shortly.
off for attending and we'll start in a couple of minutes here just going to get
one or two more minutes like more people find them.
you
Alright, let's get things started. I just want to thank everyone for attending and for all the
journalists as well and also thanks to this great panel for taking the time
to speak with everyone today. Just some housekeeping things we are taking
questions so feel free anytime to type in the chat and we will also be having
about a 15-minute Q&A session at the end of this briefing so feel free again to
ask any questions in the chat and I will be monitoring those. Just really
briefly I see a lot of familiar faces and names but also some new ones so I'm
just really quickly about Keep Our Public. We were founded in the spring of 2020
to address challenges posed by the pandemic to voting ahead of November of
2020 and we were engaged well before January 6 and all the information
misinformation that took place after election day in 2020. Keep Our Public
we're a nonpartisan nonprofit and we're dedicated to safeguarding the pillars of
American democracy primarily making sure that every eligible voter can vote
we're committed to upholding the integrity of our electoral system and
also educating citizens on the threats to our democracy. We try to and we
succeed successfully serve as a beacon of truth with transparency in an era of
miscommunication and primarily in specifically in the swing states that we
work in of Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin we work to demystify the
election process specifically in Wisconsin and we do this in our other
states as well but we go on the ground working with election officials like the
ones that are in this call as well as advisory council members who are also in
this call and going to areas meeting community members and educating them
and the media national state local on the election process on the all the
administration parts of the election and really going into the nuts and bolts of
it. We've been in person to Northwoods Waukesha West Bend La Crosse, Swamuco, Chippewa
Valley ahead of the November election and so that's been great and we continue
to do great work in Wisconsin and then similar to this briefing ahead of 2024
we hosted a briefing like this about a week before the November election and
it was extremely helpful. I'm so glad we're able to do that and planning to do
the same here. So I am going to introduce our great panelists and we'll
start off with a read. Well, good afternoon everybody. My name is Reed
Ribble. I'm a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives represented
Wisconsin's 8th Congressional District primarily Appleton and Green Bay and
parts north of there and retired in 2017 from that position. I've been involved
with Keep Our Republic now for two years as one of their advisory council members
and working with clerks in the state of Wisconsin in preparation for current
elections including the one upcoming here in a few days and so it's very good to
be with you. I'll pass it on to John. Good afternoon everybody. I'm John
Bodrie. I was a federal prosecutor here in Western Wisconsin for three eight
years. The last seven and a half of those years I was the United States
Attorney appointed by President Obama. During that time I'm among my other work
and criminal work criminal cases the voting issues we focused on were
protecting the right to vote especially in the face of laws that we saw just
in franchising certain groups of people. I resigned in March of 2017 after the
first election President Trump when it was his time to appoint U.S. attorneys.
Like Reid I've been a member of the advisory council for the last couple
years since 2023. Primarily hoping to address trust in the election process.
From pointing to how I just keep thinking how we've seen politicians of all
sides use lies about voting fraud as a political weapon. Just weaponizing suppose
it's fraud. Things like non-citizens are voting or absentee ballots in the
mail or the machines are rigged. All of these we all know are not true. It was
my hope by going out to communities to meeting with the media to just try and
tell people as I think Reid has said so well persuade people who want to be
persuaded who are willing to be persuaded about the truth in our election
process. But just yesterday as we'll talk about Judge Schimmel one of the
candidates was speaking to the media raised again the lies about fraud in
Milwaukee in the absentee process ballot. So it is not something that ended. It is
something that continues. Thank you. Glad you're all here.
Thank you John. And then we'll pass it on to Lisa Tolson.
Hi I'm Lisa Tolson. I am the Rock County Clerk for Rock County Wisconsin. I
started in election administration in 2010 as a town clerk for the town of
Harmony in Rock County. I was appointed County Clerk in 2015 and been doing this
ever since then.
Excellent.
I am Lisa Freibert from the Lake County Clerk. I started in the office of the
County Clerk in 1998 for 2000 when everyone was worried about it back then
if computers were going to work in 2000 and I was elected as found the Lake
County Clerk in 2008 and took office January of 2009 and has going on my 17th
year of being found like County Clerk.
Excellent. Thank you all. And so we'll start off talking about the April election
and just kind of the landscape of Wisconsin right now.
Okay. The the April election and the election that is coming up is a really
fascinating election. Historically these April elections were relatively low
turnout events but that's no longer the case in Wisconsin. The turnouts are
really quite quite large and quite frankly I'm anticipating a large turnout
in on April 1st here. This race has garnered a lot of attention. It's one of
the most if not the most expensive Supreme Court race in US history. And so
it's going to it's going to drive a lot of voters to the polls I believe and
significantly it is very important because the potential of the court flipping
in Wisconsin from more progressive control to more conservative control.
