Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R) neatly, if unintentionally, summarized nearly every aspect of Donald Trump’s post-2020 election effort to somehow return to power.
Vos’s summary makes clear that he has now joined former vice president Mike Pence and a battery of other officials across the country: Trump wanted them to do something they had no power to do — and so Trump disparaged them publicly.
The situation in Wisconsin, however, is a bit more complicated than Trump’s other ongoing efforts to somehow reverse the results of an election that’s seen President Biden serve as president for 18 months. It derives from a recent decision from the state’s elected Supreme Court that Trump allies are now presenting as having invalidated the presidential election results in that state.
It does not and it could not, and, as Vos notes, this should be obvious to even the most Trump-sympathetic observers.
In early 2020, with covid-19 beginning to kill thousands of people nationally, the Wisconsin Elections Commission issued a rule allowing election officials to use ballot drop boxes to collect ballots. The intent, as with changes in other states, was to make it easier to vote without having to crowd into a small polling place and potentially risk coronavirus infection.
The national effort to increase absentee or early voting quickly became a centerpiece of Trump’s claims about potential voter fraud. Trailing in the polls, he resurrected his 2016-era claims that only fraud would cause him to lose the election, but with a new twist centered on early votes. His rhetoric helped fuel a partisan split in how people voted in the November 2020 general election — a split that ended up helping his efforts to cast absentee votes, votes often counted more slowly, as suspect.
In recent months, the use of drop boxes to collect ballots has come under specific scrutiny, largely because of a roundly debunked film from Dinesh D’Souza alleging a rampant yet somehow undetected scheme involving thousands of people to collect and submit ballots through drop boxes. Reporting from the Associated Press makes clear that there is no evidence of any significant fraud committed through the use of drop boxes. But D’Souza’s film, tailored neatly to argue that the election was stolen from Trump, has spawned a cottage industry focused on drop boxes.
In Wisconsin, D’Souza’s film claims, 14,000 “illegal votes” were cast in drop boxes. Except that, as legislators pointed out during a March hearing in the state, even if D’Souza’s conspiracy theory were true (which is not supported by any evidence) those ballots would have been legally cast, since collecting and submitting ballots wasn’t banned at the time. That hearing focused on testimony from True the Vote, the group that provided D’Souza the data for his film, and the group’s head, Catherine Engelbrecht. They stated that they weren’t alleging the ballots were illegal, just that “the process was abused.”
Enter the state Supreme Court. A pair of Wisconsin voters sued the Wisconsin Election Commission, alleging that the commission had no right to allow the use of drop boxes and that its doing so harmed them. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority agreed.
“[T]housands of votes have been cast via this unlawful method, thereby directly harming the Wisconsin voters,” its opinion read. “The illegality of these drop boxes weakens the people’s faith that the election produced an outcome reflective of their will.”
This is a remarkable assertion, certainly, suggesting that because drop boxes were allowed and normal Wisconsin voters used them to vote, confidence in the election results were damaged. That decline in confidence, of course, stems from the robust after-the-fact effort to cast drop-box voting as suspicious or prone to fraud, which the evidence simply doesn’t support.
The court’s decision landed in the midst of an already active effort in Wisconsin to somehow unwind the results of the 2020 election — results that, again, have not been shown to have been tainted in any significant way. (Even D’Souza’s entirely invented 14,000-vote number is less than Biden’s margin of victory in the state.) That’s in part because of a Republican-backed “investigation” into the election (helmed by a conservative former member of the state Supreme Court!) that tried to undercut confidence in the results. Its report, released earlier this year, mostly alleged that the results were affected by efforts to increase turnout, a weird reason to try to reject how those voters voted. While the report didn’t call for a “decertification” of the state’s results, the former judge leading the effort, Michael Gableman, did. (Gableman was found to be in contempt in June for not turning over required documents related to his probe.)
So once the Supreme Court decision dropped, there was a quick push to declare a much broader victory over Trump’s opponents. That included Trump trying to persuade Assembly Speaker Vos to decertify the election, much as he had tried to persuade Pence to block submitted slates of electors on Jan. 6, 2021. And when Vos declined to do so — again, because he had no power to do so — Trump disparaged him on social media.
“Looks like Speaker Robin Vos, a long time professional RINO” — that is, Republican in name only — “always looking to guard his flank, will be doing nothing about the amazing Wisconsin Supreme Court decision stating loud and clear that the impossible to control Ballot ‘Unlock’ Boxes in the State are ILLEGAL,” he wrote on Truth Social. He added that Democrats “would like to sincerely thank Robin, and all of his fellow RINOs, for letting them get away with ‘murder.’ ”
It’s worth considering the logic here. If the Supreme Court were tomorrow to declare that voting in polling places was for some reason unconstitutional, would Trump (or anyone!) argue that votes cast by that method in 2020 should not count? Would the natural response be to recalculate election results to exclude those votes? Or would there be a recognition that most or all of those voters would simply have cast ballots some other way? That’s setting aside the assertion that it’s odd to decry illegal behavior when illegality was asserted only after the fact. If buying alcohol was made illegal tomorrow, the 21st Amendment repealed, would that mean that everyone who’s had a drink since 1933 engaged in criminal activity?
The thing about Vos is that he’s sympathetic to Trump’s position. He’s the one who hired Gableman in the first place! But even if he wanted to do what Trump asks, he can’t.
Even if Wisconsin for some reason did decide to change the 2020 results, so what? Biden would still not only have enough electoral votes to have won, he’s still president. There’s no mechanism besides impeachment or the 25th Amendment for removing him from office. Neither is going to happen.
After Vos revealed Trump’s recent call in which the former president continued to insist on this surreal scenario, Trump again took to his bespoke social media platform to make a political threat.
“So what’s Speaker Robin Vos doing on the Great Wisconsin Supreme Court Ruling declaring hundreds of thousands of Drop Box votes to be illegal? This is not a time for him to hide, but a time to act!” he wrote. “I don’t know his opponent in the upcoming Primary, but feel certain he will do well if Speaker Vos doesn’t move with gusto.”
It is never Trump’s fault. His loss wasn’t his fault, it was fraud. That all of the electoral votes certifying his loss were counted on Jan. 6, 2021, wasn’t Trump’s fault; it was Pence’s. And Trump’s failure to get Vos to do something Vos can’t do isn’t his own fault. Somehow, it’s Vos’s.
