared revenue, and ensuring that Milwaukee’s professional baseball team stayed in the city, Johnson said that working on a bipartisan basis with the Republicans has already accomplished a lot. “That was a win for us,” said Johnson.

“That all came because we were able to work collaboratively with Republicans and Madison, in order to make that happen.” Johnson said he hopes that moving into the future, more people see that “you can actually work with the leadership here in Milwaukee to get stuff done, too.”

Crowley said he felt that the Republican Party “appreciated the fact that we did this [the RNC], but I don’t think this is necessarily the single one thing that’s going to improve that relationship.” As a former state legislator, Crowley has direct experience trying to work across the aisle. The county executive hopes, going forward, that work can be done to change “the narrative of how people view Milwaukee.”

Witt said city leaders making the shared revenue deal and agreeing to hold the RNC shows that the city has “new, fresh leadership” able to negotiate with Republicans. But the result was a trade-off, the upside of which, he said, only dug Milwaukee out of a hole created by Republican legislators denigrating Milwaukee and starving it of funding for 20 years.

“The state has been holding us hostage for over 20 years on shared revenue, they’ve been choking us to death,” Witt said. “We are the engine. If Wisconsin’s a motorboat, Milwaukee is the engine and you better put gas in the engine.”

On Tuesday afternoon, out-of-state police from Columbus Ohio fatally shot an unhoused Milwaukee man. The officers were standing in King Park, an area known for its high population of unhoused city residents, when they noticed two men fighting while at least one of them held a knife. Within 14 seconds, the officers had rushed over and fired shots, killing the man identified as Samuel Sharpe Jr.

That evening, mourners gathered to hold a vigil, and Milwaukee Police Chief Jeffrey Norman told media that five officers had fired in an attempt to save someone’s life. The shooting is being investigated by the Greenfield Police Department, part of the Milwaukee Area Investigative Team which normally investigates officer-involved deaths. This was the eighth time this year that Columbus, Ohio officers have been involved in a shooting. As Norman prepared to deliver the update about Sharpe, who was not identified during the press conference, news broke that he is a finalist for a police chief job in Austin, Texas.

Sharpe’s killing created a wave of anger, fear, sadness, and questions in the community. Many wondered why the out-of-state officers were more than a mile outside the RNC’s security footprint, despite assurances made by MPD that such officers would not be patrolling nearby communities during the RNC. The next day, Norman announced that Milwaukee officers would accompany their out-of-state counterparts when entering nearby communities. The shooting, however, also rekindled a larger conversation about the needs of the hundreds of people living unhoused, and on the street throughout Milwaukee. On Wednesday night, much further away from the convention grounds, Milwaukee police exchanged gunfire with a man outside of a gas station with the man sustaining non-life threatening injuries.

At a Thursday morning press conference, Johnson said the city’s performance and preparation during the RNC had gone “pretty smoothly,” adding that “I want more big conventions, more big sporting events, more entertainment events, and other large meetings, and I want them to take place right here in this city.”

Johnson reiterated what he told the Wisconsin Examiner Tuesday morning, that convention attendees had “very, very positive impressions of Milwaukee.” The mayor is excited for Milwaukee to be what people think about when they think of Wisconsin, or even of the whole Midwest Johnson said that despite hosting the convention, he does not support Trump’s policies, and that inside the Fiserv Forum during the convention there was “a false narrative of gloom, a false narrative of blame, a message from Republicans that simply is not true.”

During the press conference on Thursday, Johnson said “the RNC is not the end, it’s the beginning.” The mayor hopes that after this “four day commercial,” another “uptick in interest” will come to Milwaukee.

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.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court suspended former Trump attorney James Troupis from its Judicial Conduct Advisory Committee on Tuesday.

Troupis, who also previously served as a Dane County Circuit Court judge, was charged with felony forgery for his role in planning the scheme to have a group of Republicans cast false Electoral College votes for Trump after the 2020 election.

Despite his role in the false elector scheme, Troupis was reappointed to the advisory committee by the Court’s then-conservative majority in March 2023. The committee, which consists of nine members — six judges, one court commissioner, one attorney and one member of the public — gives opinions and advice on judges’ compliance with the state code of judicial conduct.

