State Clerks Continue to Combat Election Disinformation

Tuesday, November 7th, 2023 -- 1:01 PM

(Tyler Katezenberger, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel) Armed with a slideshow and a microphone, La Crosse city clerk Nikki Elsen and her fellow event panelists walked three dozen people gathered in a windowless, beige basement room through the minutiae of Wisconsin's election process on a recent night.

According to Tyler Katezenberger with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, some of the details Elsen covered were painstakingly dull, a fact the audience and the election officials sitting next to her acknowledged with shared quiet laughter.

But Elsen remembers how election officials were rocked by rampant and inflammatory election disinformation three years ago, much of which attacked routine practices undertaken by nonpartisan local and state election workers during former President Donald Trump's loss in the 2020 presidential election.

It's a scenario she and others on the panel hope to avoid as they gear up for an impending 2024 presidential race where Wisconsin could be the "tipping point" state that decides the winner by a razor-thin margin.

“It was a little frightening. Everybody was fleeing city hall,” Elsen said when asked to recall her experience as deputy clerk during the November 2020 election season. “We were there and had to just continue working through it.”

Serious mistrust of routine election processes lingers in Wisconsin and other battleground states. A Monmouth poll from June found nearly a third of Americans still believe the 2020 election was stolen from Trump despite dozens of court cases and investigations proving otherwise.

The Oct. 25 La Crosse event was hosted by Keep Our Republic, a nonpartisan voter education nonprofit that has organized town hall-style forums throughout the state as part of a nationwide effort to combat election mistrust.

Those in attendance largely avoided confrontation, with the exception of some grumbles about Wisconsin's Republican-leaning voting district maps. Officials instead fielded clarifying questions about state election rules.

For example, one woman asked if her son in the Navy could vote from overseas (yes, he can) while another asked where observers could stand at the polls (between three and eight feet away, though that varies by municipality).

Local election officials like Elsen and Meagan Wolfe, Wisconsin's embattled top elections administrator, went under the microscope for 2 1/2 hours in La Crosse to explain their jobs and dispel misinformation enveloping Wisconsin's election process ahead of the 2024 election.

Rather than rehash the politically tumultuous 2020 race or single out a political party, panelists walked step-by-step through Wisconsin's election infrastructure to correct misconceptions and share safeguards used to prevent voter fraud.

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