Election experts defend system, downplay threats at Milwaukee event

Kathy Bernier, Paulina Gutierrez and Meagan Wolfe discuss Wisconsin's election security at a July 9 event in Milwaukee. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

Election experts who have held positions at the local, county and state levels appeared at an event Tuesday in Milwaukee to defend Wisconsin’s election system as safe, explain how the system works and state that they believe November’s election will be smoother than 2020. 

At the event, hosted jointly by the Milwaukee Press Club, Rotary Club of Milwaukee and Wisconsin Alliance for Civic Trust, Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe, Milwaukee Elections Commission Director Paulina Gutierrez and former Republican state Sen. Kathy Bernier discussed how election conspiracy theories have affected the state over the last three years, the impact of last week’s state Supreme Court decision to again allow the use of absentee ballot drop boxes and how election officials across the state are preparing for this year’s elections. 

Drop boxes

Last Friday, the Wisconsin Supreme Court overturned a 2022 decision, by the then-conservative majority on the Court, banning the use of drop boxes. In the previous decision, the Court ruled that absentee ballots must be brought to a mailbox or directly to a voter’s municipal clerk. In a 4-3 decision, the Court’s current liberal majority found that the previous ruling was “unsound in principle.” 

Prior to 2022, dropboxes had been used by municipal clerks across the state in urban and rural communities. The method became especially popular in 2020 when absentee voting surged in popularity because of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

At the event on Tuesday, Gutierrez said the city of Milwaukee is working to get its 15 drop box locations back into working order and educating voters about their return. 

Bernier previously worked as the Chippewa County Clerk, chaired the Senate Elections Committee and has spent her retirement from the Legislature traveling the state to educate voters about how the voting system works and combat misinformation. She said she has problems with the Court’s decision, saying it’s a “slippery slope” when legal interpretations can flip flop the way they have on drop boxes, but that under the new law, the WEC should pass an emergency rule to give clerks clarity on how the boxes should be used, secured and monitored. 

“I think we should all be concerned that we are on a slippery slope in this state, in this nation,” Bernier said. “When the interpretation of the law is not an actual interpretation of the law — the law said you return your ballot by mail or you return it to the clerk — that is my interpretation. That’s been my interpretation for years. I don’t necessarily agree with this current interpretation, however, the Supreme Court is the Supreme Court. So now I encourage the Wisconsin Election Commission to pass an administrative emergency rule to make sure that all of the processes and procedures are in place.” 

Wolfe said the elections commission will be meeting Thursday morning to discuss how it should respond to the decision, adding that it’s not as simple as simply returning to the pre-2022 guidance the commission had provided to clerks on the issue. 

Election denial

When Bernier was still in the Senate, she was one of a few elected Republicans in the state to push back against conspiracies about the election system. In her work with Keep Our Republic since retiring, she’s gathered local officials to meet with skeptics in communities across the state to meticulously explain how the process works. In those meetings, she readily states she believes there were problems in 2020, but not enough to swing the election results. 

On Tuesday, she touted reports by the state’s Legislative Audit Bureau and Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty proving the election was won by Joe Biden and said that many of the problems in 2020 happened because the election was held at the height of the pandemic. 

Last week, in the Democratic primary in a special election for an empty seat in the 4th Senate District, some of the state’s most high profile election deniers showed up to polling places in the Milwaukee suburb of Glendale to observe the polls. Claiming that the observers were being obstructive by not following rules and objecting to every absentee ballot, local officials forced the  observers to leave after calling the police. 

At the event on Tuesday, all three speakers downplayed the threat of incidents like that, saying most observers simply sit and watch the process. 

Bernier noted that having skeptics get trained to work the polls or come to the polls to observe often helps to assuage their fears when they find the system is carefully designed with multiple checks and the process is generally quite boring. 

Wolfe added that having people observe the voting process is a “healthy part of Election Day.” 

Many of the conspiracy theories about the 2020 election in Wisconsin have stemmed from the process of counting absentee ballots, especially in Milwaukee. Most communities in the state count absentee ballots at the polling location where each absent voter would have gone to vote in person. In Milwaukee and a handful of other communities, all the ballots are sent to one “Central Count” location where they’re all tallied together. 

Under state law, ballots cannot begin to be processed until polls open at 8 a.m. on Election Day. 

Conspiracy theories have abounded about the absentee process and Milwaukee’s central count, alleging that Democratic operatives worked to “ballot harvest” and force people to cast absentee votes for Biden or that large “vote dumps” from Milwaukee changed the results for Biden in the middle of the night. 

Bernier said that she doesn’t think ballot harvesting really happens, questioning how it would even occur while Wolfe said these allegations are often dispelled with simple explanations to people with questions. 

Wolfe recounted an interaction she had at an event hosted by Bernier’s organization in which a man asked why it often takes Milwaukee longer to count its absentee ballots. 

“Somebody asked me, ‘Why does it take longer for Milwaukee to count their absentees than any other jurisdiction?’ Because they have more absentee ballots from their jurisdiction,” she explained.  “If you had more apples than your neighbor, and we both had to count our apples, the person with more apples, it’s going to take longer to count them.”

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