An absentee ballot drop box used by the city of Madison. (Wisconsin Examiner photo)

The Wisconsin Elections Commission found that the city of Madison failing to count nearly 200 absentee ballots cast in last year’s November election was the result of a “confluence of errors” and a “complete lack of leadership” in the city clerk’s office, according to a draft report of WEC’s investigation into the incident. 

The Madison city clerk’s office told the elections commission in a memo Dec. 20 about the lost ballots from two Madison wards. A bag containing 68 unprocessed absentee ballots from two wards was found Nov. 12 in a tabulator bin, the memo stated. During reconciliation of ballots on Dec. 3, clerk employees found two sealed envelopes containing a total of 125 unprocessed absentee ballots from another ward. The discovery of the missing ballots was announced to the public Dec. 26. 

The missing ballots were not enough to change the result of any local, state or federal elections.

WEC’s investigation into the matter was led by the commission’s chair, Ann Jacobs, a Democratic appointee, and Don Millis, the commission’s most recent Republican-appointed chair. The investigation took six months and involved 13 depositions and the review of more than 2,000 documents. 

The report on the investigation, which goes to the full commission for approval in a meeting next week, found five counts in which the city’s clerk, Maribeth Witzel-Behl, acted “contrary to” state election law. 

Witzel-Behl resigned from her position in April after nearly 20 years as city clerk. 

The investigation found that the city exposed itself to mistakes by printing the pollbooks for polling places — the log in which election staff records when a voter’s ballot has been received and counted — three weeks before Election Day. That time frame meant that by the time polls opened on Nov. 5, the record in the book of which voters had already returned their absentee ballot was out of date. 

Additionally, the city “failed to track absentee envelopes and bags” meaning that large manila envelopes and courier bags full of absentee ballots weren’t numbered and organized by ward. 

“This meant that the polling places would not know how many Courier Bags or Carrier Envelopes to expect and with what seal numbers,” the report states. “Had they been given those numbers, they would have been able to immediately know if they were short a bag or an envelope and could have immediately looked for the missing item.”

According to the report, the most likely explanation for the ballots not being counted at the polling places on Election Day is that they were never delivered to the polls. 

Much of the report is a blistering criticism of Witzel-Behl’s leadership and response to the missing ballots, particularly her decision to leave on vacation on Nov. 13 — while the city was still working through the ballot reconciliation process. 

“The lack of action by the City Clerk with regard to the found ballots is astonishing,” the report states. “She demonstrated no urgency, let alone interest, in including those votes in the election tally. At the time the Ward 65 ballots were found, the county canvass was continuing, and those ballots could have easily been counted. That would have required the City Clerk to take the urgent action that the situation demanded.” 

“Instead, she went on vacation and, per her testimony, never inquired about them again until mid-December,” the report continues. “There was nobody who took responsibility for these ballots. It was always someone else’s job. Rather than acknowledge these significant errors, the City Clerk and her staff either ignored the issue or willfully refused to inform the necessary parties and seek assistance. These actions resulted in nearly 200 lawful voters’ votes going uncounted – an unconscionable result.  This profound failure undermines public confidence in elections.”

The report found that Witzel-Behl potentially violated state law by abusing her discretion to run Madison’s elections, printing the pollbooks too early, failing to maintain records on the handling of absentee ballots, failing to properly oversee the staff responsible for counting the absentee ballots and failing to inform the city’s board of canvassers about the missing ballots. 

“It was the job of the City Clerk to immediately take action once notified about the found ballots, and she did nothing,” the report states. “It was the responsibility of the Deputy Clerk to take action in her absence, and he did nothing.  These ballots were treated as unimportant and a reconciliation nuisance, rather than as the essential part of our democracy they represent.”

If the report is approved by WEC, it will require Madison to certify it has taken a number of actions to correct the problems from November. Those requirements include developing an internal plan delineating which employee is responsible for statutorily required tasks, printing poll books no earlier than the Thursday before elections, changing the absentee ballot processing system so bags and envelopes aren’t lost, updating instructional materials for poll workers and completing a full inspection of all materials before the scheduled board of canvassers meeting after an election. 

WEC is scheduled to vote on the report’s findings at its July 17 meeting.

Don Millis and Ann Jacob, the former and current chairs of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, testify Tuesday, Feb. 4, at an Assembly hearing on a commission rule for election observers. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

The Wisconsin Elections Commission on Monday published a new permanent administrative rule to guide how election observers are allowed to conduct themselves at polling places. 

On Friday, the commission voted 5-1 to approve the rule after more than two years of work that involved the participation of a 24-person advisory committee made up of municipal clerks, poll workers, political parties and outside groups including advocates for people with disabilities and right-wing election conspiracy outfits. 

The final rule order specifies who is allowed to observe elections and defines the boundaries of what observers are allowed to do at a polling place. The rule also dictates when poll workers are allowed to call law enforcement to diffuse a situation and includes provisions to require that observers be allowed to use available chairs and restrooms and for how the news media is allowed to operate inside polling places. The rules are different for members of the media, who are allowed to take videos and photos inside polling places while observers are not.

