Wisconsin election officials have reignited a legal battle over absentee voting with July guidance stating that voters cannot void a returned absentee ballot and cast a new one, even if Election Day is weeks away or the candidate they supported has dropped out.
Three Democratic residents in Dane County on Thursday sued the Wisconsin Elections Commission over the guidance, which was adopted by the commission on July 9, calling it an unconstitutional violation of the state’s absentee voting laws. All three plaintiffs voted for a gubernatorial candidate who has since dropped out of the primary, and under the commission guidance they cannot change their votes, even though those votes have not yet been counted. The legality of spoiling ballots just to change a vote has long been disputed.
The lawsuit says WEC’s guidance means the plaintiffs “will all be disenfranchised from meaningfully participating in this August election unless this Court steps in.”
Thursday’s lawsuit is the latest development in a legal dispute that began in 2022 and was reopened by an appeals court decision earlier this year. It was filed two days after the Democratic Party of Wisconsin sent the commission a letter urging it to rescind the guidance. The letter raised many of the same concerns later cited in the suit, including that the policy could disenfranchise voters and was adopted after early voting in the primary had already begun.
The July 9 guideline for clerks reverses the Wisconsin Elections Commission’s previous position and Attorney General Josh Kaul’s legal arguments on the agency’s behalf that voters should be allowed to replace absentee ballots they have already returned as long as they comply with statutory deadlines.
The WEC spent years arguing in court in favor of that broader definition of ballot spoiling, but its latest guidance effectively restores the rule imposed by a 2022 court ruling that banned the practice.
The commission adopted the guidance after clerks had already mailed ballots for the Aug. 11 primary and, notably, after multiple candidates in the crowded Democratic gubernatorial race dropped their bids.
“It seems to me exceedingly likely that this is something that people are going to keep fighting about,” Jeff Mandell, founder of the liberal law firm Law Forward, said ahead of the lawsuit.
He added that the timing of the guidance was unusual: Typically courts are skeptical of efforts to change rules close to an election. Some absentee voters in this election cycle probably cast their ballots under the assumption that they could spoil their ballot and cast a new one if their preferred candidate dropped out or they just wanted to change their vote, Mandell said.
Even if the commission’s guidance is in line with Wisconsin law, it creates a clear discrepancy between in-person Election Day and absentee voters, said Sam Liebert, the Wisconsin state director of All Voting is Local and a former municipal clerk.
Election Day voters can receive up to three ballots at the polls if they make a mistake, he pointed out. On the other hand, he said, absentee voters now get no second chance once they return their ballots, even if Election Day hasn’t arrived yet.
“The inconsistency is hard to ignore,” he said, and it presents a policy question for the Legislature — or maybe the courts.
Spoiling controversy blew up amid similar political dynamics in the 2022 primary
The WEC’s more permissive August 2022 guidance on ballot spoiling was prompted by similar dynamics as that of the present: highly contested primaries with candidates dropping out throughout the race and at the last minute.
In September 2022, GOP voter Nancy Kormanik sued over that guidance allowing absentee ballot spoiling, arguing that clerks can only reissue an absentee ballot if a voter returns an absentee ballot in a “spoiled or damaged” condition. Voiding a ballot that’s already been submitted and getting a new one over a voter’s own mistake or a candidate dropping out didn’t fall under that category, she argued.
Kaul, the state’s Democratic attorney general, saw the issue differently. A few different laws allow ballot spoiling, he said in a court filing, and “none requires the elector to explain how or why the ballot is ‘spoiled.’”
The ban stood until February of this year, when an appeals court vacated the lower court ruling. But the new ruling wasn’t on the merits of the case. Rather, it came because the court said Kormanik didn’t properly serve documents to a legislative committee at the start of the suit.
After the February ruling, clerks sought the commission’s updated guidance about how to deal with spoiling. They didn’t receive it in time for the Wisconsin Supreme Court election in April, and some municipalities offered instructions on how to spoil ballots. But with midterm primaries coming up — and particularly as rumors of gubernatorial candidates dropping out swirled — clerks were especially eager to know if the commission planned to stand by its earlier interpretation of the law and allow absentee ballot spoiling again.
On July 9, the commission provided an answer: It voted 4-2 that absentee ballot spoiling is prohibited after a voter returns an absentee ballot. Democratic commissioner Carrie Riepl, a former clerk, voted with the three Republicans in favor of the guidance. Democratic commissioners Mark Thomsen and Ann Jacobs voted against it.
The guidance came just one day after Democratic gubernatorial candidate David Crowley, the Milwaukee County executive, dropped out of the race and endorsed Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez for governor. Just over a week later, Rodriguez dropped out of the race and Crowley reentered.
Over 36,000 Wisconsin voters had already returned ballots by the day the commission issued its guidance, commission data shows. Voters had returned nearly 68,000 ballots by the time Rodriguez dropped out.
At the July meeting, commission chair Don Millis, a Republican, argued that voters should only be able to void — or spoil — ballots before they return them to the clerk.
“Once you’ve turned your ballot in, that’s it,” he said.
Meanwhile, Thomsen noted that in-person voters on Election Day can mark a ballot and receive a replacement ballot if they make an error, as long as the first ballot isn’t tabulated yet. But under the new guidance, an absentee voter couldn’t spoil a returned ballot even if it’s weeks from being tabulated.
“Why are we treating people that use mail differently than me if I show up?” he said.
On one hand, voters can argue that the inability to spoil ballots effectively disenfranchises them if they vote for a candidate that has since dropped out, said Bryna Godar, a staff attorney at the University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative.
