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    Wisconsin Elections Official Targeted in Partisan Clash Over Voting

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    Meagan Wolfe, the Wisconsin Elections Commission administrator since 2018, has been demonized by former President Donald J. Trump’s allies in the battleground state.Republicans in Wisconsin pushing to oust the state’s nonpartisan head of elections clashed on Tuesday with voting rights advocates and some local clerks during a rancorous public hearing in Madison, sowing further distrust about voting integrity.With their new supermajority in the State Senate, Republicans fought over the reappointment of Meagan Wolfe as the Wisconsin Elections Commission administrator.The agency’s head since 2018, Ms. Wolfe has become a steady target of right-wing attacks, fueled by former President Donald J. Trump’s grievances about his defeat in the battleground state in 2020. Many of them hinge on his falsehoods about election fraud and the use of electronic voting machines and ballot drop boxes.Ms. Wolfe did not attend the hearing, where a stream of critics told a Senate election oversight committee that she should be ousted. Among them was Michael J. Gableman, a conservative former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice whom Republicans tasked with leading a 14-month investigation into the 2020 election results in the state. The review, which cost taxpayers $1.1 million, found no evidence of significant fraud.“A majority of people in Wisconsin have doubts about the honesty of elections in this state,” he said at the hearing. “That’s disgraceful.”On Tuesday, Ms. Wolfe declined to comment through a spokesman for the elections commission, who shared a copy of a letter that she sent to legislators in June that had sought to dispel election misinformation.“I believe it is fair to say that no election in Wisconsin history has been as scrutinized, reviewed, investigated and reinvestigated as much as the November 2020 general election,” her letter said. “The outcome of all those 2020 probes produced essentially the same results: the identification of a relatively small number of suggestions for procedural improvements, with no findings of wrongdoing or significant fraud.”Meagan Wolfe, the administrator, did not attend the hearing, where a stream of critics told a Senate election oversight committee that she should be removed.Ruthie Hauge/Wisconsin State Journal, via Associated PressAt the hearing, Ms. Wolfe’s supporters described her as a model of competency who guided a network of state, county and local election officials through the pandemic and has done so in an impartial manner. They warned that her removal would result in chaos.“Considering what happened after the 2020 elections and since, we are in a world of crazy for next year,” said Lisa Tollefson, the clerk of Rock County, in the southern part of the state. “With the actions and accusations that have been made toward election officials, we are certainly seeing the highest turnover in county clerks and municipal clerks in our history.”Dan Knodl, a Republican who is the chairman of the Senate committee, challenged her “world of crazy” remark.“Are you predicting something, or you have information that something is on the horizon?” he said.Ms. Tollefson answered that the political climate was only likely to intensify in Wisconsin and pointed to the hard-fought election in April that flipped Wisconsin’s Supreme Court from conservative to liberal.Several times during Tuesday’s hearing, Democrats argued that the Legislature did not have the authority to vote on Ms. Wolfe’s reappointment, noting that state law requires her renomination to come from the commission.A June vote by the commission on whether to appoint her to another four-year term ended in an impasse, with three Democrats abstaining over concerns that Republicans would use their supermajority in the Senate to remove her. By doing nothing — declining to renominate or take any other action — the commission can effectively keep Ms. Wolfe in her current role under state law.Republicans have challenged the statute, and the issue is expected to end up being decided by the courts.Ann S. Jacobs, a Democratic commissioner, referred to the move by G.O.P. lawmakers to oust Ms. Wolfe as a “circus.”Mr. Knodl bristled at her language and said he was not about to abdicate oversight.“Whether it’s circuslike or not, that’s what we’ll do,” he said. “Thank you for attending the circus.”Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause in Wisconsin, a government watchdog group, said Ms. Wolfe’s removal would be a major blow to the state, which is likely to once again be a crucial battleground for the presidential race.“The vast majority of Wisconsin’s voters and citizens can and will lose confidence and trust in our elections,” he said. More

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      This Wisconsin Court Race Is Highly Partisan. It Wasn’t Always That Way.

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      Supreme Court races were once more swayed by endorsements from legal and law enforcement officials. Now they’re indistinguishable from other elections.Today’s election in Wisconsin will be closely watched for its impact on the partisan makeup of the state’s top court, with abortion rights and election rules frequent topics of the campaign. The contest between Daniel Kelly, a conservative former state Supreme Court justice, and Janet Protasiewicz, a liberal Milwaukee County judge, is set to be one of the most consequential — and expensive — elections in the country this year.Judicial elections in Wisconsin are officially nonpartisan, but the races have become increasingly political. While it used to be common for voters to cast ballots for judges with whom they weren’t ideologically aligned, Democratic counties now heavily favor the liberal judicial candidates and Republican counties the conservative ones.The trend has been turbocharged in recent years as partisan polarization has grown nationally and as overt partisanship has crept into the dialogue among candidates for the court.It wasn’t always this way. In the 1980s and 1990s, races were largely seen as less partisan and more swayed by endorsements from leaders in the legal and law enforcement community, according to Charles Franklin, the director of the Marquette University Law School Poll. He has studied the relationship between the ideological voting patterns in state Supreme Court races and presidential races.“Supreme Court races at the time seemed to be about who had more endorsements from sheriffs and prosecutors than anything else,” he said.While many candidates during the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s had discernible ideological leanings, there was almost no relationship between electoral support for judicial candidates and presidential candidates of the corresponding political party. A notable example is Dane County, a longtime Democratic stronghold that is home to the University of Wisconsin at Madison. In 2000, a majority of voters in Dane County voted for Diane Sykes, a conservative judicial candidate, while also voting for Al Gore, the Democratic candidate for president.Partisanship began creeping into races over the next decade. In a particularly vicious 2008 campaign, the conservative candidate, Michael J. Gableman, ran TV ads falsely accusing his opponent, the only Black justice on the state Supreme Court, of securing an early release of a rapist who was also Black. Mr. Gableman won by a narrow margin. After leaving the bench, he led a partisan inquiry into whether there was election fraud in Wisconsin during the 2020 presidential election.The Relationship Between the Judicial and Presidential VoteState Supreme Court and presidential election results have become increasingly correlated in Wisconsin. More

