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Michael Gableman
Photo:
KAYLA WOLF/Associated Press
After narrowly defeating a
Donald Trump
-backed primary challenger last week, Wisconsin Assembly Speaker
Robin Vos
is pointing the way back to reality—and maybe a victory this fall. On Friday he fired special counsel
Mike Gableman,
whose interminable inquiry into the 2020 election failed to prove much at all, while costing taxpayers more than $1 million.
“It’s time for us to move on,” Mr. Vos told WISN. “He did a good job last year, and kind of got off the rails this year, and now we’re going to end the investigation. We’re going to focus on winning the election, so that the bills that we passed, which are ready to go to fix the problems that were discovered, can be signed into law hopefully early next year.”
This is the right line, politically and factually. President Trump lost Wisconsin in 2020 because he lagged the state’s five Republican Congressmen by 63,547 votes. (President Biden ran ahead of Democrats in these districts by 64,880.) The brute fact is that a decisive number of Republicans didn’t want four more years of Mr. Trump. In some suburban wards, 10.5% of ballots for Mr. Biden went GOP for Congress.
State officials deserve criticism for stretching Wisconsin’s voting laws, such as by authorizing drop boxes. Yet there’s no justification for trying to “decertify” the 2020 result, even if it weren’t “constitutionally impossible,” as Mr. Vos says. Mr. Gableman’s report was mainly about nursing homes, with some concerning anecdotes from families who said a loved one shouldn’t have voted. This is a problem, but Mr. Trump lost the state by 20,682, an order of magnitude larger than anything for which Mr. Gableman had solid evidence.
Beyond the obvious holes in his report (see “The Republican Plot to Lose Wisconsin,” May 2), Mr. Gableman hurt his credibility with forays into partisan politics. Recently he recorded a robocall urging voters to “join President Trump and me” in defeating Mr. Vos. Off the rails indeed. When he was appointed, Mr. Gableman insisted that “we are not challenging the results of the 2020 election,” while promising to be “guided by facts, not personalities.”
The fight now is that Mr. Vos and the Legislature are passing bills to strengthen Wisconsin’s voting system, but Democratic Gov.
Tony Evers
keeps vetoing them. Mr. Evers’s Republican challenger in November,
Tim Michels,
would be wise to follow Mr. Vos’s lead and focus on ideas that unite the GOP, not unsubstantiated fraud theories that divide even Republicans. The end of Mr. Gableman’s snipe hunt is a turn toward what matters in 2022 and 2024.
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the August 16, 2022, print edition as ‘Wisconsin’s 2020 Snipe Hunt Is Over.’
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