The state of Wisconsin should not certify its election results until it can get to the bottom of what happened on Election Day. Something is not right. The results do not appear to be accurate.
I’m a longtime journalist and a native of Madison, Wisconsin, and have spent years studying voter rolls, election laws and election returns. I’ve spent the last several days studying the returns from Wisconsin and am convinced that something happened that should not have happened — something that altered the outcome.
The results posted for the upper middle-class Milwaukee suburb of Wauwatosa, for example, are astounding.
They show Joe Biden with 20,880 votes — 4,564 more than Hillary Clinton’s total of 16,316 in 2016, and 5,660 more than Barack Obama got in 2012 in his re-election run. Trump increased his vote total slightly in the city, from 10,034 votes in 2016 to 10,104 this year.
The streets of Madison, Wis. on the eve of the 2020 general election (CREDIT: Margaret Menge)
How did Biden increase his vote total by 28 percent in a city that only recently flipped to become majority Democrat? Who are these additional 4,564 voters who didn’t vote for Clinton four years ago but were motivated to vote for Joe Biden?
Wauwatosa’s population has grown at a rate of less than 0.5 percent a year, on average. In 2010 its population, according to the U.S. Census, was 46,396. It’s now 48,118, according to the 2019 Census estimate.
Similar and even bigger jumps can be seen in almost every suburb in Milwaukee County — unbelievable vote totals for Biden when compared to both Clinton in 2016 and Obama in 2012, in West Allis, Whitefish Bay, River Hills, Glendale, Fox Point, Cudahy and about every other town and village in the county.
They can also be seen in the three counties surrounding Milwaukee — Washington, Ozaukee and Waukesha. It’s as if someone manning the central controls turned the dial up, adding 10 to 40 percent more votes for Biden in community after community.
Terry Dittrich, chairman of the Republican Party of Waukesha County, points to Biden votes in Brookfield, which borders Milwaukee County.
“It’s very, very big, and it’s like, Boy, this just doesn’t seem right,” he said about absentee ballots in particular, which showed close to 80 percent going for Biden. Trump won Brookfield overall, getting 53.5 percent of the vote. But Biden got 12,434 votes in the city, a stunning 36 percent increase over Clinton’s vote total four years ago.
“The answer is I don’t know,” Dittrich says when asked why he thought the numbers were so high.
No one knows who these added voters are and won’t know for a few weeks as county clerks have 45 days to get the voter data for this election entered into the system.
“The bottom line is that it’s just incredible that this guy could get this big of a bump, in New Berlin, Brookfield, Elm Grove, Menomonee Falls, and even some of our strongholds in the county like Hartman and Sussex,” said Dittrich.
In New Berlin, Biden got 28 percent more votes than Clinton in 2016 and Obama in 2012.
In the Village of Elm Grove, Biden got 28 percent more votes than Clinton and 54.6 percent more than Obama.
In the Village of Menomonee Falls, Biden got 34 percent more votes than Clinton and 41 percent more than Obama.
In the Village of Hartland, Biden got almost 39.7 percent more votes than Clinton and 40 percent more than Obama.
In the Village of Sussex, Biden got 39.69 percent more votes than Clinton and 43 percent more than Obama.
Dittrich also points to Biden’s 5,576 votes in the city of Muskego, a 26 percent increase over Clinton’s vote total in 2016.
“Which is really incredible,” he says, “because we canvassed the hell out of the place and it’s very, very red.”
Trump got 66.3 percent of the vote in Muskego. Dittrich said he would have expected it to be over 70 percent.
In Waukesha County as a whole, Biden got 103,867 votes this year, compared to 79,244 votes for Clinton four years ago — an additional 24,623 votes, a 31 percent increase.
Biden won the state of Wisconsin, according to the unofficial numbers, by just 20,540 votes.
Over in Dane County, home to Madison, election returns show Biden with 260,157 votes — 42,460 more than Hillary Clinton’s 217,697 votes from Dane County four years ago and 44,086 more than Obama’s 216,071 vote total from Dane County in 2012.
How could Biden have increased his vote total by 19 percent over Clinton in Dane County and by 20 percent over Obama?
Dane County is growing, but not by that much.
Overall, Wisconsin is showing 1,630,569 votes for Biden, 248,033 more than Clinton got in 2016, in a state in which President Trump campaigned heavily and Biden hardly at all.
The state should not certify results before doing an audit in the counties that show these unbelievable increases. The audit should involve a hand count of paper ballots and also knocking on the doors of a percentage of “new” voters who appeared out of thin air to vote for Biden this year.
Until this is done, millions of Americans will not believe that the numbers out of Wisconsin are an accurate reflection of the votes cast by eligible voters in the state this year.
