I would like you to meet the Milwaukee Election Boss Who Says She Broke the Law to Save Democracy
On the morning of October 25, 2022, ten days before the midterm elections, the second-highest election official in the City of Milwaukee sat down at her city-issued work laptop, logged into Wisconsin’s public absentee-ballot portal, and requested three military absentee ballots in the names of three women who did not exist.
Their names were Holly Jones, Holly Adams, and Holly Brandtjen. Each came with a fabricated date of birth and a fabricated Social Security number. The official, Deputy Director of the Milwaukee Election Commission Kimberly Zapata, then opened a second screen inside WisVote, the restricted statewide voter registration database that only election administrators are permitted to access. She used her administrator-level credentials to look up the home address of Republican State Representative Janel Brandtjen, chair of the Wisconsin Assembly Elections Committee and one of the most prominent voices in the country promoting 2020 election conspiracy theories.
She routed the three fraudulent ballot requests through clerks in South Milwaukee, Shorewood, and Menomonee Falls. According to the appellate court that later upheld her convictions, she chose those municipalities specifically because she believed their clerks were “subpar” and would not catch the fraud. She had the three military absentee ballots mailed to Brandtjen’s house.
Brandtjen received them on October 27, photographed them, and posted them on social media. Two days later, Zapata’s supervisor sent her a news article about the discovery. Zapata wrote back, “She has a point.” On November 1, she admitted to her boss she had created the fake voters herself. The next day she was fired. Two days after that, the Milwaukee County District Attorney filed felony charges.
On May 12, 2026, a unanimous three-judge panel of the Wisconsin Court of Appeals affirmed her conviction on one felony count of misconduct in public office and three misdemeanor counts of election fraud. Her appellate defense, that she was a private-citizen whistleblower, that she had never personally taken possession of the ballots, that she was raising the alarm about real flaws in the system, was rejected on every point.
A Democratic election official, paid by Democratic city taxpayers, working in a city governed by Democrats, used her official credentials to commit documented election fraud. She did it, by her own admission, to prove that election fraud was possible. And in doing so, she handed every election denier in America the one thing they had been desperately searching for since November 2020: a real, court-documented case of an insider faking ballots from inside the system.
Let the Democratic Party of Wisconsin take a bow. This is whom they hired.
What the Centercratic Party Stands For
The Centercratic Party rests on nine governing principles. The fourth reads: “One Law for All. The law applies equally to all. Independent courts ensure fair process and protect basic rights.”
Underneath that principle sits a simpler idea that any voter in any precinct in this country should be able to take for granted. The people who run our elections are not permitted to commit election fraud. Not for any reason. Not to make a point. Not to expose a flaw. Not because the other side is spreading lies. The badge, the laptop, the database, the access, none of it is a license. It is a trust.
The seventh principle reads: “Truth Over Spin. Decisions should be made with facts. Disagreements should be honest, not deceptive.” Kimberly Zapata told investigators, told her boss, and told a jury that she committed election fraud because she wanted “the truth to come out” about real vulnerabilities in the system. That is not truth over spin. That is fraud dressed up as journalism. A genuine whistleblower writes a memo, files a complaint, calls a reporter, testifies before a committee. A genuine whistleblower does not generate three fake voters, route their ballots through clerks she has personally identified as incompetent, and mail the evidence to the home of the politician she dislikes the most.
The eighth principle reads: “Stewardship of Trust. We do not own our offices. We hold them in trust for the people we serve.” Zapata held her office in trust for every voter in the City of Milwaukee, Republican, Democrat, and independent. She broke that trust on her work laptop, on city time, using credentials issued to her because the people of Milwaukee believed she would protect their elections rather than rig them, even just a little, even just to make a point.
The Sordid Details
The criminal complaint, the trial record, and the May 12 appellate opinion lay out a case that should disturb every American who has ever defended the integrity of our elections.
Zapata was 44 years old in October 2022, a veteran election administrator with administrator-level access to WisVote, a city laptop, and city credentials. Her job, as the appellate court put it, was “to ensure that elections ran smoothly and securely, including overseeing absentee voting.” She knew the system inside out.
She also worked in a commission that, like election offices across the country, had been receiving sustained harassment and death threats from 2020-election conspiracy theorists. By her own account to investigators, she was frustrated. She wanted, she said, to redirect the conspiracy theorists’ attention “from outrageous conspiracy theories to something that’s actually real.”
So she committed three felonies and three misdemeanors.
She chose Janel Brandtjen because Brandtjen was, in Zapata’s own words, “the most vocal election fraud politician that she knew.” Brandtjen had advocated for decertifying Joe Biden’s 2020 win in Wisconsin and had used her committee chairmanship to amplify conspiracy theories the courts, the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission, and a Republican-led nonpartisan audit had all rejected. Zapata’s plan was to expose the military-absentee process as exploitable and force the conspiracy crowd to focus on a real vulnerability instead of an imagined steal.