There's a lot of dynamics that are going on in this race. And so in part part of
the issue you have for for candidates quite frankly there's so much outside
money coming in from political action committees mostly from outside of the
state that it creates real dilemma for a candidate to control their message
because there really is no legal mechanism for coordination behind the
messaging from so whatever Governor Pritzker's PAC or Elon Musk PAC on the
right do who or Pritzker's on the left does they can say things that may or may
not be fully true. And the candidate oftentimes has to respond to things that
people trying to help them are saying that they need now to defend. And they've
lost complete control over the messaging of these campaigns because the amount of
money they can spend directly from contribution directly to their campaigns
is now so small as a total percent. And there's just this kind of annoying in my
view increase of partisanship in these state Supreme Court races. It's supposed
to be a nonpartisan position but as everyone's aware I think that's a little
bit of a falsehood but at the end of the day these things have become very
very partisan. And unfortunately we now have partisanship kind of masquerading
as the principle itself. And so it makes it difficult when individual candidates
don't have enough money to offset the outside noise to actually diminish some
of that partisan talking points and maybe in some cases nonsense and come
forward with what their views are on this or that as it relates to the Supreme
Court and its makeup. I think this is an incredibly important race to watch.
But I'm also very concerned that national media is going to view this and try to
try to posture it as some type of bellwether. I'm not 100% convinced that this
is a bellwether race at all. I think the country is pretty closely divided
in anybody who watches Wisconsin's schizophrenic election nature on statewide
races. This is a very candidate centric race and I believe that the candidate
that is strongest is most likely to win without regard to all these millions
and millions of dollars being spent. And I would also say without regard to the
partisan talking points, I'm with Trump or I'm pro choice or whatever the case
may be pro education, however it may be. And I'm not as convinced at all that this
is going to be some type of bellwether race. It's kind of a inside the family
Wisconsin race. And I think people are more concerned about either overturning
act 10 or not overturning act 10 than they would be about whether Trump is
doing something in the White House that they don't like in this particular
moment. And so John, what are your thoughts?
Thanks. Thanks, Reid. Just add a few things to what Reid said. It strikes me
and I never ran for elected office, but it strikes me with all the outside
spending and the ads and we're going to talk about the misinformation a couple
slides downstream. For the candidate, whether you're Judge Schimmel or
Judge Crawford, it becomes whackable. Rather than getting out your message,
who I am, what I stand for, my positions as best you can in a judicial race, you
just end up trying to respond to things. And when I say whackable, we're all
familiar with that game. And it's troubling, of course, because even with
increased turnout, what we see in a couple of recent polls is a large
percentage of voters in my state, our state saying, well, I just don't know the
candidates. And you're thinking, gee, people are spending $75 million throwing
out really negative ads. And none of them have achieved one key goal of who
are these people. And you can't perhaps get your message out, as Reid said, because
you're too busy, just as I said, whackable, hitting this issue, hitting that
issue. Yesterday's a good example. And as I said, when Judge Schimmel is in Milwaukee
and he's talking and he says that, you know, this is, it's all about ballot
dumping and they didn't count the ballots till late and what's going on in
Milwaukee. So the Crawford campaign is responding to that. Neither one of
these things tells us more, and perhaps it does at some level, about each of
them. But it doesn't allow them to say, here's who I am, here's where I come
from, here's what I do. So that huge spending, the other thing, we are seeing
the increased turnouts, as you see in the screen, you know, usually an April
election, a judge, a judicial election, you know, they were historically low. But
but one thing that I always think is when we hear these claims of fraud and
the election is, you know, the absent non citizens are flipping the election
and so on and so forth, the ballot boxes. I would pose this question as I
often do, if only 40% or 50% of voters are voting, which is just a tragedy,
frankly, with the issues that are so significant in this race, that fewer
that that low number, which is still this heartly high, that that low number
voters vote, it strikes me, how can we seriously think that the 40% who are
voting or 50% who vote, that is also made up of huge numbers of fraudulent
votes, which is simply not possible, not been proven. So it feeds into this,
my, my concern, that the public thinks, well, this thing is fixed and the
races are, clerks don't run good elections and so on. And our hope is to
keep our republic to beat that message back. And I think the spending in
this, the inability for voters to actually know the candidates in this
supposedly nonpartisan race is troubling. And I certainly agree with read
that it hopefully it is, it is pretty much state, state center to our state
in terms of the issues themselves. But, you know, then again, you know,
Judge Schimmel made the comment that I'm here to support President Trump. I
don't know where that comes from. You're a Supreme Court justice. But then
Judge Crawford, they better respond to that and go down the rabbit hole. So
it's, it's a difficult time. And hopefully people will see through the
smoke.
