'A blatant violation of trust': Milwaukee mayor slams fired official for fraudulent ballot request

At a press conference on Thursday, November 3 in Milwaukee, Mayor Cavalier Johnson announced that he had fired Milwaukee Election Commission Deputy Director Kimberly Zapata — who, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, fraudulently requested absentee voter ballots that were reserved for members of the U.S. military.

Johnson told reporters, “This has every appearance of being an egregious and blatant violation of trust. Election integrity is absolutely integral. It's absolutely essential.”

According to Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporters Molly Beck, Alison Dirr and Corrinne Hess, an internal review shows that Zapata sent the absentee ballots to a “Republican lawmaker known for embracing unfounded conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.”

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Zapata, according to the reporters, has said that she requested the ballots in order to show vulnerabilities in Wisconsin’s voting system — not because she wanted to commit voter fraud. But Johnson’s position is that what she did was wildly inappropriate regardless of her motivations.

The Milwaukee mayor told reporters, “It does not matter to me that the alleged crime did not take place at work. It does not matter to me that the City of Milwaukee ballots were not a part of this, nor does it matter that there was no attempt to vote illegally or tamper with any election results.”

“The revelation five days before the November 8 midterm election is potentially explosive at a time when Republicans have cast doubt on the security of absentee voting, and in Milwaukee in particular, ever since former President Donald Trump began falsely accusing Milwaukee election officials of rigging the 2020 election,” Beck, Dirr and Hess note.

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