2 years ago
A draft report for a GOP-run investigation of the 2020 election in Wisconsin, authored by a former state Supreme Court justice, embraces the fringe theory that election results could be decertified after the fact — advancing former President Donald Trump’s calls to overturn an election he lost well over a year ago.
Former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman for months has been conducting a probe of the 2020 election, authorized by state Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, one of the most powerful Republicans in the state.
Gableman’s interim report, released at the start of a hearing on Tuesday in front of the state Assembly committee on campaigns and elections, attacks Wisconsin election administrators and argues for dismantling the state’s bipartisan election board and limiting mail voting.
But perhaps most astoundingly, given that election experts and legal scholars say such a step is not possible, Gableman argued that the 2020 election results could be decertified — something that Trump has advocated since his loss.
“I believe the legislature ought to take a very hard look at the option of decertification” of the 2020 election, Gableman said at the hearing.
Gableman’s report attacked the administration and results of Wisconsin's 2020 election on multiple fronts. He went after the state board for a decision on how to send absentee ballots to nursing homes and handle their return during the pandemic — a decision approved at the time by five of the six commissioners on the bipartisan board, but which Republicans have since argued was illegal.
“WOW - Gableman goes full in crazy conspiracy theory and demands that Wisconsin ‘Decertify’ the election,” Ann Jacobs, the Democratic chair of the Wisconsin Elections Commission tweeted during Tuesday’s hearing.
The retired judge also attacked private grants from the Center for Tech and Civic Life, an elections-focused nonprofit organization to which Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg donated hundreds of millions of dollars in the run-up to the 2020 election. That money was redistributed as grants to local election officials across the country to deal with the complications of running an election during the pandemic.
Gableman referred to five large cities in Wisconsin — Milwaukee, Madison, Racine, Kenosha and Green Bay — that received grants from the CTCL as the “Zuckerberg Five.” Those cities received the majority of the grant money awarded to Wisconsin jurisdictions, but election officials in 39 of the state’s 72 counties received grants, part of a larger group of 2,500 election offices in 49 states that received a grant from the CTCL.
Nevertheless, Gableman alleged a partisan conspiracy from CTCL to boost Democrats.
Gableman's report argues that the legislature could “decertify the certified electors in the 2020 presidential election” by the state legislature first voting to conclude that the election was held in violation of state law, then claiming that “the level that fraud or other illegality under Wisconsin law could have affected the outcome,” and then exercising "its plenary power to designate the slate of electors it thought best accorded with the outcome of the election.”
The report concludes that a theoretical Wisconsin decertification “would not, on its own, have any other legal consequence under state or federal law” — like “chang[ing] who the current president is."
This is a developing story that will be updated.
English (US)