WEC commissioners of both parties advocated for the passage of the rule, arguing that while not perfect, the compromise reached to create the rule was better than the vague interpretation of state law that had previously governed observers. 

But even after their involvement on the advisory committee, election skeptics opposed the rule’s enactment. WEC commissioner Robert Spindell, a Republican who has often flirted with election conspiracy theories, was the lone vote against the rule going into effect. 

Republican lawmakers on the Legislature’s Joint Committee for the Review of Administrative Rules (JCRAR) had denied the passage of an emergency rule instituting similar provisions earlier this year. JCRAR deadlocked on a vote to deny the permanent rule’s enactment in April, allowing it to move out of the committee and back to WEC for final approval. 

“Today marks a significant milestone that will ensure election observers, election officials, and voters all have a clear and consistent understanding of the observer process,” WEC Administrator Meagan Wolfe said in a statement. “After years of thorough public hearings, advisory committee input, and careful drafting, this rule enshrines standards for election observers that ensure participation in our electoral process.”

The commission will hold a meeting later this year to approve new guidance for election clerks administering the rule, according to a news release. The rule is set to go into effect Aug. 1.

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.

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.

Voters in Wisconsin could be seeing double on Election Day if the practice of fusion voting — which allows the same candidate to appear on the ballot under multiple party lines — makes a comeback in the battleground state.

A lawsuit filed Tuesday seeks to legalize the practice, saying it would empower independent voters and lesser-known political parties at a time of increasingly bitter partisanship between Republicans and Democrats. The lawsuit comes just four weeks after the Wisconsin Supreme Court election, which broke records for spending and saw massive involvement from the two parties and partisan interests.

Common in the 1800s, fusion voting means a candidate could appear on the ballot as nominated by Republican or Democratic parties and one or more lesser-known political parties. Critics argue it complicates the ballot, perhaps confusing the voter, while also giving minor parties disproportionate power because major-party candidates must woo them to get their endorsements.

Currently, full fusion voting is only happening in Connecticut and New York. There are efforts to revive the practice in other states, including Michigan, Kansas and New Jersey.

The lawsuit by the newly formed group United Wisconsin seeks a ruling affirming that minor parties can nominate whoever they like — even if that person was nominated by the Republican or Democratic parties. Under fusion voting, “John Doe, Democrat” could appear on the same ballot with “John Doe, Green Party.” All of the votes that candidate receives are combined, or fused, for the candidate’s total.

United Wisconsin wants to become a fusion political party that will cross-nominate a major party candidate, said Dale Schultz, co-chair of the group and a former Republican Senate majority leader.

But first, he said, “we’d like to see the state courts affirm that we have a constitutional right to associate with whomever we want.” Schultz is one of the lawsuit’s five named plaintiffs, which include a former Democratic county sheriff and a retired judge who was also a Republican state lawmaker.

The lawsuit was filed against the Wisconsin Elections Commission in Dane County Circuit Court, and it argues that the state’s nearly 130-year-old prohibition on candidates appearing on the ballot more than once for the same office is unconstitutional.

Wisconsin Elections Commission spokesperson Joel DeSpain declined to comment on the lawsuit.

Attorney Jeff Mandell, president of Law Forward, which is representing United Wisconsin in the lawsuit, said voters want more choices and called the current two-party system “calcified and deeply unstable.”

But Wisconsin Republican Party spokesperson Anika Rickard came out strongly against the concept, saying voters could be “manipulated into voting for a major party candidate masquerading as an independent.”

“Fusion voting will be used to confuse voters, will be an election integrity nightmare, and is simply dishonest,” she said in a statement.

Haley McCoy, a spokesperson for the Wisconsin Democratic Party, declined to comment.

Last year, the Wisconsin Democratic Party unsuccessfully tried to remove both Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein and independent Cornel West from the ballot. Democrats feared that third party candidates would draw votes away from then-Vice President Kamala Harris. President Donald Trump won Wisconsin by more than 29,000 votes. Stein and West combined got about 15,000 votes.

Fusion voting was commonplace in the United States in the 1800s, a time when political parties nominated their preferred candidates without restriction. The practice helped lead to the creation of the Republican Party in 1854, when antislavery Whigs and Democrats, along with smaller parties, joined forces at a meeting in Wisconsin to create the GOP.

Less than 50 years later, in 1897, that same Republican Party enacted a prohibition on fusion voting in Wisconsin to weaken the Democratic Party and restrain development of additional political parties, the lawsuit contends. That’s in violation of the state constitution’s equal protection guarantee, United Wisconsin argues.

Similar anti-fusion laws began to take hold nationwide early in the early 1900s as the major political parties moved to reduce the influence and competition from minor parties.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup. This story is published in partnership with The Associated Press.

Same candidate, two parties: Wisconsin lawsuit aims to bring back fusion voting 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.