FVI November 2023 John Pudner - Wisconsin Patriots Toolbox

November 2023: John Pudner, president, Take Back Our Republic Action Fund

Thirty-five people attended the November 6 meeting of Fox Valley Initiative, held at Freedom Project Academy in Appleton, to hear a presentation by John Pudner, president of Take Back Our Republic Action Fund. He addressed several aspects of election integrity — including a couple interesting stories about election fraud in other states — and made the case for a special type of ranked choice voting known as Final Five Voting.

Note: For those of you interested in hearing more about Final Five Voting, Pudner will be debating Heather Smith of the MacIver Institute on Tuesday, November 14, at 6:30 p.m. Learn more here. DEBATE CANCELLED

And for those of you interested only in the photos, skip to photos here!

Election Fraud: Not a New Problem

Pudner reminded everyone that “Trump was not the first candidate to contest a presidential election result,” although the media seems to have forgotten that fact.

He noted many elections have been riddled with fraud. He provided an example of how to pay people to vote:

A person holding money to pay other people goes in to vote first. He takes a ballot, punches it to register votes for the candidates he wants, but doesn’t turn the ballot in at the counting machine. He steps outside and provides the pre-punched ballot to a person in line who wants to get paid. That person takes the pre-punched ballot and also picks up his own unpunched ballot. He puts the pre-punched ballot into the counting machine and takes the unpunched ballot outside, where he gets his money. The guy with the money punches that ballot, hands it to the next person who wants to get paid for his/her vote, and the cycle continues.

Pudner also described following vans on election day, noting

you can’t find a van to rent on election day because the Democrat Party has rented them all. A van full of people pulls up at a polling place; everyone climbs out, votes, then gets back into the van ... which moves on to another polling place, where the same people get out and vote again.

He said Wisconsin’s adoption of a voter I.D. law in 2015 solved the problem of Chicago Democrats coming up to Wisconsin and voting.

Pudner said the biggest remaining problem in Wisconsin is same-day voter registration. This especially impacts voting on college campuses, where Democrats knock on dorm-room doors to encourage students to vote even if they’ve voted absentee in their home states. With same-day registration, there’s no way to check whether the student has previously voted at home.

In 2021, a constitutional amendment to authorize same-day voting was on the ballot in New York. That amendment, known as Proposal 3, was defeated, with 56% of voters preferring to keep the state’s 10-day registration rule in place. New York voters also rejected Proposal 4, which would have permitted universal vote-by-mail.

Money Problems

Democrats’ willingness to exploit campaign finance loopholes is also a big problem, Pudner said. He described ActBlue, a pass-through political action committee that raises billions of dollars on behalf of Democrats and left-wing causes. The website prominently features a continuously updated “ticker” that, at the time of this writing, reported more than $12.5 trillion raised through the ActBlue website since its inception in 2004. According to the website, “14,167,137 Democratic donors have saved their payment information with us via an ActBlue Express account.”

Pudner noted ActBlue does not allow its credit card processors to check the zip codes and CVV numbers for credit card payments made on the site. That makes credit card fraud much easier, he said. He also said he asked a programmer to investigate whether Act Blue could be used to make donations anonymously; within 24 hours, the programmer was able to write a program that would interact with ActBlue to do just that.

Peter Bernegger of Election Watch, Inc. has investigated the use of “smurfs” to launder large sums of money by making numerous small donations to liberal PACs, committees or directly to candidates’ campaigns. (Concerned you may have been smurfed? Check here.)

The Left, Pudner said, “simply has more billionaires than we do.” Democrats can afford to spend millions of dollars trying to get conservatives to vote for someone other than the Republican candidate. Candidates from the Constitution Party, Libertarian Party, “Pro-Life Party,” etc. benefit from spending on their behalf intended to split the Republican vote. They even spend money in Republican primaries, funding the “weaker” candidate who they think might be easier to beat in the general election. He suggested this happened in the most recent Wisconsin Supreme Court race, where Dan Kelly may have benefited from spending by outsiders who calculated he would be easier to beat in the general election than Jennifer Dorow would have been.

