The Wisconsin Elections Commission on Thursday ordered an investigation into Green Bay’s city clerk for accidentally sending some voters more than one absentee ballot during April’s spring election and for the upcoming August primary. 

During the spring election, duplicate absentee ballots were issued to at least 152 Green Bay voters. While the complaint about the first incident was pending, the clerk’s office mistakenly sent 244 extra ballots. 

Commissioners were very critical of the clerk, Celestine Jeffreys, for the repeated errors.  Democratic Commissioner Ann Jacobs said it was “unconscionable” that the same mistake could be made in consecutive elections. 

“I am really concerned that, first of all, it happened once, but then for the exact same error to happen a second time weeks later is unconscionable,” Jacobs said. “And we need, I think, as an organization, to investigate exactly what was going on in Green Bay, so we know how this error happened, other than just saying, ‘Well, somebody printed them twice.’ Well, yes, duh, but we need to know why they were able to print it twice, why this wasn’t caught, why it is that they mailed out 300 more ballots, apparently, give or take.” 

A complaint about the duplicate spring ballots was made by the Republican Party of Wisconsin. In its own analysis, the commission’s staff found probable cause that the clerk’s office had violated state election law by sending the duplicate ballots and recommended that the commission order her to “conform her conduct to the law and put procedures in place to prevent issuing duplicate ballots.” The commission decided to investigate the cause of the problem first before taking further action. 

The repeated mistakes were made as the election administration of Wisconsin’s largest cities, including Green Bay, has been under intense scrutiny since the emergence of Republican complaints about the 2020 election. 

Green Bay was one of the main targets of Republican complaints of “Zuckerbucks” — grants to support election administration costs during the COVID-19 pandemic from a nonprofit supported by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg that largely went to Democratic-voting cities. The city was also pulled into a drawn-out legal battle stemming from the actions of Republican officials and a local election conspiracy theorist following the 2020 election. 

During Thursday’s meeting, commissioners noted that the state’s WisVote system has safeguards to prevent this exact error, but that Green Bay used a different process. Wisconsin’s election system gives local election clerks a lot of discretion to decide how elections will be managed. 

“If a municipality is using the WisVote system to print the stickers that go on the outgoing envelopes to voters containing their ballots, if you use that system, you cannot do a duplicate generation of those stickers,” Jacobs said. “You can’t do it. We put in a failsafe, and that failsafe is there specifically to prevent this from happening. And I want everyone to know that that system works and has worked and does work. Where this has happened more than once is where communities have elected to not use the WisVote system to generate their own stickers.” 

Election betting 

The commission on Thursday also discussed a state law that makes it illegal to gamble on the results of a Wisconsin election and vote in that election. The issue has become increasingly relevant due to the rise of prediction markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket. 

Earlier this year, Jacobs warned on social media that betting on an election could result in people losing their right to vote — though there remained questions of how the law could be enforced. 

Commission staff said that the law would be enforced similarly to other rules about voter eligibility, which largely rely on complaints being made to the commission by witnesses. 

“Many voters may not know that they risk making themselves ineligible to vote in Wisconsin if they place a bet on a prediction market for an election-dependent outcome, such as which candidate will win the nomination or the office sought at an election,” WEC attorney Angela O’Brien Sharpe said, noting a gambling voter could be charged with a felony. “If someone has cause to believe that a voter has placed a bet, that would be solved by the same type of challenge as the other voter qualifications. The challenger would initiate the qualification challenge process the same as they would for any qualification issue, the voter would then be asked under oath if they had made any bet or wager depending on the result of the election, and that process would follow the very specific steps that are outlined in our administrative code for how to administer those types of challenges.”