On the other hand, she said, others can cite the Wisconsin law calling absentee voting a privilege, not a right, and argue that voters who exercise that right accept some risk in casting an absentee vote that can’t be taken back.
“The issue of whether ballot spoiling is or is not allowed under Wisconsin statutes hasn’t been definitively resolved,” she said.
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
For years, Mequon election workers employed an unusually strict standard for judging the validity of witness addresses on absentee ballot envelopes — a standard not apparently used elsewhere in Wisconsin and that the Wisconsin Elections Commission has now said is illegal.
Under that standard, Mequon officials rejected absentee ballots if the witness address did not include a state or ZIP code and the municipality name was not unique nationwide. That’s despite the fact that Wisconsin’s absentee ballot envelope no longer specifically asks witnesses to provide the information Mequon treated as essential: a state or ZIP code.
But a Votebeat review of hundreds of April 2026 absentee ballot envelopes, the dozens of ballots Mequon at least initially rejected since 2024, and scores of city records found that the city’s strict standard was applied unevenly — and, in some cases, resulted in the initial rejection of ballots that did not appear ambiguous at all.
In April, election workers accepted several ballots with the same missing witness-address information as ballots they moved to the reject pile. In one case, poll workers appeared to override the city’s own recommendation to reject a ballot. And of the ballots Mequon rejected because officials said the witness address listed a municipality name shared by other places in the country, about a third were actually from uniquely named municipalities. All the rest had unique combinations of street number, street name and municipality, even without a state or ZIP code.
Across several recent elections between 2024 and 2026, the city rejected at least 27 absentee ballots while allowing others with the same missing witness-address information to count. In the Wisconsin Supreme Court election this April, Mequon initially intended to reject five more ballots before the commission ordered city officials to count them — and to stop applying the unusual standard in elections moving forward.
Mequon followed the commission’s order to count the votes in April. But when Votebeat asked whether the city would abandon its practice in future elections, the city attorney was less definitive, leaving open the possibility that it could return.
Mequon officials have defended the rejections by saying voters are responsible for following the rules. Nancy Martin, a chief inspector at a Mequon polling place, said that she is unequivocally supportive of the city’s witness-address policy. She invoked a state law calling absentee voting a privilege, not a right.
Because of that law, she said, “you need to make sure that you’re doing your job as a voter, and I don’t think that sending incomplete information is doing a complete job as a voter.”
How Mequon’s standard clashed with state practice
Wisconsin law requires absentee voters to have a witness sign the ballot envelope and provide an address. But state law does not define how complete that address must be. In a lawsuit filed by Rise, Inc., a nonprofit advocacy organization, a court in 2024 sided with the group’s more lenient view, ruling that an address is sufficient as long as a clerk can reasonably discern where the witness lives.
The Wisconsin Elections Commission has since said that means clerks should not reject ballots simply because the witness address does not include a state or ZIP code. In fact, the WEC-approved state absentee ballot envelope doesn’t specifically designate spaces for a witness to provide a state or ZIP code. Mequon has taken a stricter view than WEC in rejecting ballots that do not provide that information.
Sam Liebert, the Wisconsin state director of All Voting is Local and a former municipal clerk, said it’s normal for city attorneys to be in touch with clerks to decide or interpret election policies.
“But in Mequon, it is pretty alarming and jarring that an attorney would so blatantly not be in agreement with WEC’s interpretation of the Rise ruling,” he said.
Inconsistencies within polling places that rejected ballots
The unevenness showed up even within the same polling places.
Mequon officials at the same polling places who initially rejected the five ballots from the April election counted six others in that same election — three from Cedarburg, one from Waukesha, one from Rib Lake, and another from Shorewood — even though their witness addresses were also missing ZIP codes and states, and the municipality names were not unique nationwide.
In one instance, poll workers even appeared to override a city official’s instructions to reject a ballot from Shorewood that didn’t list a ZIP code or state. It arrived at the precinct with a handwritten note affixed to it saying “Reject — multiple ‘Shorewoods’ in US.” There is a Shorewood near Mequon and others in Illinois and Minnesota.
In different handwriting, an election worker wrote that the street name listed on the address, Farwell Avenue, was in the nearby Shorewood, and accepted the ballot.
Mequon’s controversial practice came to light in April 2026 as a result of a letter to Fochs from Law Forward, a liberal law firm, warning that the city’s policy may be wrongfully disenfranchising absentee voters.
But it appears that city officials did not use simple techniques that would have shown that the witness address provided on each of the rejected ballots was unique.
All rejected ballots did have unique address
Of the 32 ballots Mequon initially rejected in recent elections, about a third did not meet even the city’s own standard for rejection: They came from uniquely named municipalities, like Fox Point and Chicago.
All the rest were also traceable to unique addresses. Even without a state or ZIP code: The street number and street name on those ballot envelopes pointed to only one location in the United States, even though the municipality name wasn’t unique.
Votebeat sought to better understand the process by which Mequon officials rejected those ballots, which the city has described as extensive. But the city has provided little transparency about what specific steps are actually taken to verify witness addresses.
In response to a records request for election workers’ online searches, Mequon initially said it had no responsive records. After Votebeat explained how to export browser history, the city produced records showing that Mequon officials searched Google on April 6 and 7 — Election Day and the day before it — for whether there were multiple cities in the United States named Baltimore and Verona.
