They Don't Catch The Smart Ones

Milwaukee elections official fired after false requests of military absentee ballots https://t.co/OpLjxoQRP0

— Raw Story (@RawStory) November 3, 2022

First, you don't expose fraud by committing criminal fraud. That's just "committing criminal fraud."

Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson announced at a press conference Thursday that the employee, commission deputy director Kimberly Zapata, had been fired immediately after the city learned of her actions. Johnson said she requested the ballots to prove that election fraud is possible.

I know this is supposed to work in the movies, where the "good guy" commits the crime but in doing so exposes the "bad guy" as the REAL criminal, and everyone is happy 90 minutes later when they realize what the good guy did for everybody; but this is real life.  Funny thing, too:  this has happened before in Wisconsin:

The Wisconsin Department of Justice has charged a Racine County man with two felonies and two misdemeanors for allegedly fraudulent requests for the absentee ballots of other people, including several public officials.

The man, Harry Wait, posted videos online of himself requesting absentee ballots for Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and City of Racine Mayor Cory Mason. Wait, a right-wing activist involved in efforts to discredit the results of the 2020 presidential election, said he was attempting to expose an alleged vulnerability in the state’s voter registration system. 

On Thursday, the DOJ announced that Wait had been charged with two felony counts of the unauthorized use of an individual’s personal identifying information and two misdemeanor counts of election fraud. Each of the felony charges comes with a maximum sentence of six years imprisonment and a $10,000 fine. Each misdemeanor charge carries a maximum sentence of six months imprisonment and a $1,000 fine.  

This guy is especially clueless:

In an August interview with DOJ investigators, Wait admitted to requesting the absentee ballots of several people without their permission, knew that it was a crime to do so and said that he planned to do so again, according to the criminal complaint. 

Last month, Wait told the Racine Journal Times that he plans to use his prosecution to request “hundreds of thousands of documents” during the discovery process from the WEC and that he does “play chess,” adding that he expects national funding to help mount his defense.

There is no "discovery process" in a criminal case.  There is a criminal investigation conducted by the prosecutors, an arrest, and a trial.  He may be able to request "hundreds of thousands of documents" from the state under any open records statute Wisconsin has, but that doesn't mean he'll get them.  Their relevance to his criminal trial would be up to the judge.  This guy "plays chess"?  He's not even playing tic-tac-toe.

Elections officials in the state said that Wait requesting the ballots wasn’t proof that the system was vulnerable to fraud, only proof that he’d broken the law. 

Yeah, pretty much end of story there, for both these people.