A judge has allowed Voces de la Frontera to join a lawsuit challenging subpoenas in the GOP election review
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
MADISON – A judge on Wednesday agreed to let an immigrant rights group join a lawsuit challenging subpoenas issued by Assembly Republicans as part of their taxpayer-funded review of the 2020 election.
After an hour-long hearing, Dane County Circuit Judge Rhonda Lanford said she would let Voces de la Frontera Action of Milwaukee participate in the case.
Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul brought the lawsuit in October to try to block subpoenas the Republicans served on the state's bipartisan Elections Commission. Voces asked to join the lawsuit after it received subpoenas in early January.
Lanford in January declined to immediately block the subpoenas issued to the commission but raised questions about their legality. The Republicans have appealed Lanford's decision to let the case continue.
Subscribe to our On Wisconsin Politics newsletter for the week's political news explained.
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos of Rochester over the summer hired former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman to oversee the review and gave him a budget of $676,000. Gableman has spent months conferring with conspiracy theorists as he probes an election that Joe Biden won by about 21,000 votes.
Courts have repeatedly upheld Biden's victory over Donald Trump and independent reviews have found no evidence of significant voter fraud.
Gableman and the Assembly Republicans tried to keep Voces out of the case, arguing the group should file a separate lawsuit to challenge the subpoenas it received. They said Voces' participation would slow the case down as all sides try to gather documents through court discovery.
"With discovery comes delay," said George Burnett, an attorney for Assembly Republicans.
Lanford rejected that argument, saying it was more efficient for Voces' challenge to be handled alongside ones made by election officials.
"It makes no sense to this court to expend more judicial resources and more taxpayer dollars to challenge these subpoenas in a separate lawsuit," Lanford said.
Gableman was originally supposed to complete his work in October. Vos in recent weeks has said he wants Gableman to be done by the end of February but acknowledged he may miss that deadline.
Legislators plan to wrap up their session for the year in March.
Gableman has sought huge tranches of documents from Voces, elections officials, the state's information technology office, the state's five largest cities and voting machine companies. Many of them have called the demands vague and far too broad.
Make your voice heard. Find and contact your representatives.
Contact Patrick Marley at patrick.marley@jrn.com. Follow him on Twitter at @patrickdmarley.
Our subscribers make this reporting possible. Please consider supporting local journalism by subscribing to the Journal Sentinel at jsonline.com/deal.
DOWNLOAD THE APP: Get the latest news, sports and more
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Voces de la Frontera can join challenge of Wisconsin GOP subpoenas
