As three alleged planners of Wisconsin’s fake elector scheme prepare to be arraigned this week in Dane County court, the criminal charges against them are moving forward in a national legal and political landscape that looks dramatically different from the one in which they were filed.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

When Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul filed the charges in June 2024, Joe Biden was president, Donald Trump was battling a criminal case brought by the U.S. Department of Justice over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and state prosecutors in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, and Nevada were bringing criminal cases tied to the fake elector scheme.

That scheme arose in the aftermath of the 2020 election, when Trump allies tried to keep him in power despite his loss. Those allies, who became known as fake or false electors, attempted to cast electoral votes for Trump in multiple states he lost and submit those certificates to Congress.

Now, as the three defendants in the Wisconsin case await arraignment on 11 felony forgery charges on June 16, Trump has regained the presidency, and he and his allies are undertaking extensive efforts to rewrite what happened in the 2020 election.

Since returning to office, Trump has issued a federal pardon to those involved in the 2020 scheme, and his administration has sent the FBI to investigate the 2020 election in Wisconsin and elsewhere.

The federal criminal case against Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election has been dismissed. And, until recently, his administration had plans to allocate $1.8 billion to compensate people it claimed had been unfairly prosecuted by the federal government, raising questions about whether participants in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot and those involved in the fake elector schemes could receive taxpayer funds.

Other state cases have also faltered. Georgia’s election interference case has been dismissed, though not before the prosecution secured some guilty pleas from Trump’s allies. Michigan’s false elector case has also been dismissed. Arizona’s remains unresolved after a major setback for the prosecution, and Nevada’s just resumed after its Supreme Court revived charges that a lower court had thrown out.

Kaul faced criticism for filing his charges so late — it was the last criminal case to be filed regarding the fake electors. But two years later, that timing has left Wisconsin’s as one of the last cases standing in the broader, mostly failed effort to prosecute Trump and his allies for their attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

“The direction of activity has completely flipped, from prosecuting the people who were disrupting the election or inhibiting the normal flow of events to now going after Trump’s adversaries,” said Barry Burden, a UW-Madison political science professor who founded the Elections Research Center.

The Trump administration’s new investigation into the 2020 election in Wisconsin and elsewhere, Burden said, “seems to be a targeted effort at people who were mostly upholding the law and trying to administer an election in a very difficult environment.”

Amid the federal government’s current activity, and nearly six years removed from the 2020 election, Burden said any guilty finding in the Wisconsin fake elector case would likely have a muted effect.

“If we wanted the public to believe that there were ramifications for that kind of unlawful behavior, it would have to happen quickly and publicly, and feel like it was an immediate response to what people had done after the 2020 election,” he said. “But that’s not where we are six years later.”

‘Shocking’ if there are no ramifications in Wisconsin

The Wisconsin criminal case is still in its preliminary stages. Although it was filed two years ago, a number of motions and an appeal have set the case back significantly.

The defendants — former Dane County Judge Jim Troupis, who was Trump’s Wisconsin campaign attorney in 2020; attorney Kenneth Chesebro, who advised Trump on legal matters; and former Trump aide Mike Roman — are scheduled to be arraigned on June 16.

Each faces 11 felony charges for his part in allegedly guiding Wisconsin’s 10 fake electors to send documents to the U.S. Capitol falsely stating that Trump had won Wisconsin in the 2020 election.

The 10 false electors from 2020 aren’t defendants in the current case, but they separately settled a civil lawsuit in Wisconsin by acknowledging that Biden won the 2020 election and pledging not to violate election laws in the future.

Chesebro and Troupis separately reached a settlement in that case, turning over a trove of documents outlining their role in 2020 and agreeing not to participate in similar schemes in future elections.

Text messages and emails show that Chesebro was a primary architect behind the 2020 plan to have Wisconsin’s GOP electors attest that Trump won the state while Trump’s court challenges seeking to overturn the election were still ongoing. Troupis discussed that plan with the Trump campaign, and Roman helped craft the language of the documents Republicans planned to send to the Capitol from states that Biden won.

Troupis has since asked the federal government to reimburse him $3.2 million from the proposed $1.8 billion fund, saying his life has been a “nightmare” since he stepped up to represent Trump.

“My experience is a poster-child for what weaponization can do,” he wrote in a letter to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, adding that “the entire legal system is at risk if compensation is not paid.”

Attorneys for Chesebro and Roman didn’t respond to requests for comment, and Troupis’ attorney declined to comment.

