Will Wisconsin’s Republicans Make Voting Meaningless, or Just Difficult?
Claire Woodall-Vogg, right, worries about the loss of a “functioning democracy.”Photograph by Erinn Springer for The New Yorker
Right wing activists are combining voter suppression with election conspiracies to capture the state in 2022 and beyond.
by Dan Kaufman
In late March, Claire Woodall-Vogg, the executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission, was in her office in city hall, preparing for Milwaukee’s mayoral election, when an F.B.I. agent called. The agent was investigating death threats that Woodall-Vogg had been receiving since deciding to permit the use of drop boxes during early voting for the upcoming election. Drop boxes had long been used for absentee ballots in some Wisconsin communities, but their use increased dramatically in 2020, owing to the coronavirus pandemic. After President Donald Trump’s narrow defeat in the state, the boxes became a focus of conspiracy theories claiming that the election was stolen from him.
Woodall-Vogg, along with other municipal clerks and election officials, was at the center of those conspiracy theories. She played me a few of the hundreds of threats she has received since the 2020 Presidential election. “You motherfucker,” one voice mail went. “You rigged my fucking election. We’re going to try you, and we’re going to fucking convict your piece-of-shit ass, and we’re going to hang you.” Woodall-Vogg is estranged from her mother-in-law, who is a firm believer in the stolen-election conspiracy, and she no longer speaks to her husband’s aunt. “She said that I signed up for this—for death threats?” Woodall-Vogg said. “You have to wonder if people are thinking very deeply about what they’re doing. Do they realize what the alternatives are to a functioning democracy?”
Approximately 3.3 million ballots were cast in the 2020 election in Wisconsin, and Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump by nearly twenty-one thousand votes. To date, according to the Associated Press, twenty-four people have been charged with voter fraud. Neither state nor independent reviews found evidence of widespread fraud. More than ten lawsuits filed by Trump and his allies were dismissed by various courts, and recounts in Dane and Milwaukee Counties, the state’s two most populous counties and the only ones where the Trump campaign requested recounts, confirmed Biden’s victory.
And yet conspiracy theories about the election continue to circulate, fuelled, in large part, by Republican politicians and Party officials. Representative Janel Brandtjen, who believes that Trump won the election, is the chairwoman of the State Assembly’s campaigns-and-elections committee, and she regularly holds hearings propagating conspiracy theories. The state legislature has also created a sprawling, taxpayer-funded voter-fraud investigation led by former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, who has said that the election was stolen and has called for jailing the mayors of Green Bay and Madison. Republican elected officials, including Speaker of the Assembly Robin Vos, have suggested that five of the six members of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which is governed by three Democrats and three Republicans, should be criminally prosecuted for allowing clerks to more easily send absentee ballots to nursing-home residents during the height of the pandemic. More than sixty per cent of the state’s Republicans now believe the election was stolen, a figure that both reflects the persistent attacks on Wisconsin’s election infrastructure and creates a justification for escalating them.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court has played a key role in undermining democratic norms. In July, the court upheld a ban on nearly all drop boxes and barred voters from entrusting anyone, including family members, to submit their ballots. A day after the ruling, Trump hailed “the amazing Wisconsin Supreme Court decision.” Christine Corcoran, who has multiple sclerosis and relies on her husband to return her ballot because she is mostly bedridden, was crushed. “This will be devastating to me and thousands of other people,” she said. (Advocates for the disabled contend that federal protections allow voters like Corcoran to continue receiving assistance mailing their ballots.)
What’s happening in Wisconsin is part of a national Republican strategy to take control of election administration and to make it harder to vote. The effort is particularly pronounced in swing states. Last year, Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, signed a law that restricted drop boxes and absentee ballots and made it illegal to pass out water to people standing in line to vote. This spring, Arizona’s governor, Doug Ducey, signed a law requiring voters to provide proof of citizenship, and, in Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis created a special law-enforcement unit devoted to policing voter fraud, and appointed a secretary of state who has refused to acknowledge that Biden won the Presidency.
Election administration has become the most prominent issue in the upcoming Wisconsin governor’s race, in which the Democratic incumbent, Tony Evers, will face one of the three leading Republicans after an August primary. The stakes are heightened by Wisconsin’s role as the most pivotal swing state: in 2016 and in 2020, the Presidential election came down to three states, and only Wisconsin appeared on that list both times.
None of the Republican Party’s gubernatorial candidates—the former lieutenant governor Rebecca Kleefisch, Tim Michels, and the state representative Tim Ramthun—will say that Joe Biden won the election, and all of them have vowed to abolish the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which was created by the Republican-controlled legislature in 2015. Kleefisch has sued the W.E.C. (the case was dismissed), and Ramthun authored a resolution to decertify the state’s Democratic electors. This idea has been promoted by Wisconsin’s U.S. senator Ron Johnson, who met privately with Vos and other Republicans last November, after suggesting to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that the legislature simply take over the elections. “I would just say, ‘We’re claiming our authority,’ ” he said. “Don’t listen to W.E.C. anymore. Their guidances are null and void.”
Many proposed election-law changes are contingent on Evers losing. “The debate all along here has been between the conspiracy theorists and the good old-fashioned voter-suppression advocates,” Representative Mark Spreitzer, a Democrat from Beloit, told me. During the past year, the two sides have put aside their differences to advance more than a dozen election-related bills, many of them derived from Brandtjen’s and Gableman’s investigations. These bills would allow observers to stand within three feet of poll workers, threatening workers with jail time for obstructing an observer’s view; require elderly and disabled voters confined to their homes to show a photo I.D. to receive an absentee ballot; and give the legislature more control over the W.E.C. “They’re playing a long game here, too,” Evers, who has vetoed all these bills, told me. “If they beat me, these laws will be in place for 2024, making it more difficult for President Biden to win.”
Many of the grievances and conspiracy theories about the election stem from the pandemic. In late March, 2020, when early voting in Wisconsin’s April 7th Presidential primary had already started, Evers signed a stay-at-home order. Soon afterward, he tried to delay the election but was overruled by the state’s Supreme Court. Clerks were left scrambling to staff an election with several thousand fewer poll workers than planned. Milwaukee usually has a hundred and eighty polling stations—only five were open. Images of masked voters in hours-long lines became a symbol of American collapse.
The problems in the April primary led the Center for Tech and Civic Life, a nonprofit funded in part by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, to give nearly ten million dollars to more than two hundred Wisconsin communities to help them administer the November elections. In September, 2020, the grant money was challenged in federal court by Erick Kaardal, a lawyer for the Thomas More Society, a conservative Chicago law firm. Kaardal argued that the grants amounted to bribery. The judge dismissed the case.
On the Saturday after the Presidential election, hundreds of Trump supporters gathered for a Stop the Steal rally at a banquet hall on Milwaukee’s south side. Gableman, a keynote speaker at the event, told the crowd, “Our elected leaders have allowed unelected bureaucrats at the Wisconsin Elections Commission to steal our vote.” On December 7th, Bob Spindell, one of six commissioners on the W.E.C., attended a similar rally at the state capitol, where he told the crowd, “There’s no evidence vote fraud did not occur.”