It’s been nearly a year and a half since the 2020 election. No one has produced any real evidence of the fraud Donald Trump insists plagued the process. And while the special counsel who has spent months and more than half a million taxpayer dollars on an “audit” of the results in Wisconsin has suggested Joe Biden’s victory in the state should be decertified, neither the Republican lawmaker who commissioned the election review nor the special counsel’s own attorney believes that is possible.

And yet, Michael Gableman’s absurd inquiry into the 2020 election continues—alarming Democrats, election officials, and democracy advocates, who say Republicans are using the probe to create a veneer of legitimacy around Trump’s voter-fraud lies and to chip away at democratic institutions ahead of the 2022 midterms.

“All the attacks on the free and fair election of 2020 are laying the groundwork for attacks on the 2022 and 2024 elections,” says Ben Wikler, chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin. “We’re seeing attacks on the core bedrock of democracy at every level in the state.”

The first months of Gableman’s investigation gave little indication that the special counsel was doing much actual work. More than 750 pages of emails from Gableman and his team showed the supposed auditors spending months discussing ways to avoid public scrutiny and purchasing furniture for their office, which is located in a suburban Milwaukee building that also houses a liposuction clinic and an HVAC contractor. Gableman admitted in a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel interview in October, months into his investigation, that he did not have “any understanding of how elections work.”

The state’s Republican-led legislature has given Gableman a $676,000 taxpayer-funded budget for the investigation. A former right-wing state Supreme Court justice, he hired a team of partisans, including Andrew Kloster, a former Trump administration staffer, and Ron Heuer, the head of the Wisconsin Voter Alliance, which unsuccessfully attempted to sue then vice president Mike Pence to prevent him from certifying the 2020 election results—a complaint that a federal judge, James Boasberg, tore to shreds as a “risible” effort to undermine the democratic election. (Heuer has also come under scrutiny for reportedly racist Facebook posts, which he said had nothing to do with the election audit.)

This exercise in slapstick drew praise from Trump himself last month after Gableman baselessly claimed that there had been improprieties in how Wisconsin administered the 2020 election and encouraged lawmakers to decertify its results. It echoes a similar partisan audit Arizona Republicans commissioned last year. But it also underscores how Republicans in swing states Biden narrowly won last cycle are weaponizing the former president’s “rigged election” lies in 2022 and beyond. GOP candidates for key offices in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia are running on “big lie” platforms, while Republican-controlled legislatures in those states are using those 2020 conspiracy theories as the basis for voter-restriction laws and bills that would allow lawmakers to exert more control over the election process. In Wisconsin, much of that legislation has failed to become law, thanks to the state’s Democratic governor, Tony Evers. But Republicans are looking to remove that guardrail in the fall, as a primary field of GOP candidates who have questioned the 2020 results works to defeat him in the 2022 midterm elections.

“Wisconsin Republicans’ circus has long surpassed being a mere embarrassment for our state,” Evers says in a statement to Vanity Fair, noting that “every Republican running for governor has peddled dangerous conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.” “From the beginning, it has never been a serious or functioning effort, it has lacked public accountability and transparency, and it has been a colossal waste of taxpayer dollars. This circus has spread disinformation about our election processes, it has attacked the integrity of our clerks, election administrators, and poll workers, and it has emboldened individuals to harass and demean dedicated public servants."

Gableman was hired in the summer of 2021 by Republican Robin Vos, the Wisconsin Assembly Speaker, to conduct an investigation that would “restore full integrity and trust in elections” and answer the “many questions” that had been raised about the 2020 vote, which he had previously claimed was marred by “irregularities.” Vos produced none of the “indisputable evidence” he claimed existed to back up his allegations, and other reviews—including one by the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty—did not find any. “In all likelihood,” WILL’s inquiry found, “more eligible voters cast ballots for Joe Biden than Donald Trump.”

Gableman was an early supporter of Trump’s “rigged election” conspiracy theory: “I don’t think anyone would be here if we all had confidence that this was an honest election,” he said at a Trump rally in Milwaukee on November 7, 2020, hours after networks called the race for Biden.

As the Associated Press reported in September, Gableman’s first email to county election clerks was sent from a Gmail account bearing the name “john delta”; his message, instructing the officials to preserve records related to the 2020 election, wound up in several of their spam folders. Records suggest Gableman was taking some cues from MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, who put on a South Dakota symposium about supposed election fraud last August that was attended by the special counsel, whom he also contacted via email.

