Wisconsin’s Dane County Election Officials Acknowledge Problem with Ineligible Voters

Thomas More Society Early Allegations Vindicated in County Clerk’s Voter Roll Review

From the onset of Thomas More Society’s Election Integrity Initiative in 2022, there has been glaring evidence of an ongoing problem with ineligible voters casting ballots. This issue, which first came to light in nursing homes shortly after the 2020 election, has finally been acted upon by election officials in Dane County, Wisconsin.

In spring 2022, attorneys from the Thomas More Society filed multiple complaints with the Wisconsin Election Commission on behalf of family members of people under court orders deeming them incompetent to vote. Each case involved a voter residing in a nursing home, who had been declared “incompetent” yet, according to the state voter database WisVote, had cast ballots in multiple elections despite their ineligibility.

Named complainants charged election officials in Dane, Appleton, Grand Chute, and Outagamie Counties, along with those responsible for voting oversight throughout Wisconsin, with voter abuse and election fraud.

It was reported in October 2022 that Dane County election officials had reviewed a random sample of 20 entries from the “no vote” list and found two examples in which either a ballot had been cast in the ineligible person’s name or that person was still listed on registered voter rolls.

That prompted Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell to conduct a review of about 1,000 names from the state’s list of people that a court had declared as incompetent to vote and found 95 examples of someone who voted after being added to the “no vote” list. McConnell announced that the state needs to fix how it keeps track of such people.

Erick Kaardal, Thomas More Society Special Counsel, has been at the forefront of the Election Integrity investigations from the project’s inception.

“What struck me was the sheer numbers,” shared Kaardal. “When the allegations of shenanigans occurring in Wisconsin nursing homes surfaced with the 2020 election, the potential for nursing home and assisted living resident voter manipulation, abuse, and fraud, was massive in scale. There are over 91,000 nursing home residents in the State of Wisconsin. From forty to fifty percent of these residents suffer from varying degrees of dementia.”

Kaardal added that the problem was magnified when no Special Voting Deputies were assigned in the 2020 Wisconsin election, thus removing an extra layer of security to monitor absentee voting and to guard against voter fraud.

“We are pleased that Dane County has acknowledged the problem,” noted Kaardal, “and we reiterate County Clerk Scott McDonell’s call for the Wisconsin legislature to fix a broken system – and ensure that the Wisconsin Election Commission does their job of enforcing the state’s election laws.”

“It’s imperative that the integrity of America’s elections, local, state, and federal, be preserved,” Kaardal emphasized, “the American way of life depends on it.”