As the long tail of the 2020 presidential election continues to reverberate through Wisconsin politics, a bipartisan pair of former elected officials sought to deliver a message of trust Tuesday in how the state counts votes and runs elections.
Meanwhile, the official Republican nominee for governor, U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, has been ramping up his campaign refusing to admit President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, including in Wisconsin.
Former Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen and former Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett appeared at Viterbo University in La Crosse Tuesday as representatives of the Democracy Defense Project, a bipartisan multi-state initiative to build trust in the country’s election systems.
“The 2020 election has been litigated and relitigated and relitigated over and over again, and nothing has changed,” Barrett said.
A day earlier, fresh off winning the GOP endorsement at the party’s weekend convention, Tiffany was asked at a campaign stop in Elm Grove Monday if Biden won the 2020 election. He replied that “the problem with the 2020 election was the improprieties that happened.”
It was one of multiple appearances in which Tiffany declined to directly engage the outcome of the 2020 race.
Trump’s endorsement of Tiffany earlier this year helped clear out the Republican primary field for the three-term congressman.
Tiffany was also one of the Wisconsin congressional delegation’s most ardent election deniers following Trump’s 2020 loss — which was affirmed by several reviews, recounts, investigations, audits and lawsuits in the years since.
On Jan. 6, 2021, Tiffany voted against certifying election results from Arizona and Pennsylvania and told reporters at the time that he would have voted to not accept Wisconsin’s results as well. He also supported a lawsuit from the state of Texas that sought to overturn the election results of Wisconsin and three other states.
The effort from right-wing congressional Republicans to reject the electoral votes for Biden from swing states was one of the mechanisms that led directly to the attack on the U.S. Capitol that day.
In the days following the Jan. 6 attack, Tiffany appeared at a closed door rally with other right-wing figures who called for “war.”
Tiffany’s comments come as the Trump administration has increased its effort to use the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI to relitigate the 2020 election. Swing states across the country have seen increased scrutiny surrounding previously debunked 2020 allegations and in recent weeks the FBI has begun digging into Wisconsin’s election administration — including questioning Milwaukee election workers.
On Monday, Tiffany supported the FBI’s work.
“Whatever they’re searching for, the investigation should be allowed to continue and let’s find out what happened there,” Tiffany told reporters. “If there’s improprieties that happened then there should be charges filed. If not, then you let the investigation cease.”
In La Crosse on Tuesday, Van Hollen and Barrett both lamented the FBI sticking its nose into an issue that’s already been closed. Barrett called the investigation a “fishing expedition” while Van Hollen criticized the waste of FBI time.
“There are a lot of better uses for our FBI resources right now, so I don’t think that that is a great use of our resources,” Van Hollen said.
The former attorney general also said the agency’s investigation didn’t concern him.
“I don’t think the FBI is going to turn out and fabricate something, and if they, for some reason, uncovered something that we hadn’t known in the past, by all means, we want to make sure to enforce our laws as well, to make sure that people have confidence in our election system,” Van Hollen said. “So, is it something that I think is necessary? No. Do I think we should be concerned? Not necessarily.”
The Democracy Defense Project continues previous work done by state and local election officials across Wisconsin who have sought to respond to election conspiracy theories with basic facts about the state’s election system.
During their visit to La Crosse, Barrett and Van Hollen highlighted Wisconsin’s decentralized election system in which local clerks across the state do the brunt of the work to administer the state’s elections and noted that those local officials are broadly trusted by their communities.
“The general public believes very strongly in the folks in this room and other people who are running their local elections,” Van Hollen said, citing polling data from the project. “They believe you’re doing a good job, they recognize that you’re doing a nonpartisan job, a very important job.”
Polling shows that a majority of voters “have great respect for the people who are working the polls at a local level — yet they don’t necessarily have a belief that we have election integrity, which seems to me to be a bit of an oxymoron,” Van Hollen added.
Lack of information is a primary culprit, he said.
Many people are “just not informed as to the way our elections are run, and when we have so much misinformation out there,” Van Hollen said.
While calling it a problem involving Democrats as well as Republicans, he acknowledged Republicans have been a bigger contributor to the problem.
“It comes from both political parties of late, certainly a lot more from my party,” Van Hollen said, “which has probably given rise to everybody’s desire to finally step forward and try to inform the public a little more.”