Thank you, John. Thank you, Reed. We are going to now hand it over to both
Lisa to talk about kind of what clerks have been seeing on the ground,
what they are doing to prepare and just some of the overall trends that
they are seeing as well.
Whoever wants to start.
Prepping for elections, we are, first of all, it takes a tremendous
amount of work for our municipal clerks and our county clerks. We have
to come right off February, get those, the primary certified and we're
prepping for ballots to make sure everything is ready to go and everything
goes out. Early voting in person started on Tuesday and our clerks are seeing
numbers that they're not used to seeing. And some of my clerks are already
requesting a new absentee extra ballots for election day. If someone wants to
vote absentee, the deadline to request an absentee ballot by mail is next week
Thursday. I recommend you don't wait that long, because you're you're waiting
you're depending on the mail to get it to you. So if you're going to request an
absentee ballot, I recommend you're if you're going to want it by mail, I would
request it today. We are looking for a record turnout again, making sure that
everything is prepped, poll worker training, we are doing there's so many
little pieces throughout this entire part of what we're doing. Talking about
I have 146 different ballot styles just from right county there's 72 counties
some have more some have less
poll worker training, making sure we're giving supplies and supports to all of
our municipal clerks. There's there's so many pieces to put together to make this
work. It's amazing. And the fact that there's only six weeks between the
February primary and the April first election, Lisa, I'm sure you can cover
this a lot more detailed than I can.
You're doing a great job. But one of the things that we are seeing, obviously,
too, is the amount of absentee requests and the people and people looking for
in person absentee voting, that is always frustrating when people call it early
voting in Wisconsin, in my area, at least because people truly believe that it is
early voting and they're looking for the machine because when the media puts it
on the TV, early voting began and they have a picture of the machine. That's
when I wish they would hold up absentee ballots and explain to the two
people. Everyone that this is actually going in the envelope. And it's going
to some that's what we trust our election officials to put that ballot on
your behalf into the machine.
Preparing communicating communications is so key right now with our
municipal clerks with the borders. I have four referendums, big referendums in
my county besides. So it's, you know, everybody is worried about the top of
the ballot, but yet our April elections truly are what is what is on your
tax bill, county, municipal, and then onto our schools. So it's getting
everyone to understand that yes, the top of the ballot is very, very important.
But our local races are just as important, especially when there is
opposition and our candidates work so hard. They don't have that kind of money
to spend like the top of the ballot does.
Getting right now the testing, letting the public know that machines are being
tested, that the public can come and witness the testing of the machines in
the next two weeks. And most counties, I can't speak for all of them, but in our
county, we are also testing the transmission of those unofficial results
on election night, making sure all of that all works and that we don't have any
problems out in the field with that. Lisa, some more to add to that.
Just some more things for voters to consider is that if you're looking to
request an absentee ballot or where's your polling location going to be
election day, checking your voter registration, the best place to go is
myvote.wi.gov. You can, you can search all of that and look at your sample
ballot. It has the information that you need to know for election day. And it
lists all the deadlines, absentee, everything is there, and you can track
your absentee ballot there also.
That is a great point, especially when you said how many different ballot
styles, obviously a little bit smaller county, but I have almost 90 different
ballot styles. One of my smallest towns has four different school districts.
