'Despicable': Wisconsin mayor slams prominent election deniers

The mayor of Glendale complained that two of Wisconsin’s most prominent election conspiracy theorists were disruptive while observing voting in the Milwaukee suburb of Glendale during Tuesday’s primary in the special election for the 4th Senate District.

First reported by Fox 6, Glendale Mayor Bryan Kennedy said he thought the actions of the two election deniers, Peter Bernegger and Harry Wait, were “despicable.”

“You have every right to observe the process, but our poll workers are incredibly well trained,” Kennedy told the TV station.

Kennedy told the Wisconsin Examiner that Bernegger and Wait were among a group of people who showed up at each of Glendale’s three polling locations, adding that one of them, when asked who he was representing, said the Traditionalist Party, a neo-Nazi group.

Kennedy said the observers at each of the polling locations were challenging every absentee ballot and refusing to comply with the rule that requires them to stay three feet away from the table where absentee ballots are being opened and processed.

“[They] kept persisting and agitating, making it so at one of the polling places by 10 a.m. there wasn’t a single absentee ballot counted,” he said.

After continuing to escalate, the observers refused to comply with requests to leave until police were called.

Appearing later at Milwaukee’s central count location for tallying absentee ballots, Bernegger accused a reporter of “harassing” him by asking questions about the earlier incident.

For four years, Bernegger and Wait have been two of Wisconsin’s most prominent and active election conspiracy theorists. In 2022, Bernegger, who was previously convicted of mail fraud and is the grandson of the founders of sausage company Hillshire Farms, alleged at a hearing of the Assembly Campaigns and Elections Committee that with the use of a “supercomputer” he’d been able to find hundreds of thousands of illegally cast votes.

Bernegger refused to elaborate on his process or how he came up with that figure. Election officials said he was making malicious accusations based on easily explainable occurrences in the statewide voter registration database.

Bernegger had claimed that he found addresses in which there were so many people registered to vote it didn’t make sense. Upon further review, election officials found that those addresses were dorms on the campuses of University of Wisconsin schools where hundreds of students live and move out after just one year, explaining the high amount of turnover.

Wait has drawn attention for his allegations that the state’s absentee ballot system is vulnerable to fraud. In an attempt to prove his claims in 2022, Wait requested absentee ballots on behalf of Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and Racine Mayor Cory Mason. Wait was later charged by the state Department of Justice with violating the law by impersonating voters to make the requests.

In 2023, Wait told the Wisconsin Examiner he was so involved in right-wing election activism because “we have a bunch of cheaters in our state, that’s why.”

Kennedy said that he believes the incidents on Tuesday were a sign that there may be increased harassment at the polls in the presidential election in November. One of the observers, while leaving the polling place, promised to be back in Glendale for every election until then.

“I believe yesterday was a dry run for November,” Kennedy said. “When … they left city hall, they said rather curtly to the staff, ‘We’ll be back at the end of the month, we’ll be back in August and we’ll be back in November.’ If it’s not them, other people like them will be back. We’re going to see the same thing happen probably at a much larger scale. I have confidence in the hundreds of clerks across the state who are members of both parties or no party and the people who show up to run the polls and make sure their neighbors have the right to vote.”

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