2 WI Republicans Say Biden Won As Assembly Committee OKs Audit

WISCONSIN — Two notable Wisconsin Republicans said that President Joe Biden won the 2020 U.S. election as GOP state lawmakers seek to spend $680,000 to investigate discredited claims of voter fraud.

U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson and former Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin disputed arguments by state legislators in support of the effort.

The GOP-dominated Assembly Committee on Assembly Organization voted Monday to designate former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman to lead an investigation into the election and to hire investigators, The Wisconsin Examiner reported.

Lawmakers planned to spend up to $680,000 paying for investigators, The Associated Press reported.

Some $325,000 of the total will be used to hire a data analysis contractor under the category of "voting machines," The Associated Press reported.

Madison and Milwaukee already conducted a recount of election votes and confirmed the election's outcome, a result that was affirmed by the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

"There's nothing obviously skewed" about election results in Wisconsin, Johnson told Lauren Windsor in a video on The Undercurrent website. Windsor represented herself as a conservative in her conversation with Johnson.

Johnson added that other Republican candidates for office received more Wisconsin votes than President Donald Trump in November 2020. "The only reason Trump lost Wisconsin is that 51,000 Republican voters didn't vote for him. They voted for other Republican candidates."

Ryan, a Republican who served as the GOP speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives until 2019, said that it was clear that Biden won the election. Trump "exhausted his cases. He exhausted his court challenges. None of them went his way, so he legitimately lost," he told WISN-12.

Both Ryan and Johnson's words disputed claims made by both GOP lawmakers and the former president about widespread or coordinated voter fraud in the 2020 election.

Johnson said he was still in favor of the election investigation, The Associated Press reported. In The Undercurrent's video, he said that he didn't support the investigation's focus on voting machines.

Patch reached out to both Johnson and Ryan for comment.

Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, said Monday that it was "outrageous" for GOP lawmakers to authorize spending $680,000 of taxpayer money on another election probe.

Biden won Wisconsin by about 21,000 votes in November 2020, data from the Wisconsin Elections Commission said.