On November 16, 2020, Andrew Kloster, then a lawyer for the Trump Administration, filed an affidavit calling into question the integrity of Wisconsin’s presidential election results. It recounted a series of tense encounters he managed to get into while serving as a Republican election observer in Brown County, Wisconsin. This included spats with a mayoral staffer named Amaad Rivera-Wagner, who in his own account said Kloster verbally accosted him, screamed at election workers, and yelled at police.
Kloster’s affidavit claims he saw Rivera-Wagner hand a single ballot envelope to an election official “in a surreptitious manner,” among other similarly threadbare accusations, none of which prove that any fraud occurred, much less on a scale that would have overturned the results of the election. Trump lost Wisconsin by nearly 21,000 votes, an outcome affirmed by a recount of ballots in two counties. It was roughly the same margin Trump won by in 2016.
The Wisconsin probe’s whole purpose is to sow doubt as to the reliability of elections, and make it easier to steal the next one.
A few months later, Kloster declared in an online post that “the 2020 presidential election was stolen, fair and square. No use complaining.” He then proceeded to do a lot of complaining, leading up to this twisted call to action: “We need our own irate hooligans (incidentally, this is why the left and our national security apparatus hates the Proud Boys) and our own captured DA offices to let our boys off the hook.”
Such rantings probably merit FBI surveillance. Yet Kloster achieved something completely different—he was tapped to play a role in a massive review of Wisconsin’s election headed by former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman and financed to the tune of $676,000 in taxpayer dollars, and possibly more.
The probe is similar to the ones underway in Pennsylvania and Texas. And, so far, it has been marked by the same wholesale incompetence as the “forensic audit” undertaken in Arizona, which dragged on for five months, cost $6 million, and ended up concluding that Joe Biden actually beat Trump by slightly more votes than originally reported. (Trump, impervious to shame, proclaimed that he prevailed, telling his followers: “It is clear in Arizona that they must decertify the election. You heard the numbers. And those responsible for wrongdoing must be held accountable. It was a corrupt election.”)
In September, Kloster was identified as the author of an email signed by Gableman and sent to election clerks across the state, asking them to retain election data, as they are already required to do. The email from an unofficial account was flagged by some clerks as a security threat.
Gableman also issued subpoenas, which he later had to rescind, that were rife with what The Washington Post called “glaring errors,” including misspellings. His ability to order public officials into closed-door interrogations—an overreach and affront of Wisconsin’s transparency laws—is being challenged in court by the state’s Democratic attorney general, Josh Kaul.
A hard-right conservative backed by Republicans, Gableman was elected to the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2008 with the help of a campaign ad so racist and dishonest that the independent Wisconsin Judicial Commission brought an ethics charge against him. He escaped discipline only because his fellow conservatives on the court forced a deadlock vote.
Gableman, like Kloster, comes to the task of reviewing the integrity of the election with no integrity and no understanding of elections. In fact, Gableman has conceded as much, telling the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: “Most people, myself included, do not have a comprehensive understanding or even any understanding of how elections work.” (Emphasis added.)
Burned by the blowback to this stunning admission, Gableman took to conservative talk radio to compare the Journal Sentinel, one of the nation’s great daily newspapers, to Adolph Hitler’s head of propaganda: “What they’re doing over at the Journal would make Joseph Goebbels blush.” When the host balked, he agreed to compare it to Pravda, the former organ of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party.
A few days after the November 3 election, Gableman declared that it was stolen, based on zero evidence. He told a gathering of Trump supporters: “Our elected leaders—your elected leaders—have allowed unelected bureaucrats at the Wisconsin Elections Commission to steal our vote.” The commission is bipartisan, with three appointed Democrats and three Republicans.
Gableman also primed for the job of eroding public confidence in elections, in order to facilitate their future theft, by making a pilgrimage to Arizona to observe the overtly partisan Cyber Ninjas’ election “audit,” saying “I learned a lot there that will be helpful to my investigation.” He also traveled to South Dakota to hear the MyPillow guy, Mike Lindell, spout nonsense about the 2020 election. Lindell insisted he had “irrefutable” proof that the election was stolen by hackers in China—a claim his own hired cyber expert deemed bogus.
The Wisconsin probe was ordered up by Assembly Speaker Robin Vos shortly after Trump publicly lashed out at him for not doing enough to manufacture the illusion of election fraud. The disgraced and deranged former President accused Vos and two other Wisconsin Republican lawmakers of “working hard to cover up election corruption in Wisconsin.
“Don’t fall for their lies!” he admonished. “These REPUBLICAN ‘leaders’ need to step up and support the people who elected them by providing them a full forensic investigation. If they don’t, I have little doubt that they will be primaried and quickly run out of office.”
Wisconsin’s Republicans got the message loud and clear. They redoubled their efforts to suck up to Trump, just as Republican politicians are doing all over the country. Senator Chris Kapenga, one of the GOP legislative leaders threatened by Trump, responded by praising him for “doing great things as our President” and soliciting an invitation to a round of golf.
The Wisconsin GOP passed a package of bills that would make it harder to vote, but these were vetoed by Tony Evers, the state’s Democratic governor. Nineteen other states have enacted thirty-three laws that have this effect, which Republicans see as critical to their future electoral success.
Meanwhile, the results of a separate audit of Wisconsin’s election by a nonpartisan legislative agency made several dozen minor recommendations for further study or change but found no evidence of widespread fraud. More than three million Wisconsinites cast ballots in the 2020 elections; of these, four have been charged with attempting, unsuccessfully, to cheat.
Rachel Maddow, on her nightly MSNBC show, touted the new audit as a hopeful sign. State Republicans, she said, were now being made by Kaul’s lawsuit to jump through some legal hoops and “forced to admit, after a real audit, that actually everything was fine with the election results there.” She added: “I realize maybe this is the soft bigotry of low expectations, like maybe I am seeing silver linings in what are very, very dark clouds.”
Oh, Rachel, ’tis darker than the darkest night.
Wisconsin’s Supreme Court has long been controlled by conservatives, though Gableman’s departure from the bench in 2018 did allow a Democrat-backed contender to narrow the margin.
The court’s conservatives have upheld Republican efforts to promote the spread of COVID-19 and draw legislative maps designed to give their party an unfair advantage, so there is little reason for optimism that they will rein in the power granted to their former colleague.
As for being “forced to admit” the election was fair, Vos and other Republican leaders responded to the fact-based nonpartisan audit by ordering another investigation—this time into the audit itself. They said in a statement that the audit’s innocuous findings actually “paint a grim picture of the Wisconsin Elections Commission and their careless administration of election law in Wisconsin.”
Many have called for state Republicans to stop embarrassing themselves and spike the Gableman probe. But doing so would defeat its whole purpose, which is to sow doubt as to the reliability of all elections, and make it easier to steal the next one—though that still will not be easy to accomplish.
We already know where this is going: Gableman will produce a report that sharply and inaccurately portrays some aspects of the election—like the use of mail-in ballots, or ballot drop boxes, or outside funding to pay for hand sanitizer in polling places—as being rife with the potential for fraud. It will turn up no actual evidence of widespread or even significant fraud, because none exists. This will pose not even the slightest of speed bumps for Trump and his followers, as they barrel down the highway of preposterous claims that the state’s election results are somehow “corrupt,” as Gableman concluded long before his investigation began.
Prior to the November 2020 election, seeing that he was among the most widely despised Presidents in U.S. history, Trump lied, “The only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged.” Now this is true the other way around: The only way Trump and his party can win is through massive fraud. Republicans in Wisconsin, and throughout the country, are doing their best to make that happen.