Wisconsin Secretary of State Sarah Godlewski speaks at a press conference defending ballot drop boxes and local election officials on Oct. 30, 2024 in Madison | Wisconsin Examiner photo

As the 2024 campaign air war reaches a furious crescendo over our battleground state, a few groups of public-spirited citizens have been quietly organizing on the ground to shore up the foundations of our democracy.

Take just three events that occurred during the week before Election Day: 

• A bipartisan group of current and former elected officials signed a pledge to respect the results of the election — whatever they may be.
• A separate bipartisan group of Wisconsin political leaders held a press conference to declare their confidence in the security of Wisconsin’s election system and to pledge to fight back against people who cast doubt on the legitimacy of the results — whatever they may be
• Wisconsin Secretary of State Sarah Godlewski and grassroots pro-democracy advocates held an event in downtown Madison to support the use of ballot drop boxes and to defend local election clerks in a season of threats, intimidation and destabilizing conspiracy theories.

All of these public declarations of confidence in the basic voting process we used to take for granted show just how far from normal we’ve drifted.

As Democratic U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan put it in a joint press conference with Republican former U.S. Rep. Reid Ribble, “This is sort of no-brainer stuff.” Yet the two Wisconsin congressmen celebrated the announcement that they got 76 state politicians to sign their pledge to honor the results of the 2024 election.

Notably, however, the list of politicians who agreed to respect what Ribble described as “democracy 101” — that “the American people get to decide who leads them; candidates need to accept the results” — does not include many members of the party of Donald Trump.

Petition signers so far include 64 Democrats, one independent and nine Republicans. Worse, nearly every one of those Republicans has the word “former” next to his or her title. 

Technically state Sen. Rob Cowles is still serving out the remainder of his term. But the legislative session is over and Cowles won’t be back. After announcing his retirement, he made waves this week when he renounced Trump and endorsed Kamala Harris for president. Other GOP officials who pledged to respect the election results include former state Sen. Kathy Bernier, who leads the group Keep Our Republic, which has been fighting election conspiracy theories and trying to rebuild trust in local election clerks, and former state Sen. Luther Olsen, a public school advocate who worked across the aisle back before the current era of intense political polarization.

On the same day Pocan and Ribble made their announcement, a different bipartisan group of Wisconsin leaders, members of the Democracy Defense Project – Wisconsin state board, held a press call to emphasize the protections in place to keep the state’s elections safe and to call out “bad actors” who might try to undermine the results.

Former Democratic Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes and former Republican Attorney General JB Van Hollen joined the call along with former Republican U.S. Rep. Scott Klug and former state Democratic Party Chair Mike Tate.

“I can speak from personal experience, having won and lost very close elections, that the process here in Wisconsin is safe and secure, and that’s exactly why you have this bipartisan group together,” said Barnes, who narrowly lost his challenge to U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson in 2022.

Barnes said false claims undermining confidence in voting and tabulating election results “have been manufactured by sore losers.”

If you lose an election, he added, “you have the option to run again at some point. But what you should not do is question the integrity or try to impugn our election administrators just because the people have said no to you.”

Former AG Van Hollen, a conservative Republican, seconded that emotion. “I’m here to tell you as the former chief law enforcement officer for the state of Wisconsin that our system does work,” he said.

Van Hollen reminded people that he pushed for Wisconsin’s strict voter I.D. law, which Democrats opposed as a voter-suppression measure. “Whether you were for it or against it, the bottom line is that it is in place right now. If people pretended to be somebody else when they came in and voted in the past, they cannot do that any longer,” Van Hollen said.

For voters of every stripe, he added, “Get out and vote. Your vote will count. Our system works and we have to trust in the result of that system.”

Former Republican Congressman Klug underscored that Trump lost Wisconsin in 2020 “and it had nothing to do with election fraud. It just had to do with folks who decided to vote in a different direction.”

He also praised local election workers and volunteers, like those who take his ballot at his Lutheran church, and “who make Wisconsin’s election system one of the best in the country.”

Tate, the former Democratic Party chair, warned that the unusually high volume of early voting and a state law that forbids clerks from counting ballots until polls close on election night will likely mean delays in results coming in. “There are good reasons for that,” he said, “because our good election workers are exercising extreme due diligence.”

In a separate press conference outside City Hall in Madison, members of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign and Secretary of State Godlewski also chimed in to defend Wisconsin’s hard-working election clerks and combat conspiracy theories.

Nick Ramos, the Democracy Campaign’s executive director, connected recent news stories about drop-box arson in other states to the hijacking of a local dropbox by the mayor of Wausau, Wisconsin, who physically removed his town’s ballot drop box and locked it in his office. The mayor was forced to return the box and is now the subject of a criminal investigation. It’s important to hold people accountable who try to interfere with voting, Ramos said, because otherwise “people will try to imitate those types of bad behaviors.”

