Election workers discuss keeping voting clean during La Crosse forum

Making sure that Wisconsin elections are fair and free of fraud was the subject of a discussion in La Crosse on Wednesday.

A panel of election officials from the local and state levels talked about the processes designed to keep voting honest during a seminar hosted by the group Keep Our Republic.

Meagan Wolfe, administrator for the Wisconsin Election Commission, told the audience that election problems are usually caught very quickly.

“We’re able to see immediately if something is sort of off, if our baseline in terms of, you know, the activity in the system, who’s accessing it is off, we’d be able to see that and investigate that,” Wolfe told those attending the forum at the La Crosse County administrative building.

Wolfe said neither the voter registration process nor the voting system in Wisconsin was breached in the 2020 election, despite claims of fraud in the state. Charges of widespread fraud were disproved by an investigation last year.

Kathy Bernier, Keep Our Republic director, said charges by Donald Trump that Democrats cheated in the last election don’t hold up. 

Bernier said Trump should have expected Democrats to take the lead in Wisconsin late on election night, once counting of absentee ballots began.

There were accusations that Joe Biden took the lead from Trump in Wisconsin unfairly, based on fake ballots counted overnight.

“It’s fashionable to pretend something that is not actually true,” Bernier, a former state legislator and election clerk, said.

Speaking on Trump, Bernier said “his people had to know he had to be so much ahead going into Milwaukee or Dane County, whatever, in order to win the election in Wisconsin.”

Panelists at the forum cautioned that running vote totals on election night are not official, because they lag behind the counting process. Democrats have proposed having ballots counted early, but there has been no movement by Republicans, who control the state Legislature to change that part of the system.