Compelling Evidence of Irregularities in Wisconsin’s Senate Election

Wisconsin Senate candidate Eric Hovde didn’t say it, but he certainly seems to believe it: His race was stolen from him. In a video posted to social media Tuesday afternoon, nearly a week after his apparent loss to Senator Tammy Baldwin, Hovde outlined his concerns.

“I was shocked by what unfolded on Election Night,” he said. “At 1 am, I was receiving calls of congratulations and, based on the models, it appeared I would win the Senate race. Then, at 4 am, the City of Milwaukee reported approximately 108,000 absentee ballots with Senator Baldwin receiving nearly 90 percent of those ballots.

“Statistically, this outcome seems improbable, as it didn’t match the patterns from same day voting in Milwaukee, where I received 22 percent of the votes. “

In a vacuum, this could be chalked up to Milwaukee’s Democrat voters still voting absentee at a much higher rate than Republicans, but Hovde noted that it also coincided with conspicuously high voter turnout in multiple wards.

“Since last Wednesday, numerous parties reached out to me about voting inconsistencies such as certain precincts in Milwaukee having turnout of 150 percent of registered voters and in some cases over 200 percent,” he explained, adding that “this was accomplished by same day voter registration that surged by almost 50 percent on a rainy day.”

Several poll workers and election observers have since come forward with similar stories of massive same day voter registration on Election Day in the most heavily Democratic precincts. While this is not per se evidence of illegality in those registrations, it does echo a criminal conspiracy in Milwaukee 20 years ago.

Ahead of the 2004 presidential election, Milwaukee Police detective Michael Sandvick led a five-member Special Investigative Unit that uncovered a massive vote fraud ring headed up by officials from Democratic nominee John Kerry’s campaign.

Sandvick discovered that they took advantage of Wisconsin’s same-day registration rules to fraudulently register thousands of people in what he called an “illegal organized attempt to influence the outcome of (the 2004) election in the state of Wisconsin” in which as many as “5,300 more votes were counted in Milwaukee than the number of voters recorded as having cast ballots.

As the Wall Street Journal reported, “absentee ballots were cast by people living elsewhere; ineligible felons not only voted but worked at the polls; transient college students cast improper votes; and homeless voters possibly voted more than once. The report found that in 2004 a total of 1,305 ‘same day’ voters gave information that was declared ‘un-enterable’ or invalid by election officials.”

A total of 16 members of the Kerry campaign were referred to the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s Office for criminal charges, but neither Democrat DA E. Michael McCann nor Democrat Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager would bring them. Four years later, Democrat Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett barred Sandvick’s unit from patrolling any polling places during the 2008 presidential election.

“We know what to look for,” Sandvick told the Wall Street Journal in 2008, “and that scares some people.”

Could a similar same-day voter registration scheme have been operating at the polls in 2024? It is certainly possible, and such a conspiracy would coincide with (and potentially take advantage of) a simmering controversy regarding Wisconsin’s driver’s licenses.

Three weeks before the election, while mail-in ballots were being returned, Wisconsin Congressman Bryan Steil demanded to know whether non-citizens would be able to use their driver’s licenses to unlawfully vote. Non-citizens are barred from voting in Wisconsin (and, on Election Day, voters overwhelmingly passed a constitutional amendment affirming this), but the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) did not specify whether state-issued driver’s licenses could be used in voting.

At issue were language printed on some licenses indicating that the bearer is either a “Limited Term” resident of Wisconsin or “Non-Domiciled,” meaning that they do not have a home in the state. Steil sent a memo to WEC asking whether these licenses could be used by non-citizens or otherwise ineligible voters to cast ballots.

“Because both the ‘Limited Term’ and ‘Non-Domiciled’ identifications are issued pursuant to Chapter 343 of the Statutes, Wisconsin Statute § 5.02(6m)(a)1. mandates that these identifications must be accepted as a proper form of voter identification,” WEC wrote in a memo to Steil. “However, possessing a valid identification does not necessarily mean the holder of the identification is eligible to vote.”

The onus, WEC explained, would be on local clerks and election workers to determine whether a would-be voter showing such a license would be allowed to vote. This would be difficult enough on its own, but WEC confirmed in a special meeting the Friday before Election Day that not all driver’s licenses issued to non-citizens carry the “Limited Term” designation. In fact, many non-citizens are issued driver’s licenses that are identical to those issued to citizens.

Theoretically, any number of them could have used these licenses to cast ballots on Election Day, registering that day by taking advantage of lax regulations and oversight that have already yielded a massive fraud scam in Milwaukee once this century. Again, this is not per se evidence that the 2024 Senate election was tainted or even tilted by fraud—as Hovde suggests—but it does raise enough suspicion as to be worthy of investigation.

