Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos will meet with a group pushing to decertify the 2020 presidential election
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MADISON - The Republican leader of the Wisconsin state Assembly on Wednesday will meet with a group of conservatives who want him to take the impossible and illegal steps of decertifying President Joe Biden's 2020 victory in Wisconsin to "see if they can prove their case."
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos will talk to the group at the state Capitol, a spokeswoman confirmed Tuesday — a meeting that will take place hours before he and Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu are traveling to the Stevens Point area to meet with leaders of each county Republican Party, some of whom expect to discuss the same idea.
"I still believe that we do not have the ability to decertify, but I said I would listen to those who are bringing experts to say we can and we will see if they can prove their case," Vos, a Republican from Rochester, told the Associated Press. “I’ve asked people who think we can and think we can’t to all sit in a room and discuss it and that’s what we’re doing tomorrow.”
Vos told The Associated Press he was also inviting to the Capitol meeting those who believe the 2020 election cannot be decertified.
A spokeswoman for Vos did not respond to a request last week from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel seeking information about the meeting that has been widely promoted on social media this month by conservatives seeking to reverse the 2020 election result.
In one post, the meeting is promoted as a "closed door" event that will be followed by a legislative hearing. Vos' spokeswoman Angela Joyce did not say whether the hearing was taking place.
The discussions come as Vos defends himself against a growing number of Republicans in the party's grassroots who view him as a roadblock to rooting out voter fraud and decertifying the 2020 election, and are calling for his resignation.
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The meeting was scheduled after former President Donald Trump and Former Supreme Court justice Michael Gableman, whom Vos hired to review the 2020 election, called on the Legislature to take the illegal act of decertifying.
Vos has said repeatedly he does not believe in the idea that legal scholars have called preposterous, impossible and illegal.
"Decertification is not possible. You have people who are paid around the country to write an opinion to say it is, but there is no constitutional scholar in Wisconsin who says that it can," Vos said earlier this month in an appearance on WSAU. "There is no one who believes that we can decertify the election and go back and put Donald Trump in office."
More: A who's who guide to the Republican review of Wisconsin's 2020 presidential election
Next week, the Assembly Committee on Elections and Campaigns is inviting two election conspiracy theorists who have claimed widespread voter fraud for years — including through busloads of out-of-state voters in the 2012 recall elections.
Testifying are True the Vote leader Catherine Engelbrecht, who made the 2012 claim, and Gregg Phillips, who has repeatedly promoted the false idea that up to 5 million non-U.S. citizens voted in the 2016 election — a claim Trump seized upon and used to sow distrust in elections since.
Committee chairwoman Janel Brandtjen, R-Menominee Falls, did not immediately say what topic Engelbrecht and Phillips will be addressing.
True the Vote filed lawsuits in Wisconsin, Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania following the 2020 election alleging widespread voter fraud but quickly dropped them. An attorney for the group, James Bopp, also represents Gableman in lawsuits seeking records from the 2020 probe.
Much of Gableman's latest report on his review focuses on voting in nursing homes, which came under scrutiny in late 2021 when Racine County Sheriff Christopher Schmaling said an investigation into one facility in his county showed guidance from the Wisconsin Elections Commission resulted in ballots cast by nursing home residents who were not coherent.
A district attorney from Green Lake County said Tuesday she would not charge a member of the state Elections Commission for how she handled voting at nursing homes during the coronavirus pandemic — the third prosecutor to decline Schamling's request to prosecute members of the commission over the guidance.
During the pandemic, the bipartisan commission told municipal clerks to mail absentee ballots to nursing home residents and ignore a state law requiring them to first send poll workers to those facilities. The commissioners said there was no point in sending the poll workers because most nursing homes weren’t allowing visitors during the pandemic and they wanted to make sure residents received absentee ballots in time to return them.
Schmaling alleged the commissioners committed felonies by giving their advice to clerks and asked for charges.
Racine County District Attorney Patricia Hanson in February said she didn’t have the authority to charge anyone because none of the commissioners live in her county. A prosecutor in Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm’s last week declined to press charges against two commissioners who live there because he said there was no support for Schmaling’s claims that crimes were committed.
On Monday, Green Lake County District Attorney Gerise Laspisa issued a news release saying she would not charge Commissioner Marge Bostelmann because of a lack of evidence that she committed a crime.
Schmaling has asked two other prosecutors, in Sheboygan and St. Croix counties, to consider charging other commissioners.
Patrick Marley of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel contributed to this report.
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Contact Molly Beck at molly.beck@jrn.com. Follow her on Twitter at @MollyBeck.
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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Vos to meet with group pushing to decertify Wisconsin 2020 election