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      Talk of ‘Civil War,’ Ignited by Mar-a-Lago Search, Is Flaring Online

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      Soon after the F.B.I. searched Donald J. Trump’s home in Florida for classified documents, online researchers zeroed in on a worrying trend.Posts on Twitter that mentioned “civil war” had soared nearly 3,000 percent in just a few hours as Mr. Trump’s supporters blasted the action as a provocation. Similar spikes followed, including on Facebook, Reddit, Telegram, Parler, Gab and Truth Social, Mr. Trump’s social media platform. Mentions of the phrase more than doubled on radio programs and podcasts, as measured by Critical Mention, a media-tracking firm.Posts mentioning “civil war” jumped again a few weeks later, after President Biden branded Mr. Trump and “MAGA Republicans” a threat to “the very foundations of our republic” in a speech on democracy in Philadelphia.Now experts are bracing for renewed discussions of civil war, as the Nov. 8 midterm elections approach and political talk grows more urgent and heated.More than a century and a half after the actual Civil War, the deadliest war in U.S. history, “civil war” references have become increasingly commonplace on the right. While in many cases the term is used only loosely — shorthand for the nation’s intensifying partisan divisions — observers note that the phrase, for some, is far more than a metaphor.Polling, social media studies and a rise in threats suggest that a growing number of Americans are anticipating, or even welcoming, the possibility of sustained political violence, researchers studying extremism say. What was once the subject of serious discussion only on the political periphery has migrated closer to the mainstream.But while that trend is clear, there is far less agreement among experts about what it means.Some elements of the far right view it literally: a call for an organized battle for control of the government. Others envision something akin to a drawn-out insurgency, punctuated with eruptions of political violence, such as the attack on the F.B.I.’s Cincinnati field office in August. A third group describes the country as entering a “cold” civil war, manifested by intractable polarization and mistrust, rather than a “hot” war with conflict.After Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, his supporters demonstrated at the Michigan Capitol in Lansing.John Moore/Getty Images“The question is what does ‘civil war’ look like and what does it mean,” said Elizabeth Neumann, assistant secretary for counterterrorism at the Homeland Security Department under Mr. Trump. “I did not anticipate, nor did anyone else as far as I know, how rapidly the violence would escalate.”Ms. Neumann now works for Moonshot, a private security company that tracks extremism online. Moonshot found a 51 percent increase in “civil war” references on the most active pages on 4Chan, the fringe online message board, in the week after Mr. Biden’s Sept. 1 speech.But talk of political violence is not relegated to anonymous online forums.At a Trump rally in Michigan on Saturday night, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, said that “Democrats want Republicans dead,” adding that “Joe Biden has declared every freedom-loving American an enemy of the state.” At a recent fund-raiser, Michael T. Flynn, who briefly served as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, said that governors had the power to declare war and that “we’re probably going to see that.”On Monday, federal prosecutors showed a jury in Washington an encrypted message that Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers armed extremist group, had sent his lieutenants two days after the 2020 presidential election: “We aren’t getting through this without a civil war.”Experts say the steady patter of bellicose talk has helped normalize the expectation of political violence.In late August, a poll of 1,500 adults by YouGov and The Economist found that 54 percent of respondents who identified as “strong Republicans” believed a civil war was at least somewhat likely in the next decade. Only about a third of all respondents felt such an event was unlikely. A similar survey conducted by the same groups two years ago found nearly three in five people feeling that a “civil war-like fracture in the U.S.” was either somewhat or very unlikely.“What you’re seeing is a narrative that was limited to the fringe going into the mainstream,” said Robert Pape, a political science professor at the University of Chicago and founder of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats.The institute’s researchers tracked tweets mentioning civil war before and after Mr. Trump announced the search on Mar-a-Lago. In the five preceding days, they logged an average of roughly 500 tweets an hour. That jumped to 6,000 in the first hour after Mr. Trump published a post on Truth Social on the afternoon of Aug. 8, saying “these are dark times for our Nation.” The pace peaked at 15,000 tweets an hour later that evening. A week later, it was still six times higher than the baseline, and the phrase was once again trending on Twitter at month’s end.Extremist groups have been agitating for some sort of government overthrow for years and, Mr. Pape said, the most radical views — often driven by white supremacy or religious fundamentalism — remain marginal, advanced by no more than 50,000 people nationwide.But a far larger group, he said, are the people who have been influenced by Mr. Trump’s complaints about the “Washington swamp” and “deep state” forces working against him and his allies.Trump supporters in Phoenix, too, protested after his election loss.