Harry Wait, the Wisconsin MAGA asshole who “proved” voter fraud by illegally putting fake names and addresses into the state’s online absentee ballot request form system, was convicted Tuesday night on two misdemeanor counts of election fraud and one felony count of identity theft for his mind-bogglingly pointless 2022 scheme, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports. Seriously, this guy’s plot was arguably dumber and less effective at validating MAGA conspiracy shit than former Mesa County, Colorado Clerk Tina Peters‘s exposure of her Dominion Voting System passwords.
At least she might theoretically have exposed security vulnerabilities. Wait’s “pentest” exposed nothing that could ever have been consequential for “election integrity” in the Badger State.
Not very long story short, Wait visited the state’s absentee ballot request website and put in Republican state Assembly Speaker Robin Vos’s and Dem Racine Mayor Cory Mason’s names but Wait’s home address and successfully ordered Mason’s ballot to be mailed to him. He did it again with at least eight other people’s names, all of them fellow “Stop the Steal” assclowns. Wait then tried to hand Mason’s unopened ballot to Racine City Clerk Tara McMenamin’s office but was told they could and would not accept it. So instead Wait tried to show it to a patrol deputy under Racine County Sheriff Chris Schmaling – a fellow MAGA asshole whose later refusal to investigate Wait led to the state attorney general‘s office taking the lead – while Schmaling publicly validated the scam.
In 2021, Schmaling had freaked the fuck out over some nursing home workers who assisted residents with opening and filling out their absentee ballots prior to the 2020 election. He did not arrest any of them, nor five members of the Wisconsin Elections Commission whom Schmaling said had committed felonies by voting to allow such “election fraud” to take place as an expedient measure during the COVID-19 pandemic. Notably exempted from that empty threat was pro-Kanye West racist Republican WEC member Bob Spindell, even though Spindell had also consented to the motion. Schmaling recently announced he won’t be running for a fifth term this November.
Anyway, the only person actually looking at prison time is Wait, who faces seven years in the joint for the felony ID theft charge specific to Mason’s ballot. The jury acquitted Wait on Vos’s because the clerk had rejected the request. Absent from the defense was Wait’s former pro-bono counsel, disgraced ex-state Supreme Court Justice, “election integrity” czar, and adult dental braces wearer Mike Gableman who had showed up to represent Wait during initial pre-trial hearings in the case.

Wait had to hire a real lawyer to get convicted. So he’s got that legal bill and prison time to show for proving that sometimes the ballot request system doesn’t check against voter registrations and wasting at most several dollars of taxpayer money for printing and mailing costs. Not for nothing but it might’ve been more bold, even admirable, if he’d at least tried fucking voting with the goddamned ballots. Significant too, at least insomuch as it’d be a yes/no answer on whether the system truly works – even if we already kind of know that 9,999 times out of 10,000 that the answer is yes.