Burden said it is striking that the case is still ongoing nearly six years after the election, but he said the conduct at issue remains extraordinary.

“These were among the most serious challenges to elections we’ve seen in modern times,” Burden said.

“To think that there might be no ramifications of that really would be shocking,” he said, “and, I think, at odds with how the American criminal justice system has typically operated.”

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

The FBI agents arrived at David Bolter’s Milwaukee home on a cool, cloudy Wednesday morning in late May. They were armed with a list of questions for the 2020 poll worker, who had raised concerns about the way local officials handled the 2020 election, Bolter told Votebeat.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

President Donald Trump relied on Bolter’s claims in an unsuccessful 2020 lawsuit that sought to throw out more than 220,000 votes. That would have been more than enough to move Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes from Democrat Joe Biden, who won the state, to Trump. Though courts, several election reviews, and many audits rejected Trump’s claims, the Republican never stopped believing that he was cheated out of the presidency in 2020.

That appears to be why, last month, the FBI sent agents back to Milwaukee to question Bolter as part of an expanding national effort by the second Trump administration to investigate long-debunked claims of fraud in the 2020 election.

The investigation into the 2020 election appears to be relying on already disproven allegations from people like Bolter. Bolter declined to divulge more about his conversation with the FBI, which has not been previously reported, but allegations from Bolter’s 2020 affidavit were central to some conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. For example, he alleged that somebody in Milwaukee’s absentee ballot counting facility announced around midnight on Election Day that a “huge truckload of ballots” was going to be delivered — an accusation for which there has so far appeared to be no additional evidence.

Around the same time Bolter says he talked to the FBI, two plainclothes agents with FBI badges showed up at the apartment of a former Milwaukee resident and 2020 poll worker about an affidavit she submitted, according to the former poll worker, who asked to be identified only by her first name, Christine, to give her the freedom to discuss an ongoing investigation.

Christine had also submitted an affidavit about the 2020 election, saying election workers had been told that all votes were counted, but she then saw workers continuing to count ballots around midnight. That affidavit was the focus of the agents’ questions, Christine told Votebeat.

“I suspected wrongdoing, but I’m not saying that it actually happened,” she said. “I’m just one lowly person that was working there.”

During the interview, she added, an agent showed her a photograph of Claire Woodall, the former Milwaukee election chief, asking her if she recognized the former election official who has been central to false allegations about the 2020 election. She identified her by name. Woodall didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Caroline Clancy, a spokesperson for the FBI’s Milwaukee office, declined to comment.

While investigators seem mainly focused on the 2020 vote, some elections experts believe the Trump administration’s wide-ranging probe is actually designed to create more doubts among Americans about future elections, as Republicans face strong political headwinds that could cost them control of Congress later this year.

“This isn’t about the 2020 election, this is about the 2026 and 2028 elections,” said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan, nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research. “This is about intimidating election officials. This is about creating a stream of disinformation designed to delegitimize an election the president may believe he’s going to lose. This is designed by the president’s underlings to satisfy the unrealistic expectations of a president that still cannot comprehend that he lost an election that he definitely lost, and it’s incredibly destabilizing.”

Wisconsin is the latest known target of the Trump administration’s 2020 investigation. The FBI is looking to interview elections officials and Milwaukee police officers in what some worry could be a precursor to an effort to seize ballots from the 2020 presidential race, as it already has in Georgia.

The Trump administration is revisiting allegations of election fraud that have been repeatedly scrutinized

In January, federal investigators seized 600 boxes of ballots from the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia. The heavily Democratic county, home to Atlanta, was key to Biden’s narrow 2020 victory in the state.

As in Wisconsin, the FBI in Georgia has built its investigation on allegations that have already been repeatedly scrutinized by audits, investigations, and courts without unearthing any evidence of fraud or tampering that could have overturned the results.

The Georgia search represented an unprecedented intervention by the federal government into local administration. Even more unusually, Tulsi Gabbard, who will step down at end of this month as director of national intelligence, personally oversaw the seizure and arranged for Trump to speak directly to the FBI agents via cell phone after they carried out the operation.

The Trump administration investigations stretch from Arizona, where federal officials subpoenaed computerized records of a partisan review state lawmakers conducted of Maricopa County’s 2020 election, to Puerto Rico, where the Office of the Director of National Intelligence procured voting machines to examine for potential security risks.

