Wisconsin Republicans are pushing to seize total control of elections in the state, even calling for criminal charges against state election commissioners while stoking conspiracy theories about former President Donald Trump's electoral defeat.
The most powerful Republican state lawmaker is backing calls to charge members of the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC), which was actually created by the GOP-led legislature just five years ago — and this comes in response to an investigation that turned up no evidence of voter fraud. A Republican member of the state Assembly's Constitution and Ethics committee wants to decertify last year's election results. And U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, a Republican and Trump loyalist, is calling for state lawmakers to stage a complete takeover of elections.
The Republican proposals are a "blatantly partisan and coordinated attempt to baselessly challenge the integrity of democracy in our great state," WEC administrator Meagan Wolfe, the state's top election official, said in a statement.
These Republican complaints center on a vote by the WEC during the early days of the pandemic last year. A recent report by the state's Legislative Audit Bureau found no evidence of fraud in the 2020 election but issued recommendations to improve WEC operations. The WEC was created by Republican lawmakers in 2015, over Democratic objections, to eliminate the oversight powers of the state's former Government Accountability Board, which Republicans claimed was biased against them in the wake of a campaign finance investigation. The WEC unanimously voted in March 2020 to suspend a rule requiring special voting deputies (SVDs) to visit nursing home residents before allowing them to vote by mail, because long-term care facilities had barred most visitors from entering to control the spread of COVID. The commission determined there was not enough time before the state's April primary to send out SVDs only to have them turned away.
"We knew that for the protection of residents, only essential workers (which did not include SVDs) were being allowed into facilities across the state," Commissioner Julie Glancey said in a statement. "As such, we knew it was essential to preserve the right to vote for those residents, so rather than require the absurdity of sending SVDs to knock on a locked door, we pivoted to the absentee voting process."
