Conservative Activists Target Assembly Speaker Vos With Recall
Racine County representative faces recall for not backing Trump's theories, impeaching Wolfe.
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos speaks during the 1st District GOP Fall Fest on Saturday, Sept. 24, 2022, at the Racine County Fairgrounds in Union Grove, Wis. Angela Major/WPR
Conservative activists have launched a recall effort against Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, citing his criticisms of former President Donald Trump and what they describe as an insufficiently right-wing record.
Matthew Snorek, a resident of Union Grove in Racine County, filed the petition to the Wisconsin Elections Commission on Wednesday. Vos, R-Rochester, has represented parts of Racine County in the state Assembly since 2005.
In the complaint, Snorek alleges Vos “is blocking fair elections in WI” and pointed to Vos not contributing to efforts by a small bloc of right-wing Assembly members to impeach Meagan Wolfe, the state’s top election administrator.
“Wisconsin must move ‘Forward’ without Robin Vos in power,” the complaint reads.
In a statement, Vos called the recall “a waste of time, resources and effort.”
“The effort today is no surprise since the people involved cannot seem to get over any election in which their preferred candidate doesn’t win,” Vos said, adding that he did not expect the recall to “gain any real traction.”
Vos ordered an Assembly investigation into Trump’s unfounded accusations of voter fraud in the 2020 election. That months-long probe, conducted by former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, turned up no evidence of widespread fraud. Vos later rejected one call by Gableman for Wisconsin to decertify its 2020 election results.
As a result, Vos was criticized by some on the right for not pushing pro-Trump conspiracy theories harder. Some of those critics mounted a primary challenge against him in 2022, coming close to defeating Vos in a GOP primary.
More recently, Vos said he does not support an effort among some Assembly Republicans to impeach Wolfe, the state’s top election official. Wolfe, too, has been a target of conspiracy theories because of President Joe Biden‘s narrow state victory over Trump.
That victory has been upheld by multiple investigations, and lawsuits challenging Wisconsin’s results, in both state and federal courts, were either thrown out or ruled in favor of a Biden victory.
Snorek’s petition will need to get about 7,000 signatures — calculated as a quarter of votes cast in Vos’ Assembly district in the 2022 gubernatorial race — in order to force a recall election. Organizers are aiming for an election date in June.
Listen to the WPR report here.
Recall effort launched against Vos was originally published by Wisconsin Public Radio.
AAmusing that conservatives are unhappy with Vos when I expected a recall effort to come from Democrats!
The recall initiative on Robin Vos is a sign that once the Republican Party started pandering to the extremes, they put the party on a slippery slope to even more bizarre, antidemocratic, and self-defeating crusades.
There are dozens of reasons why Vos should be recalled–one of the worst elected officials in the nation–but these ridiculous reasons are not the ones most deplorable. The world would be a better place if the Wisconsin never heard from Vos again.
Vos has learned what Mike Pence, Liz Cheney, and many other GOP devotees have come to realize: If you dance with the devil, you may lose your soul, or at least your political future.