MADISON, Wis. — New reporting from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reveals that Republican candidates in battleground districts have a long history of election denialism and encouraging voter disenfranchisement. These Republicans include many first-time candidates vying to replace incumbents in competitive districts following fifteen Republican retirements last Spring, including leaders in both chambers.

“The best that WisGOP has to offer is a crop of election-deniers spewing misinformation to try to sow doubt in our elections,” said Democratic Party of Wisconsin spokesperson Rachel La Due. “While voters are struggling to afford everyday living, Republican candidates like David Daniels are banking on their misinformation playbook to work. Wisconsinites are tired of Republican fearmongering and cost-raising policies and are already heading to the polls to welcome in new, Democratic representatives who are committed to uplifting working families, not working to suppress their votes.”

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Dems Raise Alarm Over GOP Candidates’ Election Integrity Stances
By: Jessie Opoien | 10/22/2026

As Democrats seek to secure a majority of Assembly seats for the first time since 2008, they’re raising alarms about a slate of Republican candidates who have taken stances including suggesting mail-in ballots contribute to voter fraud and calling the congressional Jan. 6 committee “criminal.”

They include candidates in battleground districts as well as a few that are more likely to lean Democratic.”It is incredibly concerning to see how many Republican candidates have shared information about our elections that we know to be false,” Assembly Minority Leader Greta Neubauer, D-Racine, said in a statement.”

“They are intentionally spreading misinformation to undermine the credibility of our elections and attempt to disenfranchise voters. When we win a Democratic trifecta, we will ensure that every eligible voter can cast their ballot and know that it will be counted.“

Of the nine Republican candidates Democrats listed, one responded to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel to clarify his comments and answer questions: David Daniels, who’s running in the 53rd Assembly District for the seat being vacated by retiring Rep. Dean Kaufert, R-Neenah.

In audio obtained by the Journal Sentinel, Daniels can be heard during a June conversation at the Neenah Farmers Market saying that “we know” election fraud occurs with mail-in voting – though he suggested it could occur with both parties.

In response to a person telling Daniels he was worried about voter fraud, the candidate said he’d seen a presentation put on by a county clerk and had asked the clerk about mail-in ballots.”

She goes, ‘That’s one of the things.’ You know, mail-in ballots are very easy to be fraudulent,” Daniels said. “You get a ballot and it’s an older person, and their kid fills it out and sends it in.”

Daniels also noted during the conversation that studies have shown voting machines to be accurate.

“So it’s hard to prove, but does it go on? We know it does,” Daniels said. “And does it go on on both sides? Maybe. I don’t know. You can’t just say it’s voter fraud and certainly Democrats. It could go possibly both ways. That’s a whole ‘nother rabbit hole.”

Asked about his June comments, Daniels said he does believe elections in Wisconsin are fair and secure and said he supports mail-in voting as an option for those who need it.

“Like most things that involve many people, things can fall through the cracks. For example the Green Bay duplicate ballot incident. Errors can happen, but it doesn’t have to indicate maliciousness,” Daniels wrote in an emailed response to questions from the Journal Sentinel. “Overwhelmingly evidence points to no widespread fraud or foul play in Wisconsin’s elections over the past few elections. Due to these investigations I would have to say they are fair & secure.”

Asked about changes he’d like to see to election administration to Wisconsin, Daniels said he would like to see improvements to allow ballots to be counted “more efficiently.”

“Take Florida for example. They had the ‘hanging chad’ inncident [sic] some years back. Now that they fixed their system they get results in faster than some local elections in WI,” he said.

Daniels is running against Democrat Becky Nichols. The district favored Democrat Kamala Harris by 4.4 points in the 2024 presidential election.

Democrats point to Republicans in Milwaukee area Assembly races.

Democrats also highlighted a number of since-deleted posts on X by GOP candidate Dylan Pfaffenbach, who is running against Democrat Dan Bukiewicz for the 21st District seat being vacated by retiring Rep. Jessie Rodriguez, R-Oak Creek.

They included a 2024 post referring to ballot drop boxes as “pseudo-voting,” a 2024 post describing the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol as a “criminal J6 board” and posts touting his connections with conservative organizer Scott Presler, who attended the Jan. 6 rally that preceded the attack and promoted false claims of voter fraud in “Stop the Steal” rallies after the 2020 election.

