Why we removed a story on ‘election integrity’ in Wisconsin from our site

Last Friday a story we featured on our site and called attention to in our email newsletter was replaced by an Editor’s Note that stated simply that we removed the article “while the newsgathering process used to produce it is reviewed.”

The piece, by a States Newsroom reporter, described an online meeting of a national group dedicated to pursuing voter fraud, at which Wisconsin Assembly Campaigns and Elections Committee Chair Rep. Scott Krug (R-Nekoosa) laid out his plan to search out and purge noncitizens from Wisconsin’s voter rolls.

Shortly after we posted the story, a representative from the Election Integrity Network sent us an email demanding an immediate retraction.

The group did not challenge any of the facts in the story. But it objected to the reporter joining the call, noting that “no media are ever allowed on our calls” and that their calls are “off the record” and “no notes or comments are to be uploaded in any public space.”

States Newsroom’s national editors and Washington Bureau chief agreed that participating in the call without identifying himself as a reporter violated our ethics policy, which states: “Our journalists will never misrepresent themselves to get an interview or story. We will tell all sources if we are taping an interview. We do not use hidden cameras, go undercover or pay for interviews.” 

We took the story down but did not write a retraction. 

It is painful to have to take a story down — all the more so in this case, which involves reporting that goes to the heart of the current battle for the future of democracy in our state and the nation. But our ethics policy and our commitment to admitting when we mess up are part of our larger commitment to accuracy, transparency and our relationship of trust with our readers. We are not an opposition research organization or a hit team. We strive to uphold the highest standards of journalism.

This might not satisfy the Election Integrity Network, whose executive director Kerri Toloczko wrote in her letter demanding a retraction, “for the record, we are not ‘election deniers.’ We’ve never denied there are elections.” 

In fact, the term “election deniers” accurately describes the Election Integrity Network that, The New York Times has reported, is “recruiting election conspiracists into an organized cavalry of activists monitoring elections.” Cleta Mitchell, the group’s founder, is one of former President Donald Trump’s lawyers who pushed false claims of voter fraud to argue that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. Now she is working to undermine confidence in the next election.

“The only way they win is to cheat,” she said of Democrats, according to The Times piece. 

Noncitizen voting, which has been shown to be negligible in reviews in other states, is one of the issues the Trump campaign is preparing to seize on in Wisconsin to challenge the 2024 election results as “cheating” if they don’t go Trump’s way. 

Krug’s quest to get the state Department of Transportation to give him noncitizen drivers’ records to compare to voter lists in order to ferret out illegitimate voters, even if it doesn’t succeed, could lay the groundwork for a future lawsuit challenging Wisconsin’s election results. That’s a big deal in a state with the narrowest of margins in recent elections. 

In addition to raising doubts in advance about the legitimacy of election results and helping set the stage for another Jan. 6 insurrection, the noncitizen voting issue is worrying because it focuses not on any actual, reported problem but instead on suspicion and resentment against immigrants. 

The idea that immigrants are trying to steal U.S. elections is an insidious smear.

Wisconsin already denies driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants. The people targeted in a search for noncitizen drivers are immigrants who are legal residents like those with green cards. Voting as a noncitizen is a felony. The idea that the workers and permanent residents who have managed to achieve the security of legal status would risk it all to cast illegal votes is preposterous. 

As Lee Snodgrass (D-Appleton) put it at a hearing on the issue in May: “I’m trying to wrap my brain around what people think the motivation would be for a noncitizen to go through an enormous amount of hassle to actively commit a felony to vote in an election that’s going to end up putting them in prison or be deported.” 

It’s disappointing to see Krug take up the issue, let alone promote it to a group of election deniers. Since becoming chair of the Assembly elections committee, he has built a reputation as a low-key, bipartisan problem-solver, in stark contrast to his predecessor, Rep. Janel Brandtjen (R-Menomonee Falls), one of the Legislature’s most outspoken election deniers and a proponent of off-the-wall conspiracy theories.

One of the missed opportunities in the piece we removed from our site was the chance to interview Krug, who has made himself accessible to the press.

Examiner reporter Henry Redman followed up with him this week, and Krug insisted that he’s open to learning that there isn’t actually a problem with noncitizen voting. “My whole goal is if there’s something there I want to show it,” he told Redman. “If there’s not something there, I want to show it. Some people say it’s not an issue, I always tell people, what does it hurt to take all the data and say if it did happen or didn’t happen? It is equally as valuable to me to disprove something as it is to prove something.” 

It’s unclear if Krug will even get the records he’s seeking. He told Redman he is “making progress” with his effort to get the noncitizen drivers database from the DOT. But there is reason to be skeptical that the agency will be willing to risk the heavy penalties for violating the Federal Driver Privacy Protection Act it lays out on its own website.

We will continue to follow the story. 

Toloczko of the Election Integrity Network did not respond to an email asking why a meeting with a legislator about a public policy proposal was off the record in the first place.

But Krug told Redman he wasn’t the one who challenged the article we took down. He had made all his points in a public forum already anyway, he said. His main objection was that the reporter “didn’t even call for a comment.”

I’m glad we could fix that.