The administration’s investigations aren’t entirely limited to 2020. The U.S. Department of Justice sent a letter in April to Wayne County, Michigan — home to Detroit — demanding all ballots cast in the 2024 election, which Trump won. But even in that case, to support the request, the Justice Department cited accusations of fraud made after the 2020 election, including a lawsuit that was quickly dismissed after a judge wrote that “plaintiffs’ interpretation of events is incorrect and not credible.” Wayne County never handed over the ballots, because it doesn’t have possession of them.

What do the 2020 elections mean for 2026?

The FBI faces challenges in pursuing cases tied to the 2020 election since the five-year statute of limitations that applies to most of the likely charges expired last year. Law enforcement veterans said it is possible that the Justice Department could pursue broader conspiracy charges in the case, but the prospect remains unclear.

FBI Director Kash Patel suggested in April that the Justice Department would soon announce arrests related to the 2020 election, but that has not yet occurred. Officials with the FBI and Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment.

John Keller, a former acting head of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section who resigned in 2025 after refusing the Trump administration’s demands to drop corruption charges against then-New York City Mayor Eric Adams, said the administration appeared to be trying to normalize federal investigations of state elections to pave the way for future intervention.

“They are using enforcement directed at the 2020 election as a test run for what they can get away with on Election Day this year, or after, to try and delay certification or invalidate an election” if the results don’t go their way, he said.

Injecting federal law enforcement officials into an ongoing election is a more extreme and serious action than investigating a past one, and it could face stiffer opposition. But it’s clear, at least, that the administration is scrutinizing current elections closely.

Trump last week blasted California’s long vote counting process in its primary election and asserted that Democrats were trying to steal the election and federal authorities were investigating. Last month, Trump also said he was ordering the Justice Department to investigate an error that led to some voters in Maryland receiving ballots for the wrong party in the state’s upcoming primary. State officials in both cases have explained the true causes of the issues and that nothing nefarious was behind them.

Any effort to seize ballots in an ongoing election would create unprecedented new issues, such as a breach in the chain of custody over cast ballots, that could prevent election officials from declaring a winner and throw results into uncertainty.

Catherine Engelbrecht, co-founder of the Texas-based conservative group True the Vote, which has promoted debunked theories about the 2020 election, said she understands Trump’s intentions but believes the 2020 election questions should have been resolved “in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election.”

“This is not necessarily the way I would have recommended that it would be handled,” she said. “The fact that it wasn’t addressed has left this lingering void.”

In most cases, however, Trump’s claims of voter fraud were addressed in the wake of the 2020 election. Time and again, courts, state investigations, and even the Justice Department concluded that there was no evidence of problems or fraud that would have changed the results.

Engelbrecht said she views the Trump administration’s ongoing investigations as an effort to dig into long-standing concerns about the voting process it wants to address for future elections.

“The past is prologue,” she said. “If we don’t understand what happened, we are doomed to repeat it.”

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

When President Donald Trump pressured state and local officials to intervene in his behalf in the 2020 election, it wasn’t a matter of abstract constitutional theory for the people running elections. It was armed protests outside offices, threats against their families, subpoenas for voter data, and months of uncertainty about whether doing their jobs would land them in legal jeopardy.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

Now, Trump says he wants Republicans to “nationalize the voting” and “take over the voting in at least 15 places,” language that evokes the pressure campaigns he and allies mounted during that contentious 2020 period.

Trump’s 2020 effort ultimately stalled when even some Republicans refused to take steps they believed were unlawful. And his call to nationalize voting this week prompted pushback from some GOP members of Congress and other Republican figures.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Trump’s proposal raised constitutional concerns, and he warned that nationalizing elections could make them more susceptible to cybersecurity attacks. Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska was more blunt, saying he has long opposed federal control of elections. “I’ll oppose this now as well,” he wrote on X.

On Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump’s comments referred to his support for federal legislation commonly called the SAVE Act.

Election officials say the lesson of 2020 was not that the system is invulnerable, but that it can be strained in ways that cause lasting damage long before courts step in. While it’s unclear whether Trump’s latest demands — and possible future actions— would lead to the same level of disruption, legal experts say some of the backstops that ultimately stopped him last time are now weaker, leaving election officials to absorb even more pressure.

Memories of 2020 shape the response

Kathy Bernier, a Republican former Wisconsin lawmaker and Chippewa County clerk, was the chair of the state Senate’s election committee following the 2020 election and repeatedly pushed back on Trump’s claims of widespread fraud. As Republicans launched a prolonged review of the results, Bernier criticized the effort publicly, saying Wisconsin’s elections were secure and that “no one should falsely accuse election officials of cheating.”

