Elections commission rejects Vos recall petitions

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) speaks to reporters about Wednesday's Assembly floor session. (Baylor Spears | Wisconsin Examiner)

The Wisconsin Elections Commission voted 4-2 on Thursday to reject the petitions filed in an attempt to recall Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, marking a second defeat for the right wing groups attempting to oust Vos from office.

WEC staff had recommended earlier this week that the petitions be accepted by the commission, finding that the recall organizers had filed 16 more signatures than the 6,850 required. However the four commissioners in the majority, which included all three Republican appointees and Gov. Tony Evers appointee Carrie Riepl, found that more than 300 of the signatures had been filed too late.

State law requires people organizing a recall attempt to register their intent before they start gathering signatures. The group then has 60 days to collect more signatures than 25% of the vote total in that district during the last gubernatorial election. For this recall attempt, that 60-day deadline fell on Memorial Day weekend, so the recall organizers were given until the Tuesday after the holiday to file their signatures. During that added time, recall organizers continued to collect signatures.

Vos’ attorney Matthew Fernholz argued that the extension to the filing deadline was fine, but that the collection of signatures should have stopped, so any signatures collected on May 27 and 28 had to be stricken from the total.

The decision to strike the signatures because of the deadline issue allowed the body to avoid making a decision on the unanswered legal question of which district the signatures should come from or where a potential recall election should be held because the 63rd Assembly District Vos was elected to in 2022 was declared unconstitutional by the state Supreme Court and replaced by the new 33rd Assembly District under new maps instituted in February.

The recall effort against Vos was organized by right wing figures who have objected to his perceived failure to go along with their efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. A faction of Republicans in Vos’ Racine County district have become increasingly antagonistic against the speaker, nearly defeating him in a 2022 primary campaign after his challenger, Adam Steen, was endorsed by former President Donald Trump. The recall organizers have gained support from high profile figures such as MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman.

Commissioners’ debate over the deadline at times turned philosophical as Democratic-appointee Mark Thomsen and Republican-appointee Don Millis — who was appointed to the commission by Vos — argued over whether the body should follow the exact letter of the law or if it should give leniency to the recall organizers and err on the side of respecting voters’ right to recall officials.

“I think we all try to follow the law, follow best practices,” Millis said.” We certainly have some disagreements on philosophy, and that bears out in the votes, but this is just following the statute, following our guidance. And I think, you know, I don’t look at this as applying to anyone [differently] … This doesn’t matter whether you’re the speaker of the Assembly or a backbencher in the minority, the same rules.”

But Thomsen, who said he thought the recall effort was a “waste of time, waste of money” and that Vos would win the election anyway, said repeatedly he thought denying the petition would violate the organizers’ constitutional right to force a recall after they’d collected the signatures of thousands of people who no longer want Vos to represent them.

He compared the decision to the commission’s vote in 2022 to allow Republican gubernatorial candidate Tim Michels access to the ballot despite a number of technical issues with his paperwork and said that if the commissioners gave Vos a pass, it would damage the reputation of the commission — which has already been subjected to numerous attacks since the 2020 election.

“At the end of the day, the public is going to perceive this,” Thomsen said. “Is this commission going to give Speaker Vos a pass on some technicality that we ignored every place else? Look, I sat here and I voted to put Mr. Michels on the ballot because I thought we had to have a fair election. We could have taken him off as a technicality. But, I mean, how would that — what  would the state have said about us?”

“These folks, there have been two campaigns, they worked very, very hard,” he continued. “They failed the first time, they came back, and now they cross the finish line by 16 votes, following the same rules that we applied for [nomination] papers. Why should I ignore that? We just put people on the ballot because I think it’s good for people to vote. Why should I just ignore these 6,000 folks and their right to recall? I don’t know if they even have a chance of winning it, but don’t they, haven’t they met their burden to at least get to vote?”

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