A senior vice president of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Chamber of Commerce, Steve Baas, had a thought. “Do we need to start messaging ‘widespread reports of election fraud’ so we are positively set up for the recount regardless of the final number?” he wrote in an email on April 6 to conservative strategists. “I obviously think we should.”
Scott Jensen, a Republican political tactician and former speaker of the State Assembly, responded within minutes. “Yes. Anything fishy should be highlighted,” he wrote. “Stories should be solicited by talk radio hosts.”
That email exchange, part of documents published by The Guardian on Wednesday with a report on Governor Walker’s political operations, was followed by a spate of public rumors of vote-rigging. A month later, legislators passed a state law requiring Wisconsin voters to display one of five types of approved photo IDs before casting ballots.
The Wisconsin statute was part of a wave of voter ID laws enacted in the last six years, mostly by Republican-controlled legislatures whose leaders claimed that cheating at the ballot box is a routine occurrence.
Yet academic studies and election-law experts broadly agree that voter fraud is not a widespread problem in American elections. Rather, they say, it is a widespread political tactic used either to create doubt about an election’s validity or to keep one’s opponents — in most cases, Democratic voters — from casting ballots.
In unguarded moments, some Republican supporters of the laws have been inclined to agree.