The Sconi

Some of the eight election reform bills bottled up in a Wisconsin Senate committee could see action as early as Friday after Sen. Stephen Nass (R-Whitewater) Wednesday blasted the chair of the committee for again delaying the release of the bills.

“At this moment we have an agreement on three and possibly four of the bills,” Mike Mikalsen, spokesman for Nass, told The Sconi.

On Wednesday, Sen. Kathy Bernier (R-Lake Hallie), chair of the Committee on Elections, Election Process Reform and Ethics, announced that two of reform bills scheduled for consideration would be put off for “fine tuning.”

“The authors of these bills have been working to get these bills out of committee for weeks, but have been met with resistance to action by the committee chair,” Nass said in the statement.

Nass also appealed to Republican leaders to take the bills up on the floor next week, the only session week scheduled in May,

“I am calling on the Republican leadership of the Senate leadership to act boldly and immediately, to schedule a floor day next week solely for the purpose of taking up all the election reform bills," he said. "No more delays and no more excuses.” 

Mikalsen said that it was important to get the bills moving before June when floor discussion will be set aside for the approval of a biennial state budget.

One of the bills scheduled for action earlier this week, SB 205, will make it a felony for retirement home or long-term care facility workers to influence whether someone applies for an absentee ballot and for whom they vote.

Mikalsen said that it was now against Wisconsin law for employees to influence the votes of nursing residents, but the harshest penalty violators face is a misdemeanor.

“We knew a lot of this was going on during COVID-19, because observers were not allow into the homes to supervise the process,” Milkalsen said.

Conservative talk show host Dan O’Donnell wrote in January that the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) would violate the law in the February primary by mailing unrequested ballots to nursing homes and allowing nursing home staff members to assist in filling out and returning the ballots.  

In an article published by the MacIver Institute, O’Donnell wrote that the practice “is in direct violation of Wisconsin Statute § 6.875, which explicitly provides that 'the municipal clerk or board of election commissioners of the municipality in which the home or facility is located shall dispatch special voting deputies to visit the home or facility for the purpose of supervising absentee voting procedure by occupants of the home or facility.'”

He also wrote, “A disability services coordinator said every single one of her more than 20 clients told her that a staff member either pressured them to vote for Democrat Joe Biden or had a Biden ballot already filled out in their name.”

In a response to Nass’ statement, Bernier shot back that election law is complicated and getting it right takes time.

“Any perceived delays are due to crafting good policy,” she said in a statement. “If that were something career politician Steve Nass ever attempted to do, he’d understand that.”

Mikalsen said that since January, 13 state legislatures have sent 34 election reform bills to their governors

“Apparently they know how to deal with complex reform laws,” he said.

Additional reform bills include requiring all non-military voters to apply for an absentee ballot for each election in which they seek to vote absentee, making it a felony for county or municipal clerks to send out absentee ballot applications unless a voter requested one, and requiring voters to show a photo ID in order to receive an absentee ballot for every election.

Wisconsin has been one of states at the center of unproven allegations of abuse of voter laws leading up to the November 2020 elections.

Last month the conservative watchdog group the Amistad Project filed a lawsuit against the WEC on behalf of five Green Bay residents who allege that city officials allowed private activist groups to control significant aspects of the 2020 elections, including ballot "curing" and vote counting.

According to the complaint, which cites emails obtained through public records requests by Amistad, a longtime Democratic operative Michael Spitzer-Rubenstein ran the central counting facility in Green Bay and worked with a Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), a group headed by progressive operatives, to bring in Democrat political consultants and lawyers to set election policy in the presidential election.

Working with $350 million of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s money, CTCL also was involved in the administration of elections in other battleground states.