Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 41. Sunrise is 6:45 and sunset is 7:15 for 12 hours 30 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 70 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1915, Typhoid Mary (Mary Mallon), the first healthy carrier of disease ever identified in the United States, is put in quarantine for the second time, where she would remain for the rest of her life.
A jury convicted a Wisconsin man of election fraud and identity theft for requesting the ballots of Republican state Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and Democratic Racine Mayor Cory Mason without their consent.
Jurors in Racine County on Tuesday found Harry Wait guilty of two misdemeanor election fraud charges and one felony identity theft charge following a two-day trial. He was acquitted of a second count of identity theft.
Wait leads a group that makes false election claims, including that Wisconsin’s elections are riddled with fraud and that President Donald Trump won the 2020 election. Trump lost Wisconsin in 2020 by about 21,000 votes.
Wait admitted in 2022 that he requested Vos’ and Mason’s ballots to try to prove that the state’s voter registration system is vulnerable to fraud. Wait told The Associated Press at the time that he wasn’t surprised he was charged.
“You got to expect to pay some costs sometimes when you are trying to work for the public good,” he said.
His efforts drew praise from Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson in 2022, who called Wait a “white hat hacker.”
After the verdict, Wait told NBC affiliate WTMJ of Milwaukee that he “would do it again.”
“I tested the system and the system failed,” he said.
A sentencing date has not been set. Wait’s attorney Joe Bugni did not respond to an email Wednesday asking whether he would appeal.
Wait, 71, faces up to six years in prison on the felony conviction and up to a year in jail on each of the misdemeanor convictions.
See Activist who pushed 2020 election fraud claims convicted of election fraud, NBC News, March 25, 2026.
Of course Harry Wait is unrepentant, and Sen. Ron Johnson is supportive of him: years of burrowing into every dark, conspiratorial tunnel have left those two incapable of seeing much and seeing anything clearly.
The greater surprise would be if either man showed normal judgment and contrition.
A Bird Cam from Ithaca, New York: