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When Madison residents went to vote in a special election this month, they didn’t have to stand in line according to their last name or wait for poll workers to flip through paper lists to find their names. For the first time, election officials there used electronic pollbooks to check voters in, allowing them to search for voters’ names and collect signatures on digital pads.

They could also use the e-pollbooks to process absentee ballots, register new voters and issue voter numbers, just as they did with paper poll books, but with less chance of error.

The pilot program in the state capital offered a glimpse of both the technology’s potential — and its current limitations. Poll workers praised the state’s in-house e-pollbook system, known as Badger Book, for its speed and accuracy. But its high costs, limited vendor options, and a lack of state funding for support staff have stalled broader adoption, especially in large cities. 

Now, with the Wisconsin Elections Commission beginning to evaluate commercial e-pollbook vendors, clerks are hoping new options might offer a more sustainable path forward.

Deploying the state’s system in a city as large as Madison is “just not practical at this point,” Mike Haas, Madison’s interim clerk, said after the June 17 county supervisor election. “We looked at it more as an opportunity to get familiar with the technology.”

Funding is just one challenge. Adopting the e-pollbook in a city like Madison could cost well over $1 million. While the software is free, the hardware for running it — including a tablet-like device and a printer — costs well over $2,000 for each station, and each of the city’s 120 polling locations would each likely need several. Milwaukee, with over 180 sites, would face even higher costs. And in small, cash-strapped towns, setting aside even $10,000 for e-pollbooks can be unrealistic. 

Another challenge is access to support. Badger Book is the only approved e-pollbook in the state, and it’s designed and maintained by the Wisconsin Elections Commission. 

While any municipality can use it, commission staffers would likely be limited in their ability to provide Election Day support for a city as big as Madison or Milwaukee, unless they got more funding from the Legislature.

Larger jurisdictions using Badger Books would have to manage some of the logistics and troubleshooting on their own, said Ann Jacobs, a Democratic appointee and current chair of the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

“I would love it if we could have the staff sufficient to have a little Badger Book division and be able to service Badger Books statewide,” she said.. “That would be terrific. That’s not our current reality.”

Sun Prairie confronts the costs of an upgrade

Sun Prairie, northeast of Madison, was the first municipality in Wisconsin to adopt the e-pollbook after the technology rolled out in 2018. Now around 400 out of the state’s 1,850 municipalities use it. It’s an excellent tool that saves hours of staff time, said Sun Prairie Clerk Elena Hilby, but the city’s hardware is aging and beginning to slow down, and as long as Badger Book is the only system available, she worries about the cost of updating it. 

Currently, only one company in Wisconsin — PDS, A Converge Company, which is based in Oconomowoc — is authorized to replace the hardware used to operate the e-pollbooks. 

When Hilby asked the company for a quote on a machine in January, the cost was $2,011, she said. In April, she said, it was $2,441, an increase that the company attributed to tariffs. 

“We are literally fish in a barrel,” Hilby said. “They can make it cost whatever they want, and we’re stuck, because they’re the only ones we can use.”

And she doesn’t want the Badger Books the way they are. “I want WEC to give me other options,” she said.

Commercial alternatives may not be much cheaper, said Ben Adida, founder and executive director of election technology vendor VotingWorks. And either way, the investment can be worth it, Adida said, because e-pollbooks reduce staff time. That’s especially true at the end of the night when poll workers upload voter data, a task that’s “incredibly tedious” without e-pollbooks, he said.

One advantage of an in-house system is that it can be tailored to a particular state or jurisdiction, said Tammy Patrick, chief programs officer for the Election Center, a nonprofit group representing election officials. Commercial products start off with a basic menu of services, and customizing them can require more time and money, she said. 

The disadvantage is that the extent of state support depends on government funding. Commercial options can fluctuate in their ability to support clients, she said, but they aren’t as “susceptible to the whims of legislators and appropriators.”

Commercial alternatives could be coming

The Wisconsin Elections Commission is looking at how to give local election officials access to more options and support.

On May 2, the commission invited clerks to join a committee to evaluate commercial e-pollbook options, working with vendors and the general public. The topic is likely to be discussed at the commission’s July meeting. The commission “looks forward to addressing the committee’s feedback,” said WEC Administrator Meagan Wolfe.

The committee won’t assess Badger Books, according to the email sent to clerks, and its work “does not mean that Badger Books will be discontinued.” Other states, the email noted, have multiple approved pollbook models.

The Wisconsin Municipal Clerks Association and Wisconsin County Clerks Association have also formed a task force on the future of e-pollbooks, said Hilby, who’s co-leading the group with Portage County Clerk Maria Davis. They aim to compile a list of clerk concerns and expectations by July.

Can commercial options match Badger Book on security?

Forty states had at least one jurisdiction that used e-pollbooks in the 2022 general election. Wisconsin, Michigan, and Colorado use e-pollbooks developed in-house. Other states, like Alabama and Florida, have multiple commercial options. Some states just use one commercial vendor.

Jacobs, the election commission chair, said an advantage of Badger Book is that the commission has access and control over the product, which makes it more secure. It never connects to the internet, unlike many of the added features in commercial products that clerks have said they’d like to have, she said.

“I’m skeptical that a commercial product, especially those that connect to the internet, would be of sufficient security and usability for us to allow for them to be used within our system,” she said.

Haas, Madison’s interim clerk and the former Wisconsin Elections Commission administrator, said the commission also opted for an in-house system because the state’s elections are decentralized and have unique laws. The initial idea, he said, was to see how the in-house system works before considering whether private vendors could move into the market.

While the pilot project worked out, he said, Madison is unlikely to implement e-pollbooks anytime soon. In the long term, he said, the decision will depend on whether the city council wants to pay for it, and whether the election commission can provide enough support.

“Based on what I’ve heard from the staff in working with the technology, I think they would be happy to be able to implement it,” Haas said.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Wisconsin to consider more electronic pollbook options, as in-house system faces limitations is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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Wisconsin Republicans want to require that all proposed constitutional amendments come with a plain-language explanation, a move that they say would help voters better understand complex ballot questions.

The proposal has drawn broad support. But some lawmakers are concerned about whether the measure as proposed would leave the interpretation of ballot questions vulnerable to partisanship. And even some supporters say the bill should have more specific standards for what constitutes plain language.

In its current version, the bill calls for the Legislature to pass a plain-language explanation along with any proposed constitutional amendment. The explanation would be drafted by the Legislative Reference Bureau, a nonpartisan legislative agency that helps draft bills, but legislators would be able to revise it. Neither the explanation nor the amendment would be subject to a governor’s veto.

The proposal has the support of a wide swath of voting organizations: The ACLU of Wisconsin, the city of Madison, League of Women Voters of Wisconsin, All Voting Is Local Action and Common Cause in Wisconsin are all registered in support of it. No group has registered in opposition.

“Most of our voters do not have law degrees to interpret many of these questions,” Rep. Jerry O’Connor, R-Fond du Lac, the bill’s author, said at a June 3 public hearing before the Assembly elections committee. “It leaves individuals unprepared to really make an informed decision.”

But Republicans and Democrats expressed concern at the hearing that the bill, as written, gives too much control of the process to the legislative majority. 

O’Connor maintained that crafting the explanation should ultimately be the Legislature’s responsibility. He didn’t respond to Votebeat’s request for comment. 

Proposal leaves plain language undefined

States that require plain-language summaries of their ballot proposals vary widely in how they craft them. Oregon uses a demographically representative citizen panel. Arizona leaves it to a legislative council controlled by the majority party.

The drafting process is often contentious, and litigation over fairness is common, said Thomas Collins, executive director of the Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission.

There’s no gold standard for laws on plain-language explanations, said Michael Blasie, an expert on the subject and an associate professor at Seattle University School of Law. Regardless of who writes the explanation, he said, the key is user testing: giving drafts to readers and checking whether they understand them as intended. 

The Wisconsin bill doesn’t require that. Without testing and feedback, Blasie said, the bill is a positive step but won’t have a meaningful impact unless it’s followed by further reforms.

There are about 1,100 plain-language laws across the country at the federal, state and local levels, including in Wisconsin, Blasie said. Some of them broadly require jurisdictions to provide plain-language explanations of proposals; others are more specific, defining criteria like sentence length or prohibiting passive voice.

The Wisconsin proposal falls into the former category, requiring plain language without defining what that means, or how to enforce it. That’s a common approach and allows for more flexibility, Blasie said. 

