Assembly Republican attorney Michael Gableman is probing the backgrounds of public employees and contractors working on elections to determine their political leanings, including one who he believes is a Democrat because she lives with her boyfriend, loves snakes, plays video games and has a nose ring.
Gableman’s tally of how he perceives others’ political views was included in a tranche of documents he quietly posted online after getting sued under the state’s open records law.
Gableman, a former state Supreme Court justice, has been conducting a review of the 2020 election at taxpayer expense for Assembly Republicans since last summer. The latest disclosure about his work prompted one of his fellow Republicans to renew her call for him to shut down his review.
“I am so over Michael Gableman. He’s not right,” said state Sen. Kathy Bernier, a Lake Hallie Republican who leads the Senate Elections Committee.
“I can speculate as to why he didn’t run for Supreme Court again (in 2018) and the speculation would be he’s incompetent, in my opinion,” she said. “You would never see that in a real investigator, that they go on to speculate on things. They deal with facts. He is an absolute joke.”…
A memo from Gableman’s office dubbed a mapping expert who works for Milwaukee as “liberally deplorable” even though she has exhibited “no overt signs of rampant partisanship” on Facebook or other websites.
The unsigned memo goes on to contend that geographic information system analyst Hannah Bubacz is “probably” a Democrat because she plays video games, “has a weird nose ring,” sometimes colors her hair, “loves nature and snakes” and lives with a boyfriend but is not married to him.
Bubacz did not immediately respond to emails Thursday seeking comment.
Claire Woodall-Vogg, the director of the Milwaukee Election Commission, said she never saw Bubacz act in a partisan way. She said she had virtually no role in the 2020 election.
“She is literally just an IT person,” Woodall-Vogg said. “This is just insane. This is insane that this is what the taxpayers are paying for.”