Dispatch From Wisconsin: Ground Zero for the RNC’s Voter Intimidation Efforts

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Voting Wrongs

The sprawling county fairgrounds in Elkhorn, Wisconsin, are lined with rows of barns for showing cattle, sheep, pigs and horses. The space sat almost entirely empty last month when it hosted the GOP’s “Protect the Vote Tour” — the Republican National Committee’s (RNC) effort to recruit 100,000 volunteer poll watchers and lawyers across the country that could perhaps better be understood as a “Deter the Vote Tour.”

While the “Protect the Vote Tour” may attract some poll watchers with more genuine intentions, it is structurally part of the GOP’s overall strategy of stoking an unfounded panic about alleged voter fraud and intensifying barriers for any voters they deem suspect — particularly voters of color.

The GOP volunteer recruitment effort, which took up a single barn near the very back of the county fairgrounds complex in Elkhorn, was easy to miss, but the small crowd of Republican activists who slowly trickled in for the training seminar there on September 13 were impassioned.

“The last [election] was stolen, so I’m looking at this one to keep it safe,” said Mike Semler, an attendee who stated his view that non-U.S. citizens pose a threat to the presidential election in November. In reality, there are severe penalties for noncitizens who vote illegally and it is incredibly rare. “We’ve got a civil war ahead of us either way,” added Semler, who has not previously worked as a poll watcher. “If Trump wins, they’re not going to be happy. If they win, we’re not going to be happy.”

While it is standard for both parties to recruit poll watchers, former president Donald Trump and the Republicans Party’s obsession with voter fraud conspiracies — which are often laced with racist assumptions — undergirds the recruitment drive. In Wisconsin, a swing state where many hold tightly to Trump’s 2020 claims of a stolen election and believe the 2024 election could be distorted by fraud, the “Protect the Vote Tour” threatens to fuel election denialism and adds to a growing push by right-wing groups in the state to challenge election processes.

As the training in Elkhorn was about to begin, Rep. Bryan Steil’s speech, given in front of a stack of hay bales, reflected Semler’s debunked concerns. “Places like Washington, D.C. they not only allow noncitizens to vote in municipal elections, they’re using taxpayer dollars to encourage [it],” said Steil, who chairs the House Administration Committee, which oversees federal elections. “The Democratic playbook is to use D.C. as the petri dish to roll all this out across the country.”

While it is true that in 2024 Washington, D.C. decided to expand voting rights to noncitizens solely in municipal elections — something a handful of other localities allow — there is no evidence to support Steil’s implication that there is currently a Democratic push for the legalization of noncitizen voting in state or federal elections.

But the claim that they do, and the unfounded claim that U.S. elections are generally vulnerable to mass fraud, has fueled a wave of restrictive voting measures in the months ahead of the 2024 election.

The Right Spreads Conspiracy Theories About “Fake Electors”

In 2020, Republicans launched a campaign to invalidate Electoral College votes for President Joe Biden. The plot revolved around a handful of “fake electors” in battleground states — in which Biden had won the popular vote — who submitted false pledges in favor of Trump. These votes were ignored by Congress, but a spate of 62 Republican-backed lawsuits sought to force them to be counted. Ultimately, not one succeeded.

The fake electors plot was first cooked up by two attorneys — Kenneth Chesebro and Jim Troupis — to reverse Biden’s narrow victory in Wisconsin, where he beat Trump by roughly 20,000 votes. It was later exported as a model to six other states, leading to a total of 84 fake electors. Now, four years later, the legal consequences for these individuals — many of whom were high-ranking Republican operatives — have been uneven.

Some of the electors from Arizona, Michigan and Georgia are facing prosecution. Fourteen of the electors in four of the seven states, however, have been nominated to return to the same role as Republican Electoral College representatives. In Wisconsin, a first-of-its-kind civil lawsuit against Chesebro, Troupis and 10 fake electors recently ended in a settlement. That agreement outlawed the defendants from serving as electors in the future and made 1,400 documents detailing the plot publicly available.

Scott Thompson, an attorney from the Madison-based firm Law Forward who helped negotiate the settlement, believes the litigation served as a warning to anyone seeking to subvert future elections. “Everybody understands that if you’re going to do something like that, you’re going to pay for it,” he says. “This cost, both in terms of just time wasted, but also financial costs of dealing with lawyers … raised the stakes for the average person who might be tempted to engage in some sort of nefarious election practice.”

“We’ll literally spend years litigating this just to make sure that our democracy is not disrespected and that the will of the voters in Wisconsin is upheld,” Thompson adds.

Perhaps it is partly due to these costs that, in the years since the January 6 attacks on the U.S. Capitol, the GOP — in addition to laying the groundwork for potential post-election challenges — has looked for other ways to game the results this November.

The “Protect the Vote Tour” threatens to fuel election denialism and adds to a growing push by right-wing groups in the state to challenge election processes.

Through lawsuits designed to purge voter rolls, bills to increase voter ID requirements and appeals to peel back mail-in voting, Republicans have returned to familiar tactics to make it harder to vote. Swing states have become a key target of voter suppression legislation by allies of the former president.

In Wisconsin, the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute represented the town of Thornapple after it abandoned voting machines in favor of hand counting ballots. Thornapple has since been ordered by a federal judge to have a voting machine available in order to comply with the Help America Vote Act, which requires polling places to be accessible to people with disabilities.

Before the ruling, America First Policy Institute defended the town in a post on X, invoking a separate attempt by election deniers in Georgia to implement hand counting: “The 800 Thornapple, WI residents only wanted to do what the entire state of Georgia now does: count ballots by hand.”