What she actually did was give them a gift.
When the ballots arrived, Brandtjen did not interpret them as evidence of a system that had caught itself. She interpreted them as evidence that someone inside the system had committed fraud. She was right. She announced it publicly. Election deniers across the country seized on the story. The Heritage Foundation added the case to its Election Fraud database, where it sits as exhibit number one in the argument that government insiders are rigging elections. Every conspiracy podcast and election-denial influencer who has spent the past five years telling Americans the system cannot be trusted now has a real conviction, of a real Democratic election official, who really did use her real credentials to fake real ballots, to wave in the air.
The prosecution presented the case to a Milwaukee County jury in March 2024. The jury deliberated and convicted Zapata on all four counts. Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Kori Ashley sentenced her to nine months in jail, stayed in favor of 12 months of probation, 120 hours of community service, and a $1,000 fine on each misdemeanor count. She did not spend a day in state prison.
Zapata appealed. Her two arguments were, in essence, that she had not really committed election fraud because she never tried to vote the ballots herself, and that she had not really been acting in her official capacity because she was operating as a private-citizen whistleblower.
The Court of Appeals rejected both, unanimously. On the fraud count, Judge Geenen wrote that “obtaining” a ballot under Wisconsin law includes constructive obtainment, not just physical possession. Zapata “controlled both the names under which the ballots would be generated and the destination to which those ballots would be sent.” On the misconduct count, the court found what it called a “material connection” between her conduct and her public office. She used her work laptop. She used her employee credentials. She used her administrator access to WisVote. She used her inside knowledge of which municipal clerks were less likely to catch fraud. None of that, the court said, was the work of a private citizen.
She had also tried to invoke the rule of lenity and a First Amendment defense. The court refused to even reach those arguments, ruling she had forfeited them by failing to develop them properly.
The conviction stands. The probation continues. The damage to public confidence in our elections, on the other hand, will outlast the sentence by decades.
The case also did not happen in a vacuum. Just weeks before the appellate ruling, a Wisconsin man named Harry Wait was convicted of fraud and identity theft for requesting absentee ballots in the names of Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and Democratic Racine Mayor Cory Mason during the same 2022 election cycle. Wait was a private citizen on the right. Zapata was a Democratic election official on the left. Two people, opposite sides of the spectrum, both convinced they were exposing fraud, both convicted of committing it.
That is not a system in good health. That is a system in which trust has decayed so far that people on both sides have started rigging elections to prove that elections are being rigged.
Our Parties Have Failed Us Again
The fourth principle of the Centercratic Party, One Law for All, is not a slogan. It is the load-bearing wall of a republic. When a deputy elections director can use her official credentials to fake military ballots and send them to the home of a politician she dislikes, the wall is cracking from a side most Democrats refuse to admit it can crack from.
The Democratic Party has spent the past five years, correctly, calling out Republican-led efforts to undermine confidence in our elections. The voter intimidation. The frivolous lawsuits. The fake electors. The cynical drumbeat of “rigged” and “stolen” aimed at outcomes the courts had already settled. All of that has been real, and all of it has been damaging.
Then a Democrat inside the Milwaukee Election Commission, on her work laptop, on city time, did the one thing the conspiracy theorists had spent two years failing to prove anyone was actually doing. She rigged a small piece of the system. And she did it to prove the system could be rigged.
The Wisconsin Democratic Party did not defend her. She was fired within 48 hours. The Democratic mayor of Milwaukee condemned her on the day she was charged. There was no campaign to overturn the conviction, no fundraising appeal in her name, no martyr narrative. That is the bare minimum, and the party deserves no parade for clearing it.
But the broader Democratic message machine has spent the last three years pretending this case did not happen. Search the press releases of the national party committees from 2022 through this month. You will find thousands of statements about Republican attacks on election integrity. You will find almost nothing on Kimberly Zapata. She is the most inconvenient data point for the party’s preferred story about who threatens American elections, so the party looked away.
The Republican Party has failed too. The conspiracy ecosystem has cited the case relentlessly, but no serious Republican leader has used it the way it should be used, as a bipartisan call to professionalize election administration, raise the criminal penalties, and harden access controls on systems like WisVote. The case has been weaponized, not addressed.
The 45 percent of Americans who belong to neither party did not vote for any of this. We voted for elections we could trust, run by professionals who do not have personal scores to settle on the city’s dime. Kimberly Zapata broke that trust. The Wisconsin Court of Appeals has now told the country, on the record, that she broke it as a public official, using her official credentials, for reasons no court was willing to dignify as whistleblowing.
We must save our democracy before it is too late.
That is the wave.
The CenterWave is published by CenterVoter, the home of the Centercratic Party. Visit centercratic.party | centervoter.com