Former Milwaukee election official guilty of voter fraud, jury finds

MILWAUKEE (CN) — The former deputy director of the Milwaukee Election Commission was found guilty of one count of misconduct in public office and three counts of voter fraud at the conclusion of her jury trial on Wednesday.

Kimberly Zapata, 47, will be sentenced on May 2 at a hearing before Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Kori Ashley, who also presided over her trial.

Zapata pleaded not guilty to all the charges she faced. Combining all potential penalties for all the charges, she now faces a maximum of five years in prison and more than $10,000 in fines at sentencing.

Neither Zapata’s Milwaukee-based attorney Dan Adams nor Assistant District Attorney Matthew Westphal gave any comments to reporters after the defendant’s verdict was announced just before 4 p.m.

Including a midday break for lunch, the jurors in the defendant’s case deliberated for just over five hours before reaching a unanimous verdict.

Prosecutors successfully argued that Zapata used fake voter information to request three military absentee ballots through the Wisconsin Elections Commission’s online portal on Oct. 25, 2022 — just ahead of that year’s midterm elections — and send them to a Republican lawmaker who embraced election conspiracy theories.

Adams painted Zapata as an apolitical whistleblower highlighting real issues with election administration, divorced from conspiracy theories. He said she was under extreme stress at the time, in part because her office was inundated with such theories and threats of harm or death against election officials.

Adams used his closing arguments to try to convince the jury that there was an “incredible mismatch” between what prosecutors believe and the actual facts in the case.

Westphal had argued Zapata abandoned her responsibility to secure elections and, in her capacity as a public employee, committed fraud which compromised that security, knowing that her actions were illegal.

During closings Wednesday morning, Westphal reiterated the harm Zapata caused to public trust in elections as the foundation of democracy.

Zapata, the state’s attorney said, “took a tiny hammer and started chiseling away at that foundation. Instead of helping secure the absentee balloting system, she introduced fraud into that system.”

There were “multiple legitimate avenues” Zapata could have taken to raise her concerns, but instead she committed a crime, Westphal said. He pointed out that “the crime here is not whether these ballots were actually voted,” the crime is obtaining the ballots fraudulently, and “obtaining” the ballots does not mean she needed to personally receive them.

While she was working as deputy director of the commission, according to prosecutors, Zapata requested the three ballots. She then used her governmental access to get the home address of Janel Brandtjen of Menomonee Falls — a Republican member of the Wisconsin Assembly who frequently makes false assertions of fraud in the 2020 election — and had the fraudulent ballots mailed there.

She admitted to her actions — including to her boss, Milwaukee Election Commission Director Claire Woodall-Vogg — shortly after the fact, but claims she requested the ballots only to expose a loophole in the absentee voting system.

Westphal swatted down the notion that the defendant was a legitimate whistleblower who gained and shared information.

“She is not exposing the information; she is committing election fraud ... that’s not blowing the whistle on the problem, that’s aggravating the problem,” the prosecutor said.

Far from alleviating the mis- and-disinformation, stress and anxiety in her office, Zapata added “to the anxiety and stress in this office by creating this false narrative that people are doing this,” Westphal said.

Adams argued during opening statements that Wisconsin’s elections are secure and fair because of his client and her former colleagues. Zapata is not a conspiracy theorist, he said, and his client learned after sending the ballots to Brandtjen that the GOP lawmaker was “not a credible individual" and someone who “trafficked in conspiracy.”

Testimony, including from Zapata’s boss, Woodall-Vogg, showed that her actions were driven by stress, Adams said. Imperfect though those actions were, they exposed a real, lingering flaw in the election system.

“The truth of what she was pointing out was there, and it remains,” Adams said, adding that Zapata was trying to show that “if people don’t take it seriously, some nefarious person will do something bad with this flaw in the system.”

The fact that the three ballots raised no red flags with the election clerks who handled them proves his point, he said later.

The defense attorney said Westphal “maligned my client as a fraudster” even though she never intended to cast the fraudulent ballots, and she knew that Brandtjen, the person she sent them to, would not cast them either.

Adams argued that the prosecutor’s theory of Zapata “obtaining” the ballots flies in the face of common sense, as does his theory that Zapata was acting as a public employee when she did what she did.

“Whistleblowers are not perfect people,” Adams said, ultimately concluding that Zapata was attempting to protect the ideal of “one person, one vote” at the bedrock of democracy.

“Being a whistleblower is not a defense to this crime,” Westphal said during rebuttal. “People can have good motives to commit crimes. They’re still crimes.”

Follow @cnsjkelly

Subscribe to Closing Arguments

Sign up for new weekly newsletter Closing Arguments to get the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and hot cases and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world.

Email *

Submit