Our most senior member here is the honorable Tim Petri.
Some of you may remember him as Tom Petri, or Thomas Petri.
That's what he was elected as,
but we have found out that he prefers Tim as always been Tim.
So it's kind of like, if you knew him as Tim,
you knew we were on the cool ones in the group.
So I'm fortunate enough to finally met him as Tim
before that he was always Thomas to me.
But he served from 1979 to 2015,
so a long career in Wisconsin's sixth congressional district,
which is over on the eastern side of the state,
so opposite of where we are here today.
But a critical group, and prior to serving in Congress,
he was also in the Wisconsin State Senate,
served his time there.
Jodi Dankbier is the La Crosse County Clerk since 2011.
She has served in that capacity for 14 years
before that was the deputy county clerk.
So she has a lot of experience.
She is one of those that we have reached out to
from PBS Wisconsin when we want to hear from experts
in the field about what is going on.
We have utilized her in the past
to educate our viewers.
And as I told her tonight, we will probably be doing that
again in the future of reaching out
to utilize her expertise.
She was also recognized the Wisconsin
constitutional officer of the year.
That is an impressive title.
Yeah.
Thank you.
So when we open this program and refer to her
as the expert on a lot of these topics,
we do that with all sincerity,
not just because she is the only clerk on this stage.
We can answer the technical questions.
Also the honorable Reed Ribble, Republican.
He was also served in the eighth congressional,
which is the Green Bay area.
So Lambo Field is part of his home district.
So I'm sure he was proud to brag to everyone
that he met in Congress.
Served from 2011 to 2017.
Prior to that, he was in the roofing industry
and had a very successful business career.
It was one of those people that went from the private sector
into serving in Congress and took those skills
that he utilized.
So we have a different range of experiences,
which in the best of ways
is what we would want to rely on as a democracy,
is people bringing their personal experiences to Congress
to utilize them to the best of their abilities.
He retired in 2017 and is very happily,
serving also as a former member of Congress,
but also motorcycle and enjoying travel.
So kudos to him for that.
And finally, a face that some of you may recognize,
and that is the honorable Ron Kind.
He served in the third congressional,
which is seated here in La Crosse.
Just a couple of years ago left office,
but he served from 1997 to 2023.
La Crosse native also served as a prosecutor before that,
so a long time service in government.
So these are your panelists.
Thank you very much for being here,
and let's give them a round of applause for all of this.
All right, so we are going to start with you, Jenny,
because I want to lay the groundwork here for what,
hopefully this evening can bring us in terms of discussion.
Let's talk about election security and election administration,
because for most of us, our main interaction comes
when we go to the polls and we think it was a one day thing,
and the shorter the line, the better for most of us
getting it out and then watch for the results that night.
Can you give us a little bit of background
on the year round job, the continual job that this is?
And also, in this time of year, in this time of election season,
what it means when the US Supreme Court says
they're about to make a decision or they're going to take a case
or someone asks for an appeal on whether this person
or that person's going to be on the ballot.
So give us a little background about your job
and how much goes into it.
Yeah, contrary to popular belief, election isn't just one day.
We've been working on the November election
even before we had the August ballot, the August election.
So it's a multi-month process.
It takes a long time with coding the elections,
finding out who's on the ballot.
Sometimes we don't find out who's on the ballot
until after we've printed ballots,
but that's one of those things with the Supreme Court
decisions that come down.
We code the elections.
We get the ballots printed.
We get them to the municipal clerks,
and then they start their process of the absentee ballot
to be emailed all to those that have a request and file,
and that happens 47 days before the election,
so we can get that 45-year federal deadline.
Two weeks before the election, we go in-person absentee voting
where people can go into the clerk's office
and cast their ballot before the election day.
That gets extremely busy.
We expect that to be extremely busy for this presidential,
and then that leads up to the election day.
In that timeframe, we're also training our poll workers,
our municipal clerks.
We want to make sure they're ready.
Laws change a lot.
Sometimes we do our training, and say,
remember what I taught you last time?
Just regard that, and let's talk about what the law is now.
So we're going to do that training.
We're going to make sure our poll workers know
what the current processes are, what the current laws are.
We're going to make sure our municipal clerks
are up to date on that, and we're going to be ready
to go here in La Crosse County,
and we'll have a successful election.
We'll be safe, secure, and that's what we expect here.
So we have seen a shift over the last four years, certainly,
and perhaps even prior to that, in terms of the attention paid
to clerks and the important work you do,
but also a lot of conspiracy surrounding the work that you do.
