State election officials voted Thursday evening to cancel an effort to recall Assembly Speaker Robin Vos after the organizers failed to submit enough valid petition signatures, although the group seeking to oust the powerful GOP lawmaker has already started a second recall push.
Vos, a Rochester Republican, has drawn the ire of former President Donald Trump and his allies, who believe Vos did not do enough to boost the former president’s unsubstantiated claims of fraud in the 2020 election in Wisconsin or to try to oust the state’s top election official, who has also been a target of conspiracy theories.
In the meantime, Vos recall organizers have already started work on a second recall campaign, which they launched earlier this month after sensing that the first attempt would fail.
But this first push to recall Vos, which was launched in January, did not generate enough petition signatures from voters in either Vos’ old legislative district or in the new one created after the state Supreme Court struck down the previous district boundary lines late last year.
The recall group, led by Burlington resident Matthew Snorek, initially touted collecting over 10,000 signatures when it submitted petitions to the Wisconsin Elections Commission in March.
But the Racine County District Attorney’s office has confirmed that it is investigating over two dozen cases where residents said their signatures were forged on the petitions. Additional voters who signed the petitions didn’t live in any of the districts, a WEC review determined.
Matthew Fernholz, an attorney representing Vos, said he wants the WEC to investigate the potential for criminal fraud. The commission can do so if it is asked in a formal complaint to launch a probe.
"There is a lot of bad conduct that went into this recall and I don’t think it should be the end of the matter," Fernholz said. "WEC should use its authority to investigate and, potentially, make appropriate criminal referrals."
Former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, who conducted a review of the 2020 election on behalf of Vos at taxpayer expense before the two had a falling out, represented the recall organizers at the hearing.
Gableman said the recall leaders met with the FBI and that he believes the recall effort "was intentionally sabotaged and infiltrated by outsiders from New York and Florida."
The WEC did not throw out some signatures Vos and his campaign found objectionable, including one from an individual who claims they were coerced into signing the petition and one who said he was led to believe he was signing a document in support of Trump.
But ultimately, the recall group fell short of the 6,850-signature threshold by around 1,800 signatures.
“It really boils down to an arithmetic problem: Did we have enough signatures or did we not?" Commissioner Robert Spindell said Thursday. "And as you can see, the commission staff looked at it from every angle. And no matter which angle they looked at, the petition was woefully short of the required number of signatures."
It remains unclear in which district the recall election would have been held, had there been enough signatures to move forward.
The state Supreme Court’s redistricting decision has complicated the administration of special or recall elections after it enjoined the use of the old district lines. The high court declined to elaborate on its decision when it dismissed a legal effort by WEC to get more clarity earlier this month.
Gableman said the WEC needed to clarify which district should be used by recall advocates moving forward.
"The most foundational and fundamental question of the validity of the petition is whether the petitioners got the district right," he said.
Gableman tussled with members of the commission for nearly half an hour Thursday, at one point calling WEC staff "arrogant, condescending and wrong," which brought a rebuke from Commissioner Ann Jacobs.
The commission ultimately said the question of which district to use could not be answered until the recall organizers formally asked them to weigh in.
"If you want an advisory opinion on what the district should be for the second recall … you need to ask the commission for an advisory opinion and you haven’t done so," Commissioner Mark Thomsen said. "And there is no foundational question in my mind."
The second recall petition reiterates many of the earlier complaints about Vos but also points to his comments about the organizers, whom he called “whack jobs” and “morons,” as "flagrant disrespect for his own constituents."
The deadline for signatures to be submitted as part of the second recall effort is May 28.
