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U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany tried to help overturn the results of the 2020 election for Donald Trump.

Now the Republican is running for governor, a role in which he would be the executive of the entire state of Wisconsin. If he is elected, experts say he has a duty to perform regarding the state’s votes in the 2028 presidential election.

Though the Wisconsin Elections Commission does most of the heavy lifting to certify presidential elections, the governor does have a “key” role, said Chad Oldfather, a law professor at Marquette University.

After the November election, the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission receives and certifies the statewide election results, said Bryna Godar, a staff attorney for the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School, in an email to The Badger Project. The commission then creates a certificate naming the electors chosen by the winning political party to vote for president and vice president in the Electoral College, she noted.

The governor has to sign that certificate and send it to the U.S. archivist in Washington, D.C., Oldfather said.

Wisconsin law suggests the governor’s role in signing the certificate is more of a duty than an act of “discretion,” Oldfather said. But “there’s always the possibility that someone can come up with an argument as to why the duty doesn’t cover a specific scenario.”

Godar said courts could step in if the governor refuses to sign the certificate or tries to change it.

Asked to comment for the story, Tiffany’s campaign sent a statement from the candidate.

“Joe Biden won,” it read. “Wisconsin voters have also spoken clearly on election integrity, banning Zuckerbucks (grants from private citizens to help fund elections and named after Mark Zuckerberg) and supporting voter ID. In 2028, I’ll certify whoever wins the most votes in Wisconsin.”

Attempts to overturn the 2020 election

In the aftermath of the 2020 election, the Trump campaign filed lawsuits across the country challenging the election of then-President-Elect Joe Biden. Judges appointed by Republican and Democratic presidents rejected those attempts.

“The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history,” the federal government’s Elections Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council & the Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Executive Committees announced in a joint statement after the election.

At a campaign rally in 2016, Trump said he would accept the results of the election “if I win.”

Tiffany also joined a 2020 effort led by Texas to challenge Biden’s narrow but legitimate victories in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. He was one of more than a hundred other Republicans in Congress, and the only one from Wisconsin, to sign a letter to the court supporting the lawsuit.

The U.S. Supreme Court, featuring three Trump-appointed justices, dismissed the lawsuit in December 2020, writing that Texas lacked legal standing to interfere with how other states conduct elections.

Beyond supporting the lawsuit, Tiffany also voted to object to the certification of 2020 election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania. When asked if he regretted his vote in an August TV interview with WISN-12 News in Milwaukee, Tiffany said Biden won the 2020 election. Pressed further, Tiffany said he was focused on the future and not the past.

In a separate case, the Wisconsin Supreme Court also rejected, albeit by the narrowest of margins, Trump’s effort to challenge the results of the 2020 election in the blue counties of Dane and Milwaukee.

Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Brian Hagedorn, a conservative, sided with the court’s three left-leaning justices and wrote in his 2020 opinion that the Trump campaign needed to challenge election rules before the election, not after. 

The remaining three conservative justices on the state’s highest court dissented, writing that the court should have weighed the merits of the case.

Wisconsin voters head to the polls again in November as Tiffany and Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, a Democrat, face off for the governor’s mansion.

This article first appeared on The Badger Project.

The Badger Project is an independent, reader-supported news nonprofit in Wisconsin.

Tom Tiffany tried to overturn the 2020 election. Now he vows to certify Wisconsin’s 2028 results. is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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Several courthouses in north-central Wisconsin do not screen people coming into the building for weapons, an investigation by The Badger Project has found. A firearm discovered recently in one of them is highlighting that lack of security in public buildings in rural counties and local officials’ reluctance to pass the high costs of upgrades on to taxpayers.

A courthouse cleaner found a gun in the Langlade County Courthouse in Antigo just after 5 a.m. on Thursday, July 16, according to a criminal complaint from the Langlade County Sheriff’s Office. The firearm, stashed behind a toilet in the third-floor men’s bathroom, sat on top of a handwritten note containing the name of a jail inmate who’d recently testified in an attempted homicide trial. The day the gun was found, the Langlade County Sheriff’s Office arrested Harout Hosepian, who faces seven charges, including carrying a firearm in a public building and carrying a concealed knife.

Hosepian was seen on camera in the courthouse on July 15 and entered the bathroom, as well as the offices of the county clerk and district attorney, according to the complaint. That day, Hosepian carried a backpack and a cane. Authorities later discovered the cane concealed a serrated sword.

Hosepian remains in custody and is not yet represented by an attorney. He is a Chicago resident with multiple convictions, including aggravated battery and other felonies in 2016, according to the criminal complaint filed in Langlade County. In 2021, Hosepian was charged in Antigo with physically abusing a child, resisting an officer and disorderly conduct. That case is ongoing due, in part, to struggles finding an attorney. Hosepian is eligible for a public defender.

The criminal complaint says Hosepian told investigators that he had a personal connection to the attempted homicide trial, the one for which a witness’s name was found on the piece of paper under the gun in the courthouse.

The firearm discovery has spurred conversations among local leaders about how to improve security at public buildings. Langlade County’s courthouse, built in 1905, uses a single point of entry, but typically no one screens individuals entering the structure. A review by The Badger Project of other counties’ safety measures, which courthouse employees submitted to the county’s public safety committee, suggests Langlade County is not an outlier among rural counties. Neighboring Lincoln and Shawano counties also do not screen people who enter their courthouses. However, earlier this year, Shawano County approved spending up to $121 million to build a new courthouse and jail building.

Marathon County – with an estimated population of 139,000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau – features the most intensive form of courthouse security in north central Wisconsin, including metal detectors and an X-ray machine. This system, installed in 2017, cost more than $300,000, along with additional employee costs to operate the station, according to the Wausau Pilot & Review.

The costs of security equipment, space, and staffing can be off-putting for local governments in rural municipalities like Langlade County, population 19,500. Residents like their taxes low, Circuit Court Judge John Rhode said during the Langlade County Public Safety Committee meeting on Sept. 10, and bolstering courthouse security would require “horrendous amounts of money.”

“If we do millions of dollars on upgrades to our security, it’s going to raise taxes,” Rhode said. “It’s not a popular thing. But I think we have to have the courage to say, we have to properly protect and care for our people and provide the services that we need. We can’t just keep wishing and hoping and being relieved that nothing bad is going to happen.”

Langlade County Sheriff Mark Westen told the committee he’d proposed security upgrades to the courthouse about eight years ago, but the county board scrapped the plans over the estimated costs. Westen suggested using a single point of entry with a screening checkpoint operated by two law enforcement officers. A machine to scan someone’s belongings will cost between $80,000 and $100,000, Westen said, and two full-time employees to operate the station will cost around $130,000 a year. The county may need to spend more to build a structure for the screening area so people are not waiting outside to enter the building.

The safety committee asked Westen for a written proposal to consider. The group’s next meeting is scheduled for Oct. 1. The county board, which is in control of budgeting, would have to make the final determination on any changes to courthouse security.

In 1988, a 19-year-old man walked into the City-County Building in Madison and shot multiple people, killing two. That led the city and Dane County to enhance security at the building.

The Badger Project is an independent, reader-supported newsroom in Wisconsin.

This article first appeared on The Badger Project and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Many rural Wisconsin courthouses lack weapon screening. A hidden gun highlights the issue. is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.