Attorneys involved in planning fake elector scheme settle lawsuit

Two attorneys involved in the Republican effort to cast fake Electoral College votes for then President Donald Trump after the 2020 election settled a lawsuit against them on Monday. 

The attorneys, Jim Troupis and Kenneth Cheseboro, were intimately involved in the planning of the scheme, which was used in a number of other states. As part of the settlement, the pair agreed not to participate in similar plans in future presidential elections. 

Wisconsin was one of 10 states in which false Electoral College votes were cast. The existence of the votes, cast after Joe Biden was declared the winner, played an instrumental role in the events that led to the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Electors in other states have faced criminal charges but Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul has so far not pursued charges against the fake electors. 

“This all came out of Wisconsin and expanded to other states,” Mary McCord, an attorney with Georgetown’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection who helped negotiate the settlement, told the Associated Press. “That was a significant part of the narrative that led to the violence on Jan 6.”

Cheseboro has already pleaded guilty to a felony charge of conspiracy to file false documents in Georgia.  

“Troupis and Chesebro orchestrated an egregious and unprecedented scheme to undermine the will of the voters, in Wisconsin and beyond,” said Jeff Mandell, an attorney for Law Forward, the progressive legal outfit that brought the lawsuit. “This case was the first to seek accountability  for those individuals who tried to overturn the will of Wisconsin voters. Through this litigation, we have been able to reveal the details of the scheme and those who were responsible, to ensure this never happens again.” 

The lawsuit was initially filed against the two lawyers and the 10 Wisconsin Republicans who cast the false Electoral College votes. The 10 electors reached a settlement in December in which they agreed not to serve as electors in any future elections in which Trump is on the ballot and made a statement that Biden rightfully won the election in Wisconsin in 2020.

Wisconsin’s false votes were cast in secret on the same December 2020 day that the legitimate  electors met to cast their votes for Biden. The false electors met and cast their votes in the hopes that they could be used if the court system overturned the election results, however the Wisconsin Supreme Court had already denied the Trump campaign’s attempt at overturning the state’s election results just hours before the electors met. 

Emails and communications released as part of the settlement show that Cheseboro and Troupis were planning the scheme in the days after the election and deeply involved in efforts with Trump campaign officials to spread the plan to other states. 

Troupis is a former Dane County Circuit Court judge who served as an attorney for the Trump campaign’s recount effort in the largely Democratic voting Dane and Milwaukee counties in 2020. Last year, the then-conservative majority on the state Supreme Court reappointed Troupis to a seat on the state’s Judicial Conduct Advisory Committee.