And unfortunately, coming with that
is some threats that come in from people that don't know better,
where to channel their anger, their frustration,
their questions, and want to impue in your reputation.
What have you seen here, and what
do you have to work with for your employees
and all the volunteers that come in an election day
in terms of them preparing them for a very potentially
dangerous election season?
Yeah, it's unfortunate that in our training now
that we teach de-escalation skills.
When you get mail on your desk in the morning,
you shouldn't stop and think, oh, what
if white powder is going to fall out of this?
Because that happened in other states.
And we're teaching our clerks to be prepared, be safe.
We have contingency plans in place.
If there are certain threats at the polling place,
what are you going to do?
The de-escalation we're doing in training.
How do we get voters that are excited about certain things?
How do we get them out?
We've lost a lot of poll workers over the years
because of those threats.
And sometimes it's just voters that come to the polls that
don't like having to show their ID,
or they don't like having to sign the poll book.
Well, the poll worker isn't the person who made those laws.
They were just here to enforce them.
We're here to make sure you exercise your right
to be able to cast a ballot.
But the frustration is taken out of those poll workers.
And a lot of those poll workers just,
they got scared away from it.
And we're having to bring in new poll workers
and get them trained in because those senior poll workers
just aren't there anymore for what we need.
So it's definitely a different environment
where we were five years ago or 10 years ago
when I first started this job.
But it's part of it.
We have amazing municipal clerks.
We have amazing poll workers that are all taken it in
and stride as we go.
And we're going through it.
And we're going to get through it
and still have our elections.
Great.
If you can share your mic with Tim.
Tim, I'm going to address this question to you
as our most seasoned statesman here.
You have had the longest career in politics.
What has changed over your time?
And give us some perspective in terms
of how it used to be and when did you notice a shift
and what does that mean in the bigger picture
for our democracy?
Well, I think most actually people took the elections
pretty much for granted.
And it was part of your civic obligation to vote.
It was part of your civic obligation.
If you have the time to volunteer and work at the polls,
I suspect there are people in this room
who have friends or who may themselves at one time
or another volunteered and then poll workers.
It's an important job.
And it's done by our fellow citizens.
It's a South governing country.
And for a variety of reasons, over the years
that I've been in office, the system
has become quite a bit more formal and legalistic.
It used to be a little bit more relaxed.
And if your nomination papers weren't exactly right,
people would say, well, you made an effort
and we'll put you on the ballot and sort of sort of thing
with the attitude when I first was running.
Now, by God, you go to court and the lawyers are involved
and it's become much more sort of formalistic and so on.
And I suppose that's all right.
But it's a little overdoing it because it is self-government
and no one's good.
It's never going to be perfect.
But people are doing the best they can.
And I certainly think here in Wisconsin and La Crosse
and find like my hometown, awful lot of people
are conducting the elections and doing a very good job.
I do want to add for everyone out here,
we do hope to take some questions at the end.
If you're able, one of the cards on your seat
has a QR code.
You can scan it into your phone and then type in a question.
That will pop up on an app on my phone.
And so I'll be able to read it that way.
It's a little more efficient for us to do it that way
rather than trying to pass a mic around.
So if you do have a question, will we get to that portion?
Or if you want to scan it in right now, feel free.
So Ron, I want to ask you about the environment.
You were the most recently in Congress,
if everyone on our panel.
Is this something that needs to be handled at a federal level?
Is this a state issue?
Is this a local issue?
Everyone talks about turning down the temperature,
but that's kind of empty rhetoric at this point,
considering the stakes in these elections.
So what can be done to actually make it safe so Ginny
doesn't have to worry about recruiting
a whole new wave of poll election electors?
Zach, before I answer that, let me just thank you
and Wisconsin PBS for moderating and also Lee
Raj for his role in helping to organize this
and help get the word out.
Grayson Moore, who's been involved with the former members
of Congress Association for all the work.
We've done this now as former members
in a nonpartisan or bipartisan fashion
in Pennsylvania and Michigan and Arizona.
They're going to be in North Carolina too.
Try to get the word out in regards
to the integrity of our election process.
And that's really why we're here tonight,
is to tell people that we're fortunate being in a state
Wisconsin that does this very well,
making sure that we have secure and safe
and accurate and fair elections.
And it's because of people like Ginny Dankmeyer
and the team that she has in the clerk's office
and the professionalism and the seriousness
in which they come to their job.
We owe them a debt of gratitude
and we owe them support and encouragement,
not threats, not attacks, none of that,
because there's just no evidence or facts
for us to doubt the integrity and the accuracy
of our elections in Wisconsin,
or I would submit virtually anywhere in our country.
