The Wisconsin Elections Commission’s October 4, 2024 meeting.
Local elections clerks found just 30 instances of fraud in elections from July 1, 2023 through Sept. 12, according to a report the Wisconsin Elections Commission approved and sent to the Legislature Friday.
Those incidents occurred during the four elections in that span in which more than 4 million votes were cast. In the report, clerks from across the state found 18 instances of people voting twice in the same election — usually voting both absentee and in person. One case found a person who voted in two Kenosha County municipalities. Kenosha County also had six instances of people who attempted to register to vote while serving felony sentences.
The WEC’s annual report on election fraud has frequently found that it is an exceedingly rare crime. Despite that, baseless allegations of fraud have continued to come from members of the Legislature and prominent election deniers.
At Friday’s meeting, the commission also ended an effort to pass an emergency administrative rule guiding how election observers must operate at poll locations during the November election. The body has already approved a permanent rule on the same topic and forwarded it to the governor for approval.
Republican Commissioner Don Millis, who proposed withdrawing the emergency rule, said that he was told by Republicans in the Legislature that the Joint Committee on the Review of Administrative Rules (JCRAR) wouldn’t approve the emergency rule and if WEC forwarded it to the committee, it could result in the permanent rule not passing the committee.
“I’ve been told in no uncertain terms by the Senate side of the administrative rules committee that this rule will be suspended as soon as the committee has the opportunity,” Millis said. “Moreover, I’ve been told that proceeding on this could endanger the permanent rule. I think the permanent rule is a good thing, I’m glad it’s going to be in place. We’ll see what happens.”
The rule on election observers is meant to provide a statewide template for how poll workers should deal with election observers, including how far away from voting activities observers must be, what type of seating should be provided, ensuring access to restrooms and providing guidance for when an observer is being disruptive and can be asked to leave a poll site. The emergency rule would have gone into effect sooner, but with an expiration date while the permanent rule, if approved, won’t expire.
WEC has worked on the permanent rule for more than two years, gathering input from a wide range of partisan and advocacy groups. But with JCRAR’s opposition to the emergency rule, the fate of the permanent rule, once it reaches the Legislature, is unclear.
“I’ve asked a number of people if they would prefer to have no rule or the administrative rule, which they may find some fault with, and they’ve actually said they prefer to have no rule,” Millis said. “So I’m very disappointed, but I think that for the long term opportunity to have a rule in place is that the best course of action is to cease the emergency rulemaking process and see what happens to the permanent role in the Legislature.”
JCRAR has become increasingly hostile to WEC in recent years, including a fight in 2022 over guidance the commission had sent to clerks over the use of absentee ballot drop boxes.
“We spent two years, we had multi-partisan input, we had non-partisan input, we had both major political parties, we had minor political parties, we had persons who were advocates for persons with disabilities, who were advocates for all other aspects of it,” Democratic Commissioner Ann Jacobs said. “And we’ve had, I don’t know how many people come in here and demand that they wanted chairs and toilets and they were going to raise heck and high water, and then we put forward a rule that allowed it, and then all of a sudden they’re like, ‘Well, but not like that.’ And we read every single comment from every single person who had every single complaint. This was a bipartisan, multi-partisan rule. The fact that the Legislature is indicating, and I take Don at his word that they’re not going to let it go forward, is just sort of ridiculous, and it’s unfortunate.”
The commission also discussed updates to the agency’s open records request policy. A staff report notes that since 2020, the commission has received record-high amounts of requests — mostly for the communications of commissioners and WEC Administrator Meagan Wolfe. Often, those requests require commissioners to search their personal devices and accounts for relevant records.
Staff proposed having commissioners forward any communications involving official government business that takes place on those devices or accounts to their Wisconsin.gov email accounts so staff can conduct those searches.
Commissioners Mark Thomsen and Millis questioned the policy, with Thomsen saying people could effectively shut down his work by requesting communications from his work email that he receives unsolicited.
“This is not a rational response to the problem posed,” he said. “We cannot invite people to shut down our businesses by sending us unsolicited emails.”
State law generally considers messages about official government business conducted by officials on personal devices and accounts to be public records.
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