The exact nature of the investigation remains unclear, though it appears to be at least somewhat centered around the 2020 election. The agency’s election investigations elsewhere in the country have featured subpoenas for ballots and other election records, but legal experts still say it won’t be easy for the federal government to convince a court to give it access to ballots.
Milwaukee County officials are nonetheless preparing for that possibility, in part because they still retain ballots from the 2020 election, though they declined to discuss those preparations or comment on the record. Those ballots contain identifying information that could, in some cases, allow otherwise unidentifiable absentee ballots to be matched to the voters who cast them. Milwaukee is one of the few jurisdictions in Wisconsin that still has ballots from that election, and the city has long been a target of voter-fraud accusations and related attacks from the political right.
Elsewhere in Wisconsin — in communities whose elections have faced less scrutiny and in the vast majority of municipalities where 2020 ballots were destroyed according to the standard retention schedules in state law — election officials are less alarmed and are instead focused on preparing for the midterm elections.
Still, news of the FBI interest has created confusion and some fear on the part of voters and election officials, Votebeat reports.
So far, the FBI has contacted multiple current and former election officials in Wisconsin.
The FBI interviewed Wisconsin Elections Commission deputy administrator Robert Kehoe sometime in late April or early May. The news of the interview was first reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The interview focused on the 2020 election, with agents asking Kehoe to explain how Wisconsin elections operate.
The agency has also attempted to contact Milwaukee County Election Director Michelle Hawley. An agent left a business card at Hawley’s home when she was not there. Milwaukee County Clerk George Christensen criticized the agency for approaching Hawley at her home rather than through the county.
“While we cooperate with all legitimate law enforcement actions, we will defend against any attack on our democracy and will defend the rights of voters of Milwaukee County,” Christensen said in a statement.
Agents also left a card for, called, and texted a former Milwaukee election official, who confirmed the contact to Votebeat but requested anonymity because of personal safety concerns. That official declined to say whether they responded to the FBI.
Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson confirmed the FBI has reached out to city employees about the probe.
“The president for whatever reason cannot seem to let it go that he lost an election,” Johnson told a WISN 12 reporter.
Wisconsin Elections Commission spokeswoman Emilee Miklas declined to comment for this story. Other officials declined to speak on the record, and an FBI spokesperson didn’t answer Votebeat questions about the probe.
David Becker, the executive director of the nonpartisan nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research and a former Justice Department voting section attorney, said the federal government’s actions appeared more to be aimed at intimidating election officials than producing actionable criminal cases.
He pointed to FBI Director Kash Patel’s public statements in April suggesting arrests related to the 2020 election were coming, as well as federal officials discussing potential cases on social media before they’re brought before courts.
“If you think you’re going to bring charges and prosecute individuals, you don’t do anything that the federal government has done over the last few months,” he said.
Becker also noted that any potential federal crimes connected to the 2020 election are “well beyond the statute of limitations for any potential federal jurisdiction or crimes,” adding, “This is a problem for any investigation relating to 2020.”
Even so, Becker said election officials’ worries were justified. He said the Election Official Legal Defense Network, which he leads, has received more requests for legal assistance from election officials than ever before “even though all of these efforts indicate that the federal government knows it’s got nothing.”
It’s unclear how the FBI interviews in Wisconsin relate to the agency’s scrutiny of the 2020 election in other states.
In January, the FBI raided a Fulton County, Georgia, election office seeking records tied to the 2020 election. About a month later, the agency subpoenaed records related to the audit of the 2020 election in Maricopa County, Arizona, which includes Phoenix.
Separately, the U.S. Justice Department has sought access to 2024 ballots in Wayne County, Michigan, home to Detroit.
Those jurisdictions share several characteristics with Milwaukee County. All are located in highly competitive swing states won by former President Joe Biden in 2020, and all became central targets of President Donald Trump, who repeatedly challenged the election results despite court rulings, audits, and reviews repeatedly reaffirming his loss.
Fulton, Wayne, Maricopa, and Milwaukee County are the largest and most heavily scrutinized election jurisdictions in their respective states. Each has been the subject of persistent conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, many of which remain prevalent on social media, even after extensive investigations found no evidence of widespread fraud.
“What’s really disconcerting,” said former longtime Wisconsin election chief Kevin Kennedy, “is the fact that there is a clear pattern here to try and continue to stir up issues that were resolved in every single opportunity there was to review them, whether it was a court case, an independent audit or the actual certification and review process that exists.”
The short answer is that nobody really knows.
Officials have been considering the possibility that the federal government may seize the city’s 2020 ballots, which contain personally identifiable information.
Kennedy said recent actions by the Trump administration offer “no reason to think that information that should be protected is going to be protected.”
Kennedy said Wisconsin’s decentralized election system was intentionally designed to distribute authority among local jurisdictions — both to keep election administration accountable at the community level and to limit the amount of sensitive voter information concentrated in any one place.
“You put that at the national level,” he said, “and it only takes one bad actor — and we’ve got evidence there’s more than one of those already in the federal government — to totally disrupt the process when you consolidate that kind of information that’s protected through the various state and local laws and practices.”
Becker said it will be an uphill battle for the federal government to successfully obtain Milwaukee’s ballots. But he said the mere possibility that federal officials could theoretically identify how individual people voted is deeply troubling.
“That is not the way a democratic society works,” he said. “Now, I don’t think they’re likely going to be able to do that. I think that’s going to be incredibly difficult. It’s not impossible, but the fact that they seem to engender this fear is troubling enough.”
This story was produced by Votebeat and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.