Built during GOP control
The Wisconsin voting system President Donald Trump is attacking was built entirely by Republicans.
MADISON - In his move to overturn Wisconsin’s election results, President Donald Trump is attacking a voting system built entirely by Republicans.
The state’s voting laws and procedures were overhauled repeatedly during eight years of GOP control of state government.
Republicans dissolved the body that oversees elections and replaced it with one equally divided by Republicans and Democrats. They put in place a voter ID law, shortened the early voting period to two weeks, eliminated straight-ticket voting and barred voter registration drives.
Now Trump and his team are vilifying the very system Republicans put in place, arguing that it is rife with irregularities. Trump’s campaign is using a recount in the Democratic strongholds of Dane and Milwaukee counties to try to throw out thousands of ballots.
He hopes to flip the results in Wisconsin, which went for Democrat Joe Biden by nearly 21,000 votes. But with more states certifying their results, it wouldn’t be enough to give him the presidency.
Republicans rewrote Wisconsin’s election laws over the years because they said they wanted to improve voting integrity and ensure the public had confidence in it.
Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell said he doesn’t buy those claims.
“Really it’s just about power,” said McDonell, a Democrat who is overseeing the recount in Dane County. “The tip off is when they’re trying to throw out their own ballots.”
The Trump campaign is contending all early votes cast in person in Milwaukee and Dane counties are invalid, including the one cast by Jim Troupis, the Trump attorney leading the recount effort in Wisconsin. If Trump’s theory were applied to the whole state, the vote of GOP state Rep. Ron Tusler of Harrison — who is leading an investigation into the election — would also be illegal.
Many other Republicans would see their votes eliminated as well if such a regimen were adopted, even though clerks have been conducting early in-person voting the same way for more than 10 years.
Among them: state Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, a Republican who just won his race for Congress. Fitzgerald’s spokesman did not say whether
Fitzgerald agreed with Trump that votes like his were illegal.
One vote Trump’s team has targeted for elimination was cast by Mark Jefferson, the executive director of the state Republican Party, which is assisting with the recount.
“If these challenges can help ensure that election procedures passed by the Legislature are actually followed, and can also stop things like the abuse of our indefinite confinement protections which are now being used to circumvent a reasonable photo ID law, then I support President Trump’s efforts to ensure compliance with the law,” Jefferson said by text message.
Recount issues could fuel lawsuits
Trump’s claims of voting improprieties are being rejected by the boards of canvassers in Dane and Milwaukee counties, but Trump could try to raise them in a lawsuit.
On Tuesday, a group called the Wisconsin Voters Alliance did just that, asking the state Supreme Court to give Republicans who control the Legislature the power to decide how to cast Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes.
The partial recount effectively gives Trump a vehicle for his own litigation, but it’s unclear if he will pursue the matter now that his legal challenges have failed in other states and his administration has initiated the transition for Biden.
Separate from the recount, Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin plan to conduct a review of the election after the state certifies the results on Dec. 1.
GOP Assembly Speaker Robin Vos of Rochester told reporters this month he did not expect the recount or legislative review to find enough problems to overturn Biden’s narrow win in Wisconsin. But he said the election deserved scrutiny.
“I would rather guarantee that everyone at the end of the day has certainty that the election was conducted fairly because we do a thorough investigation as opposed to trusting a bunch of bureaucrats in Madison saying, ‘Look, we did it just fine,’ ” he said.
The bureaucrats he’s referring to are the employees of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, the state agency Republican lawmakers created in 2015 to oversee the state’s voting system. The commission is run by three Republicans and three Democrats who have largely stood behind their staff.
Vos and other Republicans created the commission to replace the Government Accountability Board, which they contended was biased against them.
The operations and advice of that Republican-created commission have come under fire from Trump’s legal team.
In 2016, at the behest of Republican members, the commission adopted a policy that said clerks could fill in the addresses of witnesses on absentee ballots if they were able to determine where the witnesses lived.
Trump didn’t complain about the policy when he narrowly won the state in 2016. And he named one of those election commissioners, Steve King, as his ambassador to the Czech Republic.
Now Trump’s campaign is alleging all ballots are invalid if the clerk supplied any part of the address for a witness.
Another criticism of Trump’s centers on how absentee ballots are counted in Wisconsin. Trump has claimed it is suspicious that some of the last votes counted were absentee ballots in Milwaukee, which went heavily for Biden.
But that, too, is a function of a system designed by Republican lawmakers. Lawmakers have not allowed clerks to begin counting absentee ballots until Election Day, causing delays in tallying the results. Republican Assembly Majority Leader Jim Steineke of Kaukauna noted just after the election that there was nothing unusual about how the results were tallied.
The partial recount effectively gives Trump a vehicle for his own litigation.
Voting laws also reworked
Republicans had complete control of the state Capitol for all but a few months between early 2011 and early 2019. During that time, they reshaped the state’s voting laws.
The creation of the voter ID law and the shortening of the early voting period — and the lawsuits they sparked — drew most of the headlines. But Republicans made changes to many other parts of the state’s law as well.
For instance, they added a provision to state law that bars counting absentee ballots if the ballot doesn’t include the address of a witness. In addition, they ended the ability of someone to vouch for a person trying to register to vote if he or she didn’t have proof of residency on hand.
Republicans also required the state to join the Electronic Registration Information Center, a bipartisan group that helps 30 states keep their voter rolls accurate. The consortium contacts eligible voters to try to get them to register to vote and assists states to rid their rolls of people who have died or moved.
Litigation is pending before the state Supreme Court over how quickly the state must take people off the rolls if it suspects they might have moved.
The voter ID law Republicans wrote includes an exemption for those who vote absentee if they are indefinitely confined because of age or disability.
Trump and his team have complained about that part of the law and contended some people have designated themselves as indefinitely confined when they didn’t meet the criteria. The state Republican Party sued over the issue this spring, and GOP lawmakers have said they may tighten that part of the law.