Rightwing effort to oust Wisconsin’s Republican assembly speaker falters

An effort by rightwing activists to recall Wisconsin’s powerful Republican assembly speaker Robin Vos appears to have failed.

The campaign, which was launched in January, was a long-shot attempt by Maga activists to squash their feud with the establishment-leaning assembly speaker by forcing him out of office. It wasn’t the first time the activists, who identify themselves as the “grassroots” of the Wisconsin Republican party, tried to remove him from office. Vos’s opponents challenged him in a primary in 2022 and came within 300 votes of winning.

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The recall illustrates the endurance of the election-denying movement in Wisconsin, whose proponents continue to push false claims of widespread voter fraud in the state. Meagan Wolfe, the non-partisan head of the Wisconsin elections commission has been a focal point of their ire – and when Vos refused to push for her ouster, the movement came for him.

“Our communities’ call to fire Robin Vos is a call for genuine electoral integrity,” Matthew Snorek, who filed the recall petition, said at a press conference on Monday. “It’s a response to his obstruction of fair elections, highlighted by his blocking of the impeachment of election administrator Meagan Wolfe.”

Snorek on Monday said the effort had cleared the bar to trigger a recall election with 11,000 signatures on the petition, but an initial review by the elections commission found far fewer valid signatures than Snorek claimed.

The recall campaign needed to gather signatures from voters in Vos’s district totaling 25% of the vote cast during the last gubernatorial election. In their first review, commission staff found that, in the best-case scenario for the recall campaign, the group had fallen short by 945 signatures.

But that’s just counting signatures collected in the district that Vos was elected to represent. New electoral maps, enacted in February after the Wisconsin supreme court found the state’s previous legislative maps unconstitutional, shifted Vos into a new district. According to the law, the new maps take effect in November – while the supreme court ruling in December mandated that the new maps take effect immediately.

During a meeting on Tuesday, the Wisconsin elections commission (WEC) passed a motion asking the Department of Justice to seek clarification from the Wisconsin supreme court about which district applies in the Vos recall campaign.

Regardless of the court’s directive, the question about which map should apply will likely be irrelevant: the recall campaign appears to have fallen short in Vos’s new district, too, where it garnered only 3,364 signatures – about 12% of the total votes cast in the last gubernatorial election there, and less than half the threshold to trigger a recall there.

The WEC commissioner, Mark Thomsen, said during the Tuesday meeting that some of the signatures had apparently been gathered from people who reside in neither of the districts in question. “I’m really worried that there’s some confusion being generated at the street level over the validity of signatures,” he said.

If the recall effort fails, the group pushing for Vos’s ouster will launch a second attempt to push him out in his primary this August, it said.

In a text message, a representative said it is the campaign’s position that “WEC is seemingly protecting Vos by saying thousands of signatures don’t count and that there’s ambiguity with the maps” and disputed the commission’s initial count of signatures, adding that the group has “the challenge periods to look forward to and we hope to give a voice to the 10,700+ residents of Racine County who signed the petition”.