Their next door neighbor may have maybe in the different school districts. So
when you're talking across the fence, oh, yeah, you got to remember,
soul and soul is on the ballot. That doesn't sound familiar. That's different
school districts. So going on to the myvote website to make sure what is on
your respective ballots and knowing what you're going to vote for prior to going
into the polling place. But our election officials cannot answer who somebody is
or even though this is a nonpartisan election, I'm so I get phone calls. So
which one leans towards this party and which one leans on that party? We can't
answer that with the statewide referendum also being on this ballot. We I have
never had so many people in many years call and ask what does the question
really mean. I've had to get the type C notice it's called. Oh, to our
municipalities as soon as we were able to get it from the state to get it, give
it to the voters. We have that for in person absentee voting. I instructed
all the election or all my municipal clerks, please have that available for
our voters. In the past, we worried about making sure it was there on election
day. Now, we actually have to start thinking about what we have there on
election day is going to now back up those two weeks prior to that. Because
2026, we are going to see even more absentee voting. I strongly believe that
I've let my municipalities know at the town's Association meeting budget for
that. But getting the word out there for people. As soon as we have our sample
ballots, I request that the municipalities get them hung in their town halls,
their village hall. So when they have meetings or they rent out their hall
for four H or whatever, that those sample ballots are already hanging up for
people to view. Perfect. Thank you. And Lisa Thompson, I know you mentioned
about early voting. And do you have any statistics from what you've seen from
this year versus others? So I did go on to the Election Commission website. So
elections.wi.gov, tons of information on there, especially if you like to geek
out on lots of stuff. If you look under statistics, you can actually look back
at previous elections. So I did pull up what they have from the 17th. And that's
there's over 400,000 ballots that were issued absentee ballots that are already
been sent. And a third of those are already back. That is already beating the
numbers that we had from last year. And last year, we had the presidential
preference. I'm expecting that number to keep climbing as more people are taking
advantage of that in-person absentee voting. So we're expecting record
turnouts for this election. Thank you. And then we'll move on to Election Day. And
if both of you can kind of talk briefly about what what the state does, what you
do and what your municipal clerks do as well, come Election Day to save. Go
ahead, Lisa. Okay, well, I'll start with the state and the county. So on
Election Day, the biggest thing for the Election Commission and the county
clerks is we are a source of information. We have voters call us every on
Election Day. We have all of our our systems up so we can check polling
locations for people. If they have questions on photo ID, we are making sure
if you know anybody needs extra ballots of like just Election Day, something
happened. We are we are their support. That is our main goal on Election Day
support our municipal clerks. They are in charge on Election Day. So they are
going to they are the ones that make sure everything happens in the field. We are
just their backups and the Election Commission works the same way. They
are their support on Election Day. Lisa, do you want to go over what the
municipal clerks do? The municipal clerks are actually not in charge on
Election Day. There is well, they are. The chief inspector is actually in charge.
And that is, you know, you see that a lot more. I know most municipal clerks
are at their town or village halls, but in a city, I have 22 words in the city
of Fond du Lac. I know Lisa has a lot more in Jamesville and everything. But the
city clerk obviously can't be in 22 different places. So these cheap inspectors
are trained that they are in charge. They are going to answer questions for
voters. They're going to keep everything running very smoothly. They do a phenomenal
job. They are kind of that secret person that is on the ground running on Election
Day. And they have a lot of responsibilities. They're going to take care of
observers coming in and making sure they're all satisfied with what they're
seeing or where they need to go to sit, a view, all of that. Just when they're
running short on ballots, they're the ones that they're going to be calling me on
the county level that we're running short. In our county, we have check ins
during the day to let me know where they are. I have a little formula I use
that if I think they're going to have enough ballots, we will not run out of
ballots on Election Day. We run our ballots in house. So we're able to get more
run to them, whether it's myself getting it to the polls, somebody from the
municipality, or I work hand in hand with the sheriff and law enforcement all
day long. Back in November, I had two deputies assigned to me personally that
would do any running or if I needed anything. We work hand in hand with law
enforcement simply because we want the voters to feel safe in the environment
on Election Day. And yes, we've had to go down that route, but it is appreciated
by our election officials and by the voters. But that is we want that we want
that feeling for people that they're not intimidated and that they can vote that
ballot that this the machine is secure and that their ballot is going to count
on Election Day. That is all of our goal, I believe out there.
And one thing we didn't really touch on from the last slide is that the the
chief inspectors and the poll workers go through a lot of training. Lisa and I do
a ton of training in our counties. I know most counties do as just as much as we
do just to make sure that they understand any changes in the law or just to remind
them of all the steps. There's a ton of training that goes ahead of the
selection so that they're comfortable and have the knowledge and the resources to
make sure those election days run smoothly. Absolutely, we had to remember
this only happens a couple times a year. So we even though Lisa and I and other
county clerks and our municipal clerks are working elections year-round, which
20 years ago I never thought would come to that, but you know we're not going to
see except for special elections or anything, elections till next year. So
it's continuously keeping our election officials knowing what is going on as
far as laws, any changes. What is on the ballot? I stress, I'm sure, others stress,
I stress that my election officials do know what is on their ballot. There's
nothing worse when the voter says, oh, why am I here? What is on my ballot? And the
election official looks at the ballot and to see what's on there. So those are
things I even instruct so that they can have the confidence when the voter does
come in and has that unusual question.
Thank you. And then briefly if you both can talk about kind of what goes on on election night as well.
On election night, they on the municipal level, they are going through those ballot.