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesThose notions, stirred in a smoldering crucible with QAnon conspiracy theories, anti-vaccine views and election denialism, have fueled a growing hostility toward the federal government and rising talk about states’ rights.“Did you know that a governor can declare war?” Mr. Flynn said at the fund-raiser on Sept. 18, for Mark Finchem, a Republican running for secretary of state in Arizona. “And we’re going to probably, we are probably going to see that.”Neither Mr. Flynn nor Mr. Finchem responded to a request for comment about the inaccurate remarks. The U.S. Constitution grants Congress the sole power to declare war and, in fact, specifically bars states from engaging in war “unless actually invaded.”However far-fetched, such ideas are often amplified by a proliferating set of social media channels such as the right-wing platform Gab and Mr. Trump’s Truth Social.Social media platforms are rife with groups and boards dedicated to discussions of civil war. One, on Gab, describes itself as a place for “action reports,” “combat vids” and reports of killed in action in “the civil war that is also looking to be a 2nd American Revolution.”In August, a single tweet stating “I think civil war has just been declared” managed to reach over 17 million profiles despite coming from an account with under 14,000 followers, according to Cybara, an Israeli firm that monitors misinformation.“Ideas go into echo chambers and it’s the only voice that’s heard; there are no voices of dissent,” said Kurt Braddock, an American University professor who studies how terrorist groups radicalize and recruit.Mr. Braddock said he did not believe these posts indicated any planning for a war. But he worries about what academics call “stochastic terrorism” — seemingly random acts of violence that are, in fact, provoked by “coded language, dog whistles and other subtext” in statements by public figures.A rally in Holland, Mich., in 2021 at a restaurant that had defied state pandemic measures.Emily Rose Bennett for The New York TimesMr. Trump is adept at making such statements, said Mr. Braddock, citing Mr. Trump’s April 2020 tweet reading “Liberate Michigan!” Less than two weeks later, mobs of heavily armed protesters occupied the state capitol in Lansing. He also pointed to Mr. Trump’s speech before the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, when he encouraged thousands of supporters to march to the U.S. Capitol and, later in the same remarks told them, “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”“The statements Trump makes are not overt calls to action, but when you have a huge and devoted following, the chances that one or more people are activated by that are high,” Mr. Braddock said.A spokesman for Mr. Trump did not respond to requests for comment.Mr. Trump used the term “civil war” in 2019, when he declared in a tweet that “it will cause a Civil War-like fracture in this Nation from which our Country will never heal” if he was removed from office. Last month, Mr. Trump said there would be “problems in this country the likes of which perhaps we’ve never seen before” if he was indicted over his handling of the classified documents that were the target of the F.B.I. search.Other Republicans have used language suggesting the country is on the brink. Ms. Greene wrote in August that the Mar-a-Lago search reflected the “type of things that happen in countries during civil war,” in posts to her nearly 900,000 combined followers on Facebook and Telegram. Senator Rick Scott of Florida likened the F.B.I. to the Gestapo, the secret police in Nazi Germany, saying “this cannot be our country.”Late last month, Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican, told The Texas Tribune he believed immigration legislation was unlikely in part because of a “political civil war.” He has made similar comments before, including a November 2021 call for Texas to secede if Democrats “destroy the country.”Nick Dyer, a spokesman for Ms. Greene, said that she was “vehemently opposed to political violence” and that her civil war comments were about Democrats, who “are acting like a regime launching a war on their opposition.”McKinley Lewis, communications director for Mr. Scott, said he had “ZERO tolerance for violence of any kind” but added that he “continues to demand answers” related to the F.B.I.’s Mar-a-Lago search.Republicans have often argued that their language is political rhetoric and blamed Democrats for twisting it to stoke divisions. It’s Democrats and the left, they said, who are courting violence by labeling Mr. Trump’s supporters adherents of what Mr. Biden has called “semi-fascism.”In response to a query about Mr. Cruz’s comments, Maria Jeffrey Reynolds, a spokeswoman for the senator, said Mr. Cruz placed blame on President Biden, claiming that he has “driven a wedge down the middle of our country.”After President Biden delivered his speech on democracy, Brian Gibby, a freelance data entry specialist in Charlotte, N.C., wrote in a Substack post that he believed “the Second Civil War began” with the president’s remarks.“I have never seen a more divisive, hate-filled speech from an American president,” Mr. Gibby wrote.President Biden described Mr. Trump and his loyalists as a threat to “the very foundations of our republic” in a speech on democracy in Philadelphia.Doug Mills/The New York TimesAsked by The New York Times to explain his views, Mr. Gibby said he believed Mr. Biden was “escalating a hot conflict in America.” He worries something will happen around the November elections that will be “akin to Jan. 6, but much more violent,” where armed protest groups from both sides of the political spectrum come to blows.“Plan ahead, stock up, stay safe, get out of cities if you can,” he wrote. 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      In Wisconsin, Robin Vos Fires the 2020 Election Investigator He Hired

