First up was Arizona, which allowed the Cyber Ninjas, an outfit with zero auditing experience to—oh, wow, this can’t be right, can it?—conduct an audit. You know, because they were convinced the historically unpopular guy who bragged about passing a dementia test and isn’t smart enough to work as an assistant glory hole attendant anywhere in the contiguous United States couldn’t possibly have lost an election.

And now? Oh, right. Now Wisconsin is ready to shit itself in public, too. And you won’t believe what the guy they’ve put in charge of their election “review” is saying:

The attorney leading a partisan review of Wisconsin’s 2020 election acknowledged this week that he doesn’t understand how elections are supposed to be run.

Not a great start, but okay.

“Most people, myself included, do not have a comprehensive understanding or even any understanding of how elections work,” [Michael] Gableman said in an interview late Tuesday before addressing the Green Bay City Council about his plans.

Gableman’s acknowledgment that he does not know how elections work comes 10 months after he told a crowd of supporters of former President Donald Trump without evidence that elected officials had allowed bureaucrats to “steal our vote.” Recounts in the state’s two most populous counties and court decisions determined Joe Biden won by more than 20,000 votes, or 0.6 percentage points.

Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Gerrymanderland) hired Gableman, a former state Supreme Court justice, to review the election. He gave him a $676,000 budget, which is a huge waste considering you can thoroughly make a fool of yourself in Wisconsin for $11 worth of Jägermeister—and the hangover will be far less severe.

But hey, maybe there’s more method to this madness than meets the eye. Except that, as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel notes, “A spokeswoman for Vos did not say why the speaker hired someone who does not know the ins and outs of elections, rather than an expert on the issue.” 

Oops.

Also—apologies for burying the lede—Gableman attended Pillow Man Mike Lindell’s barmy cyber symposium in South Dakota in August. So, yeah, this is another grotesque shitshow, and we all get front-row seats whether we want them or not.

Gableman recently issued subpoenas to the mayors of Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay, Kenosha, and Racine—which, by some wild coincidence, are home to some of the largest communities of color in the state. In response, Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said, “This constant rehashing of the 2020 election is not only demoralizing for our clerks, it is corrosive to our democracy. There is no wrongdoing to investigate which justifies subpoenas and interrogations.”

Meanwhile, Democratic Rep. Mark Spreitzer, a member of the Assembly Elections Committee, stated the glaringly obvious: “If you are going to investigate an election, you should start by educating yourself about how elections work. How can we trust the findings of a person who doesn’t understand how elections work?”

Yeah, you can’t. But this isn’t about building trust. It’s about stirring up enough mud to give Donald Trump and his cronies cover for all the awful things they still plan to do to our democracy—experience be damned.