She faced extensive backlash, including calls for her resignation, and Bernier said the dispute escalated to the point that she carried a gun for protection. She ultimately left the legislature, a decision that she said wasn’t politically motivated.

A key takeaway from the 2020 election for election officials, Bernier told Votebeat, was the importance of radical transparency — not just following the rules, but showing people, in real time, that the rules are being followed “to a T.”

“When there’s a paper jam,” she said, “announce it.”

Still, she said, officials also learned the limits of that approach. After she tried to boost election confidence across Wisconsin, she came to a blunt conclusion: “There’s nothing you can do with ‘I don’t believe you.’”

In the years that followed, Bernier said, a bigger danger than Trump himself were the “charlatans” who took his words and turned them into a business model, spreading conspiracy theories for profit. The misinformation and disinformation those people spread, Bernier said, continue to resonate among the conspiratorial segments of the GOP.

The impact of their campaigns has been felt acutely by election officials. Many received death threats, and some had to relocate and enhance their security protections. Large cities redesigned their election offices to better protect their workers, and election official turnover increased dramatically, reshaping the profession long after the votes were counted.

Stephen Richer, a Republican who became recorder in Maricopa County, Arizona, shortly after the 2020 election, had similar advice: Follow the law, tell the truth, and consult attorneys, national associations, and state associations before making key decisions, because “the likelihood that they are dealing with your jurisdiction alone is limited.”

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is among the Republicans who prominently resisted Trump’s calls to overturn the 2020 election. He and his wife received death threats, and were assigned a protective team by the state. He declined an interview with Votebeat, but in a statement this week, he urged lawmakers to improve state election administration “rather than rehashing the same outdated claims or worse — moving to federalize a core function of state government.”

Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt, another Republican who pushed back on Trump’s baseless allegations of widespread fraud following the 2020 election and faced similar retaliation, told Votebeat that the state’s elections are freer and fairer than ever before, and that the Constitution stops Trump from unilaterally nationalizing elections.

The Michigan Department of State, similarly, said this was a settled constitutional matter.

On the other hand, Michigan Republicans have asked the U.S. Justice Department for increased federal involvement in elections in the state, calling for monitors — not atypical in American elections — as well as “oversight,” although GOP leaders didn’t elaborate on what that would mean.

Richer, who lost his reelection bid for recorder in 2024 to another Republican, said Trump’s comments, combined with similar calls for federal involvement, suggest the Republican Party is drifting from its traditional commitment to federalism and local control. He also pointed to increased legislation at the federal level seeking to standardize elections, which has received little pushback from the Republican Party. That’s despite Republicans criticizing an earlier Democratic legislative effort as federal overreach.

“Clearly the federal government is going to do things that it’s never done before,” he said. “The FBI going in and taking materials from an election that happened over five years ago is unprecedented, so maybe we’re destined for additional unprecedented actions."

Election officials and courts the most significant ‘line of defense’

One of the key reasons that Trump failed in his efforts to delay and then overturn the 2020 election was the “men and women of principle” in his administration, said David Becker, an election lawyer who leads the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation & Research. Becker, a former Justice Department official, said the experience offered an uncomfortable lesson: Those internal guardrails existed because individuals chose to enforce them — and there is less reason to assume they would be there again.

After the 2020 election, Bill Barr, the attorney general at the time, disputed Trump’s claim that there was widespread fraud; the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency similarly disputed the president’s claim that swings in unofficial results during election night meant that there was election fraud; and national security officials reportedly warned Trump that he couldn’t seize voting machines.

“That line of defense is largely gone,” Becker said, because “the primary and perhaps only qualification for being hired by this administration — particularly in those key roles in the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security — is loyalty to this man.”

With fewer internal checks, Becker said, the second and most important line of defense this election cycle is courts and state and local election officials. Courts have already stymied many of the election policies Trump has tried to carry out via executive order, and “election officials are holding firm.” But he cautioned that court challenges take time — time in which “untold damage” can be done to erode public trust and to the officials caught in the middle.

That gap between what Trump can say and what he can actually do is where the risk now lies, said Justin Levitt, an election law professor at Loyola Marymount University who advised President Joe Biden’s administration on democracy and voting rights. Levitt said Trump does not have the legal or operational authority to unilaterally nationalize elections, even if he were inclined to cross legal boundaries.