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      Wisconsin Republicans’ 14-month investigation into the 2020 election results, which cost taxpayers $1.1 million and turned up no evidence of significant fraud, ended on Friday when the top G.O.P. lawmaker who first announced the inquiry fired the man he had entrusted to lead it.Under pressure from former President Donald J. Trump and his allies, Robin Vos, the Republican speaker of the State Assembly, had moved in June 2021 to hire Michael J. Gableman, a conservative former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, to scrutinize the state’s 2020 results.But after weeks of open tension between Mr. Vos and Mr. Gableman — partly over the speaker’s refusal to entertain decertifying Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in the state, and partly over Mr. Gableman’s endorsement of a primary challenger to Mr. Vos — the speaker said he was shutting down the investigation. The firing was first reported by The Associated Press.Mr. Gableman has become a key driver of conspiracy theories about the 2020 election in Wisconsin and a ringleader of far-right Republicans’ effort to overturn the state’s presidential results, which cannot legally be done.Mr. Vos told WISN-TV in Milwaukee that he had fired Mr. Gableman by letter and that the two had not spoken in recent weeks.“I really don’t think there’s any need to have a discussion,” Mr. Vos said. “He did a good job last year, kind of got off the rails this year.”Wisconsin Democrats, who have castigated Mr. Gableman and his investigation from its beginning, celebrated his firing and blasted Mr. Vos for hiring Mr. Gableman in the first place.“Finally,” said Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat.Until now, Mr. Vos had remained publicly supportive of the state-funded investigation, even as Mr. Gableman amplified increasingly outlandish theories about the 2020 election. In March, the former justice presented state legislators with a report that said they should consider decertifying the election — a proposal that has no basis in state or federal law but that has nonetheless been adopted by Mr. Trump and his most ardent supporters in Wisconsin.As Mr. Vos resisted the decertification push, Mr. Gableman continued to promote false election claims. Last week, he endorsed Mr. Vos’s Trump-backed primary opponent, a far-right political neophyte named Adam Steen who came within a few hundred votes of toppling Mr. Vos.At an election-night party after his narrow victory on Tuesday, Mr. Vos said that Mr. Gableman was “an embarrassment to the state.”In the following days, Mr. Vos defended his decision to start the Gableman investigation but signaled that he would soon end it.“There were problems with the 2020 election that we need to fix — all of those things are real,” he said Wednesday on a conservative talk radio show in Milwaukee. “But somehow, Justice Gableman, as the investigation began to come to an end, decided it was more important to play to Donald Trump and to play to the very extreme of our party who thought we could unconstitutionally overturn the election than it was to be responsive to his client, which was the Legislature.”Mr. Vos said in that interview that he had given Mr. Gableman “some very clear direction: ‘You can’t be involved in politics, you can’t go to rallies. We want you to be an independent voice.’ And he broke that.”Yet when Mr. Vos announced the hire in June 2021, he did so at the Wisconsin Republican Party’s annual convention. And he did not publicly discipline Mr. Gableman when the former justice attended a political event with Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive who has funded many attempts to overturn the election, or when he appeared at campaign events with local Republican Party chapters.Mr. Vos and his spokeswoman did not respond to messages on Friday. Mr. Gableman’s spokesman, Zak Niemierowicz, said he had resigned from the investigation last month. Mr. Gableman did not respond to messages.Francesca Hong, a state assemblywoman from Madison, was one of four Democratic legislators who demanded a state audit of Mr. Gableman’s work on Wednesday. On Friday, she said Mr. Vos was equally responsible.“Michael Gableman, fully enabled & encouraged by Robin Vos, has been nothing but a conspiracy theorist and fraudster,” she wrote on Twitter, “sowing division in our state by undermining the integrity of our elections at a price tag of more than 1 million Wisconsin taxpayer dollars.”Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, said in a statement, “Like Dr. Frankenstein, Robin Vos created a political monstrosity that wound up turning on its creator.” More

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      Trump Urged Legislator to Overturn His 2020 Defeat in Wisconsin

