WAUKESHA — A week before the Republican National Convention begins in downtown Milwaukee, top state and national party leaders told attendees at a rally Monday that turning out voters and "election integrity" were leading priorities ahead of the November presidential election.
"We're recruiting 100,000 volunteers all across the country," said Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley. "We want 5,000 of them here in Wisconsin, and we want to make sure that we are in the room whenever a vote is being cast and a vote is being counted."
His comments echoed an announcement this spring from the Republican National Committee and campaign of former President Donald Trump regarding plans to deploy tens of thousands of volunteers and attorneys to monitor and challenge voting processes in battleground states, including Wisconsin.
Trump, who is expected to formally accept the party's nomination at the RNC in downtown Milwaukee next week, has for the last four years made false claims regarding his 2020 election loss in Wisconsin. Trump lost the state to President Joe Biden by about 21,000 votes that year, an outcome confirmed by recounts Trump paid for, court rulings, a nonpartisan state audit and a study by a prominent conservative group.
On Monday, more than 130 people gathered for the rally at the Wisconsin Young Republicans headquarters in Waukesha, where the party afterward planned to hold an "election integrity" training for those in attendance.
Speakers raised the specter of voter fraud — despite there being no evidence of widespread voter fraud — and urged supporters to become poll watchers and election observers and to turn out other voters for Trump.
"We will never allow an election like 2020 to happen ever again," said Lara Trump, co-chair of the Republican National Committee and daughter-in-law of Donald Trump.
A spokesperson for Biden's campaign in response called Trump "the single biggest threat to our democracy."
"(Biden) is standing up to Donald Trump and the MAGA extremists who are obsessed with undermining our elections and threatening our democracy," said Kristi Johnston, Wisconsin Democratic coordinated campaign rapid response director. "We can stop Donald Trump’s self-obsessed quest for power once and for all at the ballot box — by reelecting Joe Biden and Kamala Harris this November."
Earlier in the day, the RNC Platform Committee met at the Baird Center in downtown Milwaukee and passed a list of priorities that cement the former president’s views at the heart of the party. The platform includes support for voting restrictions and measures to ramp up same-day voting.
However, at the Monday rally, speakers encouraged the use of early voting and absentee ballots.
“This is the law of the land right now, and so what we want to make sure that we're doing is taking advantage of the law in every single state that we have,” Whatley told reporters afterward. “And obviously every single state is different, but what we want to do is make sure if there's early voting, we want to participate, we want to engage. If there's mail-in voting, we want to participate, we want to engage.”
Wisconsin GOP Chairman Brian Schimming also supported early voting, saying he was a proponent of the measure and encouraged it to increase the chances of people voting in the upcoming election.
While they supported mail-in voting, Schimming and Whatley criticized the recent Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling that reinstated drop boxes in the state.
Schimming said the drop boxes offer "another opportunity for potential mischief," but the speakers did not specify how mail-in voting was more secure than the drop boxes.
Alison Dirr can be reached at adirr@jrn.com. Tristan Hernandez can be reached at thernandez@gannett.com.
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