The records do not show that the searches went further. Had city officials entered the complete street names and numbers, they would have found that both addresses were unique to just one of those cities. Ballots from both cities were rejected before the commission ordered Mequon to count them.
Fochs did not answer follow-up questions about whether she took other steps to determine whether the addresses were sufficient.
“I do what I can, and we do go through a lot of hoops,” Fochs said in an earlier April interview, saying the clerk’s office contacts voters with insufficient witness addresses when time allows.
But Liebert, from All Voting Is Local, saw it differently: “It does seem sort of just like a lack of due diligence.”
Mequon election workers appear split on city policy
Alisha Campbell, who was an assistant chief inspector at a Mequon polling place in April, said that every absentee ballot went through the clerk’s office before being delivered to an individual ward. The general instruction from her chief inspector, Campbell said, was to reject the ballots that the clerk’s office suggested rejecting.
She also said she was told by her chief inspector that ZIP codes were paramount, and that if a ballot is missing a ZIP and the municipality name isn’t unique, poll workers could not count it. While Votebeat found instances in which poll workers overrode a decision by the central election offices, Campbell said most were generally just following the instructions of the city clerk’s office rather than making decisions on the fly, she said.
Campbell would not say whether she agreed with the city policy.
“What you think independently isn’t always what you are told to do,” Campbell said. “I will leave that at that.”
Martin, the Mequon chief inspector who defended the city’s policy, took a different view. In her letter supporting the policy, which five other Mequon chief inspectors signed, Martin expressed hope that the election commission would “correct their position” by calling for a state and ZIP code in the witness address field.
Instead, the commission did the opposite. In its new manual, published in June, the commission said using the same witness address standard that Mequon employed would constitute “an abuse of discretion.”
Martin said she was disappointed in the commission’s new language and plans to write to her local legislators asking them to change the law to require ZIP and state. She was noncommittal on how she would handle the address standard moving forward, but said she will largely rely on the clerk’s office’s guidance.
Liebert questioned whether other cities and towns in Wisconsin were implementing policies that don’t follow state law or court decisions. Wisconsin has the most decentralized election system in the nation, with 1,850 municipalities each running elections at the local level.
But he said the commission’s intervention in Mequon this year shows a silver lining. While Mequon had rejected ballots against WEC guidance in several recent elections, the commission went further by ordering the city to count the initially rejected ballots from the April election. All five were included in the final results.
“It’s disappointing what happened in Mequon, but I think also at the end of the day, the system shows that it works,” Liebert said, adding that the commission vote to count those ballots was bipartisan. “That should give voters confidence in the system and that people are looking out for them.”
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.
As three alleged planners of Wisconsin’s fake elector scheme pleaded not guilty Tuesday to 11 forgery-related criminal charges in Dane County court, the criminal charges against them are moving forward in a national legal and political landscape that looks dramatically different from the one in which they were filed.
When Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul filed the charges in June 2024, Joe Biden was president, Donald Trump was battling a criminal case brought by the U.S. Department of Justice over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and state prosecutors in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, and Nevada were bringing criminal cases tied to the fake elector scheme.
That scheme arose in the aftermath of the 2020 election, when Trump allies tried to keep him in power despite his loss. Those allies, who became known as fake or false electors, attempted to cast electoral votes for Trump in multiple states he lost and submit those certificates to Congress.
Now, as the three defendants in the Wisconsin case await trial, the case enters what is expected to be a lengthy legal process. It will unfold as Trump has regained the presidency, and he and his allies are undertaking extensive efforts to rewrite what happened in the 2020 election.
The federal criminal case against Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election has been dismissed. And, until recently, his administration had plans to allocate $1.8 billion to compensate people it claimed had been unfairly prosecuted by the federal government, raising questions about whether participants in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot and those involved in the fake elector schemes could receive taxpayer funds.
Kaul faced criticism for filing his charges so late — it was the last criminal case to be filed regarding the fake electors. But two years later, that timing has left Wisconsin’s as one of the last cases standing in the broader, mostly failed effort to prosecute Trump and his allies for their attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
“The direction of activity has completely flipped, from prosecuting the people who were disrupting the election or inhibiting the normal flow of events to now going after Trump’s adversaries,” said Barry Burden, a UW-Madison political science professor who founded the Elections Research Center.
The Trump administration’s new investigation into the 2020 election in Wisconsin and elsewhere, Burden said, “seems to be a targeted effort at people who were mostly upholding the law and trying to administer an election in a very difficult environment.”
Amid the federal government’s current activity, and nearly six years removed from the 2020 election, Burden said any guilty finding in the Wisconsin fake elector case would likely have a muted effect.
“If we wanted the public to believe that there were ramifications for that kind of unlawful behavior, it would have to happen quickly and publicly, and feel like it was an immediate response to what people had done after the 2020 election,” he said. “But that’s not where we are six years later.”
‘Shocking’ if there are no ramifications in Wisconsin
The Wisconsin criminal case is still in its preliminary stages. Although it was filed two years ago, a number of motions and an appeal have set the case back significantly.
The defendants — former Dane County Judge Jim Troupis, who was Trump’s Wisconsin campaign attorney in 2020; attorney Kenneth Chesebro, who advised Trump on legal matters; and former Trump aide Mike Roman — each face 11 felony charges for his part in allegedly guiding Wisconsin’s 10 fake electors to send documents to the U.S. Capitol falsely stating that Trump had won Wisconsin in the 2020 election.
All entered not-guilty pleas on Tuesday during a brief proceeding attended by a couple dozen people in attendance in the several pews in the back of the courtroom.
