Two things are true at the same time.
I say it all the time. Two facts can be true, even if they appear to disagree with each other. But two things can also be true because people look at the same facts and come away with two different conclusions.
That is the polite way of saying some reporters write the story as a positive, while others write it as a negative.
A lot of the people who wrote about the Wisconsin Election Commission’s analysis of the November election used the headline ‘80% of indefinitely confined voters showed photo ID’.
That is true. Numbers show that just under 80% of the 266,000 people who claimed to be confined to their homes had shown voter ID at least once since 2016.
But the story is not that most people showed a clerk a driver's license at some point since 2016, though we can unpack that in a minute. The story is that 20% of voters who cast an indefinitely confined ballot in November didn’t have any ID at all.
I went to public school, but 20% of 266,000 people is almost 50,000 voters. Joe Biden won Wisconsin by 20,000 votes.
State Rep Janel Brandtjen told me yesterday that smells fishy.
Milwaukee and Dane clerks encouraging people not to use ID’s, led to legal action to stop the use of indefinitely confined status. This current information raises more concerns.
The indefinitely confined status was for elderly people without a birth certificate and currently do not drive. All functions of life require an ID from using a hospital, to getting a free bag of groceries at the food pantry. Indefinitely confined status, as it stands undermines our election integrity.
We were told that voter ID would reduce voter turnout, but the opposite happened in this state. Knowing who is voting is necessary to free and fair elections.
Again, no is saying this is absolute, rock-solid proof of voter fraud. But this certainly is an opportunity for voter fraud.
State Rep. Joe Sanfelippo said the same thing.
This along with many other irregularities raise grave concerns with me over the integrity of our election process.
First, even if 80% have shown an ID in the past, the photo ID law is intended to require proof that the person casting a ballot is indeed who they claim to be. I might have shown my ID to vote in a prior election but how does that prevent another individual from submitting an absentee ballot using my name in this election?
On top of that, the 20% who failed to show ID make up nearly double the number of votes separating Biden and Trump.
The big newsrooms are correct, in the sense that two things are true, there’s no proof of widespread voter fraud. We do not have video of cronies dumping ballots into the Milwaukee River. There’s no testimony from a ballot harvester in Madison. No one has stepped forward with proof that someone voted in their name, or their mother’s name. In that sense, there is no proof of widespread voter fraud.
But I dare anyone to look at 50,000 ID-less voters in Wisconsin who just happened to vote from home in this election and tell me that is on the up-and-up. There may not be any proof of widespread fraud, but there is plenty of evidence of widespread opportunity for fraud. And the instances from some very partisan election managers that there is ‘nothing to see here’ does nothing to restore voters’ faith in the system.
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