Conservative group claims ‘ballot trafficking’ in 2020 Wisconsin election, but won’t share evidence

However, when asked to provide the detailed evidence supporting such a claim, they declined to provide it.

Members of True the Vote, a conservative group investigating elections around the country, said the data suggest those people were delivering ballots that weren’t their own. Others said the data is meaningless and could show nothing more than people going about their daily lives.

“Data allegedly showing cell phones that were tracked multiple times near absentee ballot drop boxes is, alone, not evidence of a crime,” the Wisconsin Elections Commission said in a statement.

Testifying before the Assembly elections committee, two members of the group said their analysis found 138 people in Milwaukee, Racine and Green Bay each went near a drop box at least 26 times and near a nongovernmental organization at least five times between Oct. 20 and Nov. 3, 2020.

That behavior, they said, was evidence of “ballot trafficking,” or what they consider to be some combination of collecting, distributing or storing other people’s absentee ballots.

The informational hearing came as the state Supreme Court decides whether to ban absentee ballot drop boxes and the gathering and submitting of others’ absentee ballots by a third party.

At this point, absentee ballot drop boxes are not permitted for the April election, nor can a person deliver another’s absentee ballot, with limited exceptions. But that ruling was not in place for the 2020 election.

“I want to make very clear that we’re not suggesting that the ballots that were cast were illegal ballots,” True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht said.

The group declined to make its data available, making it impossible to assess its validity. Milwaukee elections administrator Claire Woodall-Vogg said the group’s analysis may well have captured city election staff making routine rounds of the drop boxes.

“I have no idea because I haven’t seen their data broken down where we can actually analyze it,” she said. “I have no idea how tracking people’s cellphones work, but if they have the cellphone numbers, I could even confirm whether they’re an employee.”

Suggesting the mere presence of the same cellphones repeatedly showing up near drop boxes is a sign of something improper “is really a bizarre reach,” Wisconsin Elections Commission’s Democratic chair Ann Jacobs said on Twitter.

Jacobs pointed out that a drop box at East Library in Milwaukee, for example, is directly below an apartment building.

Many drop boxes may have been located in central locations, like a city hall, near apartments or restaurants, frequented by the public, the commission noted.

“This group of far-right conspiracy (theorists) refuses to provide any information that would allow anyone to check their wild claims,” Rep. Mark Spreitzer, D-Beloit, said on Twitter.

In Georgia, where third parties may not legally pick up and deliver voters’ ballots, Georgia’s investigative bureau found that cellphone data showing people repeatedly near drop boxes wasn’t enough to warrant a criminal investigation, Georgia Public Broadcasting reported.

In a letter, Georgia Bureau of Investigation director D. Victor Reynolds told True the Vote that the group submitted no evidence connecting the cellphone data with ballot harvesting, provided no names of people harvesting ballots or the name of a “source” the group said could validate the group’s claims. The bureau ruled an investigation wasn’t justified.

Asked why the group didn’t provide more evidence supporting its claims in Wisconsin, Engelbrecht said the group didn’t have enough time to show the committee the “broad nature” of its findings.

“To go further really takes us in another step that begins to name names,” she said, “and that’s really not the purpose of this.”

The group’s presentation was the latest to cast doubts on the 2020 election after numerous audits, reviews and court filings found no more fraud in 2020 than is typical in any other election.

Assembly elections committee chair Rep. Janel Brandtjen, R-Menomonee Falls, has long derided the way the 2020 election was conducted, requesting information from Wisconsin counties as a first step toward what she described as a “full, cyber-forensic audit of tabulators and inspection of the physical ballots” from the election.

She has also provided a platform for a man convicted of mail and bank fraud to give a presentation featuring false and unprovable claims about the 2020 election.