He contrasted the president’s ability to control elections with ICE’s use of force in Democratic-run cities. In immigration enforcement, Levitt said, Congress has given the executive branch authority that can be exercised aggressively or improperly, even when courts later find those actions unlawful. In those cases, Levitt said, the president has “his finger on a switch” — the practical ability to act first and answer questions later. “No such switch exists” in elections, said Levitt.

But with fewer administration officials pushing back on Trump’s claims compared with his first term, Levitt said election officials can expect Trump’s messaging to get “much, much, much worse this year,” and for those claims to be given more oxygen by the rest of the federal government.

“It’s up to us to choose to believe him or not,” he added. Obedience in advance isn’t required, and treating Trump’s claims as commands would grant him authority he does not have, Levitt said, adding, “We have agency in this.”

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

A Republican lawmaker’s plan to regulate drop boxes and give Wisconsin’s clerks more time to process absentee ballots ran into obstacles last week, including skepticism from fellow Republicans and a rival GOP bill to ban drop boxes entirely.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

The cool reception for Rep. Scott Krug’s ideas, especially to let clerks process ballots on the Monday before an election, underscores the GOP’s persistent internal divide over election policy in Wisconsin, with advocates of reforms long sought by election officials of both parties running into distrust fueled by conspiracy theories and misinformation. Last week, the resistance appeared strong enough to stall or complicate efforts by Republicans who aim to address clerks’ needs and craft workable policy that can gain Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ support.

That split was on full display at a Nov. 4 hearing of the Assembly Elections Committee, chaired by Rep. Dave Maxey.

Krug, a former committee chair who championed the draft bill to regulate drop boxes, argued that his colleagues should adopt a “reality-based” mindset with their approach to drop boxes. Liberals, he said, control the governor’s office, making it all but certain that GOP Rep. Lindee Brill’s bill to ban drop boxes would get vetoed by Evers.

To that, Brill responded: “I am a believer in God and a follower of Jesus Christ, so do I think there’s a chance that [Evers] would change his mind and sign this into law? Sure. But I’m taking this on because our Republican president believes this is the direction we should be heading.”

In response to questions, she dismissed an Associated Press survey of election officials that found no widespread fraud from drop boxes in the 2020 presidential election that could have affected the results, saying she wasn’t sure she considered the AP a valid source.

“You and I find truth in different spots,” she told a Democratic lawmaker.

During the hearing, Maxey let others speak at length, including Peter Bernegger — a conspiracy theorist fined by the Wisconsin Elections Commission for making frivolous complaints — who echoed unfounded claims of widespread drop box fraud in Wisconsin.

When Krug scrutinized Brill’s proposal, though, Maxey interrupted him, leading a visibly frustrated Krug to ask him to “give me the last sentence, like we’ve let others have.”

Republicans have slim majority, divided caucus

This clash between the two views on election policy “is longstanding and is not going to be resolved anytime soon,” said Barry Burden, a UW-Madison political science professor and founder of the Elections Research Center. “Right now, it seems like neither path is really working.”

Assembly Republican leaders typically only advance bills that have 50 GOP votes, enough to pass without Democratic support. They once held 64 of 99 seats, nearly a supermajority, but now have just 54, meaning they can afford to lose only four GOP votes to advance legislation. That math, and the internal distrust, make passing even modest reforms difficult. Unless they can rally the more skeptical voices in their caucus, Burden said, Republicans have to be willing to cross the aisle and court Democratic votes.

Maxey, who co-authored Brill’s bill, told Votebeat that drop boxes “are about as effective for election integrity as a mask is at preventing COVID,” an analogy that left his meaning muddled: Drop boxes in Wisconsin have never been proven to be a means for widespread fraud, whereas masks have been shown to slow the spread of COVID-19.

Maxey said his worries weren’t “wild conspiracy theories” but came from past ballot issues in Madison, though none of those involved drop boxes. He told Votebeat that he fears tampering and that voters using drop boxes might be unable to fix ballot errors.

Burden noted that valid ballots deposited in drop boxes are like any other absentee ballot, and contain voters’ and witnesses’ information, which helps prevent fraud.

Monday processing proposal in doubt

Krug’s draft proposal to let local clerks begin processing absentee ballots on the Monday before an election was a change long sought by election officials to help speed up the reporting of results, but blocked by a few conservative lawmakers. Krug and other GOP leaders hoped his proposal could win them over because it was part of a broader package that included measures conservatives want, including an explicit ban on clerks fixing, or curing, errors on absentee ballot envelopes, and the stricter regulation of drop boxes.