“It’s performance art,” says Ann Jacobs, an election official who chaired the Wisconsin Elections Commission during the 2020 cycle and was subpoenaed by Gableman. “It’s not a legal investigation.”

That performance seemed to reach its denouement in March, when Gableman issued his interim findings. The special counsel made wild accusations, including that Mark Zuckerberg–funded grants from the Center for Tech and Civic Life were used as “bribery” to boost turnout among Black voters. “Black Americans have a strong preference for the Democratic Party,” Gableman told lawmakers, urging them to decertify the 2020 results and to dismantle the Wisconsin Elections Commission. “I believe that the conclusions in this report would support such a process,” he said. Trump cheered the “incredible findings” and encouraged Republicans to act on Gableman’s recommendations.

But the conclusions were easily debunked, and even Vos and Gableman attorney James Bopp have said decertifying the election would be impossible. Even so, Vos extended Gableman’s contract through April soon after and has suggested that criminal charges could spring from the probe—echoing an outrageous November recommendation by Republican Racine County sheriff Christopher Schmaling that five members of the state election board, including Jacobs, be charged with felonies for supposed election fraud at a nursing home—essentially because they decided to send absentee ballots, rather than poll workers, to the facility due to the COVID pandemic. “They’ve defined fraud as their guy not winning,” Jacobs says. “That’s the new definition of fraud.”

“It is incredibly dangerous,” adds Jacobs, who is part of a suit by Wisconsin attorney general Josh Kaul that’s fighting Gableman’s subpoenas. (Neither Vos nor Gableman responded to requests for comment for this article.)

The relentless fraud claims and allegations of wrongdoing by nonpartisan election officials have led to death threats, Jacobs tells Vanity Fair, and have already made it difficult for the small agency to do its work. Wisconsin officials also say the attacks on the election system contributed to voter confusion in the state’s April 5 local and judicial elections, and are being used as a pretense to push new voting restrictions. “For Speaker Vos, I do think it’s about future elections,” says Democratic state representative Greta Neubauer, the minority leader in the Wisconsin Assembly. “He continues to fan the flames of misinformation and use that to justify permanent shifts to the electoral system. I also think for many Republicans this is both about those concrete changes to the elections process and about generally trying to diminish the public space in democracy and government as a whole.”

Some states, including Georgia and Texas, have been able to translate “the big lie” into voter-suppression bills—legislation Democrats at the federal level have been unable to counter, thanks to the filibuster. But anti-voting legislation and proposals to give the state legislature more power over the election have been mostly unsuccessful in Wisconsin, thanks to Evers, the state’s Democratic governor. But that only adds to the sky-high stakes for the 2022 election, in which the governor’s mansion and the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Trump ally Ron Johnson are up for grabs.

“This is an effort to undermine people’s faith in American elections and American democracy based on essentially nothing,” Sara Chimene-Weiss, a counsel with Protect Democracy, tells Vanity Fair, adding that legislatures and outside officials have used election lies to “sow doubt” in the system and to “make it harder to vote based on these essentially invented fears and baseless reviews.”

“Arizona and Wisconsin are really a microcosm for what we’re seeing everywhere in the country,” Chimene-Weiss adds. “I think it’s definitely aimed at 2022 and 2024.”

Similar partisan audits have been proposed in other swing states narrowly won by Biden, including Pennsylvania. Trump, meanwhile, continues to push candidates who support his “big lie”; during a rally in Michigan over the weekend, Trump endorsed Matt DePerno to be the state’s attorney general and Kristina Karamo to be its secretary of state. Both supported efforts to challenge their state’s 2020 results. “This isn’t about 2020. It’s not about Wisconsin. It’s about setting the stage to steal the 2024 presidential election,” says Daniel Squadron, cofounder and executive director of the States Project. “What’s happening in these states is the single greatest threat to our democracy since the Civil War era.”

That all poses a fundamental threat to election security and voting rights in Wisconsin. But it also threatens American democracy more broadly—both because of the state’s significance in recent presidential elections and because what’s happening there could be a preview of what’s to come in other state legislatures. “Wisconsin has been a testing ground for right-wing policy,” Neubauer tells Vanity Fair, citing legislation former governor Scott Walker signed during his tenure to weaken unions, impose voter ID requirements and restrict early voting, and limit the power of his Democratic successor shortly before he left office. “Republicans intend to continue with that,” Neubauer says. “The things they try in Wisconsin, they’ll export elsewhere.”

“We’re the canary in a coal mine,” Jacobs adds.

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