“You can adapt as the needs of voters in Wisconsin change,” he said. 

“The downside is drafters really have no specific guidance and no way of knowing whether they have met that standard,” he said.

One of the groups that registered in support of the proposal, Disability Rights Wisconsin, urged lawmakers to include a standard to determine what constitutes plain language.

Concerns over changing who writes explanations

Under current law, it’s up to the Wisconsin attorney general’s office to write the explanations of constitutional amendment proposals voters see on their ballots. This bill would eliminate that role. 

State Rep. Scott Krug, R-Rome, vice chair of the Assembly Committee on Campaigns and Elections, said the explanations that come out of the attorney general’s office are often confusing. Some are written at a 12th grade reading level, whereas plain-language guidelines typically call for writing them at an eighth grade level.

Green County Clerk Arianna Voegeli, a Democrat, acknowledges that the current system needs improvement. But she said she doesn’t support the bill as written, arguing that a partisan body like the Legislature can’t produce what should be a neutral explanation for voters.

“It’s almost certain that whoever is in the majority trying to pass this legislation is going to craft it in a way that leans towards the outcome that they’re desiring, Republican or Democrat,” she said.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat’s free national newsletter here.

Wisconsin proposal to require simple explanations of ballot questions needs work, critics say is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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The U.S. Justice Department has sent letters to election officials in at least two key swing states, threatening action against the states if they don’t comply with provisions of a 2002 federal election law.

Lawyers from the department’s civil rights division sent letters in recent weeks to both Arizona and Wisconsin. The Arizona letter said that state officials are not properly verifying voters’ identities as dictated by the Help America Vote Act, and it warned of a lawsuit. The Wisconsin letter said the Wisconsin Elections Commission is not properly resolving administrative complaints as required by the same law and threatened to withhold federal election funds over that issue.

The Justice Department recently sued North Carolina also, claiming that the state has not been properly verifying voter identity.

The department issued a press release and publicly released the Wisconsin letter, dated June 4; Votebeat obtained the previously unreported Arizona letter, dated May 20, through a records request.

The letters are an early sign of how President Donald Trump’s administration is scrutinizing state election practices after his March executive order on elections, which called for stricter citizenship checks and revised voting machine standards, among other things. The Justice Department has also dropped or withdrawn from several voting rights cases dating from before Trump took office again in January.

Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, responded in a June 2 letter to the Justice Department that state election officials conduct a complete residency and citizenship check and fully comply with the Help America Vote Act when someone registers to vote. 

“Arizona has a long history of adherence to voter registration requirements, both state and federal,” Fontes wrote.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission declined to immediately comment on the letter that it received, which noted that the commission has declined to adjudicate administrative complaints against itself since at least 2022, due in part to a Wisconsin Supreme Court decision.

The letter said the commission’s actions “justify a bar” on future grants to the state from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. 

The DOJ appears to be raising a “legitimate” violation in that case, David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research and a former attorney in the voting section of the Justice Department, said after reviewing the letter. But he characterized it as minor and stressed that the agency has limited resources to devote to enforcing voting laws.

The DOJ didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment about the letters.

How Wisconsin Elections Commission handles conflict of interest

Under the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), any state receiving money for elections must also establish an administrative process allowing people to file complaints about alleged violations of the law. If the state determines there’s a HAVA violation, it must provide an appropriate remedy, the law says; if not, it can dismiss the complaint.

But in recent years, the WEC has been summarily dismissing HAVA complaints that are about the agency’s own actions. 

In rejecting those complaints, the commission cited a 2022 Wisconsin Supreme Court opinion in which Justice Rebecca Bradley, a conservative, said it would be “nonsensical” for the Wisconsin Elections Commission to adjudicate a complaint against itself. Bradley was joined in her opinion by two other justices, and a fourth justice echoed her in a separate opinion in the case.

Becker said that WEC practice probably doesn’t comply with the federal law, which supersedes state laws, especially for federal elections.

While the election commission said it would be a conflict of interest to adjudicate complaints against itself, Becker said other agencies “do investigations of themselves all the time.”

Because of the WEC’s position, complainants are left “without any recourse,” Assistant U.S. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon wrote in the letter. The commission’s actions jeopardize future federal funding, she wrote.

But in at least some cases, the agency has told complainants they can appeal a WEC ruling in court, Rob Yablon, a law professor at UW-Madison, pointed out. Yablon also said it’s unclear whether WEC’s position that it can’t resolve the complaints could itself count as a determination that meets the requirements in HAVA. 

Right now, Wisconsin doesn’t stand to lose much in federal funding over the issue. The U.S. Election Assistance Commission allocated about $272,000 in election security grants to Wisconsin in the 2025 fiscal year, money that has yet to come in, according to WEC Chair Ann Jacobs, a Democrat.

“The commission would have to decide to take it. We would have to know the conditions of receiving it,” Jacobs said, adding that she questioned “whether or not the work that would be involved in (administering the grants) would justify the receipt of the money when … it would amount to $147.03 per clerk.”

It would take a majority vote of the commissioners for the WEC to begin adjudicating claims against itself, Jacobs said, but she wouldn’t be in favor of it.

“I think our legal analysis is correct: It’s improper for us to be the adjudicating body on whether or not we did something wrong,” she said. “I think that we can have both statutes, both federal and state law, harmoniously work together. And I think that is, in fact, what’s going on.”

WEC member Don Millis, a Republican, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Following the DOJ letter, Republicans in charge of the state’s budget committee delayed a planned session to finalize the election commission’s budget, saying they had to review the Justice Department’s allegations first.

Arizona’s ID number checks are at issue

In both the North Carolina lawsuit and the Arizona letter, the DOJ asserted that the states have failed to require applicants’ driver’s license numbers when they register to vote.

North Carolina has since fixed its form to require this information, but it hasn’t contacted every voter who registered through the faulty registration form to provide the missing information. The issue of missing identification numbers was central to the recent challenge to results of the state’s Supreme Court race.

In the letter to Arizona’s secretary of state, Maureen Riordan, senior counsel and acting chief of the voting section of the civil rights division, wrote that HAVA requires the state to request the applicant’s driver’s license number if the applicant has one. If not, a Social Security number is acceptable, she wrote.

The DOJ claims Arizona improperly allows registrants to use either ID number, regardless of whether the applicant has a driver’s license.

The division asked the state to revise the form and retroactively check all applicants who provided only a Social Security number “to identify any non-citizens.”

Fontes in his response explained that since 2005, Arizona has required voters who register to vote in state and local elections to provide evidence of citizenship and has designed its form to meet that requirement as well as HAVA requirements.

When someone applies, an election official completes what the state calls a “HAVA check” using the state’s driver’s license database to check the driver’s license data, as well as to confirm citizenship, he said. 

“Our system and processes ensure that if those individuals have MVD credentials, the number of such credential is included in their voter record,” he wrote.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.

Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Fifield at jfifield@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat’s free national newsletter here.

US warns Wisconsin and Arizona over compliance with federal election law is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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A Republican-backed bill would make it easier to go to court to challenge the Wisconsin Elections Commission’s rulings on administrative complaints — a shift that could increase the number of election-related lawsuits.

The proposal, Assembly Bill 268, seeks to reverse a recent Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling that limited who has the right to appeal such rulings. If passed, it would allow more residents to bring election challenges into the court system, rather than leaving accountability solely in the hands of the commission. 

If the bill fails, supporters argue, holding election officials accountable for breaking the law would be difficult or even impossible.

As the law stands now, under the Supreme Court’s interpretation, “unless a person is personally, legally harmed by a WEC decision, the decision is unappealable,” Republican state Sen. Van Wanggaard, the bill author, said at an Assembly elections committee hearing Tuesday.

Complaints to the Wisconsin Elections Commission are frequent

State residents of all political affiliations regularly file complaints with the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which is the legally required first step for most election-related challenges, unless they are brought by district attorneys or the attorney general.

Liberals have filed complaints over concerns about towns that switched to hand-counting ballots and alleged inaccuracies on candidate nomination forms. Conservatives have filed complaints over allegedly being denied poll worker positions. Other complaints have involved allegations that clerks refused to accept ballots at polling places and unproven accusations of ballot tampering.

In one prominent case after the August 2022 election, then-Racine County Republican Chair Kenneth Brown filed an administrative complaint with the commission, accusing Racine of illegally using a mobile voting van for city residents to cast in-person absentee votes. Brown alleged, among other things, that the van was stationed around more Democratic areas of the city, illegally providing an unfair partisan advantage.