But at a hearing on Nov. 6, Krug conceded that both the preprocessing and drop box proposals were in jeopardy because of GOP opposition. Those measures were stripped out of the package after pushback from Brill, Maxey, and other conservatives, who released their own bill to ban drop boxes entirely.

Maxey told Votebeat that he would likely give a Monday processing proposal a hearing in his committee but would vote against it — adding that he knows other Assembly Republicans are against it, too.

Krug — who previously told Votebeat that he “would use every little ounce of political capital effort created on elections to get Monday processing done” — appeared to downplay the measure’s importance, saying it was only an issue in Milwaukee, where late-night reporting of election results often leads to conspiracy theories about fraudulent ballot dumps.

Clerks elsewhere disagree that the problem is so localized. Marathon County Clerk Kim Trueblood, a Republican, told Votebeat she hopes Krug “hasn’t entirely given up” on the Monday processing proposal, though “that’s what it sounds like for this session, at least.”

Krug also blamed its failure so far on the governor’s office, which he said received the draft Monday processing proposal months ago but never got back to him.

“Scott Krug has taken enough you-know-what in every community in the state of Wisconsin for being bold on this issue and saying we have to do it,” Krug said. “I need partners.”

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

On Election Day in Madison, nearly 200 absentee ballots slipped through the cracks. They weren’t processed or counted. Most of them weren’t even discovered until almost a month later.

And nobody seems to know exactly how the oversight occurred. Some city officials are questioning why it took so long for the error to come to light. It’s a mystery that the dozens of voters in the state capital would certainly like to see solved.

The critical disenfranchisement of 193 Madison voters on Nov. 5 resulted from mistakes at two different polling locations and the lack of a comprehensive system for poll workers to track whether they’ve counted every absentee ballot.

At a polling site in Ward 56, just west of downtown, election officials didn’t open two large carrier envelopes, used to transport absentee ballots, that contained a total of 125 ballots, Madison Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl said. At another site in a neighborhood slightly further west called Regent, poll workers at Ward 65 didn’t open another carrier envelope, carrying 68 absentee ballots, including one that should have been sent to a different polling place.

Normally, Witzel-Behl said, poll workers at each location “triple check” that all absentee votes have been processed before running results on the tabulator.

“We do not know why these carrier envelopes were overlooked at the polls on Election Day,” she said.

The oversight became public seven weeks after the election. Until just over a week ago, neither the Wisconsin Elections Commission nor the Madison mayor’s office knew about it.

On Dec. 26, Madison’s mayor and clerk outlined in separate statements how the ballots made it to two polling places but were somehow left unopened.

“While the discovery of these unprocessed absentee ballots did not impact the results of any election or referendum, a discrepancy of this magnitude is unacceptable,” Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said. “This oversight is a significant departure from the high standard our residents expect and must be addressed and avoided in future elections.”

The statements left significant questions unanswered: Exactly how and when did the ballots go missing? Who was responsible for the error? Why was the news coming out over seven weeks after Election Day?

Rhodes-Conway, for one, made clear the long delay wasn’t on her account.

“Unfortunately, Clerk’s Office staff were apparently aware of the oversight for some time and the Mayor’s Office was not notified of the unprocessed ballots until December 20,” she said in a statement.

In fact, Witzel-Behl didn’t alert the mayor’s office first about the missing ballots. The clerk’s office told the Wisconsin Elections Commission about it on Dec. 18. The agency then relayed the news to the city attorney, who told the mayor’s office about it.

The commission found out about the missing ballots through a process that clerks must follow if there’s a discrepancy at the polls between the number of voters and number of ballots. The clerk’s office told the commission about the discrepancy two days before the deadline for reconciling those numbers, Witzel-Behl said. Prior to that, Witzel-Behl told Votebeat she was largely out of office.

“I personally was trying to burn through vacation time after the election, and was not aware of the magnitude of this situation,” she said. “In retrospect, I should have just cut back to standard workweeks after the election.”

Madison has decentralized absentee processing

Unlike some of Wisconsin’s bigger cities, where all absentee ballots are processed and counted at a single location, in Madison absentee ballots are sent to the polling sites corresponding to where the voters would cast in-person ballots. At those sites, poll workers typically process the absentee ballot envelopes, containing witness and voter information, before counting the ballots.

Workers at each polling location have a process for checking which voters submitted absentee ballots. They typically use an orange highlighter to mark names of voters in a poll book of city residents who were issued an absentee ballot, Witzel-Behl said, and a pink highlighter to mark those who returned their ballots. Each polling place has documents outlining the number of ballots that were returned to be counted as of the Sunday prior to Election Day, she said.

