Michels won’t vow to certify ’24 election for POTUS
GOP governor candidate has Trump endorsement
MADISON - Former President Donald Trump's preferred candidate for governor won't say whether he would certify the next presidential election if Trump makes another run for the White House and again loses the key battleground state of Wisconsin.
Tim Michels, a wealthy construction executive endorsed by Trump, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that the question is too hypothetical to answer at this point, adopting a similar position his Republican primary opponent Rebecca Kleefisch took when asked whether she would have certified the 2020 election.
The unwillingness to promise to count Wisconsin's next presidential votes by leading Republican candidates for governor comes as a U.S. House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol has uncovered evidence showing blocking the certification of Wisconsin's 2020 election was key to Trump and his allies to a plot to overturn his re-election loss.
In the weeks leading up to the November 2020 presidential election in Wisconsin, and to this day, Trump has claimed without providing any evidence that the contest was rigged against him.
The four Republican candidates seeking to unseat Democratic incumbent Gov. Tony Evers have embraced these false claims to varying degrees, with all promising to abolish the state's elections commission.
Michels would not say whether he agreed with Trump's false assertion that Wisconsin voters did not actually deliver the state to President Joe Biden, or whether he believed Biden's 21,000-vote margin of victory was due to widespread voter fraud as Trump contends.
“A lot of people have questions about the 2020 election, as do I. Here's what is very concerning to me, we are 18 months now from the 2020 election. And we're still having a conversation here in Wisconsin, here in America, about the election in 2020. That is absolutely insane,” Michels said.
“We are not a third-world country. We are not a banana republic. This is the United States of America. People should not have questions about the integrity, the transparency and the honesty of an election.”
Michels said as governor he will work with the state Legislature to fix the “big problems that we had in 2020,” citing the use of ballot drop boxes and private grant funding to administer elections. But he did not answer how such features of the last presidential election resulted in a
suspicious outcome.
“No one knows what the extent of the election fraud was and that’s the problem. The fact that you’re asking me or anyone this question right now, is really the root of the issue here,” Michels said.
“We shouldn’t be having these types of conversations or having to ask these kinds of questions 18 months after an election. People deserve to know that the elections are open, honest and transparent.”
Kleefisch declined in a February interview to say whether she would have certified Wisconsin’s results if she had been governor during the 2020 presidential election. She also would not say whether she believed the vice president has the power to prevent the counting of some electoral votes, as former president Trump has maintained.
On Saturday, Kleefisch said in a statement she would certify the 2024 election if the state’s system of elections and voting is overhauled and the state elections commission is dissolved.
“We must restore the integrity of our elections and when I am governor Wisconsin will administer an election in 2024 that we can all be confident in,” Kleefisch said in a statement.
“To do that, I will abolish the Wisconsin Elections Commission, ban Zuckerbucks, clean up our voting lists, ban ballot harvesting and drop boxes and create a law enforcement agency to root out fraud before it starts,” she said, referring to the private grants funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife. “I will be able to certify the election because I will have assured it was conducted with integrity.”
For months, Kleefisch has said the best way to elect a Republican president in 2024 is to elect a Republican governor this year, a comment Democrats characterized as a signal of allegiance to Trump and his desire for a different outcome in 2020 than what voters delivered.
“When you look at Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes up for grabs in 2024, the best way to get our nominee across the finish line is to win in 2022. There is no greater dream inside the Democrat Party of Wisconsin than to get Tony Evers across the finish line so he can drag Joe Biden across the finish line in 2024,” Kleefisch said in an April 11 appearance on WIBA-AM. “That is not going to happen. That dream gets killed and Tony Evers gets sent to retirement this fall.”
Republican candidate Kevin Nicholson told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in February if he had been governor at the time, he would have ensured before the election that voting practices were changed so that no one would question the results. That would have allowed him to certify the 2020 results with confidence, he said.
Nicholson said he disagreed with Trump on counting electoral votes. Vice President Mike Pence had no choice but to count the Electoral College results that were sent to Congress, he said.
On Friday, a spokeswoman declined to answer whether Nicholson planned to certify the next presidential election, if elected. GOP state Rep. Tim Ramthun, a fourth candidate for governor, launched his campaign on the pursuit of overturning the 2020 election and as has promised to conduct a “cyber audit” of the 2022 election.
Meanwhile, Democratic incumbent Gov. Tony Evers is promising to certify the next election.
“The governor has been clear that he believes Wisconsin’s elections are fair, secure, and accurate, and he won’t overturn the will of the people as Republicans attempted to do in 2020,” Evers spokesman Sam Roecker said in a statement. “Just as he did in 2020, he will follow the process to certify the election results.”
Barry Burden, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Elections Research Center, said short of a natural disaster or technological failures, governors wouldn’t have good reasons to hesitate to certify an election.
“It’s worrisome,” Burden said of the candidates’ reluctance to promise to certify presidential elections. “Short of natural disaster or a calamity it’s hard to imagine any good reason for a governor not to simply go along and they should be proud to go along.”
“It’s a ceremonial role they get to have. It’s unique to that office, and governors all around the country are signing off on these certificates of ascertainment and sending them on to the National Archives for the electoral counts to happen in Congress. So there ought to be pomp and circumstance but no real discretion.”
“This (is) a question we wouldn’t have asked a few years ago because it was hard to imagine a presidential candidate pressuring members of their party to go against traditions and norms and objective evidence about what happened in an election,” Burden said, referring to Trump. “But now that pressure is so great on the Republican side, that candidates and elected officials are really tepid about saying anything concrete about it.”
Kathy Bernier, a former Chippewa County clerk and retiring Republican state senator, said the question is a bit unfair because largely, the candidates don’t understand how election results are confirmed before the matter of certifying reaches a governor.
“All the governor does is sign the document and send it to Congress. And so a more appropriate answer from a gubernatorial candidate would probably set that out, to say, if all of the election results were verified and certified, then it would be my duty to sign it and move it forward to Congress. That’s how I would answer it if I was running for governor,” Bernier said.
“There is no way in my mind that I believe any Republican governor would ever just unilaterally not certify the election results,” Bernier said.
Bob Spindell, a Republican member of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, said he didn’t see a problem with the refusal to answer such questions because it’s not a scenario before the candidates.
“It is hypothetical and it’s probably something that may not come about, so they probably didn’t want to talk about,” he said. “It’s not concerning.”
In contrast, Democratic commissioner Ann Jacobs said the candidates’ silence is alarming.
“What happened in 2020 was the former president didn’t get enough votes. That’s the only thing that happened in Wisconsin’s election,” Jacobs said.
“The idea that something of an unknown happened in 2020, such that a person could justify not certifying the election, is false.”
Jacobs said the hesitation to answer the question suggests the matter is up for debate.
“It’s disgraceful, and it is a complete and total abdication of responsibility that comes with higher office. The governor doesn’t have the right to refuse to certify elections just because he doesn’t like who won.”
When asked if he believed Biden won Wisconsin legitimately in 2020, Michels said “no one knows what the extent of the election fraud was.”
Lawsuits, recounts paid for by Trump, nonpartisan audits and a study by a conservative law firm have all affirmed Trump’s loss. When asked if that was not enough evidence to show Biden’s victory in Wisconsin was legitimate, Michels said he remains concerned about the upcoming election for governor.
“Anybody can turn on the TV today and see that Joe Biden was sworn in as president. We don’t have a time machine. We need to make sure that this doesn’t happen again. I’m very concerned about 2022 in this election cycle. Myself, and I’m sure any other candidate, are fearful that it could happen again.”
Michels refused to define what happened and refused to say whether Wisconsin’s 2020 election was properly called.