The commission rejected Brown’s complaint, finding no probable cause to suspect that the use of the van was illegal. Brown, represented by the conservative legal group Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, appealed. State law allows election officials or complainants “aggrieved” by a commission order to appeal it to circuit court.

Courts disagreed over whether Brown was qualified to sue under that standard. The Wisconsin Supreme Court’s liberal majority ultimately dismissed the case, ruling that Brown had not shown the commission’s decision made it harder for him to vote or harmed him personally.

“Because Brown was not injured by WEC’s decision,” liberal Justice Jill Karofsky wrote in the majority opinion, he “does not have standing to seek judicial review.”

Republicans panned the decision. Liberals were mostly happy with the outcome of the case, but some objected to the court’s legal reasoning on standing and complained that the justices should have addressed the underlying dispute in the case — that is, whether the use of the mobile voting van was legal.

Clerks, meanwhile, largely supported the justices’ interpretation of who has standing to challenge a commission ruling in court. They expressed concern about the Wanggaard bill, which would negate that ruling.

“This concept of legal standing exists because it prevents the courts from becoming overburdened with speculative, ideological or purely political lawsuits,” Green County Clerk Arianna Voegeli, a Democrat, said at the hearing. The bill, Voegeli said, opens the door to politically motivated complaints “aimed at harassing election officials or disrupting election administration.”

Proponents say bill would provide a check on the WEC

Assembly Bill 268 would explicitly allow any complainants to appeal any commission order that doesn’t give them what they’re asking for, “regardless of whether the complainant has suffered an injury to a legally recognized interest.”

Lucas Vebber, deputy counsel of the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, which registered in favor of the bill, told Votebeat that in voting disputes, courts should decide cases on the underlying legal arguments, rather than focusing on who has the right to sue.

“It’s important that any government actor who’s making decisions (has) some kind of a mechanism in place to review those decisions in every case,” Vebber said.

“Both sides have filed these types of complaints,” he continued, “and I think all of them, regardless of political affiliation, should have their opportunity to have a day in court.”

Courts are already weighing in on an increasing number of voting disputes — including cases on drop boxes, whether voters can spoil their ballots and whether municipalities can forgo accessible voting machines for people with disabilities.

Rock County Clerk Lisa Tollefson said in a statement that the proposal could lead to more harassment and a “surge in litigation” against clerks since anybody in the state could file a complaint against the clerk, whether or not they were harmed, and then continue to pursue the case in court.

Wanggaard, the bill author, said it’s not his goal to put more pressure on clerks. Clerks weren’t getting flooded with cases before the Supreme Court restricted who could sue over commission complaints, he said.

Rep. Scott Krug, the Republican vice chair of the elections committee, said the bill’s language might be overly broad and suggested changes that would draw some limits on who could challenge a commission ruling in court.

For example, he said, lawmakers could clarify that only people who live in the jurisdiction where the alleged violation occurred could appeal a commission ruling.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Clerks worry that Wisconsin bill would mean more election disputes end up in court is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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Wisconsin Republicans are proposing an expansion of early voting, with new requirements for municipalities statewide, but some local officials say the one-size-fits-all mandate wouldn’t make sense for Wisconsin’s smallest communities.

The proposal would require every municipality in Wisconsin, regardless of its size, to offer at least 20 hours of in-person absentee voting at the clerk’s office, or an alternative site, for each election. The bill’s authors say they want to reimburse local governments for the added costs, though they haven’t yet clarified how they would do that. 

Sen. Rachael Cabral-Guevara, a Republican, said she wrote the bill after noticing the stark difference in early voting availability between rural and urban municipalities.

In the Fox Valley cities that used to be part of her district — Appleton, Oshkosh and Neenah — early voting was widely available, she said. But in many of the rural areas that she began serving after the latest redistricting cycle, she said, “nobody has early voting.”

She argues the proposal would provide more flexibility for voters and offer an alternative for those who are uncomfortable voting by mail.

Local election officials generally welcome increased access, but worry about the 20-hour mandate being a burden on smaller communities. 

Acknowledging the pushback, Cabral-Guevara said, “Why should we have hesitation about giving people the opportunity of voting? Why shouldn’t there be equity across the state for rural versus urban?”

In-person absentee voting access varies across Wisconsin

In cities like Madison and Milwaukee, voters have nearly two weeks before an election to cast an in-person absentee ballot. They can vote in one of multiple locations, and at almost any time of the day. 

That isn’t the case in rural Wisconsin.

Some rural municipalities provide just a one- or two-hour window for in-person absentee voting during that two-week period. In others, in-person early voting is done by appointment only at a clerk’s home, which acts as an official office for that purpose. Many have no clear policy at all for in-person absentee voting.

Clerks in smaller towns expressed mixed feelings about the proposed changes.

In Luck, a northwest Wisconsin town with about 900 residents, Patsy Gustafson serves as a part-time clerk, generally working three or four hours per week and arranging in-person early voting by appointment only. This proposal would require her to work over double her normal hours during the early voting period.

“I think I’d be sitting around a lot of that time for nothing, but hopefully it would make more people that wouldn’t otherwise vote come,” she said.

Gustafson said she supports state reimbursement to municipalities — “elections are expensive,” she said — but questions how the state would cover her added costs, especially because she’s salaried. 

Cabral-Guevara said the funding formula is still being finalized.

In Elcho, a town of about 1,200 people in northern Langlade County, the 20-hour requirement would be unnecessary, Clerk Lyn Olenski told Votebeat. 

“I guess I wouldn’t want that,” she said about the proposal. “We don’t have that many people that want to vote early.”

The 20-hour mandate would make even less sense for smaller municipalities, Olenski said.

“If we had 100 people, I sure wouldn’t want to sit in there for 20 hours,” she said.

Cabral-Guevara said she believes behavior could shift as early voting becomes more accessible.

“I believe that there is a duty as a clerk to make sure that there is easy access for people to be able to vote,” Cabral-Guevara said. “And if they’re sitting around, well, then they can find other things to do if they would like.”

That may be wishful thinking in places like the village of Yuba, which has only 43 registered voters. Clerk James Ueeck, who also works full time for the county in another role, said he would have to request time off from his main job to be able to provide 20 hours of early voting. 

Even if every voter in the village cast a ballot early, the total time required wouldn’t come close to 20 hours. And his office would still have to keep polls open on Election Day.

“For us, it makes no sense,” he said. “I would rather just leave it where I can do it by appointment.”

Ueeck added that many clerks in Richland County also work full-time jobs and might resign their clerk positions if the mandate becomes law.

Rep. Scott Krug, a Republican from Rome and co-author of the measure, told Votebeat that he has heard concerns from small-town clerks over the 20-hour requirement. He said he’s open to tweaking the measure — for example, requiring fewer hours in communities with fewer than 250 voters. But he said there must be “access everywhere” to early voting.

Similar versions in Washington County and Connecticut

The Republican proposal mirrors a local initiative in Washington County, where officials have offered to cover the costs for municipalities that voluntarily expand early voting hours.

For the April 2025 election, the county compensated municipalities at 150% of the added cost for extending their early voting hours beyond what they were in the April 2023 election. About 90% of the municipalities in the county participated. Unlike the state proposal, Washington County’s plan had no mandated minimum hours.

Early voting has been taking off across the country, too. At this point, 47 states offer some version of in-person early voting. In Connecticut, which recently passed an early voting initiative, the program requires every municipality to be open between four and 14 days for early voting, depending on the election, regardless of population size. 

In Union, Connecticut — a town of just 800 residents — Clerk Heidi Bradrick said only eight voters showed up during the 14 days of early voting in May.

“I understand their desire to have it,” she said, “but they definitely need to take into account the size of the municipality. We always laugh, like, ‘What if we get everybody to vote the first day? Can we close?’”

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Wisconsin election officials seek more flexibility in proposed early voting mandate is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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When the clerk of Rock County, Wisconsin, gets a public records request for images of election ballots, much of it is easy to fulfill. For most municipalities in the county, it’s just a matter of uploading a photo of the ballot that’s already captured when it gets tabulated.

But for two of the county’s largest cities — Janesville and Beloit — it’s a lot more complicated, and time-consuming, because of a state law governing places that use a central counting facility for their absentee ballots.

