How a Wisconsin official became ‘a scapegoat’ for voter fraud falsehoods

The future of Wisconsin’s top election administrator, a respected and experienced elections official, is uncertain as state Republicans continue to fan the flames of rightwing conspiracy theories about her role in the 2020 election.

When Meagan Wolfe took over as interim elections administrator of the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) in 2018, her appointment to the seat was uncontroversial. Then the assistant elections administrator, Wolfe had helped run Wisconsin elections since 2011, redesigning the state’s online voter information portal and overseeing IT and cybersecurity work on elections statewide. Republicans in the state senate confirmed her appointment to helm the WEC unanimously in 2019.

But by her term’s conclusion last month, bipartisan support for the administrator had evaporated. Rightwing activists and public figures who falsely claimed the 2020 election was stolen pointed to the WEC, and Wolfe, as conspirators in a plot to deliver the presidency to Democrats. Republicans in office echoed the conspiracy theorists’ allegations that the WEC had bungled the 2020 election – if not outright endorsing their claims of fraud.

In recent weeks, Wolfe’s reappointment has become a messy political showdown between elections officials and Republicans in the state senate. Though she currently remains in her role, the battle alarms elections experts, who worry that political attacks on elections administrators will deepen the distrust in Wisconsin’s elections that took hold in 2020 and allow it to continue in the critical swing state moving into another presidential election year.

“All of the misinformation and disinformation about voter fraud sort of just got blamed on Meagan Wolfe,” said Kathleen Bernier, a former Republican state senator who has chaired the senate elections committee and broke with her party over claims of voter fraud. Bernier, who now leads an elections education organization called Keep Our Republic, described Wolfe as “a scapegoat”.

In the weeks leading up to Wolfe’s reappointment, falsehoods about the elections administrator circulated. When Gateway Pundit – a rightwing website that often spreads disinformation about elections – published a post enumerating a list of false claims and calling on readers to urge legislators to stop Wolfe from beginning her second term, the WEC said the commission was flooded with emails with claims that appeared to be copied from the misleading post.

At a press conference during the Wisconsin GOP’s annual convention on 17 June, state senator Devin LeMahieu signaled that Wolfe would not survive a confirmation hearing in the state senate. The reason she would not garner support from Republican legislators, LeMahieu elaborated, was her “mishandling” of the 2020 elections.

On 27 June, the six-member bipartisan WEC convened to discuss her reappointment. During the meeting, the commissioners expressed uniform respect for Wolfe, praising her record in office and denouncing election lies.

“I think you would agree with me that Meagan Wolfe is blamed for all manner of fanciful conspiracies that have no basis in fact,” said Don Millis, a Republican commissioner. “What’s concerning about these conspiracy theorists is that they’re willing to trash the reputations of anyone who’s interested in trying to administer elections fairly in our state.”

In a procedural maneuver, the three Democratic members on the bipartisan commission blocked the body from taking a vote on Wolfe’s reappointment, which would have triggered a vote in the senate – and likely jeopardized her position.

Without a vote, Wolfe would remain in office, an unusual but not unprecedented scenario. In 2022, a Republican-appointed member of the state’s Natural Resources Board refused to step down at the end of his term. The Wisconsin supreme court, then controlled by conservatives, ruled that the end of an official’s term does not create a vacancy in their office. Without a vacancy, the court ruled, the state could not replace an appointed official.

The next day, senate Republicans voted to proceed as though Wolfe’s appointment had been sent to the legislature for confirmation. Lawmakers have not yet moved forward with a confirmation hearing or up-down vote, which would follow in a typical confirmation process.

Wolfe was at the helm of state elections in 2020, “one of the most difficult if not the most difficult times for American elections”, according to Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin who directs the university’s Elections Research Center.

The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic sent elections workers scrambling to adjust the voting process to mitigate the risk of the virus while ensuring people could still exercise their right to vote. As Wisconsin’s 7 April elections approached, Covid-19 had spread rapidly around the US, taking hold in Milwaukee and disproportionately killing Black residents in the historically segregated city, “a crisis within a crisis”, the Wisconsin governor, Tony Evers, said in a press conference.

