Wisconsin Judge Smacks Down Leftists’ Bid To Ignore A Law Requiring Witness Information On Absentee Ballots

A Wisconsin judge rejected an attempt by a left-wing group to allow the counting of invalid absentee ballots on Friday, with the ruling coming ahead of the state’s upcoming fall elections.

Last month, in a case called White v. Wisconsin Elections Commission, plaintiffs supported by the group known as Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections (RITE) successfully barred local election officials from filling in “missing address information from ballot certifications that must accompany mail-in ballots,” according to a RITE press release obtained by The Federalist.

As mandated by Wisconsin law, “If a certificate is missing the address of a witness, the ballot may not be counted.”

In the Friday court order written by Judge Juan Colas, the Dane County Circuit Court affirmed that based upon the information presented to the court, “the definition of an absentee ballot witness ‘address,’” specifically “that an address is sufficient if it contains a street number, street name and name of municipality, is the status quo and that the requested temporary injunction is unnecessary” and therefore, denied.

“This lawsuit was a desperate attempt by extreme leftwing groups to enable the counting of invalid ballots in the upcoming election,” said RITE President and CEO Derek Lyons in a statement. “RITE’s work to secure the correct outcome in this case is another in a string of victories for Wisconsin voters and for transparency, consistency, and integrity in elections across the state.”

According to a RITE representative, the attempt to get a temporary injunction was requested by the group known as RISE Inc., which was represented by Russia collusion hoaxer Marc Elias’s firm, the Elias Law Group.

A long-time left-wing activist, Elias has spent decades attempting to interfere in U.S. elections to benefit the Democrat Party. As detailed in her bestselling book, “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections,” Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway describes how Elias “helped orchestrate the effort to change hundreds of election laws and processes in the months leading up to the 2020 election in order to flood elections with tens of millions of mail-in ballots.” These alterations were later exploited by left-wing groups funded by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to “run Democrat Get-Out-The-Vote operations from inside government election offices.”

The order from the Dane County Circuit Court comes on the heels of a ruling by Waukesha County Circuit Judge Brad Schimel, who ruled that Wisconsin absentee voters “can no longer change their vote after submitting their ballots.” The ruling came in response to a lawsuit against the Wisconsin Elections Commission for issuing “unlawful guidance that allowed absentee voters to change their vote after their ballot had already been cast.”

Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

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