Carol Brunner

Role

Carol Brunner — Vice chair, Republican Party of Wisconsin's 1st Congressional District.

The Wisconsin elector certificate

Carol Brunner was one of 10 Wisconsin Republicans who met in the State Capitol basement in Madison on December 14, 2020 -- the same day Wisconsin's certified Biden-Harris electors met elsewhere in the Capitol -- and signed a "Certificate of the Votes of the 2020 Electors from Wisconsin" declaring themselves the state's "duly elected and qualified" electors for Donald Trump and Mike Pence. On its face, the document was unconditional, unlike Pennsylvania's and New Mexico's certificates. Then-state party chair Andrew Hitt has publicly stated he was told by outside counsel the document would take legal effect only if a pending lawsuit challenging Wisconsin's results succeeded -- a characterization attributed to his own account, not established as the shared understanding of all 10 signers.

Legal and civil proceedings

No Wisconsin criminal charges have been filed against Carol Brunner or any of the other nine signers; the Wisconsin Attorney General instead charged campaign attorneys Kenneth Chesebro, Jim Troupis, and Michael Roman, whose cases remain active in Dane County. In a civil lawsuit (Penebaker et al. v. Hitt et al.) brought by Law Forward, Carol Brunner joined the other nine signers in a consent judgment, announced December 6, 2023, in which they publicly acknowledged they were not Wisconsin's lawful electors, that their document had been used in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election at the request of the Trump campaign and state party, and agreed not to serve as or sign certificates as electors in any future election in which they are not the state-certified electors under law. The settlement did not require any admission of criminal wrongdoing.

On November 10, 2025, President Trump issued Carol Brunner a federal pardon covering offenses related to the 2020 election. Because Carol Brunner had never faced state or federal criminal charges over the certificate, this pardon is described by reporting as largely symbolic.

Note

Role attribution for this individual is sourced to secondary "full list" reporting rather than a single primary document and should be independently reverified against the Law Forward settlement filing before this record is published.

Connection to the incident

See 2020 Fake Elector Scheme for the coordinated multi-state effort and its intended use during the January 6, 2021 congressional electoral count.