There's going to be a role of federal oversight
to make sure that constitutional rights
are not being impinged,
but conducting these elections is at a state
and local level with people like Ginny
and Ginny's throughout the entire state
recruiting poll volunteers,
staffing the clerk's office,
studying the law and executing it
to the best of their ability.
And they've done that very well.
And unfortunately, there are voices out there
to sow the seeds of doubt
in regards to the accuracy of our elections.
And that undermines the very underpinnings of our democracy.
If we don't have enough confidence
that our vote's going to be accurately counted,
we're going to see more January 6,
we're going to see more instances of violence,
we're going to see more instances of self-help,
which is what we don't want to see
because there's no basis or no facts
to justify that type of action.
And yet we're still in that danger zone
because of the voices out there.
And let's face it, there's one very prominent voice
that is still out there perpetuating election lives,
Donald Trump.
And we never had this problem, Zach,
when I was in office all those years
until he came to the national scene.
And he started talking about this from day one,
back in 2015 when he was announcing his candidacy,
already talking about election fraud
and how the election process can't be trusted.
And he's continued that and he's doing it even now,
months, nine years before the first ballot is even cast.
For some reason, he's having a hard time
internalizing the results of these elections.
And unfortunately, he's militarizing that
as we saw on January 6,
and that's still the danger that we face today.
So we're trying to in a nonpartisan, bipartisan way,
demonstrate what the facts of the evidence actually shows
and making sure that we strike that right balance
of accountability of how elections are run
and making sure that we're doing it
as accurately and as fairly as processed.
And as Tim alluded to, there's legal recourse
that someone has any doubt about this
that can be exercised.
Donald Trump did after the 2020 election,
60 court challenges.
Every one of those courts threw it out
for lack of evidence and lack of facts.
And yet even then, he wasn't satisfied
and he's still perpetuating this myth out there
that we have something to fear in our election process
when all the facts show just the opposite is happening.
Jenny, I want to bring up a recent news story
regarding elections in Wisconsin.
Just a week or so ago that the court
and the city of Madison issued,
announced that they had accidentally sent out
an additional 2,000 duplicate balance to voters
and walk us through how that can happen,
how that can be ensured that there aren't 2,000 double voters.
And what the, how does that happen
and how does the clerk make up for that
and what does that do to the integrity of the whole process
when there are accidents but then they're acknowledged
and talked about how these won't result in double votes?
Yeah, that happens because elections are run by human beings
and human beings make some mistakes.
And when that mistake was made,
that clerk did the right thing, she called it out.
She was transparent, she made it out, she put it out there.
This is what happened, it was a human error.
They were, from what I heard, they were emerging,
some spreadsheets together and they got duplicated,
but every absentee envelope that's sent out
has a bar code on it.
A voter is not able to send in two ballots.
So it's still very secure.
If someone was able to get a second ballot somehow,
they send it in, a clerk's gonna be like,
okay, you've already returned one ballot.
We have that in our database that you've returned a ballot.
The second ballot comes back, it's gonna be rejected.
So the pet fact that someone's gonna get 2,000 extra votes
is not gonna happen, you know, the clerk did the right thing.
She was transparent, she said, this is what happened,
this is what we're doing to fix it.
You know, this is why 2,000 ballots extra
are not gonna be cast on the election day.
Reid, in northern Wisconsin, is represented
by Republican Tom Tiffany and he had a Twitter exchange
and some public relations exchanges
with the clerk of the city of Memphis
and talking about how this looks like fraud.
This looks like questioning whether there were bar scans
on the ballots themselves or the absentee ballot envelope.
What can you tell us about whether those comments
were in good faith or those playing
into some of these election conspiracies out there
that people generally want to know
how does this happen and how is it corrected
and what is the role of the congressman
in terms of asking questions there?
I wouldn't presume to be able to tell you
what was in our kind of Tiffany's mind.
And so what we can say is that the barcode
has to be on the envelope because you don't want
to connect the specific vote necessarily,
we get to vote in private in this country.
And so therefore the identification has to be on the envelope,
not on the ballot itself.
And so that's part of how we have a secure system.
And I do think that when you look at data,
about 70 to 80% of Republicans would say
that they don't trust that the elections
are being conducted here.
And something like that plays to that audience.
And if you are always looking for a problem with elections
and you're looking at it on X or on Facebook
or whatever social media you use,
the algorithms continue to feed you
that same misinformation and it begins to reinforce
until somebody becomes a believer.
It's how urban legends get created.
And I often tell people, I would prefer
that you don't trust politicians
and there's three of us up here telling you that.
