The number is the claim, so the number is the check. The guest describes 'so many irregularities in Wisconsin,' then gives a figure: '270,000 ballots that were cured by election officials. You can't do that, but they did it anyway' [1].
Wisconsin's Legislative Audit Bureau - the legislature's own nonpartisan auditors, working for a Republican-controlled legislature - examined this in 2021. It reviewed nearly 15,000 absentee ballot envelopes across 29 municipalities [2].
What it found: 1,022 envelopes, about 7 percent, were missing parts of a witness address. Only 15 - one-tenth of one percent - had no witness address at all [2]. Clerks had corrected addresses on 66 envelopes. That is 0.4 percent of the sample.
Extrapolate 0.4 percent across Wisconsin's roughly 1.96 million absentee ballots in 2020 and you get about 8,000. Even the 7 percent partial-address figure only produces about 137,000 - and a partial witness address is not a cured ballot; it is an envelope with an incomplete address on it.
There is no arithmetic that reaches 270,000.
Then the second half: 'You can't do that.' Clerks correcting witness addresses were following written guidance from the Wisconsin Elections Commission that had been in place since 2016 [2] - four years before the election in question. A Waukesha County judge did not find that guidance improper until 2022 [2].
Whatever one thinks of the guidance, officials following a state agency's standing written instruction is the opposite of 'they did it anyway.'
The audit found no fraud and did not question the result [2].
One thing this piece does not do. The guest identifies himself only by role - as the chairman of the Senate committee that held a December 2020 hearing on election irregularities - and his name is never spoken on the recording [1]. This newsroom is not printing a name inferred from a description.
