Bipartisan Does Not Make It True

 

Why would a former Democratic Milwaukee Mayor (Tom Barrett), a former Republican Wisconsin Attorney General (JB Van Hollen), a former Republican Wisconsin Congressman (Scott Klug), and a former head of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin (Michael Tate) invest time and energy into convincing the voters of Wisconsin that “Wisconsin elections are safe and secure” rather than using their name recognition and access to the media to become leaders in the fight to correct the election system design flaws that make our elections vulnerable to cheating? That is exactly what they are doing.

 

These men are members of the Wisconsin Board of the Democracy Defense Foundation (DDF) and, while their motives are impossible to know, they have been given a lot of ink in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (MJS) editorial pages in recent months to promote factually incorrect and misleading information about the state of Wisconsin’s elections and the concerns voters have about them.

 

The Democracy Defense Foundation was founded in 2020 and describes itself as an “organization led by a bipartisan group of former elected officials and leaders across Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. They claim to be “working to defend the transparency, safety, security and validity of our nation’s electoral system,” and further assert, “We…will be an active voice against any attempts to undermine lawful election processes and outcomes.”

 

The Democracy Defense Foundation defines the “problem” as: “Today, American politics are more divisive than ever. An erosion of faith in our democracy, and the proliferation of bad actors spreading election disinformation have caused false narratives about “stolen elections” to take root. The mistrust that many voters have for our electoral system puts our democracy at grave risk.”

 

Last Sunday, the members of the Wisconsin Board of the DDF co-authored a guest column in MJS entitled “Catching errors means Wisconsin’s election system is actually working.” They used the incident in Milwaukee during the August 11 primary election to make a series of factually inaccurate and misleading statements about that event and Wisconsin’s election system more broadly, doing a great disservice to the voters of the State under the guise of serving the public.

 

To recap, on election night, audit logs rather than election results were downloaded onto five of nine memory sticks that were then transported to the county courthouse where the total votes are tallied. The error was discovered and the memory sticks were returned to the central counting location for downloading of the election results. Results reporting was delayed due to the error.

 

The crux of the authors’ message was mistakes happen; the error was discovered; the system works.

 

They contend, “A secure election system is not one in which human beings never make mistakes; it is one designed with enough checks and redundancies to identify those mistakes before they compromise an election.”  They referenced the repeated audits, recounts, and reviews that have been conducted as evidence that Wisconsin elections are secure.

 

They emphasized that “human error happens. It does not mean our elections are fraudulent,” and added, “Voters should recognize that mistakes are not evidence of fraud and that Wisconsin’s safeguards repeatedly protect the integrity of the vote.”

 

These authors damaged what credibility they may have had in important ways. In their commentary on mistakes, they glossed over the glaring nature of the “error” on election night in Milwaukee, which was caught on a local news station’s camera that showed how nearly impossible the “mistake” would have been to make unknowingly not once, but five times. They mischaracterized voter concerns about election integrity as an attack on “thousands of election workers across the state, whose work is questioned…”   “They are our friends and neighbors.” Clerks and other election workers are like any other group of people doing a job. Their performance of the tasks required to conduct elections in their local communities is as individuals. As a collective, they are not the focus of election integrity concerns. Trying to make them the focus is a deflection from the real issues.

 

The most blatant failure of these authors was the absence of any discussion of the real source of concern for voters – the election system flaws that make cheating likely in Wisconsin elections. They concocted a narrative that merged unintended human mistakes with criminal fraud, completely separate issues.

 

They were correct in their assertion that human error will occur in the best of systems and, in the case of elections, after action reviews, audits, and recounts may indeed catch errors and allow for their correction. These methods are useless in the fight against criminal fraud.

 

Correcting the system design defects to safeguard against criminal fraud is the only solution, and voter wrath is growing as the Legislators and the Wisconsin Elections Commission refuse to do their jobs. The more than 4 million names of ineligible voters on the Registered Voter List must be purged to make them unavailable to sophisticated hackers for fraudulent ballots; the 250,000 driver’s licenses issued by the State to non-citizens here legally must be clearly marked “Not for Voting” to prevent their use for voter registration or casting ballots; the process of issuing voter ID’s to students at universities must be revised to require proof of citizenship to prevent the thousands of non-citizen students on university campuses from accessing them.

 

The authors reported that DDF conducted a survey of Wisconsin voters this year and found that 34 percent are not confident the 2026 elections will be conducted accurately. Another 38 percent believe election administration in Wisconsin is becoming less trustworthy, while 55 percent describe election integrity as an extremely important issue. These numbers should be, and will be, much higher as the Wisconsin electorate becomes increasingly well informed about the system defects.

 

If these Wisconsin DDF Board members, who are attempting to use positions they held in the past to influence public sentiment about election integrity today, are in the dark about the very real election system vulnerabilities, they have no basis whatsoever for declaring that the elections are appropriately protected. If they are aware of the system defects, they are lying to us.