The appointment to a second three-year term was a month before the Supreme Court election in which Janet Protasiewicz was elected, shifting the ideological swing of the Court. The four conservatives appointed Troupis to the committee despite the objections from the three liberal justices on the Court at the time.

Last week, Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul announced that Troupis and two other former Trump associates had been charged with felonies for their role in planning the false elector scheme. The scheme was then outsourced to a number of other states and played a major role in the events that led to the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Troupis also served as the attorney for the Trump campaign in the recount it requested in Dane and Milwaukee counties and subsequent attempt to have thousands of absentee ballots that were cast from those largely Democratic counties thrown out, in an attempt to overturn the results of the election.

A progressive law firm has requested the U.S. Attorney’s office to investigate two Republican Party staff members over texts they sent prior to the 2020 presidential election.

In a letter sent Wednesday to U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Wisconsin Gregory Haanstad, Law Forward attorney Chris Donahoe alleged that two people who worked for former President Donald Trump’s campaign targeted a Milwaukee voting rights group during the campaign.

Last month, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that Andrew Iverson, the new executive director of the Wisconsin Republican Party, and Carlton Huffman, the former head of Trump Victory, texted about plans to “wreak havoc” with Souls to the Polls, an organization that drives voters to polling places on Election Day.

The texts between Iverson and Huffman show them discussing plans to flood the organization with requests for rides from Trump voters who may not even be planning to vote. Souls to the Polls does not ask people who they plan to vote for, though it operates in the Democratic stronghold of Milwaukee.

Iverson has said the texts were jokes, but in the letter, Donahoe argues they may have violated federal civil rights laws. Donahoe writes that the texts may have violated the Ku Klux Klan Act, which bans conspiracies to interfere with federal elections, the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act.

“As the Ku Klux Klan Act, Voting Rights Act, and Civil Rights Act illustrate, Black voters had to fight for their constitutional right to vote and sufficient protection to safely exercise that right,” the letter states. “Voters that Souls to the Polls serves, namely voters from marginalized communities and especially Black voters, still face disproportionate threats of disenfranchisement and greater obstacles to voting than other citizens. Iverson and Huffman’s plans to interfere with their right to vote, by flooding Souls to the Polls with fraudulent requests for rides, must be taken seriously and investigated thoroughly.”

In a statement, Wisconsin GOP spokesperson Matt Fisher reiterated that the text from Iverson telling Huffman to “wreak havoc” was a joke.

“From the beginning, Andrew Iverson has maintained that his ‘Wreak Havoc’ comments were a joking idea in response to Souls to Polls offering rides to all voters regardless of political affiliation,” he said. “The text messages demonstrate that the only person who expressed a desire to sabotage Souls to the Polls by jamming their phone lines is the disgraced white supremacist Carlton Huffman.”

Huffman has since been fired from a job in the North Carolina state government after making white supremacist media appearances. He’s also been accused of sexual assault. He previously worked for the Republican Party of Wisconsin.

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 Twitter.

At a hearing of the Wisconsin Senate Committee on Shared Revenue, Elections and Consumer Protection, lawmakers heard hours of testimony from election conspiracy theorists in opposition to a bill that would allow election officials to begin processing absentee ballots on the Monday before an election.

The proposal, authored by Republicans, is aimed at addressing a complaint often lodged by election skeptics themselves — the late addition of absentee ballot counts to vote totals.

Republicans in Wisconsin have complained that in the state’s 2018 gubernatorial election and in the 2020 presidential election, they went to bed on election night expecting one result yet when they woke up their candidate had lost because of the late addition of absentee ballot counts from largely Democratic voting cities such as Milwaukee. Republicans have often referred to these additions derisively as “ballot dumps” yet for years lawmakers of both parties and election clerks have pointed to state law that prevents absentee ballots from being opened and processed before polls open on Election Day as the cause of the delays.

“In 2018, in the first Walker-Evers election, I went to bed and Wisconsin went to bed under the impression that Walker had won reelection,” Rep. Ron Tusler (R-Harrison), one of the bill’s authors, said. “In 2020, basically the same thing happened. We went to bed thinking one candidate won, and then we wake up and find out these absentee ballots weren’t counted yet and lo and behold, it flips the election by a very, very narrow margin. Results in these elections matter, but also the appearances matter, too. It’s not fair to a losing party, to look like they won and to feel like maybe they were cheated.”

