The Wisconsin state Elections Commission has rejected complaints brought by a Republican member of the board who challenged the procedures used by state authorities last year for certifying Joe Biden’s presidential election victory in the state. As summarized by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the commission has now “determined… that Gov. Tony Evers and the commission’s director acted properly last year when they finalized results showing Joe Biden won the presidential election in Wisconsin.”
The Wisconsin Elections Commission has determined that Gov. Tony Evers and the commission's director acted properly when they finalized results showing Joe Biden won the state.
The decisions rejected complaints brought by a Republican commissioner. https://t.co/dr2RwP57te
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) May 2, 2021
The original complaints were from commission member Dean Knudson in December, and after he submitted his grievances, the panel handed them off to a Wisconsin law firm known as DeWitt because of potential conflict of interest concerns inherent in any handling of the complaints by the commission itself. Besides Evers, Knudson also filed a complaint against Meagan Wolfe, who serves as director of the commission. The panel formally adopted conclusions from DeWitt in Evers and Wolfe’s favor late last week.
Knudson originally “wanted the commission to issue a ruling that would require officials to follow a different process to confirm the results of future elections,” the Journal Sentinel explains. After recounts late last year in Milwaukee and Dane counties that re-affirmed Biden’s wins there, the election results were certified the next day, but Knudson “argued the commission should have had a chance to weigh in on how to handle the election results” instead of heading straight to certification, the Journal Sentinel adds. The official determination is that the Wisconsin law demanding more time between the conclusion of a recount and the certification of the corresponding results does not apply to presidential elections.
It’s unclear what that extra time for the commission to weigh in would have accomplished. No legitimate evidence of widespread election fraud has emerged in Wisconsin or anywhere else in the country, so what did Knudson want time to deliberate over? Consistently, Republican challenges to the handling of last year’s election have done little but jam up the process. For instance, a nonpartisan observer of November ballot-counting in Detroit revealed that they heard a Republican observer say that they were gearing up to “challenge every ballot.” (Ballot-counting procedures have provided for challenges from observers.) According to someone else who was on the scene, a Republican observer explicitly told an election worker that they had been “told to challenge every” ballot.
