Last May, I reported on two small, podunk towns in Wisconsin who decided to illegally remove their electronic voting equipment. They did so because some professional election denier came along and filled their little MAGA heads up with The Big Lie, especially how voting machines were being tampered with by space aliens with bamboo shoots or some other nonsense like that.
Disability rights groups and the US DOJ came down on them like a ton of bricks.
The Town of Lawrence was already in negotiations with the feds even before the lawsuits were filed. Their agreement was filed the same day as the lawsuit was.
However, the town of Thornapple decided to do things the hard way. Last week they hit the find out stage of things when a federal judge made it clear to them that they were criminals:
A preliminary injunction issued Friday by Chief U.S. District Judge James Peterson for Wisconsin’s Western District, states that the town’s clerk and three-member board of supervisors violated the Help America Vote Act, or HAVA, by failing to provide at least one “voting system equipped for individuals with disabilities” at its single polling place in the April 2 and Aug. 13 elections.
According to court documents, the town’s former clerk Suzanne Pinnow cited “the controversial nature of electronic voting machines” during a June 2023 town board meeting as part of the justification for moving to hand-counted, paper ballots. Meeting minutes show she also claims that municipalities with “less than 7,000 voters” are “not required” to use the voting machines.
The injunction stems from a joint agreement between U.S. investigators and Thornapple officials in which the town agreed to provide one electronic voting machine at the town’s sole polling place, and that the “voting system is, for the full period that the polling place is required to be open under Wisconsin State law, plugged into a functioning electrical outlet, turned on, and readily visible and accessible to voters.”
The town has also agreed to not enforce its June 2023 resolution “to stop use of the electronic voting machine,” post signs alerting voters that the voting machine is available for use and allow representatives of the U.S. Department of Justice to ensure the court’s order is being followed during the Nov. 5 election.
Hilariously, Thornapple officials, backed by a pro-Trump group, claimed that the law did not apply to the town because the law applied only to electronic voting equipment, which they no longer had because they illegally removed it. That's like saying you didn't steal a ton of money from a bank because you don't have the money anymore after spending it all.
The town of Thornapple's woes doesn't end there. There are still two complaints pending with the Wisconsin Election Commission. Odds are they won't take any action past what the feds did, but still, these MAGAs deserve to sweat a little.
