Wisconsin Republicans, It’s Time to Move Past Defective 2020 Election-Fraud Narratives

B eginning on November 9, 2016, we heard a constant drumbeat from Democrats in Madison, Wis., and Washington, D.C.: “voter fraud,” “stolen election,” “Russian collusion.” Those claims now thoroughly debunked, we now hear a similar beat, only now coming from Republicans regarding November 3, 2020. But we now know more about the 2020 election than any other in history. And we know more than enough to conclude that it is time to move past the wild accusations made about this election using faulty information. Instead of dwelling on defective narratives about the past, we must take the steps warranted by multiple credible and in-depth investigations and set our sights on electing Republicans up and down the ballot in 2022.

To understand why, one must first have proper knowledge of Wisconsin’s election system. Before I was a Wisconsin state legislator, I was elected to multiple terms as the Chippewa County clerk. Wisconsin’s elections system is among the most decentralized in the country, and the county clerk is the highest-ranking elections official in each of the 72 counties. During all twelve of my years in the Wisconsin Assembly and Senate, I have been either vice-chair or chair of my house’s Elections Committee. I currently chair the Wisconsin Senate Committee on Elections, Election Process Reform, Ethics. As chair, I convened my committee for a public hearing on December 11, 2020, to hear the claims brought forward about the 2020 election that had occurred merely five weeks prior. These claims merited discussion and investigation. Following that hearing, I joined others in calling for a full audit of the 2020 election in Wisconsin, to be conducted by the highly regarded, non-partisan, professional Legislative Audit Bureau (LAB).

While that effort was underway, I worked with committee members and other senators to draft a dozen bills to fix the problems we knew about regarding the administration of the November 3 election. Let’s remember, by the way, that this election was conducted amid a global pandemic, by people who had never lived through a pandemic before. We banned private money being used for election administration, the infamous “Zuckerbucks” from the Center for Tech and Civic Life. We defined ballot drop boxes in statute and regulated their use. We tightened the definition of “indefinitely confined” ballots so they can be used only by those whose age or infirmity prohibited them from living independently, not by people who simply want to vote without an ID. Those sound reforms, and others, were met with Democrat governor Tony Evers’s veto pen.

The LAB published its report in October 2021. Its audit contained 18 issues for legislative consideration, many of which had already been passed by the Republican legislature and vetoed by Evers. Shortly after the LAB concluded its work, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL), the highly respected conservative group, also released the results of its own thorough investigation into the November 2020 election. WILL also found no widespread or coordinated voter fraud. Like the nonpartisan audit bureau, WILL presented recommendations to the legislature. My colleagues and I are hard at work drafting bills related to the LAB audit and the WILL investigation, but I suspect Evers will veto those as well. After nearly every election, I have worked on bills to improve the system, but the political landscape makes this go-round different. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: If we want these election-integrity reforms in Wisconsin, either the governor must change his mind, or we must change the governor.

Wisconsin is a battleground state, and is therefore no stranger to election-fraud conspiracies. After the 2016 election, Green Party candidate Jill Stein (winner of 31,072 of the 2,976,150 votes cast) fundraised off Hillary Clinton supporters to order a statewide recount of Donald Trump’s victory in the state. The subtext then and for the four years that followed frequently revolved around some sort of “Russian Collusion” conspiracy. Liberals had a hard time comprehending how their favorite candidate could have lost and therefore concluded it could have only been some type of massive fraud perpetrated on the American public. The media spent four years calling Trump’s presidency illegitimate while of course enjoying every bit of the ratings that presidency generated for them.

Now the tables have turned. And while the Right hasn’t fully coalesced around the perpetrator of the 2020 “steal” (Italy, Russia, China, and the Forces of Darkness have all had their turn), the pattern is all too familiar. Election experts were minted overnight, and a cottage industry of half-informed opportunists began making the rounds with theory after theory of how the election was stolen.

The problem is that this game of telephone has gotten entirely out of control. My office gets calls regularly from people simultaneously concerned about a mix of very real election complaints and the wildest of debunked claims. Fixing the real problems is never going to be enough. With Pandora’s Box now open, I hear some variation of the following message at least daily: “Fix ____ and do ____ or I’m never voting Republican again!” Never mind the simple and rational explanation for most of these claims. (For example, prior to 2005, voter registration in small municipalities was not required. When we migrated to a new system, a default birthdate of 1/1/1900 was given to these voters, along with a default registration date of 1/1/1918. This doesn’t mean that multiple 100-plus-year-olds voted in the 2020 election!) Never mind even that many of the allegations being sold to these people never even happened in the first place! (Areas with Dominion voting machines voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump, who increased his win margin from 2016. These data are confirmed by an audit.) The fact is, we know what the real problems were, and we know what the solutions are. Inventing monsters to destroy harms not only the Republican Party but also the Republic itself.

Every Republican state senator in Wisconsin is getting inundated with requests to “decertify” our 10 electoral votes. No one can explain to me what that will accomplish or how it could be legally done. No one can explain it because it is a ridiculous request. Furthermore, no one can tell me with a straight face that if Wisconsin attempted such an absurd procedural move (that, again, is not permitted by law, custom, or common sense) that a future Democrat-controlled legislature wouldn’t attempt the same thing as soon as a Republican won the Electoral College again. We need to stop the madness and concentrate on what is important. The Republican Party embraces facts over emotion, but wild claims about the 2020 election have become an unfortunate exception to this. It’s time for the party to embrace facts once again.

The 2020 election, conducted in the midst of a global pandemic, was not perfect. No election is perfect. Just like after every election, we should be looking to strengthen our electoral systems for our own security and for the sake of voter confidence.

Donald Trump’s campaign paid for a recount of all the ballots in Milwaukee and Dane Counties — the state’s two largest voting areas. Our nonpartisan LAB conducted a full and thorough audit of the 2020 election. The conservative organization WILL investigated the election. We have multiple road maps for how to proceed. We know that our Democrat governor is standing in the way of making progress. I only wish he weren’t joined by the Republicans (in name only) getting rich and famous off of selling lies about what happened last November.