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      Donald J. Trump called Robin Vos, the speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly, on July 9 and pushed him to support a resolution to retract the state’s 10 electoral votes for President Biden.Donald J. Trump called a top Republican in the State Legislature in Wisconsin in recent days to lobby for a measure that would overturn his 2020 loss in the state to President Biden, the latest signal that the former president remains undaunted by congressional and criminal investigations into his election meddling.Mr. Trump’s advisers said the former president saw an opening to press the Republican official, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, after a Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling prohibited the use of most drop boxes for voters returning absentee ballots.Since drop boxes were used during the 2020 election, Mr. Trump argued, the state should be able to invalidate the results of that election. He pushed Mr. Vos to support a resolution that would retract the state’s 10 electoral votes cast for Mr. Biden. Mr. Trump’s advisers said the phone call took place on July 9 — the day after the court issued its opinion.There is no mechanism in Wisconsin law to rescind the state’s electoral votes, nor does the United States Constitution allow for a state’s presidential election to be overturned after Congress has accepted the results. Still, Mr. Trump has persisted.Mr. Vos has repeatedly told Mr. Trump and his allies that decertifying the former president’s loss would violate the state’s Constitution.Mr. Trump “has a different opinion,” Mr. Vos told a television station in Milwaukee, WISN-TV, which first reported the phone call on Tuesday. Mr. Vos did not respond to messages on Wednesday.The call is only the latest indication that Mr. Trump remains fixated on nullifying the 2020 presidential contest 18 months after Mr. Biden replaced him in the White House. He has continued to prioritize his lies that he won the last election as he aims to influence the next one, signaling to his supporters that undermining the 2020 election should be the predominant issue for the party.His actions come as a prosecutor in Georgia is gathering evidence into whether Mr. Trump violated laws in his attempt to overturn results in the state. Mr. Trump’s own team was already concerned about potential legal consequences from the deluge of devastating testimony revealed by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.And Mr. Trump may have created more legal headaches for himself when he phoned a witness in the House committee’s investigation after a hearing on June 29. Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, a Republican serving as the panel’s vice chairwoman, has said information about Mr. Trump’s call to the witness has been turned over to the Justice Department.In the past 10 days, Mr. Trump has endorsed candidates in Arizona and Oklahoma based in part on their support for his attempts to overturn the election or his criticisms of the House investigation.Supporters of former President Donald J. Trump rallied at the Wisconsin State Capitol shortly after the 2020 election.Lauren Justice for The New York Times“We won in 2020,” Mr. Trump said in a statement on Tuesday reiterating his endorsement of David Farnsworth for a State Senate seat in Arizona. Mr. Farnsworth is running against Rusty Bowers, who is the Republican speaker of the Arizona House and who has been critical of the former president’s attempts to overturn the election. In the statement, Mr. Trump called Mr. Bowers a “weak and pathetic” Republican who “didn’t have the guts to do anything about the rigged and stolen election.”Mr. Trump has never stopped looking for ways to undo the results of the 2020 election, and his desire to keep talking about his false claims of widespread fraud has intensified as investigations into his conduct have become more focused.In Arizona, a review of the 2020 vote failed to change the outcome and instead affirmed the result. Mr. Trump’s allies have come up empty in their bid to overturn the results in Georgia. In recent months, his allies have instead focused their attention on Wisconsin, where Mr. Vos has tried to accommodate Mr. Trump’s increasing demands about the 2020 election for more than a year.When Mr. Trump called for an audit of the state’s votes days ahead of the Republican Party of Wisconsin’s 2021 state convention, Mr. Vos used the gathering to announce he would appoint a former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, Michael Gableman, to investigate the election.Michael Gableman, a former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, was appointed to investigate the 2020 election results in the state. Daniel Brenner for The New York TimesIn February, Mr. Trump released a statement asking “who in Wisconsin is leading the charge to decertify this fraudulent Election?” Weeks later, Mr. Gableman’s report suggested that state legislators consider decertification.Mr. Vos repeatedly blocked efforts to hold a vote on decertification. Still, Mr. Vos met with leading proponents of decertification, something they held up as significant progress in their effort to undo the 2020 results.Mr. Trump and his allies have since turned on Mr. Vos. The former president has used his social media website to press Mr. Vos to act, and he released a statement on Tuesday suggesting that his supporters back Mr. Vos’s primary opponent if he fails to act.Mr. Vos is facing a spirited but underfunded primary challenger, Adam Steen, whose campaign hinges on the notion that Mr. Vos is not sufficiently loyal to Mr. Trump because he has blocked the decertification effort.And while Mr. Vos has not seen eye to eye with Mr. Trump on the election, his allies know the former president still holds a powerful grip on the party.An outside group supporting Mr. Vos in the primary recently mailed a flyer to Wisconsin Republicans with a picture of Mr. Vos and Mr. Trump sitting next to each other on a plane and smiling.“Leading the fight for election integrity!” the flyer reads.Maggie Haberman More

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      Wisconsin Republicans Push to Take Over the State’s Elections