For those ballots, Clerk Lisa Tollefson must redact the unique identifying numbers that the law requires poll workers to write on each one. Otherwise, the number could be used to connect the ballots to the voters who cast them. And because the numbers don’t appear in the same place on each ballot, Tollefson must click through the ballot images one at a time to locate and blot out the number before releasing the images.

To respond to records requests for this year’s April election, she had to redact the numbers from 10,000 ballot images. In November, it was over 23,000.

Given her other job duties, Tollefson says, fulfilling these requests can take months. Without that step, she says, she could fulfill public records requests in “no time at all.”

And it’s all due to a law that she and other clerks in the state say is not only outdated, but also a potential threat to the constitutional right in Wisconsin to ballot secrecy.

Tollefson and other county clerks said they support an ongoing legislative effort to repeal the law requiring election officials to write down those numbers. The proposal has come up in past legislative sessions but hasn’t gone far. It will be revived again this year, said Rep. Scott Krug, a Republican legislative leader and vice chair of the Assembly elections committee.

Number is obsolete and creates security risk, clerks say

The law might have been useful in the past, Tollefson said, when voters who changed their minds or made errors on absentee ballots that had been cast but not yet counted could void their ballot and cast a new one. The ID number allowed election officials at central count facilities to locate the ballot and cancel it before issuing a new one. 

But courts have since blocked voters from spoiling their absentee ballots, rendering the numbers obsolete. Now, if a voter tries to cast an in-person ballot after already voting absentee, the voter would be flagged in the poll books as having voted and would be turned away, Tollefson said.

Moreover, the labeling of ballots could pose a privacy risk at central count locations, where observers and poll workers might be able to match up numbers to deduce how someone voted, Tollefson said. The number written on each ballot corresponds with the voter’s number on the poll list, a public register that election officials use to enter information about voters.

There are rules in place to prevent an observer from connecting a ballot to the voter who cast it, Tollefson said, but she added, “We have laws that people shouldn’t steal, but they still do.”

Marathon County Clerk Kim Trueblood, a Republican, said the increased presence of election observers in recent years exacerbates that risk.

So far, there’s no indication that any observers or poll workers have intentionally used the numbers to link voters to their absentee ballots at central count. But election officials told Votebeat that the law creates an unnecessary risk, to go along with the significant added workload.

After the 2020 presidential election, Milwaukee County was asked to release images of its ballots as part of Donald Trump’s request for a recount in the county. The county had over 265,000 absentee ballots, all marked with identifying numbers that had to be redacted individually, Elections Director Michelle Hawley recalled. 

Given time pressures, the county hired its election vendor, Election Systems & Software, to do the redactions. It cost $27,000, which the Trump campaign covered as part of its recount request.

The county has since looked for ways to streamline the redactions and avoid outsourcing it, Hawley said. But the state law remains “extremely time-consuming,” she said. In addition to complicating records requests, she said, the law slows down absentee ballot processing as election officials at central count must write a number on every ballot.

Repealing little-known practice has had little momentum

Trueblood said the biggest obstacle to repealing the law may be simply that too few people know it exists. She said she has “talked to every” legislator from Marathon County and some were “horrified to learn” about what the law entails. 

“Hopefully the Legislature will do something about it,” she said.

Last session, the proposal to repeal the law had bipartisan support. The Assembly elections committee unanimously approved it after its Republican author, former Rep. Donna Rozar,  encouraged committee members not to discount the bill just because she wrote it with a Democrat. 

But the proposal was never introduced in the Senate and never got a floor vote in the Assembly.

Trueblood hopes the Legislature will act before 2026, when there will be an April Supreme Court election and legislative primaries and a general election later in the year.

If they just “cross off that little line in the state statute,” said Tollefson, “we would be good to go.”

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Clerks say an obsolete Wisconsin law creates needless work — and a threat to ballot secrecy is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Reading Time: 7 minutes

A couple of years ago, Lorraine Beyersdorff was ready to retire from her job as clerk of the town of Texas, Wisconsin, after 34 years of service.

“I will not run again,” she said in a community Facebook post in late 2022. “Nomination papers can be circulated for signatures beginning December 1st. If interested, call me for more information.”

About a dozen people thanked her for a job well done. But no one filed nomination papers. Nobody called. And because of a quirk in Wisconsin law, no one from outside of the 1,600-person town could take the job. 

State law requires all elected town clerks — and the appointees who replace clerks departing mid-term — to live in the town where they serve. 

Beyersdorff, 73, knew there was another option: The town could switch from electing its clerk to appointing one. That would allow officials to consider candidates from outside the town’s borders.

But in small towns such as Texas — those with fewer than 2,500 residents — making that change is slow and cumbersome. It first requires a vote at a town meeting to put the measure on the ballot, then another vote by residents to approve it.

In Beyersdorff’s case, that months-long process stretched into years. She remained on the job until voters finally approved the switch in November. In April, the town appointed a new clerk, whom Beyersdorff is training. The clerk job is part-time — about 20 hours a week, though that varies depending on elections and other town business. 

“I wanted to get out, but I was OK hanging in,” Beyersdorff said. “After so many years, you’re almost scared to not have it. It’s been part of my life for so long, and because you can do it from home, it’s kind of intermingled with cooking and doing laundry and everything else.”

A proposal to make switching easier

Now, Wisconsin lawmakers want to streamline the process for towns like Texas. A bill introduced April 16 with bipartisan support would allow towns under 2,500 people to switch to appointing a clerk with a simple vote at a town meeting — no referendum required.

The proposal would also eliminate another hurdle: Under current law, even if a town approves the switch, it can’t take effect until the end of the current clerk’s term. The bill would let towns make the change immediately if the clerk position is vacant or becomes vacant.

The legislation passed committees unanimously last year but never received a full floor vote. The proposal authors, state Sen. Romaine Robert Quinn, a Republican who represents a northern Wisconsin district, and state Rep. Alex Dallman, a Republican from central Wisconsin, didn’t respond to requests for comment about the proposal. In a public hearing last year, Dallman said the proposal “will allow towns to operate more efficiently.”

Beyersdorff agrees. “You’d have a much quicker way to replace (clerks) and a bigger pool,” she said. “It can happen that somebody dies in the middle of the term, and then how do you replace them?”

Even in less dire situations, she said, appointing clerks can be advantageous because it allows the town to weigh qualifications heavily. In elections, Beyersdorff said, sometimes small communities vote for the people they know best, without caring “if they have any qualifications or even are capable of doing it.”

The multiple hurdles that small towns face under current law make it challenging for them to recruit and train qualified clerks, said Sam Liebert, a former clerk who is now the Wisconsin state director for All Voting is Local. “Giving local communities the flexibility to appoint their clerks is a common-sense solution.”

About one-third of Wisconsin towns now appoint their town clerks, and more are considering the switch, said Joe Ruth, government affairs director and legal counsel for the Wisconsin Towns Association. The role has become increasingly complex, and the longtime clerks who held the position for decades are aging out, he said.

It can be easier for towns to look for already qualified candidates who might live outside their municipal limits, he said, an option only available if the town appoints its clerk. By forgoing the currently required referendum that small towns need to make that change, towns can save the costs of administering that ballot question.

Ruth said that he often fields calls from towns that are desperate for help.

“We often hear the question, ‘We just lost our clerk. What do we do?'” he said. “Or, ‘We lost our clerk last year, we appointed someone to fill that vacancy, and now that person quit, and we can’t find anybody else.’ Those situations are really what have driven us towards these types of changes.”

The bigger challenge that towns face, Ruth said, is when elected clerks quit early in their tenure and no other town residents seek to replace them. Because state law prohibits towns from switching to appointing clerks until the end of the current term, towns can sometimes go one or two years without a clerk — a problem that this proposal would fix, he said. 

More complications in town of Wausau

While Beyersdorff was OK continuing in her job until the town could find a replacement for her, that wasn’t the case 10 minutes away in the town of Wausau.

Late last year, the longtime clerk retired and moved out of town. The town supervisors thought they had the situation under control: They appointed a town resident. That person quit after two weeks. 

Scrambling to find a clerk before the Wisconsin Supreme Court election in April, town supervisors advertised the opening in the town’s newsletter, during a budget meeting and on its website, said Sharon Hunter, a town supervisor.

People were interested in the job, she said, but they were typically working full time or had part-time jobs. “So the concern was the number of evening meetings, all of the responsibilities of the clerk, and especially running the elections,” she said.

