The Sconi

American Majority, a national voter education group, is urging Green Bay voters to contact Mayor Eric Genrich to “tell him to stop colluding with outsiders to meddle in our elections.”

The group’s plea refers to the mayor’s role in establishing an ad hoc elections committee comprised of former Democratic operatives to oversee the Nov. 30 General Elections, and their acceptance of funds from a nonprofit group, the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), through which Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg donated nearly $400 million dollars. CTCL distributed funds to local election officials in battleground states to promote safe elections during the pandemic.

Green Bay, which received more than $1 million, is one of five Wisconsin cities with strong Democratic registration majorities granted funds by CTCL.

“(The) disturbing pattern in Green Bay was that the election there was not run by a city clerk as state law requires but by coastal elites who descended on Green Bay to legally stuff the ballot box with Democrat absentee ballots,” Matt Batzel, the national executive director of American Majority Action, told the Green Bay Reporter for an earlier story.

In April, government watchdog group The Amistad Project filed a complaint with the Wisconsin Elections Commission 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.

"Hundreds of millions of dollars purchased local election offices in 2020 to benefit one political candidate, paying salaries of election officials and literally dictating the manner in which the election should be managed," Phill Kline, director of Amistad, said in a statement released with the filing of the complaint. "Evidence in Green Bay proves this shadow government ran the election and now it is time those involved come clean."

The group alleges that email messages show that Green Bay Clerk Kris Teske, whose office was authorized to administer the elections in the city, was pushed out by Genrich and effectively replaced by Michael Spitzer-Rubenstein, an official with the nonpartisan, nonprofit National Vote at Home Institute (NVHI). Spitzer-Rubenstein was subsequently handed the keys to the ballot counting room, Amistad alleged in its statement.

In addition, Susan Smith, who worked under Kamala Harris when she served as California’s attorney general, was appointed to the election committee.

Another appointee was Amaad Rivera-Wagner, who moved to Green Bay after a failed bid for a Massachusetts state Senate seat. Genrich recently appointed Rivera-Wagner his chief of staff. The mayor’s former chief of state, Celestine Jeffreys, became city clerk after Teske left.

Moreover, WBAY reported in November that former Brown County Clerk Sandy Juno said in an email that she believed the vote tallies in Green Bay were "tainted" due to the presence, influence, and work of outside private actors.

Several other states received voting advocacy funding from private donors, and some legislatures have since take action to ban election officials from accepting private money in future elections, including Arizona, Florida, Georgia and Texas.

To date, no evidence has been presented to support claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 general election in Wisconsin or throughout the United States.