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A new report by the nonprofit Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism shows how the Fond du Lac County district attorney came to charge a woman with felony voter fraud for mistakenly registering with the address where she gets her mail—upending her life and costing her thousands of dollars while the DA runs for state attorney general on a platform supporting former President Donald Trump’s lies about widespread voter fraud.
Ironically, Jamie Wells’ mistake was made because she wanted to register and vote for Trump.
The Wisconsin Watch story follows Wells through the ordeal of being charged by Eric Toney, one of two Republican candidates running in next month’s primary election to challenge incumbent Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul.
Wells and her husband are on the road most of the year, living in a 42-foot camper as his work takes them to numerous farms across the state. They have retrieved their mail in a rental box at a UPS Store in Fond du Lac for 30 years.
But in January, while visiting family in Louisiana, Wells learned Toney had charged her with voter fraud for her mistake.
“It’s obviously for political reasons and it’s really disappointing,” said Ion Mayn, an assistant professor of political science at UW-Madison, to Wisconsin Watch.
He called it abhorrent that Toney was charging and publicly humiliating voters like Wells for making a mistake as opposed to being part of an intentional effort to help tilt an election through widespread fraud.
“Here you have a prosecutor [Toney] who is taking a really tortured view, in my mind, of what this provision (in the statute) means,” said Mayn. “I just find that so irresponsible.
Toney, who calls himself “one of the most aggressive prosecutors of election fraud” in the state, refused requests from Wisconsin Watch to comment specifically on his prosecution of Wells, whose legal bills will run to an estimated $17,000.
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