An election worker prepares absentee ballots for the general election before they are mailed to voters, at Wake County Board of Elections headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, U.S. September 5, 2024. REUTERS/Jonathan Drake
The FBI is revisiting President Donald Trump's 2020 election conspiracy theory as part of his ongoing effort to change the results of the election after he lost. The new focus is on Wisconsin.
So far, Trump's FBI has seized 2020 election ballots from Georgia and copies of voting data in Arizona from a review Republican lawmakers conducted. The Washington Post reported Friday that current and former election officials in Milwaukee have been interviewed by FBI agents in their own homes. The question will be whether the FBI demands the ballots as they did in Fulton County, Georgia.
The move would "set off alarms because Milwaukee maintains its absentee ballots in a way that could allow agents to determine who voters selected — undermining the secrecy of their ballots," the report said. One's vote is supposed to be a secret, but Trump would then have access to information on whether his allies supported him in 2020.
One question has been about an incident involving an official grabbing all of the flash drives and missing one of them. Another election worker then gave the flash drive to a police officer, who delivered it to the local official. It was never unattended, the report said. At the time, it became a huge conspiracy theory spread by MAGA supporters.
A man then filed a lawsuit claiming he saw a "secret room" in the election office and drew a floor plan showing where it was and indicated he heard someone snoring behind the door. The election denier has his own criminal history. The FBI demanded to know if there were ballots "printed" in the secret room.
Trump's agents went from the state’s deputy elections director to the former officials' homes, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported. They next intend to interview police who were responsible for protecting election officials who delivered the results, reported WISN-TV.
The ballots haven't been seized yet, but there is a larger fear that things are headed in a worrisome direction.
"Ordinarily, election officials by now would have destroyed ballots from an election that was held nearly six years ago. But Milwaukee County officials have hung on to the 2020 ballots because of litigation," the Post explained.
One concern in Fulton County is that no copies were made of the ballots taken by the FBI. So, there would be no record to compare it to if the DOJ asserted that the count was "wrong." What's different in Milwaukee, however, is that numbers are assigned to a voter's absentee ballot, which can be traced back to the person. In other states, the ballots are simply thrown together.
Officials said that they are desperately trying to guard the ballots and said those numbers are redacted when copies are released to the public. In theory, the FBI wouldn't be able to match the numbers to the logbooks without them.
“Our secret ballot is secret for a reason,” declared elections chair Ann Jacobs. “It’s sacrosanct. It is at the heart of our American democracy. And those people who demand to know how everyone voted are violating those core tenets of what it means to vote as an American.”
“You’re going to see things like, ‘Here are the Biden voters in your neighborhood,’” said former Wisconsin chief election official Kevin Kennedy. “The bottom line is the potential for mischief is there, and we have seen in this age of social media that it will happen.”