Even after being sued into submission in a relentless lawfare campaign, the tiny northern Wisconsin town of Thornapple has notched a victory for election integrity.
The win comes after President Joe Biden’s weaponized Department of Justice unleashed an army of attorneys on the Rusk County community of 711 residents.
‘No Legal Right’
Dane County Circuit Court Judge Jacob Frost in late December dismissed an appeal from Thornapple voter and left-wing activist Erin Webster that sought to stop Thornapple township from using hand-marked, paper ballots for its elections. Webster, chairwoman of the Rusk County Democratic Party, claimed her right to vote was “impaired” and that her right to run as a candidate was “injured” by the town’s switch in 2023 from electronic voting machines to traditional paper ballots.
In his order granting the town’s motion to dismiss, Frost disagreed with Webster’s claimed pain. The judge said the plaintiff lacked standing to appeal a Wisconsin Elections Commission’s ruling last year that denied her complaint because Webster was not an aggrieved party. In short, Webster didn’t show how she was impaired or injured by Thornapple’s election method.
But even if the Democratic Party official’s right had been hindered, Frost asserts that her claim would still fail because she has no “legal right to choose the Town’s method of counting ballots.” As a judge, Frost wrote, he has no authority to set aside state law “because Ms. Webster believes the choice to allow paper ballots was a poor choice by the Legislature.”
“State law clearly says towns like Thornapple can use paper ballots. That’s what they did, and the court affirmed both their decision and their right to make it,” said Nicholas Wanic, the America First Policy Institute attorney who argued the case.
Biden DOJ Lays the Hammer Down
AFPI has represented the town in its nearly two-year legal battle with a left-leaning lawfare firm, the Biden Department of Justice, and Webster’s relentless campaign to force Thornapple to stop using what the liberal activist describes as the “demonstrably less-reliable” hand-marked paper ballots.
Webster has been picking at Thornapple’s traditional ballot-counting method since at least April 2024, when she called her town board member and complained that election law required the town to use voting machines, particularly for disabled voters. She recorded the call and posted it on YouTube.
“I called my Supervisor Jack Zupan after I voted and there was no voting machine at my polling location. The County clerk told me it was legally required per Federal ADA guidelines,” Webster wrote in the description of her YouTube video. “I wanted to know why the town would not have the electronic machines, so I called him. I realized immediately I should record what he was saying.”
She didn’t like what the supervisor had to say on the subject of voting machine security, integrity, and transparency. A liberal crusade was born.
In May of 2024, Department of Justice came calling. DOJ sent a pointed letter to the town stating that “Some voters with disabilities had reported their requests to use accessible voting machines in the primary election were not granted,” according to the liberal Wisconsin Examiner. The letter warned Thornapple officials that the town needed to provide at least one electronic voting machine to be in compliance with Help America Vote Act to ensure voters with disabilities can cast ballots independently and privately.
The DOJ subsequently filed a federal lawsuit against the community, and a federal judge granted a preliminary injunction demanding Thornapple provide electronic voting systems for November’s presidential election. The town appealed but the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals last July upheld the lower court’s ruling.
‘A Little Absurd’
At the same time, the Justice Department went after the town of Lawrence in Brown County, a Green Bay bedroom community of about 6,700 residents. Lawrence government officials quickly reached a settlement with the DOJ and brought back the voting machines that, like Thornapple, they traded in 2023 for traditional paper ballots.
“We commend Lawrence for working with the Justice Department to swiftly remedy this violation by taking simple action to ensure that federal elections are accessible to all eligible voters,” then-Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said at the time.
In December, Thornapple officials signed a settlement that required the town to provide at least one voting machine “accessible to people with disabilities.”
Thornapple treasurer and chief election inspector Suzanne Pinnow said the DOJ forced a little town with very limited resources to maintain the voting machine. This, Pinnow said, despite the fact that Thornapple doesn’t have any disabled voters on its voter rolls, which she said number around 400. She said it has been about a decade since a town election officials needed to assist a voter with a disability.
“I thought is was a little absurd because we were such a small community,” the election official told The Federalist in a phone interview. She said the DOJ brought in a team of eight attorneys to the trial.
“My first thought was, ‘Don’t you have better things to do with my tax dollars?’” said Pinnow, a 26-year election official.
‘We Just Wanted to Know’
Simultaneously, the town had to defend itself against a similar complaint with the Wisconsin Elections Commission, filed by Democratic Party lawfare firm Law Forward and Disability Rights Wisconsin. The commission in November 2024 ordered Pinnow and the Thornapple board to provide a “HAVA-compliant” voting machine in all future elections. The Justice Department also sent election monitors to the town for the presidential election.
But the Elections Commission rejected Webster’s complaint, represented again by Law Forward. The complaint alleged that small communities like Thornapple needed the commission’s permission before they switch to hand-counted paper ballots. They do not, WEC said in its 5-1 ruling.
Webster then appealed the commission’s ruling to the Dane County Court, where the judge told her to take a hike.
The Federalist reached out to Webster for comment through the Rusk County Democratic Party email. Someone curtly responded, “Do you understand libel?”
“I do. Is this your comment for the story?” The Federalist asked in a follow-up email.
“Sure,” the unidentified individual answered.
‘Gold Standard’
Pinnow said town supervisors made the change to hand-counted paper ballots because they had concerns about voting machines following the rigged 2020 presidential election. Just three companies, ES&S, Hart InterCivic, and Dominion, own about 90 percent of the U.S. voting system market, Fast Company reported.
“We just wanted to know our election was run with integrity,” she said.
Pinnow said Thornapple election officials received a lot of calls from clerks in other communities who said they were following the legal battles closely. They, too, were looking to move away from machines and back to traditional paper ballots. Thornapple was a kind of test case.
The move to paper ballots, whole-heartedly endorsed in President Donald Trump’s executive order on election integrity, is going on In several states, from California to Maine. That’s because hand-marked paper ballots are the “gold standard for transparency, security, and public trust,” said Kenneth Blackwell, chairman of Election Integrity at AFPI and former Ohio Secretary of State.
“When voters can see the process with their own eyes—without black-box machines—they have more confidence in the results,” he said, adding that the recent Wisconsin ruling is a victory for Thornapple “and every town that wants to run honest, auditable elections.”
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