The delays are longer in the few dozen cities that use central count locations to process their absentee ballots. While smaller municipalities process and count absentee ballots at individual polling places, in the central count cities, including Milwaukee, the ballots are all brought to one location.

Under the bill, which earned praise from Democrats and election officials during the testimony Tuesday, central count cities would be required to begin processing on Monday while the rest of the state could start on Monday if they passed a local ordinance stating they will do so.

If passed, the law would allow election workers to only begin processing absentee ballots on Monday, not counting them. That means they’d be able to open the ballot envelope, assign voter numbers and feed the ballot into the voting machine, which tabulates the number of votes but does not yet count which candidates were chosen. At 8 p.m on Monday, the election workers will need to stop working; seal the opened ballots and flash drives containing the vote data and publicly report how many ballots were processed that day.

The aim of the deadline is to prevent ballots from being counted late into the night. Workers would be able to start again Tuesday morning when polls open.

“Clerks across the state have worked very hard over the last few years to help restore the public’s trust in our elections,” Kim Trueblood, the Republican clerk of Marathon County said during her testimony. “Allowing municipalities, giving local control, to choose to have their clerks and election inspectors have an extra day to carefully, accurately and thoroughly process those absentee ballots will only help in that effort.”

Trueblood added that preventing election workers from working late into the night will only serve to make elections more secure and lessen human error.

“The processing of absentee ballots is a very detailed and precise process,” she said. “Election inspectors who have to work into the wee hours of the morning at the end of a 20-hour day in order to get the job completed in an unrealistic time frame are much more likely to make errors. And let’s face it, perception is reality. Let’s remove the barrier that’s in place to getting our election results reported quickly, accurately and efficiently on election night.”

Yet despite the bill’s aim at addressing a regular complaint from groups that believe the 2020 election was stolen, much of the testimony Tuesday came from some of Wisconsin’s most prominent election deniers to oppose the measure.

One member of the public complained that allowing Monday processing would only give election workers “more time to carry out their nefarious activities” while others spent their allotted five minutes rehashing complaints about the 2020 election.

Ranked Choice Voting

The committee on Tuesday also heard testimony on a bipartisan bill that would move the state to a final-five primary system and instant ranked choice runoffs for congressional elections.

In a final-five primary, all candidates in a primary from both major parties and any independents are on the same ballot. The five who receive the most votes advance to the general election where the winner is selected through a ranked choice system.

Under a ranked choice system, voters rank their preferred candidates from one to five. The ballots are tallied and the candidate with the fewest first-choice votes is eliminated. All of the voters who selected that candidate as their first choice will then have their second choice votes added to the first totals and the process repeats until one candidate is left. Voters can choose to rank all five or just one candidate.

Ranked choice voting is used for primary, congressional and presidential elections in Maine and for state, congressional and presidential general elections in Alaska. It’s also used for local elections in nearly four dozen cities.

Proponents of the system said it would force candidates to appeal to a broader cross-section of the electorate, instead of primary elections in which partisanship is rewarded and general elections in which independents feel like their choices are lacking.

“This bill has the opportunity to change the divisiveness in Washington, tone down the politics in Wisconsin and get back to a functional democratic republic that Wisconsin voters crave — elections rooted in ideas rather than partisan rhetoric,” Sen. Jeff Smith (D-Eau Claire) said.

Testimony against the proposal included complaints that the system is prone to mistakes, takes longer to determine the winner and is confusing for older voters. In addition to some public opposition, a group of Republican lawmakers introduced a proposal earlier this month for a constitutional amendment that would ban ranked choice voting in the state.

“With the threat of ranked choice voting in Wisconsin, action is needed to prevent it,” Rep. Ty Bodden (R-Stockbridge) said in a statement about the proposed amendment. “Final five and ranked choice voting have proven disastrous for elections nationwide, causing prolonged result announcements when trust in election outcomes is already fragile. We must receive election results on election night, not weeks later. Ranked choice voting is confusing, leading to numerous discarded ballots. In various instances across the country, it resulted in thousands of trashed ballots and counting errors, eroding the fundamental principle of one person, one vote.”

Wisconsin Examiner is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus 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 Twitter.