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      Led by Senator Ron Johnson, G.O.P. officials want to eliminate a bipartisan elections agency — and maybe send its members to jail.Republicans in Wisconsin are engaged in an all-out assault on the state’s election system, building off their attempts to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential race by pressing to give themselves full control over voting in the state.The Republican effort — broader and more forceful than that in any other state where allies of former President Donald J. Trump are trying to overhaul elections — takes direct aim at the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission, an agency Republicans created half a decade ago that has been under attack since the chaotic aftermath of last year’s election.The onslaught picked up late last month after a long-awaited report on the 2020 results that was ordered by Republican state legislators found no evidence of fraud but made dozens of suggestions for the election commission and the G.O.P.-led Legislature, fueling Republican demands for more control of elections.Then the Trump-aligned sheriff of Racine County, the state’s fifth most populous county, recommended felony charges against five of the six members of the election commission for guidance they had given to municipal clerks early in the pandemic. The Republican majority leader of the State Senate later seemed to give a green light to that proposal, saying that “prosecutors around the state” should determine whether to bring charges.And last week, Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican, said that G.O.P. state lawmakers should unilaterally assert control of federal elections, claiming that they had the authority to do so even if Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, stood in their way — an extraordinary legal argument debunked by a 1932 Supreme Court decision and a 1964 ruling from the Wisconsin Supreme Court. His suggestion was nonetheless echoed by Michael Gableman, a conservative former State Supreme Court justice who is conducting the Legislature’s election inquiry.Republican control of Wisconsin elections is necessary, Mr. Johnson said in an interview on Wednesday, because he believes Democrats cheat.“Do I expect Democrats to follow the rules?” said the senator, who over the past year has promoted fringe theories on topics like the Capitol riot and Covid vaccines. “Unfortunately, I probably don’t expect them to follow the rules. And other people don’t either, and that’s the problem.”Senator Ron Johnson said that Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin should unilaterally assert control of federal elections.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesThe uproar over election administration in Wisconsin — where the last two presidential contests have been decided by fewer than 23,000 votes each — is heightened by the state’s deep divisions and its pivotal place in American politics.Some top Republican officials in Wisconsin privately acknowledge that their colleagues are playing to the party’s base by calling for state election officials to be charged with felonies or for their authority to be usurped by lawmakers.Adding to the uncertainty, Mr. Johnson’s proposal has not yet been written into legislation in Madison. Mr. Evers has vowed to stop it.“The outrageous statements and ideas Wisconsin Republicans have embraced aren’t about making our elections stronger, they’re about making it more difficult for people to participate in the democratic process,” Mr. Evers said Thursday. The G.O.P.’s election proposals, he added, “are nothing more than a partisan power grab.”Yet there is no guarantee that the Republican push will fall short legally or politically. The party’s lawmakers in other states have made similar moves to gain more control over election apparatus. And since the G.O.P. won control of the Wisconsin Legislature in 2010, the state has served as an incubator for conservative ideas exported to other places.“In Wisconsin we’re heading toward a showdown over the meaning of the clause that says state legislatures should set the time, manner and place of elections,” said Kevin J. Kennedy, who spent 34 years as Wisconsin’s chief election officer before Republicans eliminated his agency and replaced it with the elections commission in 2016. “If not in Wisconsin, in some other state they’re going to push this and try to get a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on this.”Next year, Wisconsin will host critical elections for Mr. Johnson’s Senate seat and for statewide offices, including the governor. Rebecca Kleefisch, the leading Republican in the race to challenge Mr. Evers, is running on a platform of eliminating the state election commission. (On Monday, she filed a lawsuit against the agency asking the Wisconsin Supreme Court to declare that the commission’s guidance violates state law.)The Republican anger at the Wisconsin Elections Commission, a body of three Democrats and three Republicans that G.O.P. lawmakers created in part to eliminate the investigatory powers of its predecessor agency, comes nearly 20 months after commissioners issued guidance to local election clerks on how to deal with the coronavirus pandemic.Republicans have seized in particular on a March 2020 commission vote lifting a rule that required special voting deputies — trained and dispatched by municipal clerks’ offices — to visit nursing homes twice before issuing absentee ballots to residents. The special voting deputies, like most other visitors, were barred from entering nursing homes early in the pandemic, and the commission reasoned that there was not enough time before the April primary election to require them to be turned away before mailing absentee ballots.The vote was relatively uncontroversial at the time: No lawsuits from Republicans or anyone else challenged the guidance. The procedure remained in place for the general election in November.But after Joseph R. Biden Jr. won Wisconsin by 20,682 votes out of 3.3 million cast, Republicans began making evidence-free claims of fraudulent votes cast from nursing homes across the state. Sheriff Christopher Schmaling of Racine County said the five state election commissioners who had voted to allow clerks to mail absentee ballots to nursing homes without the visit by special voting deputies — as is prescribed by state law — should face felony charges for election fraud and misconduct in office.Robin Vos, the Republican speaker of the State Assembly, who represents Racine County, quickly concurred, saying that the five commissioners — including his own appointee to the panel — should “probably” face felony charges.The commissioners have insisted they broke no laws.Ann Jacobs, a Democrat who is the commission’s chairwoman, said she had no regrets about making voting easier during the pandemic and added that “even my Republican colleagues” were afraid about the future of fair elections in the state.