But yeah, you can trust us.
But I'll tell you who you can trust
and you can trust your neighbor.
And that that person when you go in to cast your ballot
that's working in a polling place is generally,
generally, a senior citizen,
usually somebody very interested in conducting a fair election
wanted to see your identification
and matching your address.
And it's probably somebody that might sit two
bros ahead of you at church
or you see at the grocery store,
might be your next door neighbor.
So my strongest advice is trust your neighbor
and don't listen to the politicians
and when they tell you that your vote won't count.
And I would also say this as a Republican.
It's like the dumbest strategy in the world
to tell people their vote doesn't count.
Why in the world would I vote as a Republican
if I didn't believe my vote mattered?
I mean, just from a pure political strategy,
it's near idiotic.
And I don't understand it at all.
But I trust what other, 1,800 clerks in the sky?
1,250 municipal clerks.
And I mean, this is local government at its finest.
And so it's almost impossible to scam a system
that is that disparate.
And when you think of it, every state gets
to run their own elections.
And so it would just be almost impossible
to have a conspiracy large enough
to cheat an election like that.
So, Jenny, one of the other things that comes up a lot
is the question about illegal immigrants
or non-citizen voters voting and participating elections.
There's constitutional amendments regarding that very issue.
The question of whether a non-citizen
can vote in a local election versus a federal or state election.
So what are the processes that you have in place
to make sure that only the people
that are eligible to vote are in fact voting?
Yeah, so when someone goes to their municipal clerk
and they registered to vote,
they fill out their voter registration for them
and it's ask you, are you a US citizen?
Are you 18 years of age?
Have you been at the centers for 28 days?
And are you not a felon and we're serving the felon sentence?
And you proceed to fill out your address.
You should provide your driver's license or ID card
and that information's entered into the database.
It's compared with social security.
So if someone passes away and we get the alert
that this Princeton has passed, it gets an activated
and it's compared with the Department of Corrections.
So we can pull out felons like this person's a felon.
It's gonna be an activated.
There's not currently a process to be able to check
to see if someone's a US citizen or not.
That data is collected by the DMV,
but it's not accessible to us.
But the data also from the DMV
can be up to eight years old.
At the time, if someone goes to get their state ID,
they may not be a US citizen,
but two or three years later,
they may become a US citizen,
but that data is not gonna be updated with the DMV.
So in order for something to happen,
for us to be able to check US citizenship,
it's gonna have to be a law changed that's gonna allow it.
But I have to say that every election,
something comes up, something,
in this case, they're non-citizens going about.
There's just something to throw out there,
just that little bit of doubt
that you're going to not believe
the outcome of these elections.
A couple of elections ago,
it was all the dead people that were going
to the polls and voting.
And before that, it was all the felons that were going.
And if you historically look at the data,
and I had to say, there's never been proof.
There's never been data shown
that all these dead people
or all these felons were going to the polls to vote.
And the reports are on the commission's website.
If you go and you look at them historically,
it's ridiculously low,
the amount of election fraud
we have in the state of Wisconsin.
It is just low.
In the last 10 to 15 years,
there's only been four instances of non-citizens
actually voting.
So when you say there's all these non-citizens
are going to go with the polls and vote,
it's just not happening.
For felons, it's single digits
that the felons that are going to the polls and voting.
The biggest case of fraud
is people who are trying to vote twice.
They're trying to vote absentee from their cabin up north,
and then they go to the polls to vote in person at the polls.
That's the highest amount of fraud happening.
And still, we're looking at less than 20 cases for elections.
When you're casting three million votes,
and you have 20 cases of fraud,
it's ridiculously low, the amount of fraud that we have here.
So I feel this rhetoric is just thrown out there.
So everyone has just that little bit of doubt
that we can always just question the results
of these elections because this is your reason why,
because all these US non-citizens wouldn't vote.
And then that's why the election didn't go the way
a certain candidate wanted to happen.
Can I just add one thing there?
After I left Congress, I became the CEO
of the National Roofing Contractors Association.
If anybody said a roof put on lately,
there's a pretty good chance that it's a Hispanic or a crew.
I mean, roughly 70% of roofing workers
in the US are immigrants.
And I will tell you, having interacted with hundreds
and hundreds and hundreds, some,
I mean, I might even say most, undocumented.
I will tell you, the last place on earth,
any illegal immigrant wants to be,
is that a government operation
where they might be captured and deported.
They are not voting.
Now you talked about non-citizens,
but there are legal immigrants that are non-citizens.
And that's where you typically have the disconnect
where they have to track it.
