The Biden-Harris Department of Justice has threatened to sue two small towns in Wisconsin over their refusal to use electronic voting machines to cast and tabulate votes, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported.
In July, Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke threatened to file a lawsuit against the State of Wisconsin, the state Elections Commission and Administrator Meagan Wolfe, and the towns of Thornapple and Lawrence, as well as the towns’ clerks and boards of supervisors, because the towns allegedly did not offer voting equipment at their polling places in the April presidential primary election.
Clarke warned the potential plaintiffs in a letter that by not offering voting equipment for people with disabilities, they were in violation of the Help America Vote Act of 2002.
Among the federal requirements is that each voting system must be “accessible for individuals with disabilities, including nonvisual accessibility for the blind and visually impaired, in a manner that provides the same opportunity for access and participation (including privacy and independence) as for other voters,” the letter states.
Voting systems used for federal elections therefore have to have “at least one direct recording electronic voting system or other voting system equipped for individuals with disabilities at each polling place,” the letter said.
The letter went on to state that federal investigators had determined that the towns had failed to make “at least one direct recording electronic voting system or other voting system equipped for individuals with disabilities available at each polling place, including during the April 2, 2024, federal primary election.”
Clark said to avoid litigation, town officials needed to negotiate a “consent decree” with the federal government.
“We hope to resolve this matter amicably and to avoid protracted litigation. Accordingly, we are prepared to delay filing the complaint briefly to permit us time to negotiate a consent decree to be filed with the complaint,” she wrote.
Despite this warning, Thornapple, population 8,297, allegedly conducted the August primary election using only hand-counted, paper ballots. The Thornapple township board reportedly voted to eliminate electronic voting machines last Spring. In Wisconsin, most voters use paper ballots that are tabulated by electronic counting machines.
Suzanne Pinnow, Thornapple’s Treasurer, has disputed that voters with disabilities were unable to use an accessible voting machine during the April election. “No one’s been turned away,” she told the Journal- Sentinel in May.
Pinnow also told Votebeat that nobody in the town had been unable to vote because of the decision not to have accessible voting machines.
“I wish I could talk. I wish I could,” Pinnow said. “I wish I could because I think more people need to hear and understand and know why. But at this time, I can’t … because if it for some reason would go to litigation, I don’t want anything out there that I’m spewing this or that or saying something that I didn’t say.”
The Wisconsin Elections Commission issued a guidance in June mandating that accessible voting equipment must be provided for all elections administered by a municipality, in addition to federal elections.
A Complaint filed this week with the commission alleged that Thornapple is breaking the law by refusing to make voting machines available to voters with disabilities during the April and August primaries.
“By ceasing to use electronic voting equipment and, instead, exclusively using paper ballots completed and tabulated by hand, Respondents are no longer using voting systems that are accessible for individuals with disabilities in a manner that provides the same opportunity for access and participation (including privacy and independence) as for other voters,” the complainant, Disability Rights Wisconsin (DRW) argued.
The left-wing disability rights group asked the Wisconsin Elections Commission to order Thornapple to make accessible voting machines available.
DRW Director of Legal and Advocacy Services Kit Kerschensteiner told Wisconsin Public Radio (WPR) that “the goal is to ensure all town residents are able to cast private ballots in the November presidential election.”
“This is not the situation of a machine that just isn’t functioning that day at the polling place,” Kerschensteiner said. “This is a place that has chosen specifically, knowing that they were disenfranchising individuals with disabilities, and choosing to go ahead and do that, which we find to be unacceptable.”
Thornapple Town Board Supervisor Tom Zelm told the Journal-Sentinel in May that the decision to pull voting machines was made in June 2023.
Town voter and Rusk County Democratic Party chair Erin Webster told the paper she believed the decision was tied to former President and current GOP nominee Donald Trump’s claims about the rigged 2020 presidential election.
Webster posted on YouTube a recording of her phone call with town Supervisor Jack Zupan, in which he said the board believes that “there was a stolen election and the computers have to go because they are full of error.”
“There are court cases right now that show that anybody can hack into and manipulate that machine within a matter of just a couple of minutes,” Zupan added.
“Oh, so you’re also a conspiracy believer!” Webster retorted.
But it’s true that there are court cases have been examining these claims. In the Colorado Vs. Tina Peters case, for instance, “nationally recognized computer cybersecurity experts” who examined forensic images from the hard drives of Dominion voting systems computers independently concluded:
Dominion voting systems (1) are not auditable, as required by federal and state law (2) they can connect to the internet during elections, which violates federal and state law; and (3) they are capable of manipulating ballots and vote tabulations, which violates federal and state law; (4) the software overwrites Windows Operating System log files that are recorded during elections, which are required by federal and state law to be preserved. All these deficiencies make Dominion voting systems illegal to use in Colorado elections.
In fact, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued a report in 2020 on the security and vulnerabilities of “Election Infrastructure” throughout the country ahead of the election that year. Election infrastructure includes voter registration databases and IT systems, voting machines and systems, and software used for casting votes.
According to CISA:
• 76% of EI entities for which CISA performed a Risk and Vulnerability Assessment (RVA) had spearphishing weaknesses, which provide an entry point for adversaries to launch
attacks;
• 48% of entities had a critical or high severity vulnerability on at least one internetaccessible host,4 providing potential attack vectors to adversaries;
• 39% of entities ran at least one risky service on an internet-accessible host, providing the opportunity for threat actors to attack otherwise legitimate services; and
• 34% of entities ran unsupported operating systems (OSs) on at least one internet accessible host, which exposes entities to compromise.
CISA said election entities could “significantly reduce their cybersecurity risk by performing additional investigation and analysis of the findings described in this report. CISA encourages entities to implement
standard cyber hygiene practices and applicable mitigations identified in this report to reduce their exposure.”
