MADISON, Wis. — 2022 will bring new legislative boundaries, new lawmakers and possibly new changes to how elections are run in Wisconsin.
Spectrum News 1 Political Reporter Anthony DaBruzzi sat down with Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos to get a better sense of what the next year could look like for voters. You can watch the segment above.
Democratic Gov. Tony Evers vetoed GOP-drawn legislative maps setting up a legal battle. In late November, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled there is no need for the maps to make significant changes to boundaries.
“Well, I mean, we passed legislation a decade ago that drew maps that it had been challenged literally for a decade, and they were found to be constitutional,” Vos said. “There was a very minor tweak made in one district that made it a map that everybody said that met the challenges that the court put forward, and so did the liberals. Here we sit 10 years later, isn't it best to take a map that everybody knew is constitutional and make the least changes to it? That's what our map does. So the court basically found that least changes strategy makes sense.”
“So I anticipate a map similar to the one that was passed by the legislature become law, and that's good for the state,” Vos explained. “It was constitutional before, it'll be constitutional going forward, and people can know that we have legislators running for office in the spring, and, hopefully, some people listening will choose to take out the metal and run for public office themselves.”
During a panel discussion at the Capitol in December, State Sen. Kathy Bernier, R-Chippewa Falls, called for an end to the probe led by retired Justice Michael Gableman, which Speaker Vos authorized.
“Well, when I signed the original contract, it was for us to conclude our election investigation by the end of 2021,” Vos said. “In my wildest dreams, I never thought that we would see the level of roadblocks and obfuscation that Democrats have thrown up. Rather than saying let's get to the bottom of it, we might not like the process, but let's participate and show that there was nothing wrong, or in our mind, there were things wrong, they've chosen just to try to use McCarthyite tactics to somehow imply that Justice Gableman isn't an honest, fair broker. I think he is.”
“So, as I mentioned before, we passed six bills in the summer, which dealt with a lot of these issues dealing with money coming in from out-of-state billionaires,” Vos said. “How do we deal with election administration? How do we try to have standardized voting processes? Gov. Evers vetoed those. We're going to come back in the spring, and we're going to put forward those ideas that are slightly changed to make it even better, but also bringing forward other ideas to make elections more fair. I hope people will take a look at those and realize that the only way that you have confidence in the election in 2022 is by making sure that any mistakes that happen never occur again, or at least we try not to have them happen.”
“I guess I've thought about that, too,” Vos said. “I think it's the opposite that the people who are undermining the elections are the ones who are refusing to admit that things were done wrongly. We now have two separate investigations that found problems with the election administration. We have a third one ongoing, and what have they done with each one? Basically, said it's a red herring, and it's called the big lie. The only big lie is the fact that there were problems. I know there were. Saying that there were no problems, that's the big lie.”
You can watch more from Anthony's one-on-one interview with Speaker Vos, including their conversation about the state budget and COVID-19 vaccine mandates, here.
Spectrum News 1 also sat down with the outgoing Assembly Democratic Minority Leader Gordon Hintz, which you can watch here.