Chesebro and Roman appeared virtually. Troupis, who briefly worked in the same courthouse where he was arraigned, was there in person. He showed little emotion during the quick arraignment but smiled as he greeted supporters afterward. He told the press after the proceeding that he didn’t have anything to say.
The 10 false electors from 2020 aren’t defendants in the current case, but they separately settled a civil lawsuit in Wisconsin by acknowledging that Biden won the 2020 election and pledging not to violate election laws in the future.
Chesebro and Troupis separately reached a settlement in that case, turning over a trove of documents outlining their role in 2020 and agreeing not to participate in similar schemes in future elections.
Text messages and emails show that Chesebro was a primary architect behind the 2020 plan to have Wisconsin’s GOP electors attest that Trump won the state while Trump’s court challenges seeking to overturn the election were still ongoing. Troupis discussed that plan with the Trump campaign, and Roman helped craft the language of the documents Republicans planned to send to the Capitol from states that Biden won.
Troupis has since asked the federal government to reimburse him $3.2 million from the proposed $1.8 billion fund, saying his life has been a “nightmare” since he stepped up to represent Trump.
“My experience is a poster-child for what weaponization can do,” he wrote in a letter to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, adding that “the entire legal system is at risk if compensation is not paid.”
Attorneys for Chesebro and Roman didn’t respond to requests for comment, and Troupis’ attorney declined to comment.
Burden said it is striking that the case is still ongoing nearly six years after the election, but he said the conduct at issue remains extraordinary.
“These were among the most serious challenges to elections we’ve seen in modern times,” Burden said.
“To think that there might be no ramifications of that really would be shocking,” he said, “and, I think, at odds with how the American criminal justice system has typically operated.”
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.
The FBI agents arrived at David Bolter’s Milwaukee home on a cool, cloudy Wednesday morning in late May. They were armed with a list of questions for the 2020 poll worker, who had raised concerns about the way local officials handled the 2020 election, Bolter told Votebeat.
President Donald Trump relied on Bolter’s claims in an unsuccessful 2020 lawsuit that sought to throw out more than 220,000 votes. That would have been more than enough to move Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes from Democrat Joe Biden, who won the state, to Trump. Though courts, several election reviews and many audits rejected Trump’s claims, the Republican never stopped believing that he was cheated out of the presidency in 2020.
That appears to be why, last month, the FBI sent agents back to Milwaukee to question Bolter as part of an expanding national effort by the second Trump administration to investigate long-debunked claims of fraud in the 2020 election.
The investigation into the 2020 election appears to be relying on already disproven allegations from people like Bolter. Bolter declined to divulge more about his conversation with the FBI, which has not been previously reported, but allegations from Bolter’s 2020 affidavit were central to some conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. For example, he alleged that somebody in Milwaukee’s absentee ballot counting facility announced around midnight on Election Day that a “huge truckload of ballots” was going to be delivered — an accusation for which there has so far appeared to be no additional evidence.
Around the same time Bolter says he talked to the FBI, two plainclothes agents with FBI badges showed up at the apartment of a former Milwaukee resident and 2020 poll worker about an affidavit she submitted, according to the former poll worker, who asked to be identified only by her first name, Christine, to give her the freedom to discuss an ongoing investigation.
Christine had also submitted an affidavit about the 2020 election, saying election workers had been told that all votes were counted, but she then saw workers continuing to count ballots around midnight. That affidavit was the focus of the agents’ questions, Christine told Votebeat.
“I suspected wrongdoing, but I’m not saying that it actually happened,” she said. “I’m just one lowly person that was working there.”
During the interview, she added, an agent showed her a photograph of Claire Woodall, the former Milwaukee election chief, asking her if she recognized the former election official who has been central to false allegations about the 2020 election. She identified her by name. Woodall didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Caroline Clancy, a spokesperson for the FBI’s Milwaukee office, declined to comment.
Claire Woodall-Vogg, executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission, works at the presidential recount at the Wisconsin Center convention center in Milwaukee on Nov. 25, 2020. (Sara Stathas for Wisconsin Watch)
While investigators seem mainly focused on the 2020 vote, some elections experts believe the Trump administration’s wide-ranging probe is actually designed to create more doubts among Americans about future elections, as Republicans face strong political headwinds that could cost them control of Congress later this year.
“This isn’t about the 2020 election, this is about the 2026 and 2028 elections,” said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan, nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research. “This is about intimidating election officials. This is about creating a stream of disinformation designed to delegitimize an election the president may believe he’s going to lose. This is designed by the president’s underlings to satisfy the unrealistic expectations of a president that still cannot comprehend that he lost an election that he definitely lost, and it’s incredibly destabilizing.”
Wisconsin is the latest known target of the Trump administration’s 2020 investigation. The FBI is looking to interview elections officials and Milwaukee police officers in what some worry could be a precursor to an effort to seize ballots from the 2020 presidential race, as it already has in Georgia.
The Trump administration is revisiting allegations of election fraud that have been repeatedly scrutinized
In January, federal investigators seized 600 boxes of ballots from the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia. The heavily Democratic county, home to Atlanta, was key to Biden’s narrow 2020 victory in the state.
As in Wisconsin, the FBI in Georgia has built its investigation on allegations that have already been repeatedly scrutinized by audits, investigations, and courts without unearthing any evidence of fraud or tampering that could have overturned the results.
