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Arizona is currently in the throes of a sketchy audit run by a company called Cyber Ninjas. Georgia has a court-ordered audit of mail-in ballots coming for its largest county.
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Now, Republicans in the Wisconsin legislature are getting in on the action, and have hired a crack team of retired cops to “investigate” the 2020 election there, according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. Joe Biden carried the state by more than 20,000 votes, but his victory has been the subject of baseless claims of election fraud by former President Donald Trump and his supporters.
Wisconsin State Assembly Speaker Robin Vos is hiring three former cops and an attorney, and giving them three months and subpoena power to investigate some parts of the 2020 election, according to the Journal-Sentinel. Vos told the outlet that he acknowledges Biden won the state’s electoral votes fairly and isn’t trying to uncover individual instances of fraud, but he is looking at how to potentially change election laws.
“The election’s already over,” Vos told the Journal-Sentinel. “My job is to say, ‘Where are the laws being followed, where are they not? If they’re not being followed, how can I fix it?’”
One of the issues the cops will look at, however, is one the legislature has already moved on. Earlier this week, the State Assembly (which Vos runs) passed a bill to prohibit local governments from accepting private donations.
The bill seems to be aimed at a Chicago-based nonprofit called the Center for Tech and Civic Life, which gave more than $6.3 million to five Wisconsin cities to help them conduct their elections. The group is funded partially by Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.
The investigators, who haven’t been identified, will also look into “double-voting” claims, and how election clerks handled absentee ballot credentials, according to the Journal-Sentinel.
“A sizable chunk of people believe the election was illegitimate,” Vos told the Journal-Sentinel. “And democracy cannot flourish if both sides don’t believe in the end that both sides had a fair shot.
A report from the investigators is expected in the fall, Vos told the Journal-Sentinel.
Out of the more than 3.3 million ballots cast in the November election in Wisconsin, the state’s bipartisan elections commission released a report earlier this week showing that municipal clerks in the state referred fewer than 30 people total for alleged illegal voting. Out of the 27 people referred for prosecution, more than a half were found to have mistakenly registered to vote using the address of a UPS store in the city of La Crosse.
“It turns out that most of them were retired couples that used the UPS Store as like a PO. Box so when they were vacationing – say down in Arizona they would get the mail forwarded to them from the UPS Store instead of their actual residence,” La Crosse County district attorney Tim Gruenke told TV station WKBT earlier this week.