Once everybody has voted, and once again we have to remember, if you're online at eight o'clock
at night and there is still an hour-long line, everybody gets the vote. We instruct our
municipal clerks, election officials that somebody should stand at the end of the line at eight o'clock
to make sure that somebody doesn't come in at eight o'clock. Once everything has been done,
they are going to verify the number on the machine and the poll book, and then they will
close the poll. And various, everything is the same around the state, but everybody has different
state steps on doing this. But basically what it comes down to is they get that
unofficial or that official total, I'm sorry, official total from the machine.
And once they get all that through in our county that is transmitted to the county clerk's office,
it is unofficial results from the county clerk simply because everything is official
from the machine on the municipal level. And that's why we call unofficial because I have not seen
those tapes from the voting machines until the next day. So that is why we are very,
we strongly say it is an unofficial result plus there has been no canvassing, at least when it comes
to state and county. Lisa, you want to continue? Sir, the municipalities are also reviewing
all those ballots for voter intent. We're a high voter intent state, so we're going to look to see
the machines just basically read the field in ovals. So they're looking to see if a voter
decided to circle the name instead of fill in the oval, or if there's any right ins, because we do
have races where the right ins will actually win a race. There are some that don't have any
candidates on them, and that does happen usually at the at the municipal levels in some of the
smaller offices. They're going to be reviewing all of that, and they might actually be determining
the results of some of those races. So if it's a town board with one polling location,
they may be actually doing that canvas and determining the winner that night.
We're also making sure we're logging any provisional ballots. Those people that didn't have their
ID with them when they came to vote, there's different reasons. There's very few, but we do
log all that to make sure that they have the chance to come back and make sure their ballot
can get counted later. Again, those results are transmitted or somehow gotten to the county.
Once we have them, every municipal every county is required to post those on their website.
On election night, they are definitely unofficial because we're going to review everything after
the election. The towns and the village and the cities will certify their portion of the ballot.
The school districts have certified the school district referendums and the school board members,
and then the counties will meet a week after the election, and they are going to actually review
all of the county and above races, and that gets sent to the state once we certify,
and the state does it again and recertifies everything there. I jumped there, didn't I?
Can I just add one thing for the media to note, when it comes to the school districts, make sure
you're aware of what lines or what counties those school districts go into. I had a situation
a couple of years ago that the local media announced somebody was the winner, which you know, it was
unofficial. They had missed one county, and that person wasn't the winner. So as media on election
night, always making sure the different counties that the school district goes into, you might not
realize that there might just be that one little town that has 40 voters that in a different
county. So that's really, really important with this spring election. There is just so many
variables in our spring elections. Right. Thank you both. So we will now, we can start off with
Reid and talk about kind of some of the advertisement and misinformation we are seeing around this
election and in the state. Yeah, thanks. Thanks a lot, Anthony. And I don't know if the audience
can see me or just see their slides. What is the reality there? They can see you and the slides.
Perfect. Thank you. What I would often tell people when I was in office, they're going to town halls,
I would hold up a ruler like this. You can see that with the background. And I might put my finger
over here in one part and say this ruler contains all the truth about a particular topic or candidate.
But someone decides to tell you just this piece of the truth over here. They can then go to bed
at night and say, well, I said something that that was true. But they don't fool well that if they
told you all this other truth over here, you might come to a conclusion that you otherwise wouldn't
come to if you had truthfulness. If you just had part of the truth or part of the story. And that's
disinformation and that's predominantly what you see. And people can put something out there. But
without giving you all the background information, it looks like they're telling you something that's
true. But it's totally misleading and it's intended to be misleading. They do it on purpose to be
particularly deceptive. And you see this in almost any type of political campaign. And now we're
seeing it in the Supreme Court races where this sentence once wasn't right or this person let off
this child sex offender or this or that. You have no idea the true background or information on any
of these cases. And it can be very, very misleading. The data itself can be true. Yes, this sentence was
imposed or this occurred. But without without more information, it falls into that category of
disinformation. And with the with the widespread use of social media, people who believe it and
believe this information, they spread it, they spread it out through all of their social media
networks, whether it's on Facebook or what I affectionately calls zitter or Instagram or whatever.