Each absentee carrier envelope has a unique identification number on the seal closing it for security reasons. Madison polling sites didn’t receive a list of seal numbers for each carrier envelope that was transported to them, but the clerk’s office stated they would provide such a list in the future. There was only a handwritten log of the seal numbers in the clerk’s office.

Despite the two polling places having a large number of absentee ballots outstanding on Election Day, the missing votes weren’t discovered until after the Municipal Board of Canvassers met on Nov. 8 to certify the election, Witzel-Behl said.

By the time one batch of uncounted ballots was discovered on Nov. 12, she said, “Staff was under the impression that it was too late for these ballots to be counted, unless we had a recount.”

Madison voters cast over 174,000 ballots in the November election.

What we know about the missing ballots

There weren’t any apparent issues with sorting or delivering the correct ballots to the polling location near downtown. But at some point after Election Day, Witzel-Behl said, an hourly employee noticed there were a lot of outstanding absentee ballots.

On Dec. 3, she said, the employee looked through materials returned from that polling location on Election Day, she said. The employee found two sealed carrier envelopes containing absentee ballots. They contained 125 unprocessed ballots.

The 68 ballots at the Regent neighborhood polling site, including the one ballot sorted and delivered to the wrong station, were contained in a sealed carrier envelope of absentee ballots.

It’s not entirely clear where that carrier envelope was throughout Election Day, but election workers later discovered it inside of a chamber of a vote tabulating machine where ballots typically go after they’re counted. Madison election officials often use that compartment to transport absentee ballots to polling sites.

At the end of the night, poll workers put secure ballot bags and other materials into the tabulators, Witzel-Behl said.

Madison clerk, mayor vow to prevent future oversights

In its letter to the election commission, the clerk’s office outlined its plans to “debrief these incidents and implement better processes” to make sure all absentee carrier envelopes are accounted for and processed on Election Day.

Rhodes-Conway also said she plans to conduct a review of the city’s election policies. Additionally, she said, the city will send letters to the affected voters to notify them of the error and apologize.

“My office is committed to taking whatever corrective action is necessary to maintain a high standard of election integrity in Madison, and to provide ongoing transparency into that process,” she said.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

In the early morning following Election Day in 2020, Claire Woodall, then Milwaukee’s elections chief, mistakenly left behind a USB stick carrying vote totals at the city’s central absentee ballot counting facility. Election conspiracy theorists quickly seized on the mistake, accusing Woodall of rigging the election.

Their claims were baseless, but the mistake increased scrutiny on the city’s election staff and led Woodall to create a checklist to make sure workers at central count didn’t overlook any critical steps in the future.

This year, despite the checklist, Milwaukee election staff at central count made another procedural mistake — and once again left the door open to conspiracy theorists.

Somebody — city officials haven’t said who — overlooked the second step outlined on the checklist and failed to lock and seal the hatch covers on the facility’s 13 tabulators before workers began tabulating ballots. For hours, while counting proceeded, the machines’ on-off switches and USB ports were left exposed.

After election officials discovered the lapse, city officials decided to count 31,000 absentee ballots all over again, a choice that led to delays in reporting results.

Results from the large and heavily Democratic city ultimately came in at 4 a.m. on Wednesday, only a few hours later than expected, but a time that conspiracy theorists implied was a suspicious hour for vote totals to change. Their posts echoed claims from 2020 that used sensationalized language like “late-night ballot dumps” to describe the reality that in big cities, absentee ballots take time — yes, sometimes late into the night — to collect, deliver, verify, and count accurately.

In fact, the results in Milwaukee couldn’t have arrived much sooner. Under state law, election officials can’t start processing the hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots until the morning of Election Day. This year, they got a late start, because of delays in getting workers settled, but were still expecting to be done around 2 or 3 a.m. Then it became clear the midday decision to redo the count would add more time to the process.

But those explanations have done little to curb the false conspiracy theories that have been proliferating on the right, including from losing U.S. Senate candidate Eric Hovde.

Election officials have for years known that the slightest mistakes, or even perceived errors, can trigger false claims. In this instance, the failure to follow a critical security step occurred in the state’s most scrutinized election facility, despite new procedures meant to reduce such errors.

For people with a conspiratorial mindset, such an oversight can’t be explained away as just a mistake, said Mert Bayar, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public. The errors can provide conspiracy theorists a feeling of validation because those errors make a “conspiracy theory more realistic … more believable.”

For those people, he said, election errors are instead perceived as “part of a plot to steal an election.”