Ultimately, nobody stepped up for the April election, so two town supervisors filled in. Hunter said she had been putting in an extra 20 hours of work per week between processing permits, licenses, keeping meeting minutes and preparing agendas, doing paperwork on the annual budget, and filing reports.

The town was lucky to have a chief election inspector — the official in charge of the town’s only polling place — with detailed knowledge, she said, because it would have been time-consuming for her to learn those duties.

In the April election, the town put forth a referendum to switch to appointing clerks, but voters  rejected it by a narrow margin. Hunter attributes the loss to the failure of supporters to explain why it was necessary. The town will try the referendum again in the future, she said.

For now, at least, the town has a clerk. In the April election, voters elected another clerk, who ran unopposed.

“I’m sure she’ll do a wonderful job,” Hunter said. “My concern is stepping in and not realizing all that is involved. Maybe she finds out that this is something she really doesn’t want to do and then she resigns. Well, then we’re in the same situation again, without a clerk for two years.”

Town clerk takes on extra role after nobody else steps up

If you were to stumble across Sam Augustin at her northern Wisconsin house early on a weekday, you would find her sipping a coffee at her table, surrounded by four laptops. 

One is a personal laptop. One is issued by Forest County, where she’s a board member. Another is from the town of Armstrong Creek, where she’s an elected clerk, and the last one from the town of Caswell, where she’s an appointed clerk.

It’s good to have all those laptops open at once, she said, because if she gets a call for help at any of her three public service jobs, she just has to wake up one of her laptops rather than locate it and start it up. It also helps that they’re four different colors, Augustin said.

Work for her didn’t used to be as complicated — or busy. Originally, she held the clerk position only in Caswell, where she lives. After the Armstrong Creek clerk died in late 2020, though, town officials approached her to become the clerk there, too.

“Nobody will step up in the town,” she said. “My grandparents said, ‘If you can help, you will help.’ Did I want to? Not necessarily, but I could not have, in good conscience, said no when I knew I could do it.”

Serving as a clerk in two communities is sometimes the reality in outstate Wisconsin, where about 30% of clerks leave their positions every year and, in Augustin’s view, younger people “don’t want to serve their community” despite more and more older clerks retiring.

It’s even more challenging because of frequent internet outages in rural Wisconsin. In big cities, Augustin said, clerks are used to the internet operating virtually everywhere.

“We have to go, ‘Oh no, the wind’s blowing the wrong way here. That means it’s going to knock out,’” she said.

Augustin said having Starlink, a satellite internet service, ensures she typically has internet.

“Most people don’t have that option up here because it’s not cheap,” she said.

When residents or town officials seek her help, she said, she can receive calls anytime from 7 a.m. until 10 p.m.

“You never know if they’re going to knock on your front door because everybody knows where you live,” she said. “So heaven forbid you don’t answer your phone. If they see your vehicle at your house, they’re going to stop.”

To be able to manage elections in two towns, she said, “you have to make sure you have good chief inspectors in place.”

“I have one town that’s better at it than the other,” she said, “so I tend to spend more time with one town than I do with the other.”

On Election Day in November, Augustin had to drive to the county seat in Crandon, 30 minutes away, to get more paper ballots for each of her towns, which are 11 miles apart. 

On top of that, she has to adjust to rapidly changing election laws, she said.

“You just have to make sure you’re keeping your poll workers trained,” she said. “You have to keep, make sure you’re keeping everybody abreast of everything. And it changes so fast.”

The demands of her job go far beyond just running elections.

In mid-April, she said, she had an accounting meeting at the county at 1 p.m., an annual meeting in Caswell at 5:30 p.m. and then work in Armstrong Creek at 6:30 p.m.

“Two would be my limit,” she said. 

Because towns of different sizes have to follow varying sets of laws, the best-case scenario is for people to be the clerk of two comparably sized towns, she said.

Augustin told Votebeat that she “definitely” supports the proposal. 

It can cost $1,000 or more to hold an election on a referendum to switch to appointing a town clerk, Augustin said, “and small towns don’t have that kind of extra money laying around.”

“The process would be a heck of a lot simpler,” she said, “because it can be delayed by a great deal of time, the way they make you do it.”

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Wisconsin towns facing clerk shortages seek an easier way to hire election officials is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Madison’s city clerk, Maribeth Witzel-Behl, resigned Monday as the city and state continued to look into how she and her staff lost track of nearly 200 ballots that never got counted in November.

Witzel-Behl, who took the post in 2006, gained wide recognition for running elections in the state’s second largest city during the pandemic and multiple presidential elections. In all, she oversaw more than 60 elections.

But her reputation took a blow in the November 2024 election, when 193 ballots from two polling stations went missing on Election Day and never got counted. Clerks and the Wisconsin Elections Commission have criticized her for failing to promptly inform state and city officials about the issue.

“On behalf of city of Madison residents, I want to extend my gratitude to Maribeth for her commitment and dedication to public service,” Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said.  

Witzel-Behl was placed on leave in March, with Mike Haas, the city attorney and former commission administrator, acting as clerk in the interim. It’s unclear who will replace Witzel-Behl; Haas previously told Votebeat he does not want the job permanently. The city is undertaking a national search, officials said.

In addition to ongoing city and state investigations, the November error has also led to legal action, with a liberal election law group seeking $34 million in damages on the grounds voters were disenfranchised.

In its probe, the Wisconsin Elections Commission found that mistakes by the clerk’s office began well before Election Day, including printing poll books for the two polling sites earlier than recommended by the commission.

Had the poll books been printed later, they would have automatically indicated that certain ballots had been returned, making it clearer to poll workers on Election Day that some ballots had been received but not counted. 

Clerk’s staff found the first batch of ballots — 68 in total — in a previously unopened courier bag in the clerk’s office on Nov. 12, while Dane County was in the middle of certifying the election.

There are conflicting accounts of what happened next: An unidentified Madison election worker claimed that the county was informed about the ballots that day, but Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell has denied that. Witzel-Behl, who according to records obtained by Votebeat was on vacation for much of the time following Election Day, didn’t follow up with the county, and those ballots were never counted.

A second batch of 125 ballots was discovered in the clerk’s office on Dec. 3. However, staff didn’t relay that information to the Wisconsin Elections Commission until Dec. 18, well after the state certified the election. The commission then notified Haas about the error, and he relayed the news to the mayor’s office — which is when both learned of the problem for the first time.

Facing growing scrutiny, Witzel-Behl proposed procedural changes, including requiring clerk’s staff to verify all election materials received on election night and ensuring that each polling place receives a list of the absentee ballot courier bags it handles to prevent any from being overlooked.

Those measures were implemented fully in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election, for which she was on leave. The city apparently didn’t have any significant oversights in that election. City officials say they’re still refining the procedural changes.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Madison city clerk resigns amid investigation into 2024 ballot snafu is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Reading Time: 4 minutes

After two high-profile cases in which candidates were unable to remove their names from the ballot, Wisconsin lawmakers are weighing a change to one of the nation’s strictest withdrawal laws.

Under current Wisconsin law, once candidates qualify for the ballot, they can only be removed if they die. 

The restriction received renewed attention in August 2024, when Robert F. Kennedy Jr., running as an independent, unsuccessfully sought to withdraw from the Wisconsin presidential ballot — a request that ultimately reached the state Supreme Court. 

More recently, in January, Madison Ald. Dina Nina Martinez-Rutherford announced she was dropping out of her reelection race and endorsing her opponent, citing two major life events. Despite her public withdrawal, she remained on the ballot and was reelected in April.

On Tuesday, the Assembly Committee on Campaigns and Elections held a public hearing on the proposal written by Rep. David Steffen, a Republican, to allow candidates for certain statewide, congressional and legislative offices and independent candidates for president and vice president to withdraw from the ballot any time before the Wisconsin Elections Commission certifies candidates’ names. 

Steffen said he’s working on an amendment to address concerns raised by election clerks about how the proposal could disrupt tight ballot production timelines.

Calling the current law outdated, Steffen told lawmakers that candidates deserve a straightforward way to remove themselves from consideration before Election Day.

Clerks raise timeline concerns; Steffen promises amendment

While the bill would not apply to local or off-cycle races like Martinez-Rutherford’s, election clerks say even the limited version could still cause issues. They warned that allowing candidates to withdraw up until the day of certification doesn’t give them enough time to finalize ballots, which are often already in production before that point.

“I have no problem if a candidate wants to remove their name,” Columbia County Clerk Sue Moll, a Republican, said. “I just want to make sure that the timeline is such that we can meet our deadlines.”

