Vice President JD Vancetraveled to Wisconsin this week to highlight another new effort by the Trump administration to find a voter fraud unicorn from the 2020 election. Meanwhile, a few more actual instances of voter fraud were uncovered in other states…and you’ll never guess which political party was involved.
But before we get to the latest examples of Republicans committing voter fraud, let’s check in on what Vance said at a rally in Milwaukee on Wednesday:
“I get home and my 6-year-old greets me … and says, ‘Daddy, I’m glad you’re home. I didn’t steal any of the cookies! Well, of course he stole the cookies.”
“So, when I hear a guy protesting out of nowhere, ‘I did not do any election fraud! I did not do any election fraud!’ It makes me wonder, why is that guy protesting so aggressively?”
Vance was referring to Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson, who sent a letter to Vance earlier in the week blasting the administration for another wild goose chase about the 2020 election. As WISN in Wisconsin reports:
“Federal law enforcement agents, deployed at the direction of the President’s administration, have been present in my city, interviewing election officials,” a letter from the mayor to the vice president read, dated July 7. “I know of no justification for this activity.”
“While you are here in Milwaukee — or at any other time — I invite you to see our election operation, to talk to officials who conduct our elections, and scrutinize, firsthand, the extensive security and accuracy in place,” Johnson wrote.
If you deny committing voter fraud, then you definitely committed voter fraud. If you admit to committing voter fraud, as former Mesa County Clerk and Recorder Tina Peters has basically done (repeatedly), then you didn’t really commit voter fraud.
Anyway, as we’ve written repeatedly in this space, evidence of voter fraud is exceedingly rare in the United States. It does happen occasionally, and when it does, it is almost always committed by a Republican. We saw more examples in the last week, as The New Republic explains:
In Massachusetts, the State Ballot Law Commission ruled last week to disqualify Republican candidates for lieutenant governor and attorney general from the state’s primary election after they submitted allegedly forged signatures to get their names on the ballot.
Adam Roof, executive director of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, had filed objections to the veracity of the signatures collected by the campaigns of Anne Manning Martin, who is running for lieutenant governor, and Michael Walsh, who is running for attorney general.
Candidates needed to gather 10,000 signatures to appear on the primary ballot. The commission invalidated 1,279 of Martin’s 10,692 signatures and 1,021 of Walsh’s 10,677 signatures.
In Martin’s case, signature gatherer Joe Bronske allegedly used a list of registered Republican voters to forge hundreds of signatures. The allegedly forged signatures were first noticed by another Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, who had also hired Bronske and found he’d collected signatures from deceased voters.
Ken Paxton
Down in Texas, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate — Ken Paxton — appears to have been committing voter fraud for at least two years. From The Texas Tribune:
Despite his own warnings, Paxton appears to have used an address where he did not live while voting in six elections in the past two years, including in May’s runoff that made him the Republican nominee for U.S. senator, according to records obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.
State Sen. Angela Paxton said in a 2025 divorce filing that Paxton, whom she accused of adultery, moved out of their Collin County home a year earlier. But Paxton continues to list the home’s address in the northern Dallas suburb on his voter registration. Angela Paxton declined to be interviewed. A source close to the Paxtons said the attorney general has not moved back into the home since leaving.
It is unclear where Paxton has lived for the past two years, but reporting by ProPublica and the Tribune has linked him to a home in neighboring Denton County since February.
Three election lawyers told the news organizations that Paxton may have violated the same Texas laws his office cautioned about in its news release.
Paxton is the current Attorney General in Texas. In February, his office warned about exactly the kind of voter fraud Paxton seems to have been committing himself.
It is tedious to keep pointing out that virtually every example of legitimate voter fraud in this country seems to be perpetrated by a Republican, but it’s necessary as long as the GOP keeps trying to make the case that everyone else is committing voter fraud.
July 09, 2026 11:30 AM UTC
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