A Wisconsin sheriff who has charged that state officials – on the Wisconsin Election Commission – not only broke the state’s election law but “shattered” it during last year’s presidential race, now has referred recommendations for criminal charges against five of the six commission members.
The referral has gone to Racine County District Attorney Patricia Hanson, and does not mean that charges will, in fact, be filed.
The Wisconsin Examiner reported that the commissioners apparently broke state law by preventing special voting deputies from entering nursing homes to help people vote.
Instead, officials or workers in the homes helped. And sometimes might have even voted for residents, since a review by Racine County Sheriff Christopher Schmaling confirmed that relatives told his investigators some of the residents did not have the cognitive ability to vote, but did.
Further, one woman had died a month before the election, but still voted.
Online, the sheriff said that he was calling on Attorney General Josh Kaul “to conduct a statewide investigation into the illegal directives issued by the Wisconsin Election Commission.”
“In the directives, the Wisconsin Election Commission ordered the voting clerks in every municipality in the state to ‘not use the Special Voting Deputy ‘process” as required by Wis. Stat. § 6.875,” he wrote. “Based upon the failure of Attorney General Josh Kaul to initiate a statewide investigation, I have forwarded charging recommendations to the Racine County District Attorney’s Office for their review. The recommended charges are for Commissioners Margaret Bostelmann, Julie Glancey, Ann Jacobs, Dean Knudson, and Mark Thomsen.”
He explained the recommended charges include misconduct in public office, election fraud and three different “party to the crime of election fraud” such as illegal ballot receipt.
Schmaling had held a news conference recently laying out allegations of fraud against the commissioners. He alleges when the commissioners voted in spring 2020 not to send special voting deputies into nursing home facilities because of the COVID-19 pandemic, they broke the law, which required that.
The report confirmed, “Schmaling alleged that once the residents of a Mount Pleasant nursing home used the absentee ballot process, they were illegally coerced by facility staff into voting. Schmaling said some of the residents were cognitively impaired. People with cognitive disabilities are still able to vote unless a judge declares them incompetent.”
Commissioners have denied any wrongdoing, and claimed they had to make the changes in the law or else the residents would have been disenfranchised because of restrictions on visiting nursing homes at the time.
The report noted, “Misconduct in public office and election fraud, are Class I felonies, each is punishable by up to 3.5 years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
WND also reported that the scheming uncovered in Wisconsin blows up the idea that the election was without flaw.
That was the conclusion from John Solomon, who writes at Just the News that other factors include “Election mismanagement in Atlanta. Unlawful election instructions in Wisconsin. And 50,000 questionable ballots in Arizona, plus several criminal cases for illegal ballot harvesting and inmate voting.”
He explained, “Eleven months after Donald Trump was ousted from office, the narrative that the 2020 election was clean and secure has frayed like a well-worn shoelace. The challenges of the COVID pandemic, the aggressive new tactics of voting activists and the desire of Democrats to make the collection and delivery of ballots by third parties legal in states where harvesting is expressly forbidden has muddied the establishment portrait and awakened the nation to the painful reality its election system — particularly in big urban areas — is far from perfection.”
WND had reported on states that are auditing their 2020 results and the campaign for ballot integrity in some.
Already retired Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, Michael Gableman, reviewing the situation, said he’d uncovered evidence of those changes in election procedures, which were not allowed to be made.
And the state Supreme Court has ruled that “election officials wrongly allowed tens of thousands of Wisconsin voters to skip voter ID requirements and file absentee ballots by declaring their concerns about COVID made them ‘indefinitely confined,'” Just the News reported.
Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., formerly headed the Senate Homeland Security Committee, which oversees elections, and said Schmaling’s revelations might “only be the tip of the iceberg of fraud in the 2020 election.”
Schmaling’s comments:
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