A group of 10 Republicans who falsely attested that they were electors certifying that Donald Trump carried Wisconsin in the 2020 presidential election on Wednesday acknowledged President Biden's victory and agreed to not again act as electors, genuine or not, in any election involving the former president. In settling a lawsuit, they also agreed to revoke the official-looking paperwork they filed claiming Trump had won and conceded they were not Wisconsin's true electors. It's the first time any state's pro-Trump electors have agreed to withdraw their false filings and to not do such a thing in another election, the Washington Post reports.
The lawsuit, whose plaintiffs include two of the state's actual 2020 electors, argued that the Republicans acted in a conspiracy to defraud voters. It sought as much as $200,000 from each of the Trump backers, but the settlement does not involve money. They had met about an hour after the Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld Biden's victory, a decision Trump unsuccessfully asked the US Supreme Court to overrule. The Republicans said they filed the paperwork to Congress to ensure their votes would count if Biden's victory was overturned, per the AP.
"The Wisconsin electors were tricked and misled into participating in what became the alternate elector scheme and would have never taken any actions had we known that there were ulterior reasons beyond preserving an ongoing legal strategy," former state GOP Chairman Andrew Hitt said in a statement Wednesday. Hitt said he won't support Trump in the 2024 election. In the settlement, all 10 agreed to cooperate with the Justice Department. The deal does not cover possible criminal investigations of the group, per CNN.
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There is no known criminal investigation of the Wisconsin electors currently underway, the AP reports, but fake electors have been charged in Georgia, Michigan, and, most recently, Nevada. On Wednesday, a grand jury in the state indicted six Republicans on charges of offering a false instrument for filing and uttering a forged instrument. "We cannot allow attacks on democracy to go unchallenged," said Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford. (More Election 2020 stories.)
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