Most states provide nominees who wish to drop out of a race some sort of off-ramp. Many states allow nominees to drop off the ballot between 60 and 85 days before an election. Some states require polling places to have notices clarifying candidates’ withdrawal if they drop out after ballots are already printed. 

Wisconsin law used to allow nominees to drop off the ballot if they declined to run, but it changed in 1977 to the current policy — allowing withdrawal only in the event of death.

Under the proposal presented on Tuesday, nominees could drop off the ballot anytime before the election commission certifies candidate names. 

Processing a candidate’s withdrawal on that last day would put clerks on a “really tight” timeline, Moll said.

Even with a head start to prepare ballots, county clerks are scrambling at the last minute to get their ballots programmed, printed and sent to municipal clerks in time for them to send out by the state’s legal deadline, which is 47 days before a federal election, Moll said. 

It would have taken about an extra half-day of work to reprogram everything if Kennedy dropped off the ballot last-minute, she said. It could take more time in counties that rely on vendors to prepare their ballots and program voting equipment, she added.

When a candidate changes his or her mind and drops out, Moll said, “Well, OK, that’s one candidate. What happens if there’s five candidates?”

Rock County Clerk Lisa Tollefson, a Democrat, told Votebeat that clerks would risk going past the deadline for sending out ballots if candidates waited until the last minute to drop out.

If the deadline to withdraw was about a week before the commission certifies candidates’ names, Tollefson said, “we should be OK.”

Steffen, the author of the proposal, said at the Tuesday public hearing that an amendment in the works would do exactly that: Require nominees to withdraw at least seven business days before the Wisconsin Elections Commission meeting to certify nominees. The amendment would require clerks to be notified of a nominee’s withdrawal at least five days before the meeting.

At the hearing, Tollefson said she agrees with the amendment. She told Votebeat that the timelines would still be tight under the amendment, particularly in bigger counties like Milwaukee County and Dane County, but that clerks should be able to get their ballots done in time. 

February and April elections don’t have long enough window

Giving nominees a path to withdraw their candidacy for the February and April elections — like the one Martinez-Rutherford won after trying to exit — would be virtually impossible because those elections are run in such a short time span, clerks told Votebeat.

Clerks only have about a week between the February and April elections to prepare their ballots, get them printed and send them out to municipal clerks, Moll said.

If the amended measure becomes law and plays out well, Steffen said he may introduce a separate proposal that addresses local races. But he also acknowledged the tight timelines that clerks face in February and April elections.

Just after the hearing, at the Eastmorland Community Center in Madison, Martinez-Rutherford, the candidate who won a city council seat in April despite informally dropping out of her race, said that she would remain on the council but that it would be “reasonable” to create a process for candidates to formally drop out.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Dying to get off the ballot? Wisconsin bill offers another way out is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Reading Time: 3 minutes

It is too soon to definitively say whether Madison’s April 1 election went off without any problems. But city and county election officials told Votebeat that they were confident that new absentee ballot procedures put in place after 193 ballots went uncounted in November would prevent another major error.

Tuesday was the first high-profile election in Madison since the snafu in November, when 193 ballots in unopened ballot bags from two polling stations went uncounted during the presidential contest. Staff didn’t discover the ballots until much later, a critical lapse that prompted state and city investigations and the suspension of Madison Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl in March. A voter lawsuit is expected. 

Witzel-Behl’s replacement is City Attorney Mike Haas, formerly the Wisconsin Elections Commission administrator and a longtime election lawyer. This was the first election he has ever run as a municipal clerk.

Amid the investigation, city officials implemented new procedures to better track absentee ballots and ensure that oversights are detected before results are finalized.

New procedures add to the paperwork

The changes were apparent at Madison polling places, which had multiple new checklists and required paperwork to ensure that officials opened and processed every bag containing absentee ballots. They were also apparent at the clerk’s office, where at 9 p.m., employees had begun looking through election materials from each of the city’s 108 polling sites to make sure there weren’t any missing ballots.

At Madison West High School, where 68 of the ballots went missing in November, chief inspector Peter Quinn said just before 4 p.m. that the new procedures make a repeat error “basically impossible.” 

Quinn has been a chief inspector before, but he wasn’t the chief inspector at the school in November when the ballots went missing. 

“It’s a mistake that should not have been made,” Quinn said about the error, adding that the new procedures make it easier to catch discrepancies. 

Each polling site now receives updated lists throughout the day detailing every absentee ballot bag delivered. Each bag is identified by a seal number. Election officials check off one blank on that list when they open each bag and another blank when they process the ballots. This way, election officials know how many carrier envelopes they receive — and how many they’re supposed to count. 

Poll workers also record the number of ballots in each bag on two separate documents and, at the end of the night, complete a summary sheet confirming that the number of absentee ballots received matches the number counted or rejected.

Kevin Kennedy, former state elections chief and now a chief inspector at Madison’s Senior Center, called the new process “good documentation” — but said it can be overwhelming.

“My problem,” he said at 2 p.m., standing in front of the table where absentee ballots get processed, “is that there’s so many things to keep track of here.”

Kennedy pointed to an absentee ballot processing guide given to poll workers and said he wished the clerk’s office provided equally clear instructions for navigating the added procedures. While he believes the system is now less prone to error, he warned that paperwork redundancies can slow down the process.

Procedures still need to be refined

A half-mile away, Sam Peplinski, 19, stood outside the Nicholas Recreation Center polling place — the same site where his absentee ballot went uncounted in November.

“It was my first time voting,” he said of the experience, which shook his trust in elections. “It was just shocking.”

He said it’s unrealistic to expect perfection, but the loss of nearly 200 ballots made the issue “large enough to not be ignored.”

This time he voted at the polls on Election Day — but only because he just recently learned of the election date. “An unintended benefit,” he said.

At the end of the night, Haas, the interim city clerk, told Votebeat the new procedures might have been a little “overkill,” but said after the November snafu it’s better to have too much paperwork than too little.

​​Witzel-Behl, the city clerk on leave, put in place many of the new procedures between November and February, and more were added since then, but Haas said there wasn’t much time to get feedback on those procedures from the city’s poll workers.

“I think we just need more time to refine those, make sure that they’re workable for the inspectors,” he said.

Deputy Clerk Bonnie Chang told Votebeat that staff would spend Wednesday and Thursday looking through all the election materials that polling places return to the clerk’s office, making sure there aren’t any missing ballots there. They were also checking a new sheet that each polling site’s chief inspector fills out to make sure the number of ballots processed is equal to the number of ballots received.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

New election procedures in Madison made repeat of 2024 snafu ‘basically impossible’ is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Denise Jess walked into a Madison polling place on Saturday to vote early in person and encountered a familiar barrier: an absentee ballot envelope with a blank space for writing in her name, birthdate and address.

Jess, who is blind, chuckled along with her wife, who accompanied her to the polls. Who was going to do all that writing?

A poll worker quickly offered help, reminding Jess that she had the right to assistance. Jess, who is executive director of the Wisconsin Council of the Blind & Visually Impaired, knew she had those rights. But the moment still bothered her.

“It’s just a bummer,” she said, comparing voting with other tasks she performs independently, like identifying birds by ear, paying bills online, posting on social media, and grocery shopping. Voting is a constitutional right in Wisconsin and yet, she said, it remains far less accessible. 

Other industries have prioritized accessibility because it benefits their bottom line, she said, but voting systems were not originally designed with accessibility in mind.

“We’re making strides,” she said, “but it’s still always, always about retrofitting and trying to catch up.”

Jess’s experience illustrates a persistent tension in election policy: how to ensure both ballot security and accessibility for all voters. Electronic absentee voting is particularly nettlesome. Disability rights advocates have pushed for this option as a way for people with vision or other disabilities to vote independently, and in private, from home. But cybersecurity experts warn that current technology cannot guarantee that ballots returned electronically will be safe from hacking or manipulation.

Over a dozen other states provide fully electronic absentee voting for people with disabilities. In those states, voters with disabilities can receive a ballot electronically, mark it using a screen reader and return it electronically — similar to signing and returning a document electronically. Wisconsin isn’t one of them. Here, voters with disabilities must cast their votes on a paper ballot, or on an accessible voting machine at a polling place that prints out a paper ballot. 

That means that voters who are visually impaired or unable to write must often rely on others to complete their ballots — undermining ballot secrecy, which is also constitutionally protected. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when many disabled voters were reluctant to visit the polls in person, Wisconsin’s rules presented an even bigger barrier. 