Pfaffenbach did not respond to a request for comment.Neither did Rep. Bob Donovan, R-Greenfield, whom Democrats also criticized for having shared a stage with Presler at a 2023 event held by the Republican Party of Milwaukee County.

Donovan also did not respond to questions about a statement he made during his 2022 Milwaukee mayoral campaign indicating he would eliminate ballot drop boxes if elected to the position, or a 2008 news release in which he called for ending same-day voter registration and curbing absentee voting.

Assembly Democrats pointed to two other GOP incumbents seeking reelection – one of whom drew criticism in the past when he was tapped as a state senator to lead a committee overseeing elections.

Rep. Dan Knodl, R-Germantown, faces a challenge from Democrat Matt Brown in the 24th Assembly District, which went for Republican President Donald Trump by 9.9 points in 2024.

Knodl was one of 15 Wisconsin lawmakers who joined 76 other lawmakers across the country in signing a Jan. 5, 2021, letter to ask then-Vice President Mike Pence to put off certifying the 2020 presidential results a day before a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol to try to prevent Joe Biden from becoming president.

The Republican lawmaker in 2023 told the Journal Sentinel “there were certainly abnormalities” in the 2020 election, but said “there is no denial of the election. President Biden is the president.“

In a column published when he was named to lead the committee, Knodl wrote, “making sure our elections are fair and accurate should be a bipartisan effort and we should be continually looking to improve our election process.”

Democrats also highlighted two Facebook posts from Rep. Clint Moses, R-Menomonie, in which he addressed constituents he said had reached out with concerns “regarding the integrity of the 2020 election” but did not state a position on whether the election was valid.

“People have either told me it was a fair and honest election or it was stolen. No matter what you think, we can all agree that we need an election that is fair, secure, and according to the laws of Wisconsin,” Moses wrote in a 2021 post.

Moses did not respond to a request for clarification on his position. He faces a challenge from Democrat Jeremiah Frederickson in the 92nd District, which went for Trump by 7 points in the 2024 election.

Filling in the rest of Democrats’ list were four candidates in districts where Democrats are favored to win.Lee Whiting, the Republican challenging Democratic Rep. Karen Kirsch in the 7th District, posted on Facebook in 2024 that his unsuccessful 2024 Common Council bid was the result of a “riged” [sic] election. The 7th District went for Harris by 14.5 points that year.

In the 42nd District, which had a similar vote margin in 2024, GOP candidate Keith Miller has shared dozens of posts on Facebook questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 election, including one in December 2025 calling for the arrest of poll workers “who helped Democrats steal the 2020 election.”

On Jan. 6, 2021, Miller, who is running against Democratic Rep. Maureen McCarville, D-DeForest, shared a post asking, “How do you fools ever think we get the country back without bloodshed?”

Neither Whiting nor Miller responded to questions from the Journal Sentinel.Nor did 90th District candidate Jessica Henderson, who indicated in a June Facebook post that she supports curbing absentee voting, citing reports that the Green Bay city clerk’s office mailed duplicate ballots to some voters.

Green Bay City Clerk Celestine Jeffreys resigned in August amid an investigation into her role in the incidents. Henderson is challenging Democratic Rep. Amaad Rivera-Wagner in a district that backed Harris by 10 points.

Republican candidate Paul McGraw, who posted on Facebook in 2022 that “people should be prosecuted” for the way nursing homes handled votingduring the COVID-19 pandemic and in 2024 posted about “a huge absentee ballot dump in the early morning hours” in Milwaukee, also did not respond.

Because ballots can’t be processed until Election Day by law in Wisconsin, votes from absentee ballots often are added to totals in big batches, late at night, fueling conspiracies about fraud.

McGraw is running against Democratic Rep. Brienne Brown, D-Whitewater, in the 43rd Assembly District, which Harris won by 5.2 points in 2024.

The president has repeatedly falsely claimed that he won the 2020 election. A recount in two Wisconsin counties that Trump’s campaign paid for, court rulings, a state audit and a conservative review have confirmed that Trump lost. Biden defeated Trump in Wisconsin by about 21,000 votes.

Former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman previously led a fruitless review of the 2020 presidential election in Wisconsin, which cost taxpayers more than $2 million and turned up little information that wasn’t already known.

Still, earlier this year, federal officials conducted interviews with several election officials and police officers about Wisconsin’s 2020 election, including interviewing a top state election official about how elections are carried out and whether viral conspiracy theories are accurate.