Wisconsin: “Ballot clerks asked for help. Lawmakers didn’t act. Disinformation followed.”

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

The wild claims came in thick and fast.

The morning after Election Day, President Donald Trump took to Twitter and claimed that people were “finding Biden votes all over the place — in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.”

At a press conference in Philadelphia that afternoon, Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani repeated the deceptive claim. “In Wisconsin, mysteriously at 4 in the morning, 120,000 ballots appeared,” Giuliani said. “Here come these ballots. Well, we have no idea if they really are ballots.” 

Across social media, supporters picked up the narrative. “Between 3:30-4:30AM, they ‘found’ 140,000 mail in ballots for Biden in Wisconsin,” tweeted Nick Adams, a staunch pro-Trump political commentator. He added, falsely: “All for Biden. None for Trump.” 

His misleading tweet was shared tens of thousands of times. 

The false speculation that Biden’s overnight surge in Wisconsin was the result of mass voter fraud caused drama and headaches that could have been headed off years ago, local election clerks say, if Wisconsin lawmakers had listened to them. 

For years, Wisconsin’s clerks have asked the Legislature for flexibility in counting absentee ballots. One bill last year proposed allowing clerks to start pre-processing absentee ballots the day before Election Day. Another proposed to at least allow in-person absentee voters to feed their ballots into tabulators.

Clerks said either measure would save them from the extraordinary stress of processing increasingly large numbers of absentee ballots on Election Day. Such flexibility became even more urgent as COVID-19’s spread made it clear that a record-breaking 1.8 million Wisconsinites could cast absentee ballots this election

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