Inside the Wisconsin Fake Electors Lawsuit: Why I Became the Lead Plaintiff

On December 14, 2020, I walked into the Wisconsin State Capitol to cast my Electoral College vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. It was my second time serving as a presidential elector. The first was in 2016 for Hillary Clinton. That year, we lost. This time, we won.

What I didn’t know that morning was that in another room in the same building, ten people were signing fraudulent documents claiming Donald Trump had won Wisconsin. He hadn’t. Biden won the state by more than 20,000 votes. Courts had upheld the result. Recounts confirmed it. But these ten individuals met anyway, signed fake electoral certificates, and sent them to the United States Senate.

Eighteen months later, my name was on the lawsuit that held them accountable. Penebaker v. Hitt, Case No. 2022CV1178, filed in Dane County Circuit Court. I was the lead plaintiff. This is the story of why I did it, what it cost, and what it means for everyone who believes elections should be decided by voters.

The day I cast my electoral vote

The Electoral College doesn’t work the way most people think it does. You don’t just show up and push a button. There are certificates. Stacks of them. I signed roughly 25 documents that day to verify the results, certifying Wisconsin’s ten electoral votes for Biden and Harris.

When I opened my ballot packet and saw Kamala Harris’s name, something hit me that I wasn’t expecting. I thought about my daughters, Josie and Sydney. I thought about what it meant for them to see a woman of color in the second highest office in the country. I drew a small heart on the ballot before catching myself and marking the proper X. I still don’t know if that was technically allowed.

Afterward, sitting in my car in the Capitol parking lot, I tried to put words to what I’d just experienced. The best I could manage was this: I walked into that building one person and walked out someone slightly different. There’s a weight to participating in democracy at that level. It’s hard to describe until you’ve done it.

What I didn’t feel that day was any sense that what we’d done was under threat. That came later.

What the fake electors actually did

On the same day I was casting a legitimate vote, ten Republican individuals, led by then-Wisconsin GOP Chairman Andrew Hitt, gathered at the Capitol and signed documents declaring that Donald Trump and Mike Pence had won Wisconsin’s electoral votes. They hadn’t. Biden won Wisconsin by 20,682 votes, a result confirmed by recounts, certified by the Governor, and upheld by courts.

These ten people signed the certificates anyway. Then they sent those fraudulent documents to the President of the U.S. Senate and the National Archives and Records Administration, the same places our legitimate certificates were sent. The goal was to create a parallel set of electoral votes that could be used on January 6, 2021, when Congress met to certify the election.

This wasn’t spontaneous. According to documents that emerged through our lawsuit, the scheme was coordinated by attorney Kenneth Chesebro, who designed the fake elector strategy across multiple states, and James Troupis, who served as Trump’s Wisconsin campaign attorney. The fake electors in Wisconsin were part of a coordinated effort that included similar fraudulent slates in six other states.

When I learned the full scope of what had happened, I was angry. Not political anger. Personal anger. I had stood in that building and done something meaningful. Something rooted in the trust that voters place in the people who carry out their will. And in another room, ten people were trying to erase all of it.

Why I became the lead plaintiff

In May 2022, the legal advocacy group Law Forward, along with Georgetown University Law Center’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection and the law firm Stafford Rosenbaum, filed a civil lawsuit on behalf of Wisconsin’s ten legitimate electors. I was named as the lead plaintiff.

People ask me why I agreed to put my name on it. The short answer is that someone had to. The longer answer involves understanding what it means to be a DNC Representative, which I served as for Wisconsin from 2017 to 2023, and what it means to believe that democratic institutions only work if people are willing to defend them.

I’ve spent most of my career in business, not politics. I built a commercial roofing company from $1.5 million to $15 million. I helped grow another operation past $35 million in revenue. I now run four markets for a national home improvement company. But I’ve also been involved in civic life since I ran for Congress in Wisconsin’s 5th District in 2016. That race taught me that you don’t sit on the sidelines when something matters.

The fake elector scheme wasn’t a procedural disagreement. It was an attempt to override the votes of nearly 1.63 million Wisconsinites who chose Biden. If the people who participated in that scheme faced no consequences, the message would be clear: you can try to steal an election and nothing happens. I wasn’t willing to let that stand.

What the lawsuit accomplished

The case moved through the courts for nearly two years. The defendants tried to remove it to federal court. We got it sent back to state court. They tried to change the venue. That was denied. They tried to get it dismissed. The judge rejected that too. A trial was scheduled for September 2024.

Before we got to trial, the fake electors settled. On December 6, 2023, all ten elector defendants signed a settlement agreement that included a public acknowledgment. They admitted that their votes were cast “at the behest of the Trump campaign and the Republican Party of Wisconsin” and were “part of an effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election and disrupt the peaceful transition of presidential power.”