Besides sticking up for beleaguered election officials, the pro-drop-box press conference featured testimony from Martha Siravo, a founder of Madtown Mommas and Disability Advocates. Siravo, who uses a wheelchair, explained that having a drop box makes it much easier for her to vote. 

Godlewski described conversations with other voters around the state — a busy working mom, an elderly woman who has to ask her kids for rides when she needs to go out, and a young man who works the night shift — all of whom were able to vote by dropping their absentee ballots in a secure drop box, but who might not have made it to the polls during regular voting hours. “These stories are real and that’s why drop boxes matter,” Godlewski said. Restoring drop boxes is part of “helping ensure Wisconsin remains a state where every vote matters.”

That’s the spirit we need going into this fraught election, and for whatever comes after.

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(Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

Election officials have expressed confidence in Wisconsin’s election system and its ability to withstand any 2020-style attempts to overturn the results — yet some members of the state’s Republican party, and Donald Trump himself, have continued their work of the past four years to undermine trust in the system. 

On Friday, Trump posted on X that if elected he would prosecute people who “cheated” in the election. 

“I, together with many Attorneys and Legal Scholars, am watching the Sanctity of the 2024 Presidential Election very closely because I know, better than most, the rampant Cheating and Skullduggery that has taken place by the Democrats in the 2020 Presidential Election,” he wrote. “It was a Disgrace to our Nation! Therefore, the 2024 Election, where Votes have just started being cast, will be under the closest professional scrutiny and, WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again. We cannot let our Country further devolve into a Third World Nation, AND WE WON’T! Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”

After the 2020 election, Wisconsin Republicans formed the plan that became the fake elector scheme. In Wisconsin and six other states where President Joe Biden won, slates of Republicans cast fraudulent Electoral College votes for Trump. Those votes became the basis for Republican members of Congress’ effort to vote to change the results of the election and give the victory to Trump on Jan. 6, 2021. 

In the months leading up to the 2024 election, election experts here have pointed to legal developments that should prevent a similar effort this year. The Republicans who took part in Wisconsin’s fake elector scheme have been barred from serving as presidential electors, Congress passed a law making it harder for them to dispute election results and more people are watching than in 2020. 

Absentee counting

But some conspiracy theories that abounded after 2020 have persisted. Republicans in Wisconsin claimed that voter fraud had occurred in Milwaukee because thousands of votes from the largely Democratic voting city were “dumped” in the middle of the night, flipping the election to President Joe Biden. 

The votes hadn’t been dumped. Instead the city — dealing with a massive increase in absentee voting because of the COVID-19 pandemic — took longer to count those ballots at its central count location. 

While most communities in the state count absentee ballots at the same polling place where the voters who cast them would vote in person, 36 communities send their absentee ballots to be counted together at one location. 

In response to the conspiracy theories about late night “ballot dumps,” the state Legislature considered a bill that would allow local election officials to begin processing absentee ballots on the Monday before the election. Local clerks would be able to open absentee envelopes and get the ballots ready to be counted, though not actually fed into tabulating machines, ahead of time, which would have allowed the counting on Election Day to move faster. 

The bill passed the Assembly, but Republicans in the state Senate killed it. 

On Thursday, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) blamed state Rep. Janel Brandtjen (R-Menomonee Falls) for the bill’s failure. Brandtjen has been one of the Legislature’s most outspoken election conspiracy theorists. Some of Wisconsin’s most prominent election deniers had opposed the bill’s passage during public hearings — alleging that if the ballots were processed ahead of time, nefarious actors could figure out exactly how many fraudulent votes were needed to swing the result. 

Wisconsin Elections Commission Chair Ann Jacobs expressed her exasperation on social media: “It was based on her conspiracy theory that (somehow) if the 10’s of 1,000’s of envelopes were opened early, someone could figure out the exact # of fake ballots (how? Who knows!) would be filled out & added to the ballot count. Complete nonsense yet here we are!”

Because the bill failed, and because many voters have continued to use the absentee and early voting processes after the pandemic, it’s likely that Milwaukee will again report results long after polls close on Election Day. 

Wisconsin’s system

Unlike most other states, Wisconsin’s election system is decentralized. Administration of elections is handled by the 1,850 municipal clerks working across the state. Each clerk is responsible for the election within their community. 

At a virtual event hosted on Friday by Keep Our Republic — an organization that has spent four years trying to rebuild trust in the election system by explaining to skeptics exactly how the system works — former Wisconsin Congressman Reid Ribble said that if a person can’t trust politicians that the system is safe and secure, they should trust their local clerk and their friends and neighbors who volunteer as poll workers. 

