Wisconsin 2020 fake elector reveals he was ‘scared to death’ of Trump losing state

Former president Donald Trump (right) has asked special counsel Jack Smith (left) to keep his responses brief in a recent filing to a federal judge in Washington DC

Andrew Hitt, the former chairman of the Wisconsin Republican Party, publicly admitted to being a “fake elector” for Donald Trump during the 2020 election.

Mr Hitt made the admission during a 60 Minutes appearance with Anderson Cooper on Sunday. Wisconsin is one of the few states where Republicans have not been charged for casting fake votes during the election but allegedly acted out on the scheme to help misrepresent the popular vote.

Mr Trump ultimately lost Wisconsin to President Joe Biden by around 20,000 votes. Mr Hitt told Cooper that he acted on the plan because he was “scared to death” of Mr Trump’s supporters in the state and his Republican colleagues.

“It was not a safe time,” he said in the interview.

Oftentimes during campaign rallies, Mr Trump would call out Mr Hitt and put pressure on him to ensure he won the state during the election. At one point, while on stage, he told him, “I’m going to blame you Andrew if they don’t do it,” an apparent reference to Mr Trump losing the state.

After the election, Mr Trump’s team filed a request to have 200,000 votes thrown out.

Those included ballots in which voters declared themselves indefinitely confined, had delivered absentee ballots at an October event hosted by the Madison city clerk, voters who cast ballots at in-person early-voting sites and absentee ballots submitted in which the voter’s witness did not provide a complete mailing address.

His campaign argued that municipal clerks in Milwaukee and Dane Counties should not have been able to fill out address forms for witnesses to absentee ballot submissions, even though the Wisconsin Elections Commission had allowed them to do so. State law requires that there be a witness to absentee ballots.

Mr Hitt said he didn’t believe throwing out the absentee ballots was the right call, telling Cooper that even he voted that way.

On the day he signed a document falsely claiming Mr Trump had won the election, the Wisconsin Supreme Court tossed out Mr Trump’s legal challenge in a 4 to 3 ruling.

Still, he said he decided to go through with the scheme on 14 December 2020 at the Wisconsin Capitol because he thought the documents would only be used if Mr Trump’s legal case somehow succeeded.

“If I knew what I knew now, I wouldn’t have done it,” he told the TV show. Days earlier, he said he got a call from a representative from the Republican National Committee asking for a list of Republican electors.

He said he had an unsettling feeling regarding the conversation.

“I was already concerned that they were gonna try to say that the Democratic electors were not proper in Wisconsin because of fraud.”

Mr Hitt added that he didn’t believe there was widespread fraud because of his involvement in the election process, but he signed the document anyway alleging that there was.

“Can you imagine the repercussions on myself, my family, if it was me, Andrew Hitt, who prevented Donald Trump from winning Wisconsin?” he said.

Mr Trump has now been indicted by a federal grand jury on allegations that he attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election through channels including the attempt in Wisconsin.

Electors in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Michigan are facing charges relating to their efforts to overthrow the election. Mr Trump is currently facing 91 felony counts in two state courts and two federal districts. Any of those legal challenges have the potential to yield a prison sentence.

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