The City of Milwaukee Election Commission’s behavior on Election Day was even more suspicious. Director Paulina Gutierrez first raised eyebrows by announcing that election workers were not going to begin counting absentee ballots as soon as the polls opened at 7:00 am, as they were legally entitled to, but rather later that morning.

Before they could begin though, Milwaukee County Republican Party chairman Hilario DeLeon—who had been working as a poll watcher at the city’s Central Count facility—noticed that the doors on all 13 of the city’s vote tabulators had somehow come open. It was unclear how this had happened, and Gutierrez was quick to assure the public that no votes were impacted, but some 31,000 votes had to be recounted.

Milwaukee’s traditional early-morning ballot dump would be delayed from 1:00 on Wednesday morning to as late as 4:00 am. When those votes were finally counted and entered, Hovde’s statewide lead vanished. President-elect Donald Trump, who had been running very slightly ahead of Hovde all night, was able to withstand the overwhelmingly Democratic vote dump and went on to win Wisconsin by about one percent of the vote. Hovde, however, fell behind Baldwin by 0.9 percent.

Once again, the open doors on Milwaukee’s vote tabulators were suspect but not per se evidence of illegality. However, the lack of curiosity among members of the media and the Wisconsin Elections Commission has been apparent but should not be misinterpreted. What happened in Milwaukee on Election Day was suspicious in the extreme and, given the city’s past behavior in counting and reporting election results, it warrants a detailed investigation.

Even if the Baldwin campaign and Democratic Party did not benefit from outright fraud in Milwaukee, they most certainly engaged in the dirtiest of dirty politics by recruiting and funding a fake conservative candidate to siphon votes from Hovde, ultimately costing him the race.

Unofficial results Tuesday afternoon showed Baldwin leading Hovde by exactly 27,364 votes out of more than 3.2 million cast. That margin was nearly a thousand votes less than the 28,711 earned by America First Party candidate Thomas Leager.

An unindicted co-conspirator in the 2020 plot to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, Leager can most charitably be described as a far-right moron. No one, least of all anyone who knows Leager and can attest to his severely limited intelligence, would ever peg him for a serious (or even clownish) Senate candidate, but he was able to obtain ballot access due to the largess of liberal activists much smarter than him who realized how valuable a spoiler he could be.

The Associated Press reported last month that Leager was approached by operatives claiming to be with the Patriots Run Project, which “promoted itself as a pro-Trump grassroots movement that attacked both parties and urged conservatives to run for office as independents. The AP found the group was supported by Democratic firms and donors who worked to install several pro-Trump independent candidates in key House races. Most of them were disabled, retired or both.”

Leager is, it is believed, neither disabled nor retired, but he was stupid enough to be seduced by the idea that he should run for Senate, never once questioning why this group was recruiting him—a nobody in every sense of the word—to run for such a high office.

“According to Leager,” the AP reported, “an operative with the Patriots Run Project told him he was just the kind of candidate it was looking for because he ‘had not caved under pressure from the feds’” during the Whitmer investigation.

In reality, the group was wholly funded by Democrat megadonors David and Liz Steinglass and saw Leager as just the sort of amiable dunce they needed to run as a fake conservative candidate. They convinced him to run and then “ponied up to pay for a Democratic firm to get Leager on the ballot.”

Baldwin herself also paid for ads boosting Libertarian candidate Phil Anderson, who ultimately won 42,291 votes that might have otherwise gone to Hovde. In one prominent example just a week before Election Day, Baldwin ran a digital ad ostensibly attacking both Anderson and Hovde that was actually designed to boost Anderson with conservative voters. he is trying to “slash federal spending, stop governments from regulating cryptocurrencies, and end income taxes and eliminate the IRS.” Needless to say, all of those proposals are very popular with conservative Republicans.

This strategy directly mirrors that employed by Democrats in the 2022 midterm primaries. They spent heavily to run ads and send mailers boosting Republican candidates they deemed to be easier to beat in general election races and successfully defended the Senate by elevating the weaker Republican candidates in several key races.

Dirty politics? Sure. Fundamentally dishonest? Absolutely. Illegal? Very possibly. In Florida over the past four years, five Republicans either pleaded guilt or were convicted in a plot to fund “ghost candidates” in State Senate elections in what prosecutors called a conspiracy that “stole an election.”

A similar theft took place in Wisconsin, where spending on two fringe candidates won just enough gullible conservative votes to push Baldwin over the finish line by the narrowest of margins. It remains to be seen whether Baldwin’s conspiracy violates state laws, but it—like Milwaukee’s suspicious same-day voter registrations—certainly warrant closer examination.

Hovde did not want to come out and say that he had been cheated out of a Senate seat, but the evidence certainly could point to it. That’s why a full and thorough investigation of said evidence is necessary, not just to ensure that the right candidate won a Senate race, but to prove that Wisconsin is still capable of running free and fair elections.