Read that again. They admitted it. In writing. In a court filing.

As part of the settlement, the fake electors agreed they would not serve as presidential electors in any future election where Trump appeared on the ballot. They also agreed to cooperate with the Department of Justice investigation and released nearly 600 pages of documents related to the scheme.

Former Wisconsin GOP Chairman Andrew Hitt, one of the ten, publicly stated that he had been “tricked and misled” into signing the fraudulent documents.

In March 2024, the two attorneys, Chesebro and Troupis, settled separately. Troupis paid monetary compensation to the plaintiffs and agreed he would never again assist any presidential campaign in preparing fraudulent electoral certificates. The settlement also produced extensive discovery materials, including emails, texts, photos, and videos that detailed how the scheme was organized.

The criminal case

Our civil lawsuit wasn’t the only legal action. In June 2024, Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul filed criminal charges against participants in the fake elector scheme. Defendants filed motions to dismiss, which were denied by the judge in August 2025.

In November 2025, President Trump issued federal pardons to dozens of individuals connected to efforts to create fraudulent elector credentials. But federal pardons have no effect on state-level prosecutions. The Wisconsin criminal case continues.

That distinction is important. It means that regardless of what happens at the federal level, Wisconsin’s legal system can still hold people accountable for what they did to Wisconsin’s election. The state courts operate independently, and the charges brought by AG Kaul are based on state law.

What this experience taught me about leadership

I’ve written before about what running for Congress taught me about business. This experience reinforced some of those lessons and added new ones.

First, standing up costs something. When your name is on a lawsuit, people have opinions. Some of them share those opinions publicly. Some of them share them in ways that aren’t polite. I received messages from strangers who had strong feelings about what I was doing. That comes with the territory, but it doesn’t make it comfortable.

Second, institutional accountability only happens when individuals make it happen. The fake elector scheme didn’t unravel on its own. It unraveled because lawyers at Law Forward and Georgetown saw what had happened and decided to do something about it. And it moved forward because ten legitimate electors, myself included, were willing to put our names on the complaint.

Third, patience matters more than anger. The case took nearly two years from filing to settlement. There were months where nothing visible happened. Motions were filed. Briefs were written. Dates were set and moved. The legal process is slow by design. If I’d approached this with the urgency of outrage instead of the steadiness of conviction, I would have burned out before we reached the finish line.

That third lesson applies directly to business. I’ve managed turnarounds where the problems were obvious on day one but the fixes took months. I’ve led teams through quarters where the numbers were bad and the temptation was to make dramatic, emotional decisions. The discipline I learned through the lawsuit, stay the course, trust the process, keep showing up, is the same discipline that works in any high-stakes leadership situation.

Why this matters beyond Wisconsin

Wisconsin wasn’t the only state where fake elector schemes were attempted. Similar efforts occurred in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, and Pennsylvania. What made Wisconsin’s case notable was the outcome. The civil settlement was one of the first in the country to secure a public acknowledgment from fake electors that their actions were part of an effort to overturn a legitimate election.

The documents that emerged from the lawsuit, particularly from the Chesebro and Troupis settlements, provided a detailed roadmap of how the scheme was organized. Those materials have been cited in reporting and legal proceedings related to fake elector efforts in other states.

For anyone who cares about election integrity regardless of party, the Penebaker v. Hitt settlement set a precedent. It showed that civil litigation can be an effective tool for accountability when other mechanisms are slow to act. It showed that the people whose votes were targeted, the legitimate electors and the voters they represent, have standing to fight back.

Moving forward

I’m not a lawyer. I’m a business operator who happened to be in a position where standing up was the right thing to do. I was a Biden elector because I’d spent years working in Wisconsin Democratic politics. I became the lead plaintiff because the alternative, watching people try to erase my vote and doing nothing about it, was unacceptable.

The fake elector scheme was a test of whether our institutions can hold. In Wisconsin, they held. Not because the system is perfect, but because people within the system decided to act. Lawyers filed the case. A judge let it proceed. Legitimate electors lent their names. And the defendants ultimately had to acknowledge, in writing, what they had done.

I still think about that day in December 2020 when I sat in my car after casting my electoral vote. The weight of what I’d just done. The pride of participating in something bigger than myself. And I think about how close someone came to making it not count.

That’s why I put my name on the lawsuit. That’s why I’d do it again. Some things are worth defending, not with anger, but with persistence and the belief that the truth, eventually, will be documented where it can’t be erased.

If you’re interested in my broader advocacy work, including gun violence prevention and civic engagement, those efforts come from the same place. You protect the things that matter by showing up when it counts.

Last updated: March 9, 2026