I’d been meaning to do a post about the Wisconsin Institute of Law and Liberty’s “A Report on the 2020 Election”, an exhaustive (136 pp.) investigation into the 2020 presidential returns in the Badger State, which I liked a lot. Last week, though, the editorialists of the Wall Street Journal deftly summarized some of the report’s highlights, so I’ll save time and summarize that.

As background, WILL is a well-established nonprofit that advocates and litigates over a range of such issues as school choice, economic liberty, and the academic freedom of dissident professors. It’s also active on voting and elections law, where it’s strongly identified with the “ballot integrity” cause.

Much of the report explores possible instances in which local and state Wisconsin officials may have bent the law or otherwise gone too far with the aim of making voting highly convenient, encouraging turnout, and so forth. Those are important issues, and these sections deserve attention, revealing instances of confused guidance, inconsistent practice, and more.

That’s part of the report. Another part: there’s no evidence that any irregularities changed the outcome. “In all likelihood, more eligible voters cast ballots for Joe Biden than Donald Trump.” As the Wall Street Journal editorial puts it, “the stolen-election theory doesn’t hold up.”

President Biden won Wisconsin by a relatively slender 20,682 votes, a 0.7% margin that approximately reversed Trump’s close 2016 win. The question is whether anomalies were big enough to matter, even assuming that they reinforced each other in one direction. (Many did not so correlate, having no clear differential impact on the two sides.) As a legal matter, courts do not and hardly can be expected to throw out all votes that are cast by lawful and qualified voters in full and honest expectation that they are legal. Many absentee ballots with minor irregularities, for example, are missing a data field such as a zip code, but do not for that reason constitute uncountable votes, let alone fraud. 

As for the claims of middle-of-the-night fraud, there is simply no there there. “The raw vote total in Milwaukee County was up only 4.4% from 2016, lower than the average rise of 10.2%,” notes the WSJ. Nor was Biden’s share unusual. WILL: “Put simply, there was no unexplained ‘ballot dump.’”

As a cross-check, “WILL’s hand recount of 20,000 votes from 20 wards, including in Milwaukee, found ‘no evidence of fraudulent ballots.’” It did find a whole lot of ticket-splitting in which suburban Milwaukee voters in places like Mequon voted for both Biden and a GOP downticket.

Here’s a lovely tidbit considering all the deranged conspiracy talk about Dominion voting machines: “Only 14.7% of Wisconsin jurisdictions used Dominion voting machines. Mr. Trump won 57.2% of their ballots, up from 55.7% in 2016.”

On some other issues, including voting without ID by persons claiming shut-in status, dropbox supervision, and a lower rate of rejection of absentee ballots, the state’s methods may have been imperfect or even shoddy, but evidence is lacking that the result was to admit large numbers of invalid votes or harm Trump. On the lower rejection rate for absentee ballots, for example, a nationwide trend helped along by use of dropboxes, “rejection rates were actually slightly higher in areas of the state that voted for Biden.”

There’s been much talk of how a Mark Zuckerberg charity funded election offices during the 2020 contest, paying for greater outreach, voter help, etc. I’m one who thinks this money flow a legitimate target of scrutiny; for example, it might have stoked turnout in uneven ways, especially given that many localities declined to participate. But it is axiomatic that courts would not throw out lawfully cast votes that resulted from more intense local turnout efforts. In any event, by WILL’s estimate, any extra measurable turnout would not have been enough to swing the election. (Incidentally, Shikha Dalmia has lately written a defense of the Zuckerberg election philanthropy and has fewer misgivings than I about its possible downsides.)

There’s more, but here’s an important concluding point. Trump’s challenge to the Wisconsin returns was in no way based on any coherent across-the-board view of how the rules should apply. He simply demanded that hundreds of thousands of votes be thrown out, without applying the same standards in ways that would throw out votes from his voters and counties. Aside from all the other problems — such as the attempt to invalidate honestly cast ballots by Wisconsinites who were just as entitled to vote as anyone else — “Such selective treatment, as WILL says, is what the Supreme Court quashed in Bush v. Gore.” Precisely.

So, to sum up: WILL deserves great credit for both halves of the takeaway. Agree or disagree on the various election policy issues, it’s important for the rule of law that each state make clear and then stick to its announced rules.

And it’s a real public service for WILL (and the WSJ as well) to risk riling some political allies by laying out so clearly why there’s simply no reason to believe that one of the closest states for Biden in 2020 was in any way stolen. That message needs to reverberate in GOP circles.