The Georgia search represented an unprecedented intervention by the federal government into local administration. Even more unusually, Tulsi Gabbard, who will step down at end of this month as director of national intelligence, personally oversaw the seizure and arranged for Trump to speak directly to the FBI agents via cell phone after they carried out the operation.
The Trump administration investigations stretch from Arizona, where federal officials subpoenaed computerized records of a partisan review state lawmakers conducted of Maricopa County’s 2020 election, to Puerto Rico, where the Office of the Director of National Intelligence procured voting machines to examine for potential security risks.
The administration’s investigations aren’t entirely limited to 2020. The U.S. Department of Justice sent a letter in April to Wayne County, Michigan — home to Detroit — demanding all ballots cast in the 2024 election, which Trump won. But even in that case, to support the request, the Justice Department cited accusations of fraud made after the 2020 election, including a lawsuit that was quickly dismissed after a judge wrote that “plaintiffs’ interpretation of events is incorrect and not credible.” Wayne County never handed over the ballots, because it doesn’t have possession of them.
What do the 2020 elections mean for 2026?
The FBI faces challenges in pursuing cases tied to the 2020 election since the five-year statute of limitations that applies to most of the likely charges expired last year. Law enforcement veterans said it is possible that the Justice Department could pursue broader conspiracy charges in the case, but the prospect remains unclear.
John Keller, a former acting head of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section who resigned in 2025 after refusing the Trump administration’s demands to drop corruption charges against then-New York City Mayor Eric Adams, said the administration appeared to be trying to normalize federal investigations of state elections to pave the way for future intervention.
“They are using enforcement directed at the 2020 election as a test run for what they can get away with on Election Day this year, or after, to try and delay certification or invalidate an election” if the results don’t go their way, he said.
Injecting federal law enforcement officials into an ongoing election is a more extreme and serious action than investigating a past one, and it could face stiffer opposition. But it’s clear, at least, that the administration is scrutinizing current elections closely.
Any effort to seize ballots in an ongoing election would create unprecedented new issues, such as a breach in the chain of custody over cast ballots, that could prevent election officials from declaring a winner and throw results into uncertainty.
Catherine Engelbrecht, co-founder of the Texas-based conservative group True the Vote, which has promoted debunked theories about the 2020 election, said she understands Trump’s intentions but believes the 2020 election questions should have been resolved “in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election.”
“This is not necessarily the way I would have recommended that it would be handled,” she said. “The fact that it wasn’t addressed has left this lingering void.”
In most cases, however, Trump’s claims of voter fraud were addressed in the wake of the 2020 election. Time and again, courts, state investigations, and even the Justice Department concluded that there was no evidence of problems or fraud that would have changed the results.
Engelbrecht said she views the Trump administration’s ongoing investigations as an effort to dig into long-standing concerns about the voting process it wants to address for future elections.
“The past is prologue,” she said. “If we don’t understand what happened, we are doomed to repeat it.”
Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.
Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.
This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.
The former Madison deputy clerk who claimed responsibility for the 23 late-arriving ballots in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election has been reassigned within the clerk’s office to non-election tasks.
Jim Verbick — the election office’s former second-in-command who was previously scrutinized and sued for the clerk’s office losing 200 ballots in the 2024 election — admitted to losing track of the absentee ballots that didn’t end up arriving at several polling places until after 8 p.m. on Election Day in April, according to public records obtained by Votebeat.
He told Votebeat that he’s only partially to blame, that understaffing and a lack of communication led to the mistake and that it’s unfair that he got reassigned away from elections. Verbick is now the city clerk’s office’s lead worker for licensing.
“I do admit that I had forgotten about the ballots I secured when I left the post office,” he said, adding that he said the error was exacerbated by unexpected absences and mistakes made by others.
The issue went to court after the Wisconsin Elections Commission ordered Madison not to count the ballots because they arrived after the 8 p.m. deadline in Wisconsin law. A court reversed the commission’s decision, and the ballots were counted in the final canvass.
Verbick’s reassignment was part of a set of personnel changes designed to improve how the clerk’s office manages “the many logistical tasks of administering elections,” Madison Clerk Lydia McComas said in a statement. The city is also hiring two new deputy clerks and a lead employee for absentee voting. But this move doesn’t amount to a net gain of three election positions because one election staff member recently left the office and Verbick was reassigned.
Madison officials said after the election that the clerk’s office — not voters — was responsible for the ballots’ late arrival. Election officials had received and sorted the ballots in time to be delivered: They arrived on the Monday before Election Day and were sorted that same evening, then put on a shelf to be delivered in the afternoon of the following day, records show.
Emails, spreadsheets and Microsoft Teams messages obtained by Votebeat show that Verbick was in charge of absentee ballots and accepted some blame for their late arrival.
Around 4 p.m., Verbick sent a message on Microsoft Teams that he realized he sent out officials to deliver ballots that afternoon without the batch of absentee ballots including the 23 votes that would end up arriving late, former clerk’s office staff member Bonnie Chang said in an email to McComas.
Per that same email, Chang said that about an hour later, she scanned a spreadsheet that showed polling sites were still missing absentee ballots. She then contacted Verbick to find out how many ballots were in the late-discovered bin and whether he needed help delivering them. She wrote that he wouldn’t say how many ballots were found or whether more staff were needed to deliver ballots.
At around 6 p.m., Chang said, the clerk’s office sent additional staff to help deliver the ballots as early as possible. She said most got reassigned to other tasks.
By the time that additional help arrived, Verbick told Votebeat, the ballots had already been sent out for delivery. He said he didn’t think the couriers who were already dispatched to deliver the ballots would have trouble delivering them on-time.
