MAGA Republican urges Wisconsin to 'decertify' the 2020 election following sham investigation

Thirteen months into Joe Biden’s presidency, former President Donald Trump and his MAGA allies continue to make the false and totally debunked claim that the 2020 election was plagued by widespread voter fraud — including allies in Wisconsin, where a former state Supreme Court justice and far-right Republicann, Michael J. Gableman, is claiming that there are “significant grounds” to “decertify” Biden’s Electoral College victory in that state.

Wisconsin State Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, a Trump ally, hired the 55-year-old Gableman — who served on the Wisconsin Supreme Court from 2008-2018 — to conduct a sham investigation of the 2020 election not unlike the “audit” that the firm Cyber Ninjas conducted in Arizona. Gableman, on March 1, gave a three-hour presentation before the Assembly’s Committee on Campaigns and Elections.

Journalist Sarah Mimms, reporting in Buzzfeed News, notes that Gableman’s presentation “featured videos of a lawyer pressing Americans in nursing homes on their capacity to vote in front of skeptical family members and allegations of a broad conspiracy by Democrats, state and local elections officials, and Jewish billionaires to defeat former president Donald Trump.”

“In the hearing and an accompanying 136-page interim report, Gableman did not definitively assert that the election was stolen but instead, relied on a lot of inference and suggestion,” Mimms explains. “The report’s introduction acknowledges as much, noting that it ‘draws no conclusions about specific, unauthorized outside interference or insider threats to machine voting, but it does provide numerous examples of security gaps that tend to enable bad actors to operate in the shadows.’”

The report also claims that “absent access to (election) systems, it would not be unfair for any citizens to conclude the worst, however.”

In 2021, Gableman, according to Mimms, visited the Cyber Ninjas “audit” in Arizona and attended MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s Cyber Symposium gathering in South Dakota. Gableman also spoke at a MAGA rally in Milwaukee in November 2020 only a few days after the election, promoting the Big Lie and implying that the election had been stolen from Trump.

Gableman told the crowd, “I don't think anyone would be here if we all had confidence that this was an honest election…. I don't think anyone here can think of anything more systematically unjust than a stolen election.”

According to Mimms, Gableman’s March 1 presentation was “centered largely on two popular conspiracy theories among the pro-Trump right.”

“The first revolves around donations that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made to the Center for Tech and Civic Life — a nonprofit organization that helped local jurisdictions across the U.S. conduct an election during the middle of a pandemic,” Mimms reports. “The false suggestion is that Zuckerberg and billionaire George Soros bought the election for Democrats. And the second deals with Wisconsin residents in nursing homes who allegedly voted in 2020, but whose children don’t believe they had the capacity to do so.”

Mimms adds, “In defense of the latter theory, Gableman presented a series of video interviews in which a lawyer on his team either pressed older Americans in nursing homes on whether they understand how elections work or interviewed their adult children about their mental capacity while they sat silently in the background…. The report states definitively that ‘rampant fraud and abuse occurred statewide at Wisconsin’s nursing homes,’ but suggests that the state conduct an audit to determine its scope.”