The WEC worked on new guidelines for voting amid the pandemic, including sending absentee ballots, rather than in-person poll workers, to nursing homes. Unlike a move by Evers to postpone the April election, the decision by the bipartisan elections commission to adapt their operations in nursing homes was not challenged in the courts, and the commission voted to continue the practice in the November general election.

In the wake of the election, recounts and multiple reviews confirmed Biden’s victory in Wisconsin and underscored administrators’ success in running clean elections during a difficult year.

Still, a subset of Republican party activists in the state clung on to Donald Trump’s false claims that the election had been stolen. A 14-month long investigation by Michael Gableman, a former Wisconsin supreme court justice who promoted Trump’s false claims of election fraud, elevated unfounded doubts about the security of the 2020 election in Wisconsin.

During the investigation, which ultimately yielded no evidence of widespread fraud, allegations surfaced about a nursing home resident who had voted despite lacking the cognitive ability to do so. The WEC’s pandemic-era nursing home policy of deploying absentee ballots rather than poll workers – a source of little controversy when enacted – was suddenly a smoking gun, and Wolfe, a high-profile suspect.

“I think standing strong is really important,” said Wolfe. “Doing as much as we can to push back, and letting people know we’re not going to be silent when they try to disparage our election process and our work and the results of elections. But sometimes that’s an impossible task and it’s a huge worry for all of us. Not just in Wisconsin, but around the country.”

Although no evidence calling the results of the election into question was ever uncovered, including in nursing homes, the idea that Wolfe and the elections commission had behaved illegally and delivered a fraudulent victory to Biden caught on. Rightwing figures around the state played up the allegations, with the Racine county sheriff even calling for members of the commission to face criminal charges for sending absentee ballots to nursing homes during the pandemic. Republican lawmakers – including assembly speaker Robin Vos – called on Wolfe to step down. In 2022, Janel Brandtjen, a state representative from Waukesha county, echoed Trump’s calls to decertify the election.

Wolfe withstood those attacks, but far-right Republicans did not relent, instead ramping up their attacks this year as election administrators prepare for the 2024 presidential contest. A resolution, which passed during last month’s annual Wisconsin GOP convention, called on the elimination of the WEC, and in the weeks leading up to Wolfe’s reappointment, officials like Brandtjen called for her removal from office.

Though Wolfe’s public support from Republican state lawmakers deteriorated, her reputation in the field of elections administration has not wavered. During her tenure, Wolfe chaired numerous national committees on elections administration and security and under her leadership, the WEC earned recognition for improving voting accessibility.

A bipartisan letter of support signed by elections officials around the US and published online by the non-partisan group Center for Election Innovation and Research described Wolfe as “one of the most highly-skilled election administrators in the country”. The 2021 letter emphasized how difficult it would be to replace Wolfe given her experience and stature.

Claire Woodall-Vogg, the executive director of Milwaukee’s elections commission, described Wolfe as a critical resource and source of stability in the state’s elections and said the consequences of Wolfe losing her position would be “frightening”.

“We reach out to the election commission for technical assistance on a daily basis,” said Woodall-Vogg. “You need people who are competent, who are being led and trained well, and I would imagine that morale would sink so low that you would have constant turnover and we would really lack the technical assistance that we need in order to administer elections.”

Scott Krug, the Republican chair of the Assembly Committee on Campaigns and Elections, also split publicly with leaders in his party, praising Wolfe as “open and honest and transparent.” Municipal clerks in his district, he said, supported the administrator. “I don’t think their opinions ever changed, and they’re the ones that actually run the elections.”

Despite the senate’s move to force a vote on Wolfe’s confirmation, the legislative body has taken no further action to proceed to a vote.

“As a legal matter, and as a constitutional matter, I don’t think any of this has any meaning,” said Jeffrey Mandell, a Wisconsin election law litigator. “It’s been weeks now since they passed that resolution. If they really wanted to vote down their fake nomination, they could have done it that night. They didn’t.”

Even if Wolfe remains in office through the 2024 elections, experts say the false and misleading allegations about her conduct that this conflict has generated will haunt elections in the state.

“There will continue to be people who are suspicious about elections, distrust authorities, and this will give them another reason to have those views,” said Burden.