In hindsight, Verbick said, he would have used those additional staff to lighten their load. But he also said he could have planned for the additional staff better had anybody told them that they were en route to help him out.
That night, Verbick sent an email to McComas taking blame for not putting the batch containing the 23 ballots on the planned afternoon drop-offs to polling places.
“Missing the bin of envelopes with the initial afternoon route is my fault,” he emailed McComas at about 10:45 p.m. on Election Day. “I had all of them reviewed this morning and ready to be run with the mail delivery.”
Verbick told Votebeat he forgot about the ballots because election workers in the clerk’s office hadn’t told him about a planned USPS delivery around noon that Tuesday. Believing the delivery had not happened, he went to the post office to investigate.
Before leaving, he said, he moved the batch of ballots that later arrived late into a secure area because there were no other full-time clerk’s office staffers available to watch them while he was gone. It was there that he forgot the ballots.
The error, Verbick told Votebeat, reflected chronic understaffing in the clerk’s office — a problem exacerbated by the increase in absentee voting since the 2020 election.
In an email to McComas, Verbick said he didn’t get additional staff that he thought would help process ballots and that he didn’t intentionally ignore messages from office staff.
Relying on hourly and temporary workers to fill those gaps is not enough, he told Votebeat.
In an email to Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway sent the night of the incident, McComas said that she would “firmly address the lack of communication” and would have more staff in August and November, including the new deputy to oversee absentee ballots.
Wisconsin Elections Commission chair Ann Jacobs called the latest error “absurd” at a commission meeting in late April. The commission voted to investigate Madison over the error, meaning the agency’s first two authorized investigations in its history both center on Madison: one for the 2024 ballot snafu and one for the latest one.
Ultimately, the votes affected by this year’s error were counted. Officials said these 23 ballots were correctly, legally cast, counted and checked into the pollbooks just like any other valid absentee ballots — the only problem was that they were delivered and counted after polls formally closed. The Wisconsin Elections Commission voted that the city and county erred in counting the ballots since state law held that ballots must be delivered to polling places “no later than 8 p.m. on election day.”
A Dane County judge, however, reversed that order, ruling that the ballots should be counted because they were properly cast, and precedent held that voters shouldn’t be disenfranchised because of clerk errors.
Verbick scrutinized for 2024 election snafu
This was the second time in about two years that Verbick has faced scrutiny over allegations that he failed to act decisively when absentee ballots were at risk of being left uncounted.
The Wisconsin Elections Commission previously scrutinized Verbick for his inaction after the 2024 presidential election, when nearly 200 voters were disenfranchised.
Verbick, on the other hand, “testified that he is generally in charge when Clerk Witzel-Behl is not in the office, but that he is ‘not always the point person on everything in the office’” and wasn’t sure who the point person would have been, according to the commission investigation.
The commission stated that Verbick’s involvement was “minimal” by his own account and that nobody took responsibility for those ballots: “It was always someone else’s job.”
After learning about the ballots, the commission stated, Verbick “did not instruct anyone to determine how to get the ballots counted.”
Verbick was sued in his personal capacity for his role in the error and declined to comment about the 2024 snafu. The case is ongoing, and the plaintiffs are demanding financial damages for being disenfranchised.
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.
Ahead of the Wisconsin Supreme Court election in April, Green Bay election officials accidentally sent duplicate ballots to 150 voters, prompting an administrative complaint before the Wisconsin Elections Commission and conspiracy theories online.
In a slightly different example from this year, some voters in Maryland initially received primary ballots for the wrong party. Election officials then intentionally issued new ballots for the correct party to all voters who had requested a mail ballot, and the original ballots were voided. Nonetheless, President Donald Trump falsely suggested that nobody knew what was happening with the original ballots and that “any Republican running in Maryland doesn’t have a chance” because voters who received them, who were disproportionately Democrats, would be allowed to vote twice.
Despite the heightened attention, election officials accidentally sending duplicate ballots — or sending out an erroneous batch before intentionally sending corrected ballots to the same voters — is a rare but well-understood mistake nationwide that hardly ever results in the type of double voting Trump has warned of.
“Once any ballot is received and accepted, it locks down that voter’s record, so that a second ballot could not be accepted for that same voter,” said Tammy Patrick, chief programs officer of the National Association of Election Officials. “That’s the way it works everywhere.”
Two primary mechanisms keep these accidental duplicate ballots from getting counted: proper record keeping and deterrence, said David Levine, an election security expert and the election director in Richmond, Virginia. Generally, that record keeping is done by putting unique barcodes on absentee ballot envelopes, which prevent people from voting more than once.
“It’s usually not an issue because, one, election officials are pretty good about contingency planning and having procedures in place, so if something like this happens, they know how to either void ballots or segregate them appropriately, so that they’re not going to be counted,” Levine said.
Second, he added, most voters understand that double voting is a crime, and it’s not a practice they want to engage in. A study of 2012 election results found that, at most, one in 4,000 votes cast could be a double vote, but that clerical errors in marking turnout records — not actual double voting — may account for most if not all of that number.
Some of the attention on these mistakes comes from people who are genuinely unaware of the protections that keep double votes from being counted, Levine said. But, he said, there’s also scrutiny from people who are familiar or should be familiar with those safeguards but “choose to try and make a lot of hay out of something that’s largely much ado about nothing.”
Why do duplicate ballots get sent out?
