(C) Wisconsin Watch
This story was originally published by Wisconsin Watch and is unaltered.
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Michael Gableman's numbers on Wisconsin nursing home votes don't add up [1]
['Chris Rickert', 'Wisconsin State Journal', 'John Hart', 'State Journal Archives']
Date: 2024-04
In a three-hour presentation earlier this month on his investigation into the November 2020 election, Michael Gableman, the conservative former state Supreme Court Justice and special counsel to Republican lawmakers, aired videos of interviews with several voters who appeared to be in no condition to have cast an absentee ballot.
Seemingly confused and unable to answer simple questions, they nevertheless voted in 2020, Gableman said. Of eight identified such voters, seven of them lived in what one investigator called nursing homes, although two were actually living in assisted living facilities, and two were at facilities that provide both nursing and less-intensive care.
Earlier that year, the Wisconsin Elections Commission told municipal clerks they were not required to send special election workers into nursing homes to assist with the election because of the pandemic. Gableman’s clear insinuation was that someone not qualified to conduct an election improperly influenced these vulnerable voters or, worse, cast ballots on their behalf.
And it wasn’t just this handful of voters, Gableman said. In his report to the Legislature, Gableman claimed to have discovered that 100% of the registered voters in nursing homes in heavily Democratic Dane and Milwaukee counties, and in Racine County, home to the Democratic-leaning city of Racine, cast ballots in 2020. In Kenosha and Brown counties, home to the Democratic-leaning cities of Kenosha and Green Bay, the figures were 97% and 95% respectively.
While the videos certainly raise questions about the fitness of some of those who voted from Wisconsin nursing homes, the Wisconsin State Journal could find no evidence to support the claim that turnout in nursing homes was anywhere close to what Gableman claims.
Ron Heuer, president of the Wisconsin Voter Alliance, said he compiled the turnout numbers when he worked for Gableman from about Oct. 1 to mid-December. His Kewaunee County-based group touts itself as “promoting and protecting the integrity” of Wisconsin’s voting system and has unsuccessfully sued to overturn Wisconsin’s 2020 presidential election results.
Heuer said he used the state’s voter database as of August 2021 to look at whether every registered voter at every nursing home in the five counties voted in the November 2020 election. As an example of his work, he provided the State Journal with a one-and-a-half page document that appears to show turnout rates as high as 213% for 31 facilities in Dane County, many of them not nursing homes.
There are only 18 licensed nursing homes in Dane County, according to the state Department of Health Services, and the additional facilities he lists are “community-based residential facilities,” “residential care apartment complexes” — types of assisted living — or “clinical laboratories,” according to DHS. One of the facilities listed is now closed.
Senior citizens have long been more likely to vote than the population at large. But after reviewing thousands of pages in the 2020 poll books from the 10 Dane County municipalities in which nursing homes are located, the State Journal could find only one where turnout was 100%: Nazareth Health and Rehab Center in Stoughton, where all 12 people listed as registered in the poll book had their ballots tallied.
Turnout among all the others ranged from 42% to 91%. In the case of the facility with 91% turnout, Capitol Lakes in Downtown Madison, it’s likely that number includes mostly independent living residents along with nursing home residents because both types of voters registered at the facility’s main address, 333 W. Main St., according to Capitol Lakes executive director Tim Conroy.
Even those turnout figures are inflated, since the state Elections Commission considers turnout to be the number of votes cast divided by the voting-age population, not the number of registered voters, since that number can change up to Election Day. It’s not known how many voting-age residents lived at the nursing homes in 2020.
The DHS list of nursing homes does not include all types of long-term care, which also includes various kinds of assisted living care, but the list provides a snapshot of one county’s nursing facilities as defined by a state agency.
Turnout figures compiled for city of Milwaukee nursing homes by city elections administrator Claire Woodall-Vogg also call into question the 100% turnout figure Gableman reported for all nursing homes in Milwaukee County. Woodall-Vogg found turnouts of between 36% and 97% for 32 city nursing homes.
Gableman and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, who appointed him, did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
Only two incompetent
Under state law, a court may appoint a guardian for an adult only if it finds by “clear and convincing evidence” that “because of an impairment, the individual is unable effectively to receive and evaluate information or to make or communicate decisions.” The courts can bar those deemed incompetent from voting, but nursing home residents can retain their right to vote even if they are under the guardianship of a relative.