How to Kill the Spoiler Operations: Final Five Voting

In what he acknowledged would be the controversial part of his presentation, Pudner suggested Final Five Voting could be the solution to the Democrats’ spoiler operations. He said it could also address a concern raised at past Fox Valley Initiative events (for example, by Brian Schimming, chair of the Republican Party of Wisconsin, and Mike Thomas of Appleton Concerned Taxpayers): The losers in a Republican Party primary tend to “take their votes and go home” rather than support the candidate who won the primary. That appeared to have happened in the 2022 gubernatorial election; a third party funded an attack campaign against candidate Rebecca Kleefisch in the gubernatorial primary; her people refused to support the primary’s winner, Tim Michels.

Pudner acknowledged that Final Five Voting is a form of ranked choice voting (RCV) — which he and pretty much everyone in the room oppose. However, he said, not all forms of RCV are bad. He offered a handout, linked here, that compares standard RCV to Final Five Voting.

Most importantly, he said, most forms of RCV ask people to rank candidates in the primary. That can be very confusing, he noted: In the 2021 New York City mayoral race, for example, Democrat voters had 13 candidates to rank!

Final Five Voting, by contrast, leaves the primary election essentially unchanged: a voter picks only one candidate on primary day. The one change to the primary is that you don’t have to choose the party whose primary you want to vote in.

Two bills pending in the Wisconsin state legislature (see SB 528 and AB 563) would institute Final Five Voting for U.S. Senate and Congress. The bills explain (emphasis added):

This bill provides that electors may vote in the primary for U.S. senator and representative in Congress for any candidate regardless of party affiliation, and the five persons who receive the greatest numbers of votes for each such office are nominated to appear on the general election ballot. Under the bill, independent candidates for such offices and candidates of minor parties appear on the top-five primary ballot, and electors may vote for these candidates in the same manner as other candidates. ...

The bill requires instant runoff voting at the general election for U.S. senator and representative in Congress. Under instant runoff voting, voters use a ranked-choice ballot and have the option to cast their vote for each office in order of preference. If a voter ranks more than one candidate for an office, the voter must indicate a preference between the candidates by designating one as “first choice," another as “second choice," and subsequent choices in sequential preference. A voter may also indicate as one of their preferences a write-in candidate for any office.

Under the bill an instant runoff is used to determine the candidate elected. All votes are tallied and the candidate with fewest first-choice preferences is eliminated. A voter who has chosen that candidate has his or her single vote transferred to the voter's second-choice preference. The votes are tallied again and this process continues until there are two remaining candidates. At that point, the candidate with a majority of the combined first-choice and reallocated preferences wins.

Note these bills apply only to elections to U.S. Senate and Congress. However, consider how the bills might have affected the 2022 Wisconsin gubernatorial election.

More than 1.1 million Wisconsinites voted in the August 2022 primary. Vote totals were as follows:

Tony Evers	491,656	41.5%
Tim Michels	326,969	27.5%
Rebecca Kleefisch	291,384	24.6%
Tim Ramthun	41,639	3.5%
Kevin Nicholson	24,844	2.0%
Adam Fischer	8,139	<1%
Other/Write-In	975	<1%

Without Final Five Voting, only Evers and Michels were on the general election ballot, and Evers squeaked by with just 51.1 percent of the vote – 90,239 more votes than Michels.

With Final Five Voting, Wisconsin’s November general election ballot would have offered Evers, Michels, Kleefisch, Ramthun, and Nicholson.

Is it possible, as Pudner said, that some of the Kleefisch (and no doubt Ramthun, too) primary voters sat out the general election, refusing to vote for Michels? Is it possible that 90,000+ of those might have chosen Michels as their second choice, if given the option, allowing him to finish with a higher vote total than Evers?

Final Five Voting can be confusing, and Pudner acknowledged there would need to be a big educational effort to help people understand it. But he emphasized Final Five Voting is a way to eliminate the Left’s ability to eliminate the strongest Republican candidate. “Democrats are taking over our primaries,” he said, “and Final Five Voting is a way to kill their spoiler operations.”