And it begins to spread. Now, they're not really, they don't really have any
bad intent there. They just read this information, they believe it to be true, and then they spread
it. And so then they're spreading misinformation. And it takes on a life of its own. And it's very,
very difficult to combat. And it's particularly difficult to combat when you have so much outside
money. And you have no control over the messaging as a candidate, as I mentioned earlier. And so
you've got ads that just take you to all different kinds of places. And you begin to wonder at what
point do regular voters, they just tune this all out. At some point, they just stop hearing the noise
of it all. And and then more and more and more money comes in. But every time a candidate wins
based on using these tactics, it encourages the use of those taxes tactics even further
in the next election. And so there's this escalation up of this environment. And this has always been
been disinformation and misinformation. I mean, the John Adams, Thomas Jefferson presidential
race was one of the ugliest in US history. And that dates way back to the very, very late
1700s and early 1800s. And it was filled with disinformation. And so this is a
proud heritage that American elections have that has been put in kind of a supercharged mode
with the speed and ability at very low cost to spread it. And so it gets to be very difficult
to combat it. And I'm not I'm not an advocate of stopping it. I'm an advocate of having more
free speech with more accurate speech. And this really imposes a burden on the candidates to get
out there and get in the public where people can read their eyes, see their body language,
see how authentic they are, and make a judgment on their own. And it it it does become more and
more incumbent on the candidates to work especially harder. And and I would say on the political
advertisement side, there's very little that you can believe on it as far as being truthful.
And I would just say that given the very tight nature of political races in Wisconsin, in Wisconsin
in particular, this this plays, I mean, you're only talking about moving 10,000 votes in some
cases for a statewide race. And this is in a state that on the same ballot elected Senator Ron Johnson,
one of the most conservative kind of America first senators out there on the same ballot that
they reelected Governor Evers or they elected Ron Johnson in one election and two years later
reelected Senator Temmie Baldwin, who's one of the most progressive members. And so these races are
so tight in Wisconsin that that misinformation and disinformation can swing an election. And so
part of the part of the reason we talk with folks like you is to to try to combat some of
this information and fact check and truth check things that if something doesn't sound right,
it's probably not probably not right. But we're also hearing about the misinformation about how
elections are rigged in Wisconsin and how you can't trust them that there's going to be ballot
dumps or that illegal immigrants are voting and and false claims like that. It kind of again
gets gets put on a supercharger as these rumors float through the internet. I can't even tell you
how much of that I've seen on on Facebook and and and on X lately. And it's kind of shocking that
with all the discussions since 2020 that this is still even a topic of discussion and even after
the 2023 election where Wisconsin put in their constitution that illegal can't vote,
that's yet to be a citizen, even though they never really were voting in Wisconsin, there's always
illegal there. It just continues to to go on. And so it really plays and there's a lot of money
behind it and pushing it. And so John. Just again, I'll just briefly follow what Reed said. This
particularly sticks in my craw. But Reed said it so well, there's a little bit of truth. Yes,
somebody did give a short sentence or somebody did give a plea agreement to somebody when they
were a prosecutor. But there's so much behind those decisions that we never know, especially the
ones where they attacked, since I'm an old prosecutor, they attacked either of these two candidates who
did have some prosecutorial experience, they attacked decisions they made. And you just you
you you don't know anything and they don't take the time to explain it. And I go back to the the
the election between our now Attorney General Josh Collin and then Attorney General Schimmel.
And they ran these ads at Josh Collin, Assistant U.S. Attorney, which I was in Baltimore. He gave
plea agreement. A guy got almost no time. And you know, call Josh Coll telling him he's not
tough on crime. Well, I knew that case. And I knew what had happened. It had been a big cartel.
They had 30 people convicted. They finally got somebody to cooperate. He got a reduction from the
judge, clearly under our sentencing guidelines, just what should have happened to bust up a big
cartel. None of that was part of the attack act. It's it's the Willie, if this is a verb,
I'll make it one. It's the Willie Hortonizing of our campaigns. And we all remember it's it's
this man went free and something horrible happened and Dukakis is to blame. It's unfortunate because
even as I speak to the media, you don't have the time to dig out every sentencing transcript,
every sentencing record. Why was why did Judge Schimmel or Judge Crawford give a shorter sentence?
Perhaps there was something in the family that perhaps there was a who knows, but but nobody has
it's whack-a-mole. Nobody has the ability to do that and the people the public doesn't do it either.
One other thing I would just follow up and I know it's one of our bullet points in the slides.
And I don't think the voters are sensitized to this. So many of the decisions that are being
highlighted, whether it's a sentencing, a sex offender, whether it's making a decision in a
criminal case as a prosecutor, it's not seeking a charge or so on. Those decisions simply are
nothing like the decisions that Supreme Court Justice makes. Supreme Court justices are at
least two levels removed from the trial. They have no charging decisions. They have no sentencing
decisions. They just see whether the law was correctly applied. These two people, Schimmel
and Crawford, are not running to be a Dane County or Milwaukee County or final
that county circuit court judge. They're running to be on our Supreme Court. What are their legal
skills? How deeply did they think? How clearly did they speak and write? Can they understand law
complicated issue? All these things are not even part of the attack and so it is unfortunate that
and reads the truth ruler and wrote it down is so perfect. A little bit of it is true. It's
yet the sentence wasn't posed or yes, a criminal decision was made. But what was everything that
led to that? And if it wasn't right, then why wasn't that part? Why wasn't the case appealed?
