Plain Talk: Wanna see a slick politician? Watch Robin Vos talk voter fraud

When Bill Clinton was president, his detractors delighted in calling him “Slick Willie.”

But Wisconsin’s own Assembly Speaker Robin Vos has become the very definition of what it means to be slick.

I watched him a couple of Sundays ago explaining why he and his fellow GOP legislators not only “need” to rewrite the state’s election laws, but hire three ex-cops — one of them a longtime Republican who has claimed elections are crawling with fraudsters — to “investigate” the conduct of the 2020 presidential election in Wisconsin. And have a right-wing ex-Supreme Court justice and Donald Trump acolyte lead that “non-partisan” probe. Michael Gableman famously told a Trump rally in Milwaukee after the election that it was stolen by Biden.

Oh, heavens no, Vos proclaims, he isn’t contending that the state’s vote for Joe Biden was fraudulent. It’s just that there were many abnormalities that have destroyed the people’s trust in the fairness of the state’s elections. All he and his legislative cohort are trying to do is restore that trust. Never mind, of course, that this cabal has been working for months to spread falsehoods about Wisconsin’s voting procedures, long considered among the safest in the country.

“Approximately 50,000 people voted for one of the eight Republicans running for Congress in Wisconsin but did not vote for Donald Trump,” Vos told A. J. Bayatpour of WKOW-TV’s Capital City Sunday recently. “So the issue is not solely one of voter fraud or election integrity; that’s a huge part of it, which is why we’re spending a disproportionate amount of time on making sure that the system is fair.”

Apparently, it has never occurred to him that perhaps those 50,000 Republicans couldn’t stomach Trump.

When Bayatpour asked for proof of irregularities that would constitute illegally cast ballots, Vos cited a nursing home in Racine County.

“We have folks in a nursing home where they actually filled out the ballots for the residents who were not necessarily able to cast the ballots themselves because they weren’t of the mental condition to be able to choose between the candidates on the ballot,” Vos said.

No one in Racine would confirm Vos’ assertion. Instead, the Wisconsin Elections Commission found that since April of last year, election clerks referred 41 suspected cases of voter fraud out of more than 3 million votes cast. Twenty-two of those were in La Crosse County for improper residential addresses, while other cases included voting twice, once in-person and once by absentee.

In other words, vote fraud in the state is practically nonexistent.

I wish folks who buy into the assertions made by slick politicians like Vos — assertions aimed at justifying laws to suppress votes by those likely to vote against them — could have listened to a presentation by Madison City Attorney Michael Haas during a recent State Bar panel discussion on litigation relating to the 2020 election.

Haas, who was staff counsel for the old Governmental Accountability Board and then the first head of the new Wisconsin Elections Commission, explained in detail how Wisconsin elections are conducted and described the safeguards built into the system.

He explained how the state has the most decentralized election structure in the country.

He noted that while most states run elections at the county level, Wisconsin conducts elections at the municipal level. Wisconsin has 72 county clerks and 1,850 municipal clerks who are involved in elections. They run elections in the smallest towns to the largest cities, except Milwaukee, which has its own Election Commission and executive director in place of the municipal clerk.

“Two-thirds of the municipal clerks work part time, and many of those have separate full-time jobs. And there is an average of 25% turnover in clerks every year. It takes time to build up expertise to run different kinds of elections, and that means the WEC is training over 400 new clerks each year. Even for more experienced clerks, there is a constant flow of new legislation, court decisions, and new processes that have to be managed.

“Then, during a major election, we have about 30,000 election inspectors or poll workers who manage the polling sites and help voters. Incredibly, all of this means Wisconsin has one-sixth of all election officials in the entire country,” he pointed out.

He went on to explain how he has worked with these clerks all around the state. They do their jobs to help people and help voters in the face of foreign and domestic assaults on our elections, and he praised their ability to adapt to the coronavirus crisis in April of 2020 and again in November.

“Our decentralization works as a barrier to organized or widespread voter fraud in many different ways because of the number of sworn election officials who would need to be involved in a conspiracy and the safeguards in place to verify voters and to tabulate and transmit results from 2,000 separate polling places,” he added. “I know what voter fraud does and doesn’t look like in Wisconsin because part of my job for 12 years was to search for it. Elections are more secure and accurate than ever before.”

He observed that voters have more trust in election results before an election than they do after their candidate loses.

“It’s human nature, and it’s the loser’s lament,” he said. “But we are facing a hardening and institutionalizing of skepticism about our democracy because of baseless claims that have been repeatedly rejected by the courts but live on to motivate restrictive voting laws and conspiracy theories.”

He invited those who hold that viewpoint to observe an election, like he has done all over the state.

“It’s your neighbors who are conducting elections. They have a monumental job, and they do it as a small part of their life, in the spotlight and with election observers watching their every move,” he concluded.

Michael Haas was hounded out of the Elections Commission by Vos and then state Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald in 2018.

He believed in the integrity of Wisconsin’s system. That view isn’t slick enough for today’s legislative Republicans.