Simply put, election season is an extraordinarily busy time for clerks and the vendors that print their ballots. Sometimes amid their multitasking, they mistakenly send two batches of absentee ballots to the same group of voters, or send an incorrect batch and have to send a second, correct one.
In the Green Bay instance, City Clerk Celestine Jeffreys said election officials were scrambling because a mid-March blizzard closed much of the city, and her staff faced a time crunch to send ballots out on time. The city sent notices to the 152 affected voters before Election Day. Ultimately, just one voter returned two ballots, and both were voided after Green Bay officials alerted the voter about it.
In Maryland, the State Board of Elections said the initial batch of ballots was erroneous because of a coding error with the board’s mail ballot vendor. Since the vendor couldn’t identify which voters received the wrong ballots, the board decided to send new ballots to everyone who had requested a mail ballot in that election and void the old ones in the state’s registration database, so they wouldn’t count even if voters returned them.
What keeps those erroneous ballots from getting counted?
One of the best tools election officials in Wisconsin and elsewhere have at their disposal are unique barcodes printed on the absentee ballot certificates that voters receive.
Those barcodes in Wisconsin connect to the statewide voter registration database and are unique to each voter. Other states have similar systems, with unique identifiers tying an absentee ballot to each voter. If an election official scans a duplicate ballot, the system shows that the voter already returned one, and one of the ballots is rejected.
That’s a “very, very established process,” Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe said after the Green Bay incident.
In examples like Racine, when voters receive a ballot missing a race or containing another error that can be corrected before Election Day, officials will intentionally send another, correct ballot to the voter. The first ballot becomes known as the “A” ballot, and the second one is known as the “B” ballot.
If a voter returns just one ballot, that vote will count — including only valid votes from the erroneous ballot, if that’s the one submitted. If a voter returns both ballots, officials will scrap the “A” ballot and count the “B” since the latter is the correct form.
That’s different from Maryland, where election officials voided all of the original ballots and reissued new ones.
How specific instances of duplicate ballots get resolved — whether that’s canceling out all the original ballots or planning for “A” and “B” ballots like in Racine — can depend on state laws, officials’ discretion and court rulings, Patrick said. How close the error is to election day and the jurisdiction’s budget can also influence how election officials handle duplicate ballots, she added.
Patrick also drew a distinction between officials sending out duplicate absentee ballots and the rare but occasional instances of double voting.
“More often than not, the rare instances where we see it, it’s an individual voting in two different jurisdictions or two different states,” she said. “It’s not so much that a single person is voting in the same election, in the same jurisdiction, under the same name.”
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
The League of Women Voters of Wisconsin is challenging the state’s law governing voters’ ability to fix missing information on their absentee ballots, alleging that the law violates the Wisconsin Constitution by giving clerks a vast amount of discretion over whether to reject ballots.
The group is asking a Dane County judge to require all clerks to provide voters notice when an absentee ballot certificate is lacking necessary information — such as a signature or the address of a voter or the person who witnessed the ballot’s casting — and give them an opportunity to add that information before rejecting the ballot, a process known as “curing” the ballot.
Right now, the law tells clerks that they “may” return incomplete absentee ballots to voters. That results in some municipal clerks sending voters prompt notice about faulty ballots, while other clerks put those ballots in the rejected pile without informing the voter at all, the lawsuit states. Municipalities also treat absentee ballots differently depending on when they receive them, the lawsuit alleges, and those that arrive closer to Election Day often have a lesser chance of getting cured.
The lawsuit, which names the Wisconsin Elections Commission as the defendant, argues that, without a blanket curing requirement, “mail-in absentee ballots are jeopardized by the lack of mandatory notice and curing opportunities across the state.”
“Right now, we have ballots that come in weeks ahead of the election, and they’re being set aside for rejection with no attempt by the clerk to contact the voter,” Debra Cronmiller, executive director of the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin, told Votebeat.
“If even one clerk is not curing ballots, that’s one clerk too many in a democratic system where voting is an absolute right,” Cronmiller said, adding that the number of clerks who fail to follow the practice could reach into the hundreds.
While the lack of uniformity could create legal issues, clerks say a blanket curing requirement could be difficult to implement if courts maintain the state’s 8 p.m. Election Day deadline for receiving ballots as the deadline to cure those ballots, too.
In 2024, Milwaukee received about 150 mail ballots just minutes before polls closed. At that late hour, it would have been virtually impossible for officials to notify those voters about any deficiencies with their ballots — much less give them a chance to cure them before the polls closed.
Size and resource disparities between Wisconsin’s many municipalities would also present challenges to a uniform curing system.
A part-time clerk working from home in a small rural town operates with dramatically fewer resources than election officials in Milwaukee, where thousands of absentee ballots can arrive on Election Day. Resources in both settings would be stretched by a uniform curing requirement, depending on how courts ultimately require it to be implemented. If courts grant the league some version of the relief it is seeking, questions about how the process would work in practice could also be settled in court.
Marathon County Clerk Kim Trueblood, a Republican, said another complicating factor for clerks is that Wisconsin’s voter registration form doesn’t require registrants to provide their email addresses and phone numbers.
Trueblood said she already tells the 60 municipal clerks in the county to try to cure ballots, but that process is harder when voters don’t provide contact information or when ballots are returned on Election Day. Requiring voters to provide their contact information would make a curing requirement a lot easier to comply with, she said.