Last year, four voters with disabilities, along with Disability Rights Wisconsin and the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin, filed a lawsuit seeking access to electronic absentee voting. A lower court initially granted some voters that option, but an appeals court paused and eventually reversed that order. The case is now before the Dane County Circuit Court. 

Beyond the roughly dozen states that offer fully electronic voting, a few others, including Vermont, Michigan, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, allow voters with disabilities to fill out ballots electronically, but they have to print out the ballots and return them by mail, drop box, or in person. Verified Voting, a nonpartisan election technology group, promotes this option as a step forward for states wary of fully electronic voting.

That wouldn’t solve the issue for everyone, though. Jess pointed out that many blind voters don’t own printers, meaning they’d still face accessibility hurdles.

Security concerns haven’t been resolved

At a time of heightened concern over election security and integrity, some technology experts say fully electronic voting is still not ready to be used widely.

Between August 2021 and September 2022, the University of California, Berkeley, hosted a working group of election, technology and cybersecurity experts to discuss the feasibility of creating standards to enable safe and secure electronic marking and return technologies. The group found that widespread adoption of electronic return would require technologies that don’t currently exist or haven’t been tested. 

A 2024 report by several federal agencies, including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Election Assistance Commission, found that sending digital copies of ballots to voters is safe and that filling them out electronically is somewhat safe, but that returning them electronically adds significant security risks.

“Sheer force of will doesn’t suffice to solve this problem,” said Mark Lindeman, the policy and strategy director at Verified Voting. “There needs to be extensive technical innovations that we can’t just dial up.”

Lindeman said threats from electronic ballot return include the possibility that somebody hacks into the system and changes votes. One potential safeguard — having voters verify that their selections were received and counted correctly — remains unproven at scale, the UC-Berkeley working group said. 

“That’s the fundamental technical tragedy at this stage of the game,” Lindeman said. “Paper ballots are obviously inconvenient for many voters. They pose real obstacles to voting, but we haven’t found a technical alternative to paper ballots that solves all the problems.”

Denise Jess chooses ‘path of least pain’

In Wisconsin, Jess chooses among three imperfect voting options.

She can vote on Election Day in her polling place, whose layout she has memorized, though it can get too busy for her comfort. She can vote using an accessible machine but still has to hand-sign the poll book, something she typically does with the assistance of a poll worker and a signature guide, a small plastic card with a rectangular cutout that frames the area where she has to sign. 

Alternatively, she can vote absentee in person during the early voting period, but then she has to receive help with paperwork and navigating an unfamiliar polling place. 

Or she can fill out an application online and vote by mail, which she avoids because she can’t fill out a paper ballot without assistance.

“It’s kind of like, what’s the path of least pain?” she said.

For this Wisconsin Supreme Court election, given the potential for bad weather, she opted for early in-person voting at the Hawthorne Public Library, which isn’t her regular polling place. 

“There’s enough consistency here at Hawthorne, but still there are surprises,” she said, sitting at a table at the library on Madison’s east side. “Even the simple navigation of going to the table to get the envelope, getting in line. They’re queuing people to wait behind the blue tape, which, of course, I can’t see.”

She could opt for more hands-on help from poll workers to speed up the process, but she said she sees her voting trips as a chance to learn more about the potential barriers for people with disabilities.

Some voters who are newer to vision loss or have more severe barriers can quickly become demoralized by the extra energy they need to put into casting a ballot, especially if poll workers aren’t trained or ready to help, she said. 

“We’ve had voters say, ‘I’m not going back. I’m just not doing that again, doing that to myself,’ she said. “So then we lose a voter.”

If electronic voting were available, Jess said, she would do it a lot more often than voting in person because she wouldn’t have to depend on transportation or the weather. 

“It would just be absolutely liberating,” she said. “I might still vote in-person at my polling place periodically, because I like my poll workers, and I always like to visit with them and give them kudos. But it would surely ease some stress.”

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

How one voter navigates Wisconsin’s hurdles for people with disabilities is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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Absentee voting didn’t used to be popular in Addison, a rural town of 3,300 in southeast Wisconsin. A few days before the last Supreme Court election in 2023, only about 60 residents had cast absentee ballots in person.

This year, at the same point in the election cycle, that number was over 300.

The sharp increase is due partly to Republicans’ recent embrace of absentee voting, especially in the nearly two-week period before Election Day when voters can cast absentee ballots in person. Washington County, where Addison is located, is one of the state’s most Republican counties and one of many Republican-dominated areas across Wisconsin where early voting rates have surged. 

But perhaps a bigger reason is a recent Washington County initiative aimed at making early voting more accessible for voters and more feasible for municipalities. The program compensates municipalities for the costs of extending their hours during the state’s early in-person voting period. It makes up for the gaps in municipal budgets that previously limited early voting opportunities.

“It really comes down to a matter of priorities,” Washington County Executive Josh Schoemann, a former municipal clerk, told Votebeat. “And there’s nothing more fundamental to county government and to government in general, in Wisconsin and America, than the opportunity for people to vote.” 

County absorbs the added costs for municipalities

The county first rolled out the initiative during the November 2024 election as part of a broader funding package approved by the county board. The package included over $150,000 for extended in-person absentee voting hours, voluntary audits and cameras for ballot drop boxes across the county. 

Public funding for such activities is more critical now after voters last year approved a Republican-written constitutional amendment banning private funding for election support, responding to a Republican outcry over private grants to fund election administration, especially in Democratic strongholds.

County Board Chair Jeff Schleif said he was eager to support the proposal because it would ensure that Republicans, who were just coming around to voting early, had the time and opportunity to do it, just as Democrats did in places like Milwaukee. 

“Our board is as conservative as it’s ever been,” he said, adding that extending early voting hours is helpful to everybody.

Moreover, Schleif said, the proposal would authorize and fund election audits that could debunk allegations from people like MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell that some voting machines were being hacked to change votes.

After the November election, about $71,000 of the funds remained unspent. This year, the county signed off on using that money to continue the program into this high-stakes April election.

For this election, the county is compensating municipalities at 150% of the added cost for extending their early voting hours beyond what they were in the April 2023 election. About 90% of the municipalities in the county are participating, Washington County Clerk Ashley Reichert, a Republican, said. The county also mailed voters a schedule of their town’s early voting hours.

Reichert said the initiative aims to provide local residents with voting opportunities comparable to urban areas, including weekend and night voting options. The additional hours benefit many residents who commute to Milwaukee for work and can’t vote during typical business hours, she said.

“We have quite a few very rural communities where the clerks are very part-time, and their budgets are small, and so for them, offering additional time was just not a feasible option,” she said. “Being able to take the funding off the table as a concern really helped quite a few of our municipalities.”

More hours for voting, and more voters showing up

Addison Town Clerk Wendy Fairbanks said early voting hours have expanded significantly due to the county’s support. In 2023, Addison’s early voting was generally open from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Thursday. Now it’s open as early as 7 a.m. and as late as 6 p.m., including Fridays.

“I’m able to bring in election workers to help me with this so I’m not doing it all on my own,” Fairbanks said. “Otherwise, I’d get no other work done.”

The county’s help, she continued, “takes the burden off the town, so that we’re not using money from our tax levy that could go towards road repair or something in the town.”

Another Washington County municipality, the village of Richfield, now offers Saturday hours for early voting thanks to county funding. About 90 residents participated on a recent Saturday, contributing to a total of 1,674 early ballots cast as of Thursday morning  — about double the amount from this time two years ago.

Village Administrator Jim Healy said the initiative was crucial for voters who couldn’t vote during regular hours. “We really felt strongly for these types of elections that have either state or national implications that we ought to try to go the extra mile,” Healy said, expressing hope that other Wisconsin counties might follow Washington County’s example.

In all, as of Thursday morning, Washington County had over 13,400 voters cast absentee ballots in person, nearly triple the number of votes at this point in the 2023 cycle and the fourth most in the state, despite it being only the 10th largest county by voting age population. 

While increased absentee voting means additional ballots to process, local clerks aren’t concerned about significantly longer counting times.

“This is absolutely adding one more thing,” Schoemann said, “but I also know that their biggest pain point is their budgets. They’re really, really tight. So we want to try to hit their biggest pain point where we can help them and get what voters want, and that is more opportunity.”

