Examining Michels ‘Blueprint For Elections’

The Tim Michels campaign webpage includes a section entitled “Tim Michels’ blueprint to restore election integrity.” Michels starts by claiming: “Our plan is simple, we need to make it easier to vote, and harder to cheat.” He then offers a list of items that would make it harder to vote and easier for those in power to cheat. It is essentially a right-wing wish list.

Years ago I moved to Wisconsin from Pennsylvania and was struck by how voter friendly Wisconsin was. It was easy to register. I concluded that Wisconsin trusts its voters. This was a striking change from Philadelphia, where I had to meet with the local election board to appeal their rejection of my voter registration. It has been hard to watch Wisconsin moving more and more in an anti-democratic direction.

Ever since former president Donald Trump’s unsuccessful reelection campaign, there has been a drumbeat of claims on the right asserting that election result cannot be trusted. Michel’s web site fits well within that milieu.

The success of the campaign among those who get their news from the right-wing bubble is reflected in the response to a question on the Marquette Law School Poll. Only 13% of Republicans said they were very confident in the 2020 election, compared to over 90% of Democrats.

Michels’ web page has 13 bullet points listing actions he promises to take if elected. Among these is a “ban on unmanned ballot drop boxes.” This is an example of something that would both make voting less convenient and less secure. Compared to a mailbox, with a drop box the voter is assured that any ballot submitted by 8pm on election day will be counted. Also, the drop box supply chain is inherently less complex than that using a mailbox. The more complex the supply chain, the more that can go wrong.

In Wisconsin, drop box usage exploded with the spring 2020 election in response to the appearance of COVID-19

It is worth noting that conservatives have not always been hostile to drop boxes. In the spring 2020 election at the height of the pandemic, Justice Neil Gorsuch joined the US. Supreme Court majority reversing a lower court decision that would have extended the deadline for submitting absentee ballots in Wisconsin (in Democratic National Committee v. Wisconsin State Legislature). The availability of drop boxes, Gorsuch wrote, made unnecessary such a time extension.

Never mind that voters may return their ballots not only by mail but also by bringing them to a county clerk’s office, or various “no touch” drop boxes staged locally, or certain polling places on election day.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh was also a fan of drop boxes. Asserting that “returning an absentee ballot in Wisconsin is also easy,” he returned to the topic several times.

Until election day, voters may, for example, hand-deliver their absentee ballots to the municipal clerk’s office or other designated site, or they may place their absentee ballots in a secure absentee ballot drop box.

Some absentee ballot drop boxes are located outdoors, either for drive-through or walk-up access, and some are indoors at a location like a municipal clerk’s office.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission has made federal grant money available to local municipalities to purchase additional absentee ballot drop boxes to accommodate expanded absentee voting.

The use of drop boxes exploded in Wisconsin with the April 2020 presidential primaries. That election was one of the first in the midst of the COVID–19 pandemic, which turned in-person voting into a health risk, especially for older and less healthy Americans (with its often-long lines, touch screens, and enclosed booths).

Even before the November 2020 general election, then-President Trump started attacking the use of absentee ballots, raising concerns that he was preparing to challenge the election results if he lost the election. Following his loss, he tried a number of arguments for reversing the results. One of his arguments was that the use of drop boxes was illegal and that votes using them should be thrown out, at least in Milwaukee and Madison. By the narrow vote of 4 to 3, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled against this attempt to disenfranchise a substantial chunk of Wisconsin voters.

Trump’s fingerprints are not limited to lock boxes. On the contrary, they are all over the Michels agenda. One common element is the hostility to the Wisconsin Elections Commission. He promises “repeal of all previous WEC election guidance and freezing the issuance of new guidance.” He would “prohibit re-hiring of any WEC staff that participated in the issuance of any formal guidance that failed to comply with existing law … and create a provision allowing the governor to remove and replace any election official held in contempt of court for failing to immediately cure a polling place violation, including any wrongful denial of observer rights.”

In addition, he promises to “require every county to designate an available election duty judge to be available for hearings on a maximum notice of thirty minutes to hear and resolve emergency Election Day complaints related to polling place violations, including any wrongful denial of observer rights.”

Finally, he would “pass first consideration of the Voter Uniformity Amendment to the Wisconsin Constitution, empowering voters to enforce their civil and constitutional rights and fight back if ever again subjected to such unfairness.” A link supposedly connecting the Voter Uniformity Amendment does not work, so it is unclear what it includes. From the name, it seems likely to end or substantially limit Wisconsin’s tradition of local control of elections.

Why did Trump win the presidency in 2016, only to lose it four years later? The answer is not that it resulted from some plot to steal the election from him. The chart below offers part of the answer. Comparing the two elections, far more people voted in 2020 than in 2016.

In fact, both candidates—Trump in both years and Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020—saw substantial increases. The problem for Trump is that his increase (shown with red bars) was substantially smaller than Biden’s (shown with blue bars). For example, the first pair of bars show that the US vote for Trump grew almost 18% while Biden’s vote grew more 23%.

The same pattern also held for the vast majority of the states. As the next pair of bars this graphic show, Wisconsin (and all 4 or 5 of the other competitive states) also saw greater growth for Biden than for Trump. In 2016 Clinton got almost 3 million more votes than Trump, but still lost the election in the Electoral College. In 2020 Biden got 7 million more votes than Trump. Most of those additional votes made no difference to the outcome of the election. They were cast in safely red states or safely blue states.

Thus, if there were an effort to throw the election to Biden, and it actually worked, one would expect it to show up, either as abnormal votes for Biden or depressed voting for Trump, or perhaps both. There is no indication from the data that either took place.

That takes us to the last two columns in the graph. As mentioned earlier, the April 2020 spring election came at an especially challenging time with the arrival of Covid. There was a crying need for new equipment to keep safe both voters and staff. While one could argue that the Wisconsin Legislature should have stepped in to fund the response, more state aid did not materialize.  Help came from the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), which accepted a joint proposal from Wisconsin’s five largest cities—Milwaukee, Madison, Racine, Kenosha, and Green Bay.

This grant was greeted with fury by members of the right-wing ecosystem, who charged that it was a thinly-disguised attempt to help the Democrats. At least two lawsuits were brought by groups hoping to switch Wisconsin to Trump, which were quickly rejected by the courts.

More recently, Michael Gableman’s second report was largely devoted to attacking the grant, calling it “Zuckerbucks” because it was largely funded by a gift from Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, and accusing the CTCL of practicing bribery. The Tim Michels Blueprint promises that he will make such grants illegal. Notably, none of these attacks offer evidence that partisan considerations entered into awarding the grant. They simply assert that as a fact.

Do the election results suggest that the grant advantaged Democrats? As the third pair of columns shows, both Trump and Biden had the same percentage increase in the five Wisconsin cities. If the same pattern held in the remainder of the state, Biden would have lost. He won because new voters in the rest of Wisconsin chose him over Trump.

Overall I found that the image of Michels resulting from his Blueprint conflicts with his image as a successful businessman. Success in business depends on pragmatism, of being willing to adapt when the facts and  circumstances change. The Blueprint reeks of dogma. Consider another of his promises: “Prohibit the closing of regular polling places less than 60 days before an election.” This promise seems to refer to Milwaukee in the spring of 2020. Polling places had to be closed because many of the staffers refused to serve at the height of the pandemic. Does Michels know how to make poll workers magically appear?

It is hard to believe that the author of the “Tim Michels blueprint to restore election integrity” was successful in business.