How one Wisconsin man plagued election offices and stoked mistrust

Peter Bernegger has spent the last three and a half years bombarding local election offices in Wisconsin with litigation and accusations of fraud. He’s brought at least 18 lawsuits against election clerks and offices in state court, and on social media, he has relentlessly promoted his litigation and circulated false claims about election fraud in the swing state.

His campaign has recently landed him in legal trouble – Bernegger now faces criminal charges for allegedly falsifying a subpoena in connection with a lawsuit against the state’s top election office.

Related: ‘Mischief and problems’: rightwing activists ramp up drive to hand-count ballots

It’s an escalation for the 61-year-old activist from New London, Wisconsin, who according to court documents, interviews with election officials and emails obtained by the Guardian, has drained election offices of already-limited resources and stoked mistrust in the electoral process in his years-long quest to uncover election fraud.

In the universe of activists who dispute the results of the 2020 election and have spent years searching for evidence of widespread voter fraud, Bernegger’s star power is small. He has not served on a Trump campaign team, no high-powered conservative law firms have taken on his cases and his media appearances are mostly relegated to interviews with fringe podcasts on the rightwing YouTube alternative Rumble.

But his efforts prove that in a country where election offices are chronically underfunded and heavily scrutinized, a single, relatively unknown person can exercise an outsize, and detrimental, impact on election administration.

In response to a request for comment, Bernegger did not address the claims raised in this article except to call them “false and misleading” and potentially defamatory.

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Bernegger became active in “election integrity” efforts in the wake of the 2020 election, developing an audience during the Wisconsin state legislature’s investigation into allegations of election fraud.

Led by the “Stop the Steal” activist and former state supreme court justice Michael Gableman, Wisconsin’s legislative inquiry into election malfeasance ultimately revealed no evidence of a plot. But it elevated the profiles of numerous election-doubting activists in the state, including Bernegger, a self-described “investigative journalist” who claimed to have discovered thousands of illegal votes cast during the 2020 election using a “supercomputer” and a team of vigilante researchers.

In 2022, he went on to promote his claims in front of the state legislature, spending two hours describing his findings to the assembly committee on elections and campaigns.

Now, in Wisconsin’s sprawling community of election workers, Bernegger is known for sending barrages of requests for election-related records and suing when he is dissatisfied with the results. Since 2020, Bernegger, who is not an attorney, has represented himself in his many lawsuits against election clerks and offices, sometimes abandoning them before they are concluded. In at least two cases, Bernegger’s complaints were dismissed on the grounds that he had simply stopped responding.

In 2022, the Wisconsin elections commission voted to fine Bernegger a dollar for every claim of voter fraud the bipartisan group found to be frivolous in nature; his penalties amounted to $2,403.

Election officials, especially those whose small offices are already strained, worry that speaking about Bernegger publicly will invite more litigation, tying up more crucial time and resources.

“I think the biggest thing is fear of retaliation – you know, and what’s he going to do to make our lives more difficult, especially as we go into the 24 election cycle,” said a Wisconsin clerk whose office Bernegger has sued, but who asked for anonymity, citing the concern that Bernegger would renew his legal efforts. “It’s also just demoralizing to have somebody constantly attacking your integrity.”

In addition to filing public records requests, Bernegger has directly contacted clerks across the state with confusing and misleading emails. In an email sent on 25 October, 2022, for example, Bernegger claimed, incorrectly, that the state’s electronic poll books, called Badger Books, required federal certification and that by using them, officials could be sued or face criminal charges.

“Any Clerk who uses Badger Books in any election, especially a federal one, will be breaking the law. This is directly on Meagan Wolfe,” wrote Bernegger, referring to Wisconsin’s top non-partisan election official who has become the focus of election-related conspiracy theories. “She put you, the Clerks, in this precarious legal position.”

Scott McDonell, the Dane county clerk, said municipal clerks across the county had reached out to him multiple times to flag Bernegger’s misleading communications.

In Dane county, where the state capital, Madison, is located, election conspiracy theories play a minimal role in local politics. As a result, McDonell is less politically vulnerable than officials in deep-red jurisdictions. He said he worries more about election clerks overseeing offices in smaller, less resourced municipalities in parts of the state where doubts about the results of the 2020 election have persisted.