Other clerks look at the Washington County model

Reichert, the Washington County clerk, said she has heard from a number of county and municipal clerks, along with legislators, interested in replicating this initiative across the state. Right now, though, she said Washington County appears to be the only county offering municipal clerks that compensation. 

That may change soon: At a recent event, Rep. Scott Krug, a legislative leader who formerly chaired the Assembly Elections Committee, said one of his top upcoming legislative priorities was funding early voting so every municipality offers the same availability. He wasn’t available to comment further on Thursday.

Meanwhile, in most counties, early voting hours are uneven from town to town. In neighboring Ozaukee County, municipal clerks are staggering their hours to try to make time for residents seeking to vote early in person, said County Clerk Kellie Kretlow, a Republican. Some municipal election offices are open every day for early voting, while others are only open a few days across the nearly two-week voting period.

Sheboygan County Clerk Jon Dolson, a Republican, told Votebeat he was interested in the proposal but couldn’t see how his fiscally conservative board would approve a $15,000 funding increase, much less a $150,000 package like the one passed in neighboring Washington County. The county board recently cut the number of positions in his office, he said. 

So how did such a large spending proposal for election offices get through the fiscally conservative Washington County Board of Supervisors, which represents one of the most staunchly Republican constituencies in the state?

Schoemann, the county executive, said the board prioritized this initiative after years of disciplined budgeting and surplus management.

He said it was important for officials at the county level to take the lead, rather than expecting local clerks to each ask for help.

The proposals together were billed as an “election integrity package” that would enhance election security — a concern that Republicans have repeatedly raised.

Reichert, the county clerk, said it likely helped that the support for extended early voting hours was rolled into a broader package addressing security concerns around drop boxes and audits. Extending early voting hours itself addressed a security concern, she said, since some supervisors questioned whether mailed ballots would arrive too late or get lost in the mail.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

How Wisconsin’s Washington County helped its municipalities expand early voting hours is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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Election officials in Madison are already facing a state and city investigation into the series of errors that resulted in nearly 200 absentee ballots not being counted in last fall’s election. Now officials there face a claim for compensation in an unusual case that aims to emphasize the importance of properly counting all ballots and set a monetary penalty for denying people their vote. 

A liberal election law group called Law Forward served a $34 million claim this month against Madison and Dane County, seeking damages amounting to $175,000 for each Madison voter whose absentee ballot got misplaced. The filing is likely a precursor to a lawsuit, as the group is seeking out other disenfranchised voters to join its case.

“There is going to be a price to pay when you interfere with someone’s right to vote in Wisconsin,” said Scott Thompson, staff counsel for Law Forward.

Cases like this have a history that goes back to the voting rights fights of the late 1800s and 1900s, when officials intentionally sought to bar Black people from voting. But they’re highly unusual today — most voting rights cases seek only to have a challenged right restored, rather than damages — and experts say it’s unlikely that Law Forward’s claim in the Madison case will lead to any damages being paid out.

The threat of a financial cost for errors could add to the pressure on local clerk’s offices, which already deal with the challenges of new laws and court rulings, along with persistent scrutiny from election skeptics and lawmakers. (Madison’s city clerk has been placed on leave while the investigation into her office continues.) Some clerks around the state said they consider the errors in Madison serious, but questioned the move to assign liability.

Melissa Kono, the clerk in the small town of Burnside in western Wisconsin, said that instead of a payout to voters affected by an error, money would be better spent on developing a better system for clerks to manage the increasing number of absentee ballots, which have surged since the COVID-19 pandemic. The uncounted ballots in Madison were all absentee ballots.

Thompson acknowledged the potential impact of his group’s action on clerks. But he said it serves as a broader response to the steady stream of lawsuits filed by conservative groups since 2020 aimed at preventing officials from counting certain ballots because of the way they’re returned or the information they’re missing. In the context of these lawsuits, he said, it’s important to send a message that there should be a cost for disenfranchising people.

“Elections are about exercising the right to vote,” he said. “They’re not about finding ways to kick people off the voter rolls.” 

Legal filing says Madison and Dane County violated constitution

In a statement, Madison spokesperson Dylan Brogan didn’t directly address the Law Forward claim but said every ballot should be counted accurately and that the city is cooperating with ongoing investigations while conducting its own. 

Here’s what investigators have said about the case so far: In all, 193 absentee ballots that were sent to two polling places in the city for tabulation on Election Day went missing, and were not counted, even after they were found. For reasons still unknown, the election workers at those polling places never opened the courier bags containing those ballots. Those ballots then went to the city clerk’s office, but workers didn’t open one of the parcels until Nov. 12 and the other one until Dec. 3. 

The ballots in the bag opened on Nov. 12 could still have been counted — city and county officials have given conflicting accounts on why they weren’t.

The sum total of the oversights, Law Forward alleges in its claim, resulted in the unconstitutional disenfranchisement of the 193 voters. The group appears to be preparing for a class-action lawsuit and is welcoming the other disenfranchised voters to join the case. 

In the claim, the group cites two Wisconsin Supreme Court cases that it says allow it to sue for damages, even if what happened in Madison turns out to be a series of unintentional oversights. 

One of those cases was a judgment from 1866, in which the court ruled that government officers can be found liable for their actions in denying Black Wisconsin residents the right to vote, even if those actions are done without malice. The other is a 1916 finding that because a group of voters was entitled to vote, people depriving them of that right can be held liable for their disenfranchisement.

Claims like these typically move to lawsuits if they’re not resolved, and the city and county are unlikely to accept or negotiate the requested amount, likely prompting Law Forward to file suit this summer.

When voters seek monetary damages 

Why ask for money on behalf of the voters? Thompson said it’s because there’s nothing else to ask for besides money and a finding of the city’s wrongdoing. It was too late, he said, to give the voters back the right they had been deprived of: the right to vote and have their ballots counted in the November 2024 election.

Thompson said attorney-client privilege prevented him from disclosing how the group arrived at the $175,000 figure for each voter. Wisconsin law currently caps damages against government officials at $50,000. Thompson said a secondary goal of the forthcoming lawsuit is to have a court find that law unconstitutional and allow groups to seek larger damages. 

Voter lawsuits seeking monetary damages were never very common, but there were instances in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, typically tied to racial discrimination, said Justin Levitt, an election law professor at Loyola Marymount University and a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s civil rights division. 

The most prominent cases of this kind were in Texas, where between the 1920s and 1940s Black voters who were barred from voting in Democratic primaries because of their race sometimes sued for damages in court, Levitt said.

In those cases, Black voters were designed to be left out of the voting process. In Madison, by contrast, it appears at this point that a series of mistakes — not malice or intent — led to these ballots getting lost initially.

But Thompson cautioned against coming to conclusions about why the Madison ballots didn’t ultimately get counted.

“It is too early for anyone, I think, to say with certainty exactly what happened and why it happened here,” he said. 

Lawsuits seeking damages against government officials face two significant challenges, said Richard Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law: First, courts usually look for something more egregious than negligence, such as malicious intent. Second, he said, a number of legal doctrines usually give government officials a raised level of immunity. 

He said he couldn’t think of any cases of this kind, where voters deprived of their right to vote successfully sued election officials for damages, since the 1960s.

Clerks question monetary penalty for errors

If the city accepts the claim or a court does award damages, it could have a financial impact of millions of dollars and would send a signal across the state.

“It’s not normal for this quantity of ballots to go uncounted, and I think everybody recognizes that that’s not normal,” Levitt said. “If this case succeeded, it would substantially increase the stakes of an error like that.”

But Madison’s errors stand out as unusually serious, said Wood County Clerk Trent Miner, a Republican. He said he thinks that Law Forward’s claim proposes too high a penalty, but that it shouldn’t make clerks fear the prospect of penalties for the far less consequential errors that they encounter from time to time.

“Humans run elections, so errors will happen,” he said. “This, I think, pole vaults over a minor error.”

Kono, the Burnside clerk, pointed out that the initial error of not counting the ballots at the polling sites was at the hands of the poll workers at the Madison polling sites who never opened or processed the 193 ballots.

“If you’re relying on unpaid or low-paid, glorified volunteers, essentially, what is the liability?” she said.

Even if the court doesn’t ultimately award monetary damages, the discovery phase of the expected lawsuit — where the two sides must share evidence — could significantly increase transparency around Madison’s ballot-counting errors, Thompson said. This process would likely place additional pressure on Madison and Dane County to fully disclose information beyond what has already emerged from ongoing city and state investigations.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Madison’s missing-ballot mess leads to an unusual claim for monetary damages is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.