Harry Wait from Racine County, Wisconsin has been charged with two counts of Election Fraud and two counts of Unauthorized Use of an Individual’s Personal Identifying Information, after ordering ballots in other people’s names in a demonstration on how easy it is to cast a fraudulent ballot in Wisconsin.
As we previously reported, following the 2020 election, Wait, who runs a government watchdog group called “Hot Government”, conducted a sting operation to show how easy it is to harvest ballots in the state.
He now faces up to 13 years in prison.
In July of 2022, according to the Wisconsin DOJ complaint, Wait went on the MyVoteWi.Gov website to order ballots under 10 different names, including State Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and Racine Mayor Cory Mason.
In a video published to Wait’s Hot Government Rumble channel, Wait holds up ballots he received at his address that were not his but were, in deed, sent to him.
Wait subsequently alerted the Racine County Sheriff Christopher Schmaling, that he conducted this sting operation and offered to turn himself in, hoping law enforcement would act on his information.
Schmaling declined to press charges.
The Wisconsin Examiner writes:
In a Facebook post, Schmaling wrote that anyone who has the name and date of birth of a registered voter can request and cast an absentee ballot as that person through Wisconsin’s MyVote system. Schmaling wrote that this can be done without needing to provide a photo ID and the ballot can be sent to a different address than the one where the voter is registered.
Schamling wrote that this “vulnerability” was discovered when several Racine County residents attempted to request ballots under the names of their friends and government officials — an apparent violation of the law. One Racine County resident, Adrian Melby, told the Journal Times that she had a friend request a ballot under her name, while the group Honest Open and Transparent (H.O.T) Government requested ballots as Racine Mayor Cory Mason and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos.
But the Wisconsin Elections Commission did decide to go after Wait.
After requesting and obtaining the ballots, Melby and H.O.T. Government turned themselves into Schmaling, who responded by calling foul about the apparent flaw they’d found in the system, not the crimes they apparently broke in the process.
“Claiming that by committing a crime by submitting false information to obtain an absentee ballot somehow reveals a vulnerability of our system is inaccurate and irresponsible,” WEC Administrator Meagan Wolfe said in a statement. “Intentionally using someone else’s identity to subvert the system does not demonstrate a flaw with MyVote, but rather a flaw with that person’s conduct. A nefarious person who chooses to impersonate someone else in order to gain official documents of any kind – whether for election use or any other purpose – is clearly violating state and federal law and could face consequences.”
Wait says he “broke the law to save the republic” and he “will take the penalty any day of the week.