“He’s causing them a lot of problems – in a lot of ways, more than me,” said McDonell. In total, McDonell estimates that his office had spent more than 100 hours on Bernegger’s inquiries and litigation.

At least one of Wisconsin’s more than 1,800 election clerks is receptive to Bernegger’s claims. In response to an email from the Guardian inquiring about Bernegger’s legal efforts, Donald Hayes, the clerk in Richmond – a town of just over 1,000 in southern Wisconsin – wrote that he believed that the “right to freely elect our President was stolen from us during the last Presidential election” and that Bernegger’s efforts were an attempt “to bring light to that tragedy”.

“As an election official, I discovered evidence from our very own election process, thanks to Mr Bernegger’s inquiry, that confirmed my suspicions,” wrote Hayes.

Hayes did not respond to a question about the evidence Bernegger purportedly uncovered.

At times, clerks said Bernegger’s activism borders on harassment. In 2023, the Wisconsin state capitol police warned him that his conduct towards Wolfe, the chief administrator of the Wisconsin elections commission, could be interpreted as “stalking”.

He is also known to name-check election workers on social media, where he enjoys a modest but enthusiastic following.

In April, he posted the full names of two Dominion Voting Systems employees and insinuated, baselessly, that they were acting on behalf of the Chinese government. ​​

In an email to the Guardian, a spokesperson for Dominion called Bernegger’s tweets identifying employees by first and last name “yet another example of how lies about Dominion have damaged our company, subjected officials and Dominion employees to harassment, and baselessly diminished the public’s faith in elections”, adding that “allegations that Dominion employees anywhere tried to interfere with any election are completely false”.

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Years before he began his relentless hunt for evidence of election interference, Bernegger focused on a very different venture: entrepreneurship and startups.

According to court filings, Bernegger and an associate raised hundreds of thousands of dollars from investors to bankroll a collection of companies in the food processing business. Among other ventures Bernegger touted was a company called We-Gel, which he claimed was capable of harnessing waste from catfish processing plants to produce an alternative form of gelatin – one that could be used widely in pharmaceuticals.

But there was a problem. The business partners “were never able to manufacture a sellable product”, according to charges brought by the justice department in a 2008 case before a US district court in Mississippi. A jury convicted Bernegger of mail fraud and bank fraud for his participation in the scheme.

Bernegger successfully appealed the initial amount of restitution down to $1.7m, from the approximately $2.2m initially ordered, but was unable to convince the courts to reduce his prison sentence of 70 months.

It is not clear how Bernegger, whose grandparents founded the sausage and meat company Hillshire Farm, sustains his election-related efforts today.

Bernegger is listed as the agent of two organizations registered in Wisconsin called Election Watch, Inc. and Wisconsin Center for Election Justice, Inc. In 2022, the latter group garnered $12,500 from an organization founded by the Trump ally and former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, according to the group’s most recent tax filings.

Amid his prosecution for allegedly doctoring a subpoena, Bernegger circulated a call for donations on a crowdfunding website. As of 25 April, he had received a smattering of small donations from individuals, amounting to just over $4,500 – far less than the fundraiser’s stated goal of $45,000.

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Even as Bernegger’s criminal proceedings wear on, which he describes as “politically motivated”, he continues to spread alarming and unsubstantiated claims about elections on the messaging app Telegram and on X, where he maintains 25,500 followers.

Election officials worry he will ramp up his activism ahead of the 2024 general presidential election.

In an 8 April post – six days after Wisconsin’s 2024 presidential primary – Bernegger claimed that the clerk of Ozaukee county was unable to certify the election. “Dominion modems,” he wrote, “failed to transmit.” In the post, which was shared 1,600 times, Bernegger wrote that the clerk was “panicking” and “liberal Dem observers are going berserk”.

In fact, in Ozaukee county, which encompasses some of Milwaukee’s northern suburbs, the election results were certified promptly – and Karen Niemuth, the Ozaukee county clerk, was far from panicked.

“I don’t even have an increased heart rate,” Niemuthsaid, “because my canvass is complete, and it is certified, and there were no issues.”