100% Voter Turnout in Wisconsin Nursing Homes Isn’t Normal. Will it Happen Again in 2024?
Close to 100 nursing homes housing non-verbal dementia patients boasted unbelievably high voter turnout in Wisconsin’s 2020 election. Now voting rights advocates are asking questions the Left doesn’t want to answer.
Saddam Hussein famously won reelection just 6 months before the U.S. invasion of Iraq with 100 percent voter turnout, 100 percent of the 11.5 million votes, and zero invalid ballots.
Civic-minded North Koreans unanimously reelected Dear Leader Kim Jong Un with an amazing 99.99 percent turnout in 2019—just as they have like clockwork since 1957.
Turkmenistan’s president won reelection with 97 percent of the vote in 2012, with endorsements from most of his opponents—all of them members of his Democratic Party. Then there was his Communist predecessor’s smashing 99.5 percent victory in 1992, when no one else was allowed to run against him.
In March 2024, Vladimir Putin’s United Russia Party snagged 88.5 percent of the national vote, giving Putin a fifth term in office. Yet even that doesn’t hold a candle to the time the party won 99.5 percent of votes in Chechnya in 2011, an astounding vote of confidence from a region the Russian autocrat brutally repressed just two years prior.
And then there’s Wisconsin.
Most Americans would laugh at instances of banana republic-level voter turnout rates at any point in our democratic republic’s two-and-a-half century record. Yet that’s exactly what happened at dozens of nursing homes across 5 Badger State counties in 2020—and Democrats are shockingly quiet about it.
(MORE WISCONSIN: Tammy Baldwin is Using Election Interference King Marc Elias to Interfere in the 2024 Election)
Elder Abuse
At least 91 nursing homes reported 95–100 percent turnout in the Nov. 2020 election, according to data from the nonpartisan Center for Vulnerable Voters, which advocates for seniors, the disabled, and other voters whose ballots are at risk of not being counted.
Those counties include the “blue” vote-rich Milwaukee, Dane (Madison), Brown (Green Bay), Racine, and Kenosha.
Many of these elderly voters suffer from illnesses that renders them medically “incompetent” or otherwise incapable of voting—including “severe dementia”—as substantiated by witness interviews in the 2022 Office of the Special Counsel report. Experts discovered:
- One resident in Dane County deemed incompetent by doctors since 1972;
- A voter who had “not [been] of sound mind for over 10 years”;
- A Brown County senior who had unlawfully voted twice by absentee ballot;
- Another voter in the same care home whose signature did not match the signature on his absentee ballot envelope;
- A 104-year-old voter who is “clearly incompetent” and had been for several years;
- And multiple seniors who were not legally permitted to vote due to a court-imposed guardianship order, yet voted anyway.
These are not voters who could be expected to request, properly fill out, and return an absentee ballot on their own. Yet these incapacitated individuals did so at extraordinarily high rates—the result, experts say, of staff pressure erroneously enabled by the Wisconsin Election Commission (WEC).
Killing Democracy
As a protected group, nursing home residents are normally aided in voting (typically by mail) by Special Voting Deputies appointed by municipal clerks and enshrined in Wisconsin state law. These deputies are authorized by law to supervise, issue, and help complete residents’ ballots.
Yet in June 2020, the WEC directed—in a 5–1 vote—all municipal clerks statewide not to send Special Voting Deputies to nursing homes, but instead mail ballots directly to their residents—using COVID-19 to gut all safeguards against elder abuse.
The Special Counsel discovered that nursing home staff and administrators:
- illegally “helped” residents mark their ballots;
- illegally stood in as witnesses for residents’ absentee ballots;
- very likely forged residents’ signatures;
- and pressured residents to vote who were deemed medically incompetent to vote or had their right to vote taken away by court order.
A 2021 investigation by Racine County Sheriff Christopher Schmaling found employees at Ridgewood Care Center admitted to illegally helping residents fill in their ballots. The investigation was prompted by a concerned Racine Co. woman who told authorities her elderly mother “didn’t have the mental capacity to vote absentee in the months leading up to her death in October” 2020. Democrats called the investigation a “political stunt,” but are otherwise mum on the scandal.
Post-election turnout statistics show this didn’t happen in isolated instances, either.
The Center for Vulnerable Voters estimates 92,000 Wisconsin seniors live in nursing homes statewide. For nursing home voter turnout in to reach 95–100 percent in any county—let alone these 5 highly populous counties—facility staff would’ve had to pressure residents to vote not a handful of times, but do so on an industrial scale.
A similar stunt occurred in Michigan. In Feb. 2022, Macomb County nursing home employee Tranae Myesha Rainey was found guilty of forging signatures on multiple absentee ballot applications in 2020 at the Father Murray Nursing Home and sent to jail. Worse, the voters hadn’t even requested the ballots.
In Texas, a social worker was indicted for voter fraud—a felony—after registering mentally incapacitated seniors to vote without their consent ahead of the 2020 election.
This isn’t democracy in action; it’s a sham that would impress the tin pot dictators we used to make fun of. So why won’t Wisconsin Democrats demand more investigations and prosecutions to protect our most at-risk voters before it happens again in 2024?
(READ MORE: Swing State Dems Support Illegal Alien Voting in Our Elections)