Instead of considering the 2024 Milwaukee mistake a simple oversight, Bayar said, conspiracy theorists may think that the tabulator doors “cannot be left unlocked unless they’re trying something tricky, something stealth.”

Genya Coulter, senior director of stakeholder relations at the Open Source Election Technology Institute, said Milwaukee can still fine-tune its processes and checklists.

“I don’t think anybody needs to be demonized,” she said, “but I do think that there needs to be some retraining. That would be helpful.”

Milwaukee error initially drew complaints, but not suspicion

It was an election observer who first noticed the open tabulator doors and alerted election officials. Around 2 p.m., Milwaukee’s current election chief, Paulina Gutiérrez, went from tabulator to tabulator, monitored by Democratic and Republican representatives, to lock all of the doors. Two hours later, she made the call to rerun all ballots through the tabulators.

The tabulators had been in full view of partisan observers and the media, but behind a barrier that only election officials and some designated observers, like representatives for both political parties who accompany election officials during some election processes, can enter. Any tampering would have been evident, Gutiérrez said, and there was no sign of that.

For that reason, some Republicans at central count opposed recounting all the ballots and risking a delay. U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, who went to central count on Election Day to learn more about the error, said he didn’t think anything nefarious happened, though he said the election operation there was “grossly incompetent.”

Coulter said the decision to start the counting over again was “the right call for transparency’s sake.”

Hovde, who lost his Senate race in a state that Donald Trump carried, invoked conspiratorial language to describe what happened.

“The results from election night were disappointing, particularly in light of the last minute absentee ballots that were dropped in Milwaukee at 4 a.m. flipping the outcome,” he said Monday in his concession speech. “There are many troubling issues around these absentee ballots.”

In an earlier video, Hovde criticized Milwaukee’s election operation and spread false claims about the proportion of votes that opponent, U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, received from absentee ballots. That led to a skyrocketing number of posts baselessly alleging election fraud in Wisconsin.

One prominent conservative social media account questioned whether the tabulator doors being left open was a case of sabotage.

In a statement, the Milwaukee Election Commission said it “unequivocally refutes Eric Hovde’s baseless claims regarding the integrity of our election process.”

Why Milwaukee’s results were late

There’s no proof of fraud or malfeasance in Milwaukee or anywhere else in Wisconsin on Election Day. But a few key factors combined to delay Milwaukee’s results until 4 a.m.

First, Milwaukee central count workers started processing and tabulating ballots around 9 a.m., long after the 7 a.m. start time allowed under state law. The delay was a matter of getting dozens of central count workers organized and at the right station in the large facility.

The more high-profile one was the failure to close the tabulators, which prompted the decision to count 31,000 absentee ballots all over again.

But both of those slowdowns could have been less consequential had Wisconsin election officials been able to process absentee ballots on the Monday before Election Day, as some other states allow. Such a change could have allowed election officials to review absentee ballot envelopes, verify and check in absentee voters, but not count votes. An effort to allow election officials to do so stalled in the state Senate this year.

Checklist change could ‘improve transparency’

Milwaukee election officials may have avoided the situation entirely — and could avoid similar situations in the future — by modifying their central count checklist, said Coulter, from the Open Source Election Technology Institute.

Currently, the checklist states that at the start of Election Day, the tabulator doors should be locked and sealed. It’s not clear why that step was skipped. Gutiérrez didn’t respond to questions for comment about who was in charge of the process or whether that person faced disciplinary action.

But the step likely wouldn’t have been overlooked, Coulter said, if the checklist required the official in charge of locking the tabulators to be accompanied by a representative from each major political party.

“That’s a relatively painless change that … I think it would improve transparency,” Coulter said.

“There needs to be an emphasis on having two people from different political affiliations performing all duties that involve the tabulator,” she said.

Another pre-processing step on the checklist calls for people working at the tabulators to make sure the numbered seals pasted over the tabulator doors are intact. It doesn’t call for checking that the tabulator doors are locked.

To avoid a repeat situation, Coulter said, “They should also check to make sure that the door to the power button is properly locked, and what to do if it isn’t.”

Election officials recognize the scrutiny they face over errors, Coulter said, and they sometimes focus more on avoiding mistakes than running election operations.

“It’s like a racecar driver … If you focus on the wall, you’re going to wind up hitting that wall,” she said. “You have to train your mind to think about the curve and not the wall, but unfortunately, it’s really hard for election officials to do that, especially in high-pressure jurisdictions.”

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

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