Only two of the eight people shown in the videos Gableman presented to the Assembly elections committee on March 1 have been found incompetent by a court and are therefore ineligible to vote, said Erick Kaardal, an attorney for the conservative Thomas More Society who conducted the interviews in December, more than a year after the election.
One of them, Sandra Klitzke, was deemed incompetent by an Outagamie County judge in 2000, Kaardal said. The guardianship order for the other, Wally Jonkowski, “goes back to the 1970s due to brain injury,” he said.
The other six were all registered and allowed to vote according to the state’s voter database, he said, although their families maintain they were unaware of what they were doing.
Kaardal said the families of the eight “want us to get the story out” about their relatives voting, but he and Heuer declined to provide the families’ names or contact information. Kaardal said Heuer had contacted three of the families, but none wanted to speak with a reporter.
At Skaalen Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Stoughton, where 84% of residents who were registered voters voted in November 2020, administrator Kristian Krentz said staff worked with the local clerk’s office to obtain ballots for residents who wanted to vote, then acted as witnesses or assistants if necessary.
No residents found to be incompetent voted at Skaalen, he said. “Everybody that we had (voting) was competent.”
‘Not really my thing’
Altogether, Gableman pointed to at least 13 instances of voting irregularities in nursing homes in seven counties, although he did not name the nursing homes where they allegedly occurred or the people involved, making it impossible to verify the claims.
In one case, Gableman reported that a resident of a Dane County nursing home received an absentee ballot for the November 2020 election but hadn’t requested one. The person’s guardian intercepted the ballot and the person didn’t vote, then told the facility that the resident wouldn’t be voting again. Nevertheless, Gableman alleges, the resident voted again in the spring 2021 elections.
In another Dane County case, a nursing home resident who had been adjudicated incompetent since 1972 voted in 2020, Gableman said.
The report doesn’t speculate on who might have requested the ballots in either case. Under state law, a person who is indefinitely confined due to age or infirmity may ask to become a “permanent absentee voter,” which allows them to automatically receive an absentee ballot for every election. If the voter fails to return a ballot in one election, however, the clerk is supposed to notify the voter that they will no longer receive a ballot if they do not reapply for permanent absentee status within 30 days.
Gableman points to other cases in which residents allegedly voted more than once or voted despite being found to be incompetent.
Some degree of fraud is present in every election, but usually the numbers are far too small to have any effect on the outcome. After the 2020 election, election officials referred 31 cases of potential fraud to prosecutors in 12 of the state’s 72 counties. After reviewing them, prosecutors declined to bring charges in 26 of those cases.
President Joe Biden defeated former President Donald Trump in Wisconsin by almost 21,000 votes in 2020.
If Gableman found actual evidence of fraud, there is no evidence he or his investigators have referred their findings to prosecutors.
District attorneys for five of the seven counties mentioned — Brown, Dane, Milwaukee, Outagamie and Washington — either said they’d received no voter fraud referrals related to the November 2020 election or no referrals related to nursing homes.
Racine County DA Patricia Hanson, a Republican, declined comment for this story. In February, she declined to file charges against members of the Elections Commission or workers at the Ridgewood Care Center nursing home in Racine after the county’s Republican sheriff, Christopher Schmaling, alleged the commission’s instruction to clerks not to send special voting deputies into nursing homes amounted to voter fraud. But in a statement at the time, she appeared to endorse the notion that something illegal had occurred.
“It is appalling to me that an appointed, unelected group of volunteers has enough authority to change how some of our most vulnerable citizens access voting,” Hanson wrote, referring to the commission. “Residents who did not request ballots voted because someone else made a request for a ballot on their behalf and then voted on their behalf. If even one person’s right to freely choose to vote or not to vote was diminished, then a travesty of justice has occurred.”
Kenosha County DA Michael Graveley did not respond to requests for comment.
Asked if he planned to forward allegations of election fraud based on his interviews of voters to prosecutors, Kaardal said “that’s not really my thing,” adding he was only trying to help the families involved.
State Journal reporter Lucas Robinson and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
Editor's note: This story was updated on April 8, 2022, to clarify information about the videotaped interviews of voters. Seven were interviewed, and a relative of the eighth was interviewed after that voter had died.
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