‘Recall Vos’ organizers deliver signatures in effort to remove Assembly speaker

Conservative activists attempting to remove Wisconsin’s powerful Assembly speaker from office said Monday that they had collected 11,000 signatures to force a recall election.

Matthew Snorek, a resident of Union Grove in Racine County who filed the petition to remove Rep. Robin Vos, R-Rochester, from his Assembly seat, delivered two boxes of paperwork to the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

Snorek launched the recall effort in January, citing Vos’ lack of support for effort to remove the state’s top election administrator from her post. 

“Our community’s call to fire Robin Vos is a call for genuine electoral integrity,” Snorek told reporters outside the WEC office in Madison Monday. “It’s a response to his obstruction of fair elections, highlighted by his blocking of the impeachment of election administrator, Meagan Wolfe.”

The Elections Commission will meet Tuesday morning to discuss whether the recall petition will move forward, according to Riley Vetterkind, the agency’s spokesperson.

To be successful, Snorek will have had to collect signatures from a quarter of voters in Vos’ Assembly district, or about 7,000 signatures. The commission will review the signatures submitted Monday to determine that they came from qualified voters.

“We’re fed up with a decades of political maneuvering that serves the interests … other than those of Wisconsin as people,” Snorek said. “The upcoming recall elections are an opportunity to affirm our values.”

Vos did not immediately respond to WPR’s request for comment. He previously called the recall “a waste of time, resources and effort.”

Recall effort follows years of turmoil between Vos and pro-Trump activists

The attempted recall is just the latest effort by conservative critics of Vos who’ve sparred with him following former President Donald Trump’s loss to President Joe Biden in 2020.

Vos ordered an Assembly investigation into Trump’s unfounded accusations of voter fraud in the 2020 election. That months-long probe, conducted by former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, turned up no evidence of widespread fraud. Vos later rejected a call by Gableman for Wisconsin to decertify its 2020 election results.   

As a result, Vos was criticized by some on the right for not pushing pro-Trump conspiracy theories harder. Some of those critics mounted a primary challenge against Vos, coming close to defeating the powerful Assembly speaker in August of 2022.

Last month, state ethics investigators recommended felony charges against Trump’s Save America political action committee, three county GOP arms and state Rep. Janel Brandtjen, R-Menomonee Falls, for allegedly violating state campaign finance rules during that campaign. Local prosecutors will make final determinations about whether to pursue charges in that case in the coming weeks.

Vos has also said he does not support an effort among some Assembly Republicans to impeach Wolfe, the state’s top election official, who has has been a target of conspiracy theories in the wake of the 2020 election.

Wisconsin’s 2020 election results have been upheld by multiple investigations, and lawsuits challenging the results, in both state and federal courts, were either thrown out or ruled in favor of a Biden victory.