The bipartisan Wisconsin Election Commission has refused to refer criminal charges for now on a group of conservative hackers who intentionally exploited a gap in the state’s ballot request portal to obtain thousands of absentee ballots for eligible voters, the Wisconsin Examiner reports.
The six-member commission will reconsider charges for actions brought to light by a Trump-supporting local sheriff, Racine County Sheriff Christopher Schmaling, who discovered the hackers illegally hacked into the MyVote system to have absentee ballots falsely requested on behalf of actual registered voters and sent to improper addresses. Schmaling has been on a two-year crusade to prove that Donald Trump was cheated out of reelection by millions of falsely-cast ballots.
Wisconsin election officials, however, say that the hackers didn’t expose a vulnerability in the MyVote system; instead, it asserts that the hackers simply submitted false information to the system to obtain the ballots–which is not voter fraud but voter registration fraud. In other words, the conservatives lied, which in and of itself is a crime when certifying a person’s information is correct on registration forms.
“Claiming that by committing a crime by submitting false information to obtain an absentee ballot somehow reveals a vulnerability of our system is inaccurate and irresponsible,” WEC Administrator Meagan Wolfe said in a statement. “Intentionally using someone else’s identity to subvert the system does not demonstrate a flaw with MyVote, but rather a flaw with that person’s conduct. A nefarious person who chooses to impersonate someone else in order to gain official documents of any kind – whether for election use or any other purpose – is clearly violating state and federal law and could face consequences.”
Harry Wait, one of the accused conservative cheats, said that he would happily become a martyr to prove that election fraud is possible. “I would be willing to take that hit for the country,” Wait said about facing potential jail time for his crimes. “You can’t have ballots going all over the place, unsecured.”
Wait, however, has not proven anything other than the fact that he’s a liar for falsely registering thousands of times.