Frederica Freyberg:

Even though courts found no legal basis last year for claims of Wisconsin election fraud, a state panel will investigate election procedures and will give lawmakers subpoena powers over records and individuals. This as a result of Republicans in the state Assembly passing a resolution to direct a committee to get the investigation underway. The resolution claims Wisconsin election officials failed to adhere to and encouraged noncompliance with elections laws. The committee is instructed to focus only on elections after January 1, 2019. Republican Representative Joe Sanfelippo is the vice-chair of the Committee on Campaigns and Elections. I spoke with him earlier. Representative Sanfelippo, thanks very much for joining us on this.

Joe Sanfelippo:

Thank you for having me.

Frederica Freyberg:

So my first question to you is do you yet acknowledge that Joe Biden won the election?

Joe Sanfelippo:

Oh, yeah. I don’t think that that’s, you know, in question. And everything we’re doing really has nothing to do with the presidential election per se. It has to do more with the look at how our elections are administered throughout the state.

Frederica Freyberg:

So you want to gather more evidence to see if election laws were broken, but wasn’t that kind of asked and answered several times in courts of law in Wisconsin and across the nation when both the Trump campaign and his allies sued over these issues and lost?

Joe Sanfelippo:

Well, I think there’s a couple different things. First of all, a lot of those court cases never even got to the point where evidence was presented and so they were just dismissed before they got to the evidentiary process. The other thing is that the Trump campaign was focusing solely on his campaign and his results. And I think that what we want to look at here, because we’ve seen evidence and we’ve heard stories from various areas around the state that just are pointing to the fact that our election laws that are already on the books may not be being followed. And that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re not being followed for nefarious reasons. Could be there’s a lack of proper training or somebody just didn’t take the time to do something that they were supposed to do. And, you know, we have to provide equal protection under the law. And the way to do that for elections is to make sure that in all of our jurisdictions, which we have over 1800 of them in the state, we want to make sure that the election laws on the books are being evenly adhered to throughout the entire state and that’s what our focus is on.

Frederica Freyberg:

So tell me, what kinds of elections laws are you going to be focusing on?

Joe Sanfelippo:

Well, you know, last week or a couple weeks ago we had a hearing and we looked at things in particular in Green Bay that took place and through a series of looking at emails and things that were presented to the committee as evidence, I mean, it was clear that we had third parties from outside of the election process in charge running — you know, calling the shots, running at least one central count location. Those are things that are against the law that should not be being done. We know that in some areas around the state we had clerks that were curing ballots on their own, which is contrary to law. And so I think we have to take a look at why those practices need to be done and maybe we need to — if we have to update the laws to allow for some of these things, we should. But the fact of the matter is only the Legislature can make election law and we shouldn’t allow clerks on their own to be deciding what laws they’re going to follow, what laws they’re not going to follow, because that’s when you get into this uniformity issue.

Frederica Freyberg:

Well, I know that in covering all of these matters that the State Elections Commission was giving guidance to clerks and that things like curing ballots was something that clerks do do and in Green Bay I know that officials are saying what you presented at that hearing, it just didn’t happen.

Joe Sanfelippo:

Well, I know that’s what the Green Bay talk has been, especially from the mayor. But the emails tell a completely different story. For example, there is one of these individuals who is not associated with the city from a third-party group out of state and there’s an email that says he and only he should have access, the keys and access to the central count location. Now, that is strictly against the law. When he was asked what his role was in the election, if he was an employee of the city of Green Bay or a contractor, he just said, no, he was an election observer. Well, election observers aren’t given keys to the central count locations with access to the tabulating machines. It’s things like that that we need to dig into further.

Frederica Freyberg:

Just really briefly, your elections committee was given the authority to subpoena people to come and testify before you. Who do you want to subpoena?

Joe Sanfelippo:

Well, you know, I’m actually hoping that we won’t even have to get that far with subpoenas, right? Because our elections — we have a history in Wisconsin of having very open and transparent elections and I can’t imagine why any election official would not want to come and speak openly about how elections are administered in their jurisdiction. Now, that being said, we may have to rely — because there are these third parties involved that are not state employees or city or local, county employees, we may have to subpoena documents, we may have to subpoena people to get them to come in and testify. And so we’re just kind of setting the platform in place in case we need to do that.

Frederica Freyberg:

All right. We need to leave it there, but we thank you very much for your time. We’ll be watching all of this.

Joe Sanfelippo:

You got it. Thank you so much. I appreciate the opportunity. If you have any other questions going forward, please just reach out.