Meanwhile, Wisconsin MAGA activist Ardis Cerny, who participated as an election observer during the post-2020 election recounts in the state, has filed a suit seeking to require the Department of Transportation to share data with the state elections commission to confirm that voters are U.S. citizens. Voting rights groups have opposed the push; other states with similar policies have inadvertently targeted naturalized U.S. citizens in their noncitizen voter purges.

The Protect the Vote effort, while not in itself an outright act of voter suppression, supports the narrative that the elections system is under siege by nefarious forces — and that stronger restrictions on who can vote are needed.

“It’s funny that they call it Protect the Vote when at every instance they find a way to make voting difficult, specifically for Black and Brown folks,” says Angela Lang, the founder and executive director of Black Leaders Organizing for Communities (BLOC), a voter engagement nonprofit in Milwaukee. More than a third of Wisconsin’s Black population lives in Milwaukee, and these communities have long been the target of voter suppression — a fact that state GOP officials have been candid about on multiple occasions.

“I think there’s a lot of times that they just try to sow enough confusion to get people to hopefully give up in the democratic process,” Lang explains.

Right-Wing Vote Deniers Mobilize in Wisconsin

The RNC claims that, in the months since Protect the Vote was launched, they exceeded their recruitment goal by over 75,000 volunteers. Wisconsin, a state with 1,850 municipalities, 72 counties and one of the most decentralized elections administration systems in the U.S., reportedly accounted for 5,000 of these signups.

This summer, election workers got a hint of the kind of role these activists could play in November.

In July 2024, during a special election for a State Senate seat in Glendale, a Democratic suburb of Milwaukee, two poll watchers had to be removed from a polling site after they challenged each absentee ballot that came in. As the observers were escorted out by police, they ominously told the city’s mayor, “You’ll see us in November.”

As one plank of a larger pattern, Protect the Vote adds another layer to the array of schemes that voter protection organizers like Lang worry could sow confusion and disrupt the electoral process.

Some of these ploys — such as a November ballot measure to ban noncitizen voting — are led by the state Republican Party; many, however, are orchestrated by independent activists, far right groups or local officials motivated by baseless claims of widespread voter fraud.

More recently, in Wausau, a small city northwest of Green Bay, Republican Mayor Doug Diny personally removed a ballot drop box from outside City Hall. Diny’s actions — which he memorialized with photographs of himself carting away the box while wearing a hard hat and suit — were likely illegal. Although the drop box has since been returned, the removal is being investigated by a Wisconsin district attorney.

The Wausau incident followed a State Supreme Court decision in July that allowed absentee drop boxes after a previous 2022 ruling had banned them. While the court’s turnaround legalized drop boxes, it did not require them, instead granting municipal clerks the authority to decide whether or not to use them.

In response, election denier groups, including the far right organization True the Vote, have promised to closely monitor the boxes — and have reportedly attempted to enlist Wisconsin sheriffs to help. In July, Wisconsin Senate candidate Eric Hovde amplified the call to monitor drop boxes, claiming “illegal ballots” could be “stuffed” in the drop boxes.

The possibility that drop-box observers could lead to conflict while voters cast their ballots has already had a chilling effect on the use of the drop boxes, according to Sam Liebert, the Wisconsin director for the voting rights organization All Voting is Local.

In Wausau, a small city northwest of Green Bay, Republican Mayor Doug Diny personally removed a ballot drop box from outside City Hall.

“Some of the concerns that we are hearing from [municipalities] is that they don’t want those armed militia people,” said Liebert. “So in some ways, that voter suppression tactic is already working. The fact that it’s intimidating our elections officials not to use a drop box, out of fear that they would have to sort of deal with that situation, or putting their voters in that situation, shows that it’s working.”

This disparate push among right-wing groups to monitor drop boxes comes as the RNC ramps up its “election integrity” efforts.

Trump’s Daughter-in-Law Uses RNC to Sow Mistrust in Election Integrity

The RNC’s newfound laser focus on “election integrity” stems from the staffing shakeup in March that ended with Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law, appointed as its co-chair. Along with fellow Chair Michael Whatley, Lara Trump was handpicked by Donald Trump to make the organization more directly subordinate to his campaign. And since voter fraud claims are a centerpiece of the campaign, attacking elections administration is a top priority for the RNC.

The formal content of the RNC’s trainings is hard to monitor because the trainings are closed to the press, but recordings have been leaked to multiple outlets without provoking any specific complaints from voting rights advocates. However, it is worrisome that the sessions — which happen multiple times a week in Wisconsin, both in person and online — are sometimes accompanied by conservative activists who have baselessly cast U.S. elections as fraudulent.

Republican officials insist the RNC training does not seek to sow mistrust, but instead, as Wisconsin GOP Chair Brian Schimming said during the Elkhorn event, to “make sure that [the election] is a transparent, fair process that follows the rules.”

The RNC frequently hosts Trump-aligned speakers to rally support for the former president ahead of poll observer trainings — who at times offer a very different message.

In September, one of these speakers was Jack Posobiec, a far right operative known for helping to spread the “Pizzagate” and “Stop the Steal” conspiracy theories. Posobiec, addressing a group of potential poll watchers from Michigan via Zoom, reportedly told them they were the “final line of defense against Marxism.” The poll observers, Posobiec said, should think of themselves “as the ground forces, as the army that’s going to be out there, the eyes and the ears of the Trump campaign.”