Former President Donald Trump is continuing to pressure officials in states he lost to President Joe Biden to overturn the results of the 2020 election — nearly a year and a half after the election took place.
In an interview with a television news station in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, state Speaker of the Assembly Rep. Robin Vos (R) said that Trump has repeatedly asked him in private conversations to decertify the election, asking as recently as earlier this month.
“It’s very consistent,” Vos said.
The Republican leader has told the former president that he is unable to change the election result, even if he wanted to.
“He would like us to do something different in Wisconsin. I explained that it’s not allowed under the [state] Constitution,” Vos said. “He has a different opinion.”
In the past, Trump has repeatedly derided Vos for his refusal to take actions that he believes could lead to the presidential election in Wisconsin being decertified. Last August, the Assembly speaker relented and initiated a state audit of the election; the person that Vos hired to manage the audit made numerous missteps regarding open records laws and ultimately produced a report that is riddled with false allegations and theories that have already been debunked.
In actuality, there is no action that Vos or the Republican-controlled state legislature can take to decertify the election result. However, that didn’t stop Trump from lambasting Vos following the release of his interview on Tuesday and falsely alleging that the state Supreme Court had ruled that the election was illegitimate.
“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!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social account.
The state Supreme Court did not rule that drop box votes were illegal — instead, the conservative majority found that the voting method could not be used in future elections, citing unfounded claims that such votes could be compromised in the future. (An Associated Press investigation of drop boxes published this week found no evidence whatsoever that there were any problems with votes cast in that manner in 2020.)
The majority ruling, authored by conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley, improperly compared Wisconsin’s drop boxes to rigged election standards in countries like North Korea and Syria.
In her dissent to the ruling, liberal Justice Ann Walsh Bradley correctly predicted that Bradley’s wording would perpetuate false claims that fraud had taken place in Wisconsin’s elections two years ago.
“The majority/lead opinion’s sky-is-falling rhetoric not only defies the facts, but also is downright dangerous to our democracy,” Walsh Bradley wrote. “Absent evidence that supports its statements, the majority/lead opinion still lends its imprimatur to efforts to destabilize and delegitimize recent elections.”