“We did everything we could during the pandemic to help people vote,” she said. Mr. Johnson — a two-term senator who said he would announce a decision on whether to seek re-election “in the next few weeks” — is lobbying Republican state legislators, with whom he met last week at the State Capitol, to take over federal elections.“The State Legislature has to reassert its constitutional role, assert its constitutional responsibility, to set the times, place and manner of the election, not continue to outsource it through the Wisconsin Elections Commission,” Mr. Johnson said. “The Constitution never mentions a governor.”Mr. Johnson acknowledged that his proposal could leave the state with dueling sets of election regulations, one from the Wisconsin Elections Commission and another from the Legislature.“I suppose some counties will handle it one way and other counties will handle it another,” he said.Trump’s Bid to Subvert the ElectionCard 1 of 6A monthslong campaign. More

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      Wisconsin Republican Defends Legitimacy of 2020 Election Investigation

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      The Wisconsin Republican leading the state’s partisan inquiry into the 2020 election results on Monday warned election clerks that they would face subpoenas if they did not cooperate and defended the investigation’s legitimacy by declaring that he was not seeking to overturn President Biden’s victory in the state.“We are not challenging the results of the 2020 election,” Michael Gableman, a conservative former State Supreme Court justice overseeing the investigation, argued in a video posted on YouTube. The inquiry, he said, “may include a vigorous and comprehensive audit if the facts that are discovered justify such a course of action.”The video from Mr. Gableman comes after he and Wisconsin’s Republican legislative leaders have faced increasing criticism from both their party’s far right and from Democrats. The right has accused Mr. Gableman of not doing enough to push lies about the 2020 election propagated by former President Donald J. Trump. Democrats have painted the $680,000 inquiry into the election as a waste of state resources and a distraction from other needed business. Mr. Gableman was assigned to look into Mr. Trump’s false claims that the state’s election was stolen from him by Robin Vos, the Republican speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly, nearly three months ago. The five-minute video released on Monday was the first extensive public statement Mr. Gableman has made outlining the scope and aim of his investigation.The Republicans’ continuing effort to re-examine the 2020 results in Wisconsin comes as Trump allies elsewhere have gone to great lengths to undermine Mr. Biden’s victory. Arizona Republicans are near the end of a monthslong review of ballots in Maricopa County. Pennsylvania Republicans last week approved subpoenas for driver’s license and partial Social Security numbers for every voter in the state. And 18 states, including Texas this month, have passed laws this year adding new voting restrictions.In recent weeks, Trump-allied conservatives in Wisconsin have shown public frustration at the pace and transparency of Mr. Gableman’s investigation. This month, a group led by David A. Clarke Jr., a former Milwaukee County sheriff who has been a prominent purveyor of false claims about the election, held a rally at the State Capitol in Madison to protest what it argued was insufficient devotion by Mr. Gableman and the state’s Republican leaders to challenging the 2020 results. Mr. Gableman said on Monday that his investigation would require the municipal officials who operate Wisconsin’s elections to prove that voting was conducted properly. He said local clerks would be required to obey any subpoenas he might issue.Election clerks in Milwaukee and Green Bay ignored previous subpoenas issued by the Republican chairwoman of the Assembly’s elections committee for ballots and voting machines. Mr. Vos had declined to approve those subpoenas.“The responsibility to demonstrate that our elections were conducted with fairness, inclusivity and accountability is on the government and on the private, for-profit interests that did work for the government,” Mr. Gableman said. “The burden is not on the people to show in advance of an investigation that public officials and their contractors behaved dishonestly.”Mr. Gableman added that he did not plan to release information to the public on a regular time frame but would do so when he found it appropriate.“My job as special counsel is to gather all relevant information and, while I will draw my own conclusions, my goal is to put everything I know and everything I learn before you, the citizen, so that you can make up your own mind,” he said.The chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, Ben Wikler, said the Gableman video was evidence that state Republicans were at odds with one another over how far the election investigation should go.“Robin Vos and his far-right ‘investigator’ Michael Gableman are clearly upset that the most extreme fringe doesn’t think they’re going far enough to entertain conspiracy theories,” Mr. Wikler said. “They’re wasting taxpayer funds to serve the political interests of a small group of Republican insiders who want to erode the freedom to vote. It’s a sham, a waste of time and money, and it’s damaging our democracy.” More

