Challenge to election grants falls short
Conservatives again lose legal battle in Wisconsin
MADISON – Conservatives are continuing their losing streak in legal challenges over nonprofit grants that helped city clerks run the 2020 election in Wisconsin.
The Center of Tech and Civic Life provided more than $10 million to more than 200 Wisconsin communities to help conduct the election during the COVID-19 pandemic. The center, which is funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, directed most of the money in Wisconsin to the state’s five largest cities, where Democratic voters are concentrated.
Conservatives have brought a series of legal challenges. Each time, they’ve lost.
Their latest setback came Wednesday when Dane County Circuit Judge Stephen Ehlke ruled there was nothing illegal about the grants.
“Certainly nothing in (state law) prohibits clerks from using private grant money or working with outside consultants in the performance of their duties . ... The bottom line is that the (Wisconsin Elections) Commission correctly concluded that there was no probable cause to believe any Wisconsin law has been violated,” Ehlke ruled from the bench.
His decision is in line with other courts. A federal judge in Green Bay threw out one lawsuit about the grants before the 2020 election. Just after the election, the state Supreme Court declined to take another case over the grants and other issues.
A federal judge in Washington, D.C., dismissed a third case over the grants in 2021 and referred the lawyer who brought the case to an ethics panel that is considering sanctioning him.
The attorney, Erick Kaardal of Minneapolis, has spearheaded the legal challenges in Wisconsin. He has represented Republican state lawmakers and conservative groups like the Thomas More Society and Wisconsin Voters Alliance.
Undeterred by the earlier setbacks in court, Kaardal last year filed five challenges to the grants before the bipartisan Elections Commission. The challenges were nearly identical but each one concentrated on a different city — Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay, Kenosha and Racine.
The commission in December found there was no probable cause to believe the grants violated state law.
Kaardal appealed those decisions to
circuit courts. Ehlke on Wednesday ruled in the case dealing with the grant for Madison. Other judges are set to consider the cases involving the four other cities in the coming weeks.
Jon Axelrod, an attorney for the commission, said he was pleased with Ehlke’s decision.
“We hope that the other judges rule the same way (because) the commission applied the same effort and the same neutral and detached stance in the other cases,” Axelrod said.
Any decisions by the circuit judges can be taken to the state appeals court, but Kaardal suggested he might not do that. He told attorneys for the commission after Wednesday’s ruling that he might drop the cases that are pending in other cities.
Kaardal told a reporter he brought the challenges in part because the cities used their grants to install absentee ballot drop boxes. The state Supreme Court is slated to rule this summer in a separate case over whether drop boxes can be used in Wisconsin.
“We don’t want the drop boxes to be used by the cities in 2022, and I think there’s a lack of trust … with respect to absentee ballot drop boxes,” Kaardal said. “And they just want to make sure they’re gone.”
He said his focus is on this fall’s elections, not 2020.
“Moving on — 2022,” he said. In addition to challenging the grants in court, Kaardal has assisted former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman with a taxpayer-funded review of the 2020 election for Assembly Republicans. Gableman has repeatedly criticized the grants.
Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by nearly 21,000 votes in Wisconsin. Recounts and court decisions upheld those results and independent reviews found no evidence of significant voter fraud.
“We hope that the other judges rule the same way (because) the commission applied the same effort and the same neutral and detached stance in the other cases.”
Jon Axelrod
an attorney for the Wisconsin Elections Commission