A Wisconsin elector, Bill Feehan, speaks…
After three years and a lot of emotional drama the lawsuits against Wisconsin’s Republican Electors have ended. I was one of the electors. Hundreds of thousands of dollars have been spent on attorney’s fees. Was there a basis for these lawsuits? Were the electors fake?
Wisconsin’s Republican electors followed the same path that Democrats have followed in the past. We acted to protect the votes of 1.6 million Republican voters. We did it with the knowledge that if Donald Trump prevailed in his legal challenge, it was the only way that Wisconsin’s electoral votes could be counted.
In December of 2020 the Executive Director of the Republican Party of Wisconsin, Mark Jefferson, contacted me and told me that the attorneys were advising us to assemble at the state Capitol and cast our ballots. We needed to do this so that if a court ruled that Donald Trump won Wisconsin those ballots could be counted. Given the circumstances surrounding the election, this seemed reasonable.
The precedent for this action was in the 1960 presidential election. Richard Nixon was ahead in votes on election day in Hawaii, but after two recounts John Kennedy was declared the winner. It was only because the Democrat electors met and cast their ballots at the appointed time and place that those ballots for Kennedy could be counted.
The Republican Party of Wisconsin issued a statement on Dec. 14, 2020, stating that we had met and cast our ballots to preserve Wisconsin’s votes if Donald Trump prevailed in his legal challenges.
You can still read a WIZM news story on their website dated Dec. 15, 2020. I am quoted saying, “The ballots cast by the Republican electors will be held until such a time as they might be needed. Feehan explained that would only happen if something transpired legally to reverse Wisconsin’s election outcome.”
On Dec. 7, 2023, the civil lawsuit by Law Forward was dismissed in a Dane County court. As part of the settlement agreement, the Republican electors agreed to not serve as electors for Donald Trump in the future and to state that Joe Biden is the President of the United States.
Our settlement also acknowledges that our documents were used as part of an attempt to improperly overturn the 2020 presidential election results. In no way did we admit that the electors used these documents to improperly overturn the 2020 presidential election results ourselves. The electors were not informed of any alternative use of our documents other than preserving a legal strategy.
On Dec. 20, 2023, the last complaint against the Republican electors was dismissed by the Wisconsin Elections Commission on a 5-0 vote. This was the second time that WEC voted to dismiss a complaint against the Republican electors.
WEC first dismissed a complaint from Law Forward on March 15, 2022. At that time, an attorney with Democrat Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul’s office issued an opinion stating that the Republican Electors “acted within their rights.” Based on that opinion the Wisconsin Elections Commission voted 6-0 to dismiss the complaint from Law Forward.
Still, Law Forward persisted filing the recently dismissed case in Dane County.
A reasonable person might ask why would Law Forward decide to settle at this time? Perhaps it is because they learned through discovery what the Wisconsin Department of Justice and US Department of Justice already knew. The Wisconsin electors acted exactly as we had said from the beginning.
Democrats continue to trumpet the lie that we were “fake electors.” Not true, we were the Republican electors. Each political party chooses people to act as electors. They are in fact electors, even though under normal circumstances only one group of electors casts their ballots.
There was a lot of confusion in the days after the November 2020 presidential election. There were reports in the media about voting machines changing votes and forged ballots. Many people still believe there was massive voter fraud in Wisconsin. Three years later after much research, I have concluded that the vote totals in Wisconsin were accurately counted. Wisconsin Republicans can have confidence that their vote matters more than ever.
Questions about the administration of our elections remain. Republicans in the state Legislature have passed bills to address some of these, but Governor Evers has vetoed most of them.
It is important to note that Donald Trump trailed the combined votes of Wisconsin’s Republican Congressional candidates and the combined votes of Republican Assembly candidates by 51,000 votes in the November 2020 election. Had he won those Republican votes, he would have won Wisconsin.
It should now be clear that Wisconsin’s Republican electors were not “fake” or “false.” We did nothing wrong and fulfilled our obligation to Republican voters in Wisconsin. This is evident in the dismissal not once, but twice of complaints by the WEC and the dismissal of the civil suit in Dane County.