But the idea that someone who came to the border
six months ago was going into vote is, to me,
I look at it, and that is like the most absurd idea
and one out of just not understanding
how these undocumented workers that are moving
about this underground economy in the US operate,
they do not want to be caught.
They're not coming into vote.
They're just horrible.
And, Zach, I think the reason, Jenny's point,
there are serious legal consequences.
If you're purposely trying to vote twice,
you're trying to manipulate the system
and you can be held accountable for it.
There was an elections clerk in Colorado
that was recently convicted of trying
to manipulate ballot boxes.
She was just sentenced to eight, nine years in prison
for doing it.
So let alone undocumented workers here
for fear of facing some type of legal persecution.
Citizens trying to do it will face legal consequences as well,
which are very serious.
Yeah, and I think that the voting rules are public.
And you can go and check on whether someone is voted or not.
And if anyone knows of an illegal immigrant
and can go down and look and see what their name
is on the voting roll.
And if they voted, you can put them in the slammer probably.
But in the sense, if people build that's going on,
they have an obligation to go down
and check the voting rolls and improve it.
We have the whole system is checked
and people can close elections candidates,
have a chance to have a reconse.
There are all kinds of ways of checking them out.
And one of the point I've mentioned is that
everyone who's elected is elected on the same ballot
as everyone else in that particular jurisdiction.
And so if we saw fraud,
we'd usually think of your county board members
talking about fraud and town board members
and city council members,
because it's all the same ballot.
And yet somehow it just seems to be
some sort of a media thing that's coming.
Tim, I always thought it hilarious
that every member of Congress after the 2020 election
that got elected did not dispute their own election result.
There's only the presidential levels
in some reason that they wanted to,
but no, I mean, if you were happy with the result
and you didn't contest it then there.
Yeah, if that ballot was not valid,
then their elections were not valid either.
Well, one of the things that I've dealt with
in terms of my reporting is talking to election conspiracists
or skeptics.
And to me, the easiest rebuttal that has come about
since 2020 is Ron Johnson being reelected in 2022.
Because there is no world in which you can say
that there are giant vast conspiracies
designed to elect Democrats
when they allow a Republican Senator Ron Johnson
to win re-election by the narrowest of margins.
They don't, if you're gonna commit fraud,
you do a Russian style and it's 98%
or a Iraqi president style.
Back in the Saddam days, it doesn't happen by 10,000 votes.
So Ron, I do wanna talk about that issue though,
because in 2020 when Donald Trump filed
those lawsuits he referenced,
it was in Milwaukee and Dane Counties.
And he didn't file lawsuits challenging voters
and trying to throw absentee ballots around the state.
He didn't do it here.
He charged the two largest Democratic Counties in the state.
So I'm wondering if there was dramatic fraud
in those counties, how would you get elected so much
since you don't have either one of them in your district?
But what does that say?
It's a good point, Zach.
And it was a right that Donald Trump's campaign exercise,
they had a right to ask for a recount
because the margin was that close,
but they chose only to exercise that right
overwhelmingly Democratic districts
and nowhere else throughout the state,
which is already suspect.
But the irony after those recounts was
it was actually Joe Biden that got a few extra votes
after the count, not Donald Trump.
So someone had a beef about the election results in 2020.
It was Joe Biden, not Donald Trump.
I mean, it was really minuscule and small, insignificant,
but nonetheless.
And this was on the back of 60 federal lawsuits
that they had filed challenging the election results
and everyone of those federal courts
drew them out for lack of evidence
and lack of any facts behind it.
And yet even today he's not satisfied,
which tells me that he knows what's going on
and what his rhetoric is being used for.
And it's unfortunate because it continues to undermine
the very basis of our democracy.
The opening phrase of our own constitution,
we, the people of the United States of America,
in order to perform a more perfect union,
our followers placed us, American citizens at the heart
of our democracy.
That comes with dual responsibilities,
not only responsibility to participate,
let our voices be heard and vote,
but a responsibility, I feel,
to accept the results of that election
and to allow the peaceful transfer of power.
And if we lose that as a country,
our democracy is truly in peril.
And we have one candidate today perpetuating that myth
and trying to undermine the very basis of our democracy
every day when he's out there campaigning.
And unfortunately, two or eight people are listening
to that false rhetoric and taking action because of it.
And again, the danger still exists.
And that's one reason why us former members
are trying to get together to explain
what we've observed throughout our public service careers
and how well our elections are conducted
in places like Wisconsin.
So, Ginny, let's talk about voting machines and tabulators.
And I'm gonna preamble this with another question.