Thomas Tiffany

Green Bay Mayor Eric Genrich on June 3 rebuked comments by a Republican candidate for governor, U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, about the city's handling of the 2020 election, a continued point of contention in the country’s politics.

In a May 28 segment of the 620 WTMJ radio show Point Taken, Tiffany was asked by host Steve Scaffidi his thoughts on the 2020 election.

After Scaffidi requested that Tiffany give examples of what Tiffany called “a few improprieties here in Wisconsin,” Tiffany said, “The Green Bay mayor hired a political operative from New York City to come and help them in Green Bay.”

Tiffany said, “They ultimately forced the city clerk, an elected official, out. It should only be elected officials that take care of these elections. That political operative, not elected, ended up with three of the four keys to the central count.” (The city clerk in Green Bay is appointed, not elected. Towns in Wisconsin may either appoint or elect their clerks. The Brown County clerk, as county clerks elsewhere in the state, is elected.)

Responding to host Kristin Brey and Scaffidi’s comments that the actions didn’t equate to election fraud, Tiffany said, “Yeah, it doesn’t mean that, but you have these improprieties, and people continue to ask questions about it.”

The exchange, lasting just under a minute, prompted Genrich’s reply several days later on X, formerly Twitter.

“Hey @TomTiffanyWI – Keep our city’s name out of your mouth when you’re spewing lies about the 2020 election,” Genrich wrote. “Or even better, just knock it off entirely. If you think it’s a path to political success, talk to Michael Gableman. He can’t charge by the hour anymore."

The exchange resurfaced Green Bay’s 2020 election process during a race for governor still months from its conclusion.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, thousands of Green Bay residents waited for hours to vote in-person during the April 2020 election. There were two polling locations, in part due to few poll workers. The city then created an election committee, which reviewed a $1.6 million grant from the Center for Tech and Civic Life to be spent on election costs for the August and November 2020 elections. The grant unanimously passed the City Council that July.

With some of the grant that got funding from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the city hired Michael Spitzer-Rubenstein, at that point a consultant with the National Vote at Home Institute. Some conservatives criticized the hiring for adding partisanship into the voting process, pointing to Spitzer-Rubenstein’s prior work on Democratic congressional campaigns. The legality of the larger grant was also litigated and upheld in court following claims that it would disproportionately help Democratic turnout and violated election laws.

A report by then-City Attorney Vanessa Chavez into the 2020 election said Spitzer-Rubenstein did not have keys to the central ballot counting location at the KI Convention Center. Chavez wrote that “In speaking with employees, the only concern raised regarding Mr. Spitzer-Rubenstein was whether he should have helped poll workers find information in the Central Count training manual.”

An investigation by the Green Bay Press-Gazette found then-City Clerk Kris Teske had complained for months that the mayor’s office had overtaken planning in the November election. The city’s Human Resources department concluded that Teske’s complaints were unsubstantiated. Teske later resigned.

Green Bay voters ultimately cast about 25,000 votes for former President Joe Biden and about 21,000 for Trump.

The nonpartisan Pew Research Center found belief in how well the 2020 election was run correlated with whether a voter cast their ballot for Trump or Biden. The think tank also found those Republicans who relied on the Trump campaign as a primary news source were more likely to say that election fraud in mail-in voting was a major issue versus Republicans for whom the campaign was not a major source of information.

Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos in 2021 hired Gableman, a conservative former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, to investigate the state’s 2020 election at the request of Trump. Gableman has since reached a tentative agreement to a suspend his law license for three years after violating public records laws, being found to have done little investigating, and threatening to jail Genrich, along with the mayor of Madison, during his review. Gableman faces a potential loss of his law license forever, a decision that must be made by the state Supreme Court and has been supported by Vos.

In a separate inquiry, the conservative group Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty issued a report in 2021 that said "there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud" in the state after examining about 20,000 ballots.