The complaints were filed on behalf of the voters’ guardians by Erick Kaardal of the Chicago-based Thomas More Society. One alleges that Walter Jankowski II, a resident of the Waunakee Manor nursing home, was deemed incompetent by a court in the late 1970s and that his son and court-appointed guardian, Walter Jankowski Jr., was surprised to learn he’d voted in November 2020 and was sent an absentee ballot for Tuesday’s election.

The other alleges that Sandra Klitzke, who lives at the Brewster Village nursing home in the town of Grand Chute in Outagamie County, voted in the November 2020 and April 2021 elections despite having been deemed incompetent in February 2020.

Kaardal alleged Klitzke’s case constitutes “abuse of those not cognizant enough to be aware that votes are being cast in their name” and called Jankowski’s case “outrageous” and “illegal, and it cannot be tolerated.”

The Elections Commission on Friday did not respond to a request to comment on or confirm the existence of the complaints. Waunakee’s clerk, Karla Endres, said she was “very vaguely familiar” with the Jankowski complaint and that her office was investigating it. The clerk in the town of Grand Chute could not be reached, and the directors at Waunakee Manor and Brewster Village did not respond to requests for comment.

Klitzke and Jankowski are two of the eight people Kaardal interviewed or talked to a relative about as part of his group’s investigation of the November 2020 election, which former President Donald Trump and many Republicans have baselessly alleged was rife with so much fraud that it denied Trump reelection.

Conservative former state Supreme Court Justice and current Republican-appointed special counsel Michael Gableman aired video clips of some of those interviews during a presentation on his ongoing review of the 2020 election during a legislative hearing March 1, falsely alleging in the presentation and a report he released that day that voting turnout was as high as 100% at nursing homes in five Wisconsin counties that got significant outside funding to help them run elections during the COVID-19 pandemic.

He and other election skeptics have pointed to a decision in 2020 by the Elections Commission to stop sending special voting deputies into nursing homes to help residents vote. The bipartisan commission made the decision because nursing homes were barring people from entry during the height of the pandemic when there was no vaccine and thousands of nursing home residents were dying from COVID-19. After Trump lost the election, his supporters pointed to the policy and suggested it led to mass voter fraud in the homes.

Kaardal has asserted there could be thousands more voters who have been deemed incompetent by the courts and barred from voting, but have been kept on the active rolls anyway, but has not provided evidence to back that up. So far he says he’s only been able to document such illegal voting by Klitzke and Jankowski. More than three million people cast ballots in Wisconsin in 2020 in an election that saw Joe Biden win the state by nearly 21,000 votes. Only 24 people have been charged with voter fraud in the election.

Elections Commission spokesperson Riley Vetterkind said the agency, on an “ongoing basis,” gets “case record copies of people who have been deemed by the courts as not competent and therefore ineligible to vote,” and shares those records in the statewide voter database that clerks access to make sure their local voter lists are accurate.

“This process is reliant on court records being sent to the WEC by county registers in probate in a timely manner,” he said, and commission guidance directs “clerks to review the adjudicated incompetent list before each election and update voter records as appropriate.”

Endres said her office checks that list whenever it helps nursing home voters vote and when people register to vote at the polls.