And why did an appellate court reverse them? None of that comes out and that's unfortunate.
Thank you. Really quickly also, John and others if you have, because very briefly, because
we're running out of time and want to get to questions, I'm just talking about what updates
on the happening in Madison and also some information on the constitutional amendment.
Let me hit that real quickly because you may all know this. It refers to about 200
uncounted absentee ballots from our prior election. It is under investigation as it shows on the
screen there by the WC. On March 12, the Madison City Clerk was suspended, put place to administrative
leave pending the investigation. This didn't affect the election. I think that's what's really
important. It's clear that it had no effect on the outcome. But the effect it had is what we're
talking about to keep our republic. It feeds distrust. Oh my gosh, in Madison, they're throwing
away ballots and they only threw away the rep's conservative votes. How that would ever be,
I don't know. But something happened, but the WC is going to sort it out. And in the interim
to bring some faith to our local election, I happen to be in Madison. The city attorney Mike
Haas, he's a former legal counsel of the WC as a sideline. He was also one of my law students at UW,
bright guy, honest guy, and he's going to run the election. It just can't be a reason to attack
our election. As to the voter ID amendment and read it alluded to this, I believe, or somebody did
on the amendment, so non-citizens couldn't vote. Well, it's the same thing here. We're being asked
to decide if it should be in the state constitution. It is the law in this state. If you go to vote,
there are several types of photo ID you've got to have. So one might ask the question,
why are we changing the constitution? These hallowed foundational documents in our constitutional law
usually aren't to be subject to, well, let's just change it like we vote a law or don't vote a law.
Clearly, whoever behind it wants to, it appears simply to handcuff future legislative bodies
from changing, or tweaking, or adding to, or. So it is there. I'm sure it's seemingly clear to
people about what people don't understand is, it is already our law.
Excellent. And then before we get to questions, John and others, have you seen any new election
laws or anything coming up ahead of this April?
I'm not aware of any significant changes. Most of the, I mean, the issue on the one near and
dear to my heart, the drop boxes was ruled out by the Supreme Court. That does not stand there
anymore. But Reed mentioned this earlier. The big issues that this court is going to decide are
public sector unions, act 10 litigation, workers' rights, put it that way. Clearly voting rights,
maps became huge, drop boxes, I just mentioned that. And we have to say it is certainly reproductive
rights. And how will the court view these three key areas, which are very, very significant
to everybody, whichever way you view these things, for the future of our state.
These will be before the court. The issues are huge. We can only hope that with all the
smoke floating around the election that the public is educated and knows what their votes mean.
Excellent. Thank you all. And then we are now going to open it for questions. So if you can
type in the chat or you could also raise your hand and you can ask it verbally as well for any of
those. Our first question is from Amy Sherman from PolitiFact. And she is wondering with
discussions of procedures and processes in Wisconsin specifically on ballot dumping.
How is there an impact on voters or officials ahead of April? And also if you could talk about
how these claims in the past have had affected you as well.
Could I suggest that Lisa or Lisa explain really quickly how absentee ballots are handled
specifically since Judge Schimmel raised it with the central count in Milwaukee where there's all
the numbers you're talking about and how that just simply slows the process down because we
can't process them. We don't under our law process them ahead of time.
So Rock County also has two central count locations. So instead of the absentee ballots going to the
polls and be processed with all the other ballots on election day there's between 30 and 40 municipalities
that use central count. So all their absentee's go to one location. In Wisconsin we cannot start
processing any absentee ballots until 7 a.m. on election day. And you can only do so many at a
time. There's a limit as to how fast you can go. We can't start till 7 so we have to keep
going until they are done. We can't stop. There's nothing that allows us to stop and start up the
next day. We keep going till we're done. So thinking there's a ballot dump is it's a little
off-putting because unless you understand how the whole system works they're using high-speed
tabulators at Milwaukee and they have to wait until every single ballot is processed until they
can actually pull that data. So if they're still going they are taking all the data that all of
the ballots they started processing from 7 a.m. in the morning until they are done and then they
can send that to the county. That is a huge number of ballots considering what Milwaukee is running
through. It's not a dump it's just how the system works and how the processing works in our state.
