Fond Du Lac Times

Ahead of the April 5 Wisconsin elections, Fond du Lac District Attorney Eric Toney is urging voters and local officials to report suspected election law violations to his office for possible prosecution.

“We have amazing clerks across much of Wisconsin,” Toney, Republican candidate for state attorney general, said in a statement. “We collectively want to ensure people have the right to vote and the ability to cast their ballot but it is equally important that all ballots in our state are treated and counted the same, regardless of which county the ballot is cast because elections are the cornerstone of democracy.”

Wisconsin voters are to elect county and local government officials, judges to local circuit courts and school board members.

Donald Trump carried Fond du Lac County with about 62% of the vote.

Toney has been a strong advocate of investigating and prosecuting voting crimes. Last month his office announced the filing of five voter fraud cases, bringing the total number of voter fraud cases in Fond du Lac County to seven.

“These five cases came from an investigation conducted by the City of Fond du Lac Police Department,” Toney said at the time in a news release. “The allegations relate to individuals that illegally registered to vote using a P.O. Box as their address with three of the five voting in the November 2020 election. All defendants are presumed innocent unless or until proven guilty in court.”

Toney was also critical of Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm’s recent decision not to charge members of Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) with crimes recommended by the Racine County sheriff over guidelines that nursing homes not use special voting deputies (SVD) to oversee voting by nursing home residents.

“DA Chisholm took a year to figure out he didn’t have venue for an investigation into alternate electors [in a reference to allegations of fake presidential electors],” Toney tweeted March 7. “He then released his findings around Jan. 6, 2022, but the SVD decision was made in a span of weeks, despite clear evidence election laws weren’t followed.”

Two investigations, one headed former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman as special counsel to the Assembly Committee on Campaigns and Elections, and another by the Thomas More Society, a conservative public interest law firm out of Chicago, found that some nursing home residents with severe dementia were on record as having voted in the 2020 elections.

In a March 1 appearance before the Assembly Committee, Gableman showed video-taped interviews of sons and daughters of nursing home residents who were shocked that their parents, some with severe dementia, cast ballots in the 2020 general election and in the February 2021 primary elections.

Gableman said that nursing home residents in the Democratic-run cites of Milwaukee, Kenosha, Racine, Green Bay and Madison had an unheard of 95% to 100% voting turnout.

Trump carried the counties of Racine, Kenosha and Brown (Green Bay area) while Dane County (Madison area) and Milwaukee County backed President Joe Biden. The Democrat carried Wisconsin by about 20,000 votes.

He blamed WEC for not enforcing a law that requires the presence of special voting deputies, from both parties, in the homes to ensure that those who vote are capable of voting, and not having their ballots filled out by third parties.

In his pre-election statement, Toney said any voter or any clerk who believes they have witnessed an election law violation should contact their local district attorney for guidance and “appropriate legal action to stop or prevent the alleged illegal activity from continuing or occurring.”