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      in Elections

      Wisconsin G.O.P. Wrestles With Just How Much to Indulge Trump

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      The former president set off infighting among state Republicans by saying they were not working hard enough to challenge the 2020 results, accusing them of covering up “election corruption.”Wisconsin Republicans were already going to great lengths to challenge the 2020 election results. They ordered a monthslong government audit of votes in the state. They made a pilgrimage to Arizona to observe the G.O.P. review of votes there. They hired former police officers to investigate Wisconsin’s election and its results.But for Donald J. Trump, it wasn’t enough.In a blistering statement last week on the eve of the state party’s convention, the former president accused top Republican state lawmakers of “working hard to cover up election corruption” and “actively trying to prevent a Forensic Audit of the election results.”Wisconsin Republicans were alarmed and confused. Some circulated a resolution at the convention calling for the resignation of the top Republican in the State Assembly, Speaker Robin Vos, who in turn announced the appointment of a hard-line conservative former State Supreme Court justice to oversee the investigation. The Republican State Senate president released a two-page letter addressed to Mr. Trump that said his claims about Republicans were false — but that made sure to clarify in fawning language the state party’s allegiance to the former president.“The power of your pen to mine is like Thor’s hammer to a Bobby pin,” the Senate president, Chris Kapenga, wrote, adding that he was wearing “Trump socks” and a “Trump-Pence mask” while boarding a commercial flight.It was all a vivid illustration of Mr. Trump’s domineering grip on the Republican Party, and of his success in enlisting officials up and down its hierarchy in his extraordinary assault on the legitimacy of the last presidential election. Nearly eight months after Election Day, Republicans are reviewing results in at least three states — Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia — and are trying to do so in others, including Michigan and Pennsylvania.They are likely to have little material success, since the results have long been certified and President Biden has been in office for months. But the effort to challenge state election results has raised doubts about the routine certification of future voting outcomes. It is also likely to have a far-reaching intangible impact on the acceptance of election results in a country where a significant majority of Republicans tell pollsters they believe the current president’s victory was illegitimate.In Wisconsin, Republicans have followed the lead of other G.O.P.-controlled states in passing a raft of new voting restrictions, though they are certain to be vetoed by Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat. But Mr. Trump’s demands to the state party to do more to indulge his election falsehoods have frustrated leading Republicans while exposing the Devil’s bargain that many G.O.P. lawmakers have made with him: Acceding to his ultimatums is never sufficient.“The legislative approach they’re taking to fix these problems with our voting systems is good,” said Matt Batzel, the Wisconsin-based national executive director of American Majority, a conservative grass-roots training organization. “But it was good for the base three months ago, and there’s shiny new things happening like the Arizona audit and the grass-roots moves on.”The competing narratives collided last weekend at the Republican Party of Wisconsin’s state convention, a typically sleepy off-year gathering that was instead dominated by Mr. Trump’s accusation that Republican leaders themselves were complicit in election wrongdoing.Wisconsin G.O.P. leaders expressed shock. In his otherwise ingratiating two-page letter, Mr. Kapenga, the State Senate president, pushed back forcefully on Mr. Trump’s claims. Mr. Vos, the Assembly speaker, who last month hired two former police officers to investigate the 2020 results, announced on Saturday that he had also hired Michael Gableman, a conservative former State Supreme Court justice who in November suggested that the election had been “stolen” from Mr. Trump, to oversee the inquiry.In an interview on Monday, Mr. Vos expressed his loyalty to Mr. Trump but argued that the former president is not a permanent fixture in Republican politics. He said Mr. Trump’s statement had come after seeing an incorrect report in the news media or receiving “bad information from his staff.”“I supported 95 percent of what Donald Trump did as president, right, which is as high as anybody could ever ask for because nobody’s perfect,” Mr. Vos said. “I’m not going to say the conservative movement lives or dies on whether or not Donald Trump is in the White House.”Michael Gableman, a conservative former State Supreme Court justice, spoke at a rally in support of former President Donald J. Trump after the election in November.Mike De Sisti/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, via USA Today NetworkIn a separate interview on Monday, Mr. Gableman declined to directly respond to questions about whether he believed Mr. Trump or President Biden was the rightful winner in Wisconsin, which Mr. Biden won by 20,682 votes out of about 3.3 million cast. Instead he, echoing other Republicans’ justification of their inquiries into the 2020 election, said the aim was to assuage doubts about how it was conducted — even though such doubts continue to be stoked by Mr. Trump and his allies.“Like a significant percentage of my fellow citizens, I am unsure of who the winner of the November 2020 presidential race in Wisconsin was when it is considered in the light of only those ballots that should lawfully have been counted,” Mr. Gableman said. “My hope is that this investigatory process will significantly reduce cause for such similar doubts in the future.”Few Republicans in the country swung harder and faster for Mr. Trump than those in Wisconsin. In the 2016 presidential primary, Scott Walker, the state’s governor at the time — whose own campaign ended after 71 days with a warning against nominating Mr. Trump — organized the party’s entire political and local media apparatus behind Senator Ted Cruz of Texas in what amounted to a last-ditch effort to stop Mr. Trump.Mr. Cruz won the state, the last one he’d carry before ending his campaign a month later. Most, but not all, Wisconsin Republicans quickly got on board with Mr. Trump. Paul D. Ryan, then the House speaker, dragged his feet on endorsing Mr. Trump. Charlie Sykes, at the time the most influential conservative talk radio host in the state, never did, and quit his job to become a Never-Trump commentator.Now, as they have in Georgia and Arizona, Mr. Trump’s false claims that he won Wisconsin’s presidential contest threaten to split Republicans. At the party convention on Saturday, Mr. Trump delivered a prerecorded message reiterating the lie that he won the state — though he didn’t mention any of the legislative leaders he had criticized the night before.“We had actually great results in Wisconsin,” Mr. Trump said. “As you know, in 2016 we won, and as you also know, in 2020 we won, but that hasn’t been so adjudged yet.”Mr. Kapenga’s letter to Mr. Trump was a telling distillation of the delicate way Republicans try to navigate the former president’s whims, combining ego-stroking and gentle pushback. He lightly scolded Mr. Trump for broadcasting misinformation, saying, “It is false, and I don’t appreciate it being done before calling me and finding out the truth,” before softening it with a request to play golf with Mr. Trump “at the club of your choice.”The letter concludes: “I write this as I am about to board a plane due to a family medical emergency. In addition to my Trump socks, I will pull up my Trump/Pence mask when I board the plane, as required by federal law. I figure, if the liberals are going to force me to wear a mask, I am going to make it as painful for them as possible. I will continue to do this regardless of whether or not I ever hear from you. Thank you for doing great things as our President.”Mr. Vos and Mr. Kapenga have advanced legislation to make absentee voting harder and forbid the mass collecting of early votes that the city clerk in Madison, the liberal state capital, engaged in last fall. But they have so far resisted, while not ruling out, calls to subpoena large numbers of 2020 votes and embark on an Arizona-style audit.“I want to see what Arizona actually discovers,” Mr. Vos said. “What’s legal in Arizona might be illegal here.”Robin Vos, the Assembly speaker, hired three former police officers last month to investigate the 2020 election results.Amber Arnold/Wisconsin State Journal, via Associated PressAt the convention Mr. Vos faced a resolution, which was handily defeated, that called for his resignation for not sufficiently defending Mr. Trump’s false election claims. Still, there were few voices condemning Mr. Trump.Yet one former state assemblyman, Adam Jarchow, defended Wisconsin Republican leaders in a rare statement from a Republican attacking the former president.“This is dumb and insane,” Mr. Jarchow, who has been a stalwart Trump supporter, said in a text message statement. “Trump is outside of his mind if he thinks any of those three would do what he is accusing them of.”He added: “If Trump thinks this is helpful, it’s not. It does what he did in — Georgia — which cost us the damn Senate.”Wisconsin Democrats, desperate to re-elect Mr. Evers next year and eager to win the seat held by Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican, have few ways to impede the G.O.P. investigation. Mark Spreitzer, the ranking Democrat on the State Assembly’s elections committee, said that in the absence of allegations that 2020 ballots were tampered with, there was little space for the investigation to conclude in a way that would satisfy Mr. Trump and his loyalists. (Unlike in Arizona, the false arguments that Mr. Trump won Wisconsin rest on the idea that some ballots were improperly collected, not that the ballots themselves were compromised.)“It’s been clear since the beginning that there isn’t much of a sense of direction among the Republicans,” Mr. Spreitzer said. “It’s not clear to me that they know how to tie a bow on this at the end. There isn’t going to be a smoking gun. How do you close this out?.”Some local Wisconsin Republicans are not waiting for the state investigations and are trying to take matters into their own hands. In rural Clark County, where Mr. Trump won 67 percent of the vote, the Republican Party chairwoman took out an advertisement this week in a weekly newspaper, The Shopper, seeking to raise $1,000 for a manual recount of the 15,000 ballots cast there in November. She encouraged other county parties to do the same.“The only way to vindicate the results,” wrote Rose LaBarbera, the G.O.P. chairwoman, “is to count the votes again.” More