If we could start earlier than Monday or earlier than I'm sorry I'd love to have a
Monday bill. If we could start earlier than 7 a.m. on election day you would get your results faster.
And that's that's the piece that's disheartening to some of us who work so hard to be so
so accurate and so checking everything that they're saying there's a ballot dump when it's really
not a ballot dump. It's how the process actually works. It's not my job to ask questions but let me
follow Lisa. I know it's coming for our legislature a couple times to change the time so you could
process earlier. Is that in fact do other states do that and it just isn't hasn't become our law
here for whatever reason. I believe it's I think it's four or six states. I'm not sure exactly now
others may have changed their laws. Everyone else processed them before election day. They start
processing them. We are we're just one of few states that does not. The cheese stands along.
Almost.
The next question we have is from Hope from the journal Sentinel in Milwaukee.
Every election there's hundreds or even thousands of absent ballots that are sent to voters but not
returned. Do you have any insight why that is? Do voters need more information about options for
returning their ballots? How common is it for clerks to include instructions in this envelope?
You want to take that one Lisa?
I think yes absolutely that they're not sent back is because the voter does not they get the ballot
and they look at it and they realize that does not they don't know who the candidate is. They
don't know what the contest is. We don't always know February. You see that a lot especially with
the primary we just had for public instruction. Nursing homes in Wisconsin we have the indefinitely
confined list so people automatically get that ballot in our state and they I'll get the phone
calls and say who are these people? I didn't realize there was an election so I don't have the true
answer on why people don't vote that ballot but it is costly to our municipalities that those
ballots are sent out not even just the cost of the ballot but the postage alone for the ballots
and everything. Instructions are sent along with just on what you should do with the absentee
ballot making sure you get a witness and everything. One thing people don't realize in Wisconsin that
you can send back an unbounded ballot and it will be processed. Nobody needs to know that you voted.
Nothing was voted on that ballot and it still shows in your voter record that you did vote
an election so and that is just any ballot. A lot of people think they have to vote every single
contest on that ballot or it's going to be rejected whereas you can just vote
County Clerk and send the ballot back and nobody's going to know that you did not vote
in the other contests on that ballot.
Thank you. We have a question from Mitchell from Wisconsin State Journal and this is talking
about spending and elections and misinformation that stems from ads. I'm specifically is asking if
Keep Our Public has any position on the need for campaign finance reform in Wisconsin
bringing the massive spending and also we've come to expect in these elections. Also is there
any changes that could help. Keep Our Public is not an advocacy organization and we don't
necessarily have a stance on campaign finance reform but if any of the panelists want to talk
about this more please go ahead.
Yeah I would just offer one thing just as additional information. We're seeing so much
outside money because as post the Citizens United Supreme Court case where
free speech is not limited to the amount of money that you spend. One thing that I think would help
is if state law would allow candidates to raise more money directly from individuals as opposed to
what I would say is often darker money money that's harder to track where it comes from
from outside outside sources. If the more power that candidates have to speak in their own voice
to be seen by the public and to address the public face to face or via the media
where it's actually them talking any type of reform that would be legal there would be helpful.
But what Citizens United recognized I think in the correctly even though it's been highly
criticized is that our media for the most part is for profit and these for-profit companies have
political biases themselves. I mean you you can see I'll just pick on two Fox News on the right
and MSNBC NBC on the left. They've got opinion people talking day in and day out all day long
with all the free speech that they want and yet a private entrepreneur in Milwaukee or Green Bay
up by where I live. I didn't have any right to have any political say and now the Supreme Court
said no we're going to level the playing field if an individual wants to spend their own money
to to say what they think about an election they should have the same right as a for-profit
media person. And so it has certainly changed the dynamic and in Wisconsin where races are so
closely contested in many cases. I would be very very supportive of some type of campaign finance
reform that would give candidates more ability to be direct with the public. I don't know how
you do that I don't know exactly the the legal mechanisms now the way the court has decided
about speech but it's definitely a challenge for sure. I think it's a really important question by
the way. Thank you that's all the questions we have currently just any more we have about five
or more minutes until we'll bring this to an end. Also if there's any media outlets are interested
in speaking to anyone to keep our public or any of the panelists they're available on background
or for one-on-ones after this as well. So just let me know and we can get you a communicator with
them. Well don't see any more questions now. So I just will end things here
and just want to thank all the media outlets for attending and for taking your time to listen to
us and also to report on this Wisconsin election as well. And yeah we are keep our public is here
we're open for the media and for the public so please feel free to reach out to us any time
and yeah we're always happy to help. So thank you all and enjoy the rest of your day.
.
Wow thank you so much.
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