Hi John --

It has been a busy week for election investigations. We wanted to make sure you were up-to-date on the two biggest stories this week: 1) yesterday's bombshell from the Racine Sheriff’s Department, and 2) the election report from the Legislative Audit Bureau. 

Racine County Sheriff’s Office Makes Bombshell Announcement

Yesterday, the Racine County Sheriff made a bombshell announcement highlighting the Wisconsin Elections Commission’s violation of the law in their handling of voting in nursing homes. After WEC suspended special voting deputies for nursing homes, they told nursing home staff to commit a felony by voting on the behalf of residents who could not vote themselves -- some of whom were in cognitive decline.

As WisGOP Chairman Paul Farrow said in our statement yesterday: “Anyone who cares at all about election integrity owes the Racine County Sheriff’s Department a debt of gratitude for their work today. It is horrific that WEC’s choice to violate state laws may have led to bad actors taking advantage of vulnerable citizens in nursing homes. It’s time for Democrats, the Department of Justice, and the mainstream media to take election integrity concerns seriously.”

Legislative Audit Bureau Releases 2020 Report

The Legislative Audit Bureau’s forensic audit report was released earlier this week, and it uncovered some serious problems with Wisconsin’s election administration.

Some of the findings include:

• WEC had never run a report on whether people had multiple registrations in Wisconsin or died in other states going back to 2016
• After 169,901 new individuals marked themselves as indefinitely confined in 2020, 48,554 indefinitely confined voters did not have a photo ID on file with their local clerk
• 45,665 new voters registered with driver’s license information that did not match DMV records
• WEC violated state law by not issuing rules on how to train special voting deputies or election inspections.
• WEC told clerks they could go home on election night and return the next day to finish counting, in violation of the law
• Local clerks failed to remove over 12,500 dead voters from the rolls before election day
• At least 17.5% of municipal clerks did not complete their required training by election day

To make matters worse, many clerks declined to participate in the review at all. Only 48 percent of municipal clerks responded to the LAB’s request. Auditors were even barred from handling election-related materials from the city of Madison.

You can read the full report here, or read a full summary of the report from MacIver News here.

Election officials need to follow the law. End of story. While Republicans in the Legislature work to resolve the issues outlined by the audit, the Republican Party of Wisconsin is still hard at work recruiting poll workers for every polling location ahead of our crucial elections in 2022. You can sign up to serve as a poll worker in your community here.

Thanks,

Team WisGOP