“Elections in Wisconsin are fair and safe and the 1,800 county and municipal clerks that are running those elections, and the thousands and thousands of local volunteers and poll workers, are working very hard to do their jobs in a non-partisan manner,” Ribble said. “I’ve often told friends of mine and other citizens … I get it if you don’t trust politicians. One person you should be able to trust is that — usually a senior citizen — poll worker at your local precinct that’s checking your ID and giving you a ballot and making sure that everything is done correctly. You often see these people at your grocery store. They might sit two or three rows in front of you at church and these are your friends. They’re your neighbors. They’re people that are concerned about defending democracy and seeing it unfold in front of their very eyes.”

Once polls close on Election Day and the votes are tallied, unofficial results get sent to county clerks, who report those preliminary numbers. It’s from those initial reports that media organizations use statistical processes to “call” races, declaring who has won. But the actual winners aren’t officially declared until the results are certified at multiple levels. 

This multi-step process gives election experts another layer of assurance that despite continued conspiracy theories, Wisconsin’s system is resistant  to meddling. 

Each municipality convenes a Board of Canvass, a multi-member body that reviews the community’s election results and makes sure that there aren’t any irregularities — making sure that the number of ballots cast equals the number of people who signed the poll books, for example. 

Board of canvass members live in that community, which experts say makes it hard for them to throw a wrench in the process and refuse to certify results, because they’d be declaring that their friends and neighbors’ votes shouldn’t count. This differs from states such as Georgia, where fears have arisen after last-minute process changes that partisan officials placed in this step of the process could throw out results, swaying the election to Trump. 

After the local board certifies the results, in Wisconsin, a similar body at the county level does the same. Then the state elections commission reviews the tallies and the chair of the commission certifies the results. Gov. Tony Evers will then certify whether the Democratic or Republican slate of electors has been chosen. 

On Dec. 17 this year, the electors will meet and cast their Electoral College votes for the winner of each state. 

Lawsuits 

Ahead of the 2020 election, many lawsuits were filed as questions arose over how to conduct a presidential election during a pandemic. After Biden won, Trump and his campaign undertook a flurry of legal efforts in an attempt to overturn the results. 

UW-Madison Law School Professor Robert Yablon said at the Keep Our Republic event Friday that 2024 has seen even more litigation than 2020. 

“In Wisconsin and around the country, election contests are increasingly being waged, not just in the court of public opinion, but in actual courts,” Yablon said. “The volume of litigation that we have seen in Wisconsin in 2024 is already higher than we saw in 2020, despite the fact that we’re no longer dealing with a pandemic that’s creating an array of controversies and questions about what sort of voting accommodations to be providing.”

The most significant lawsuit ended when the Wisconsin Supreme Court overturned a previous decision that outlawed the use of absentee ballot drop boxes. Drop boxes became very popular with the rise in absentee voting in 2020, but Republicans turned against them as conspiracy theories spread, claiming the boxes are vulnerable to fraud. Hundreds of drop boxes were in place across the state in 2020, but despite being legal again this year, only 78 are being used. 

A lawsuit has also changed rules guiding absentee witness signatures. Absentee voters are required to have someone witness their ballot by  signing the absentee ballot envelope and providing their address. If the address isn’t included, the ballot can’t be counted. 

In the past, local clerks have been given some discretion to add missing information to the address line. If, for example, a married couple filled out their ballots together and a voter’s spouse wrote “ditto,” the clerk could write in the complete address. Or if the clerk knows where the person lives, they could add that information themselves, similarly if the person left off a zip code or city name, the clerk could complete it. 

This practice was banned by a 2020 court decision, but subsequent lawsuits have clarified that the ballot must be counted “as long as the certificate contains enough information for the clerk to reasonably be able to identify the place where a witness may be communicated with,” Yablon said. 

A number of other lawsuits amount to what Yablon said are efforts to sow distrust in the system, even if they won’t be resolved ahead of the election. Two of these lawsuits involve the state’s voter rolls and when election officials are required to deactivate a voter’s registration. 

Some Republicans have become obsessed with the voter registration system in recent years, claiming that election officials are keeping voters active in an effort to allow fraudulent votes. 

“To some extent, it seems like these cases are serving to perpetuate and reinforce dubious doubts about legitimacy of the election, and to feed into narratives that the results shouldn’t be trusted,” Yablon said. “They’re trying to implicitly suggest that our voter rolls are bloated, and so there are many people on them who might vote who shouldn’t be voting.” 

“The reality is that this is a lawsuit that is not likely to create any action,” he added. “We’re not going to start purging voters days before the election.”

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