Kimberly Zapata held the No. 2 position at the Milwaukee Election Commission in October 2022 when she used her government-issued laptop, fake names and phony Social Security numbers to obtain three military absentee ballots, according to a criminal complaint. The ballots — requested on the state’s MyVote site and issued in the names of Holly Adams, Holly Jones, and Holly Brandtjen — were mailed to the suburban Milwaukee address of state Rep. Janel Brandtjen, an election integrity warrior in the key battleground state.
Nearly two years after Zapata pulled her illegal scheme, and three months after the elections official was sentenced on a conviction of misconduct in office, Brandtjen said she’s receiving mail (including political mailers) in the name of Holly Adams.
While sorting through her mail last week, Brandtjen told The Federalist on Tuesday, she was surprised to find a piece addressed to Holly Adams. The lawmaker added that no such individual resides at the family’s suburban Milwaukee home, nor, to the best of her knowledge, ever has.
At first Brandtjen thought it was a “sick joke.” But it’s no coincidence.
With the assistance of individuals who purchased the state’s voter list — at a bank-busting bill of $12,500 — Brandtjen said she was able to confirm that “Holly Adams” is voter ID# 701923079, still fake and still alive and well in the WisVote system, the state’s voter registration database and election management system. So are are “Holly Brandtjen” (voter ID# 701923081) and “Holly Jones” ( voter ID # 701923080). The voter entries, viewed by The Federalist, show the phony names, without a voting history, have been inactivated. But they are being sold along with millions of other would-be and ostensibly won’t be voters to anyone able to purchase the state’s expensive voter list.
“What does this say about the security of our elections? The Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) and the three municipal clerks failed to remove these fake military identities even after the Milwaukee Deputy Clerk, Kim Zapata, was found guilty of election fraud,” Brandtjen said Tuesday in a statement. The lawmaker referred to clerk’s offices in South Milwaukee, Shorewood, and Menomonee Falls, from which the military absentee ballots were sent to the Brandtjen home just days before the 2022 midterm elections.
‘There’s a Huge Flaw Here’
Zapata, who was in charge of Milwaukee’s early and absentee voting and voter registration, claimed that she sent the ballots to Brandtjen to expose the security flaws in the state’s election system. Zapata said she hoped the lawmaker, who doggedly led a state Assembly committee investigating election law violations and irregularities in the contentious 2020 election, would bring the weaknesses to light.
Zapata told police that “she went to the MyVote website and fabricated three individuals who did not exist. She used those fabricated names to have military voter absentee requests sent to the municipal clerks in Shorewood, South Milwaukee, and Menomonee Falls. She then had the absentee ballots sent to” Brandtjen.
Zapata said she believed Brandtjen would draw attention to the fraud. She was right, and her correct hunch ended up costing the deputy clerk her job and a criminal record.
“She was a whistleblower, she was showing with the truth, with an action — an imperfect action, but a truthful action — what was going on,” Daniel Adams, Zapata’s attorney, told the jury at her trial.
“There’s a huge flaw here, and if people don’t take it seriously, some nefarious person will do something bad with this flaw in the system,” Adams said. “She (Zapata) wanted to point that out.”
‘Blatant Disregard’
There remains a huge flaw in the system, Brandtjen and others say, despite assurances from the state’s election regulator that there are multiple protections that would stop fraudulent absentee ballots from being counted.
Brandtjen said the presence of the phony military voters in the WisVote system “highlights a blatant disregard for maintaining an accurate voter registry.”
“Even though they are inactive and have no voting history, the system can be updated daily,” she said, referring to the ability of local election clerks to activate and inactivate voters on the rolls. “There is no plausible reason for these names to remain on the inactive list after being implicated in election fraud. This negligence fosters distrust in the system, and unfortunately, no one will be held accountable for this incompetence.”
Wisconsin Elections Commission spokesman Riley Vetterkind explained that third-party groups regularly purchase voter roll data from WEC. That data include names and information of registered and eligible voters, as well as ineligible, unregistered voters.
Wisconsin’s municipal clerks have the “statutory authority” to change a voter’s registration status from active to inactive.
“In this case the records in question were inactivated and flagged as ineligible by the local election officials,” Vetterkind said in an email response to The Federalist. “Ineligible records are not registered to vote, do not appear on pollbooks, and cannot cast a ballot in Wisconsin elections.”
He went on to say that state law prohibits the destruction of the voting records in the WisVote system. That’s why clearly ineligible names like the fake Holly Adams remain on the list. Retaining ineligible voter records helps “safeguard against voter fraud,” the WEC official insists.
“The voter registration database is the means for election officials to track deaths; to track felons; to track people adjudicated incompetent; and to otherwise track any reason for ineligibility or fraudulent activity,” Vetterkind said. “If ineligible records are destroyed, election officials would lose a mechanism to verify these conditions.” He added that the doctored names raising alarm bells with Brandtjen were “intentionally preserved.”
“Permanently removing these voter records would be deleting evidence of the crime Rep. Brandtjen mentioned in her press release,” he said, offering that ineligible records have been flagged so local elections officials can see them and reject them “in the event someone should try to illegally use them in the future.”
Milwaukee Election Commission executive director Paulina Gutierrez confirmed the records have been inactivated and that she does not have access to them.
“Additionally, no activity can be executed under those records,” she added in an email response to The Federalist.
Gutierrez, who was named deputy elections chief after Zapata was fired, found herself suddenly tapped for the top post in the office in May after the city’s Democrat mayor removed controversial director Claire Woodall, citing “internal” issues. Woodall was at the center of Milwaukee’s election integrity troubles in the 2020 election and the state’s “Zuckbucks” scandal.
Draining Confidence
Elections officials and Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson all agreed Zapata’s actions were a “violation of trust,” eroding the public’s already shaky confidence in free and fair elections. Yet Wisconsin’s voter rolls are anything but pristine despite elections officials bragging last year that they had removed more than 100,000 out-of-date voter registrations. It’s the obligatory state database sweep, but the deactivations come only after the voters haven’t cast a ballot for four years and haven’t returned mailers checking their registration status.
Military absentee ballots make up a fraction of the total vote count in Wisconsin elections — less than a tenth of a percent, Wisconsin Elections Commission officials told the Associated Press. But the hotly contested 2020 presidential election in swing state Wisconsin was decided by some 20,000 votes, less than a percentage point, of the total, with Democrat Joe Biden claiming victory over Republican incumbent President Donald Trump.
Members of the military are not required to register to vote in the Badger State. They need only provide their name, address and date of birth to obtain an absentee ballot.
Brandtjen said the Republican-controlled state legislature squandered the chance to investigate flaws in the WisVote system, failing to use its subpoena power to demand accountability for “WEC’s failure to implement a system that verifies military ballot requests and also complies with existing laws.”
“Our agencies aren’t able to cooperate to give voters the transparency and the confidence that these lists are being managed appropriately,” the lawmaker said in an interview with The Federalist.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
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