If such a requirement were imposed ahead of this year’s midterms, Trueblood said, bigger villages and cities would likely have the staff and resources to contact every voter, but for town clerks who work a different full-time job and spend just a few hours working as a clerk on weekends and evenings, “it could be a little more challenging.”
Curing lawsuits play out in Wisconsin and across the nation
Ballot curing practices vary widely across the country. Some states don’t allow curing at all. Others allow voters to cure absentee ballots well after Election Day if they’re missing a date, signature, address or something else. As arguments over voting practices increasingly head to court, lawsuits over ballot curing have played out across the nation.
In Pennsylvania, for example, ballot curing is neither required nor prohibited under state law. Similar to Wisconsin, different counties have different curing practices — some allow voters to cure their ballots, while others don’t.
In North Carolina, a robust curing process was created as the result of a lawsuit that mirrors the one in Wisconsin. It was brought by the League of Women Voters of North Carolina, among other groups, and relied on a similar allegation: that the lack of a statewide-mandated procedure to cure absentee ballots amounted to a denial of voters’ right to due process under the U.S. Constitution.
The lawsuit resulted in a settlement that created a curing requirement in every county. Now, voters have up to three days after Election Day to cure issues on their ballot.
The ballot rejection rate has dropped dramatically as a result of the case, said Joselle Torres, a spokesperson for Democracy North Carolina, a voting rights group that joined the state’s league chapter in the case. But she added that state and local funding is crucial to educate poll workers, voters and other election officials about the changes — “and that’s no small fee.”
Marc Meredith, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who researched ballot curing in North Carolina in the wake of the settlement, said he had initially expected under 50% of voters to fix their ballot or vote a new one. But ultimately, about 82% of the 26,000 voters eligible to cure their ballots did so. Many opted to vote a new ballot in person rather than fix their old one, he said.
Curing has potential benefits but also challenges in Wisconsin
The drastic increase in the number of voters curing their ballots in North Carolina may not be replicated in Wisconsin, where many municipalities already have curing notifications and procedures in place.
Another difference is that North Carolina has 100 counties running elections, whereas Wisconsin has about 1,850 municipalities doing so. That could complicate implementation, Meredith said, because the same procedures would need to work in places ranging from Milwaukee to towns with 100 residents.
“In the places that aren’t currently curing,” he added, “I would expect lots of voters would take opportunities to make corrections.”
That issue of municipalities not curing ballots is especially pronounced in rural Wisconsin, Cronmiller said. There, part-time clerks don’t always have the bandwidth to return ballots to voters ahead of Election Day, she said. If courts call for a more stringent curing requirement, Cronmiller added, “it would force all municipalities to give resources sufficient to their clerks so they could do this work.”
A requirement for clerks to tell voters can create practical issues in bigger cities, too, especially those that can receive thousands of ballots on Election Day.
To get every last ballot cured, Wisconsin would likely have to implement a cure deadline after Election Day, Meredith said.
“You don’t want to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, is my opinion on these things,” Meredith said. “There are going to be some things that will slip through the cracks, but … don’t let the fact that a few might slip through the cracks prevent you from putting that system in that way that would help the rest.”
At the highest level, the League of Women Voters is seeking a declaration that Wisconsin’s discretionary ballot-curing law violates the state constitution, said Nina Beck, a counsel at the Fair Elections Center, which represents the league in Wisconsin and also represented the North Carolina league chapter in its lawsuit to create ballot-curing there.
What’s required under the due process clause of the Wisconsin Constitution, Beck said, is adequate notice and the ability to cure a defect if clerks are otherwise denying people their fundamental right to vote. Instead, right now, clerks are dealing with curing in many ways and may even be treating voters within the same municipality differently, she said. “That’s fundamentally unfair.”
If the court sides with the league, the group will ask the court to set a uniform procedure for all clerks to follow, Beck said, adding that the current system is “kind of a free-for-all.”
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
A federal judge on Thursday rejected the U.S. Justice Department’s demand for Wisconsin’s unredacted voter list, the latest defeat for President Donald Trump’s administration in its quest to obtain more information about voters around the country.
In his 10-page ruling, U.S. District Judge James D. Peterson said the department’s allegation that the Wisconsin Elections Commission violated the Civil Rights Act by not turning over the state’s voter roll “fails as a matter of law.”
The Department of Justice has requested voter rolls with unredacted information — including voters’ full birthdates, full or partial Social Security numbers, and driver’s license information — from at least 48 states, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. At least 15 states have provided or said they will provide the data, but most have not, prompting the department to file suit against 30 states plus Washington, D.C.
The department has so far appealed three of those dismissals, the ones in Michigan, Oregon and California.
The Justice Department has said it is entitled to the voter rolls under federal law and needs the data to enforce requirements in federal statutes. Officials in both Republican- and Democratic-led states have pushed back on the Justice Department’s request for unredacted voter data, saying it could put voters at risk. They also say the department hasn’t provided enough information on how the data would be used.
The Justice Department didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
“This ruling protects against federal intrusions into Wisconsin’s election system,” said ACLU of Wisconsin legal director Ryan Cox, adding that it “ensures private voter data is safe from abuse and prevents the Trump administration from playing politics with our right to vote.”
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
The federal government’s probe into the 2020 election has reached Wisconsin, with several current and former election officials, including multiple people in Milwaukee, confirming they have been interviewed or approached by the FBI.
The exact nature of the investigation remains unclear, though it appears to be at least somewhat centered around the 2020 election. The agency’s election investigations elsewhere in the country have featured subpoenas for ballots and other election records, but legal experts still say it won’t be easy for the federal government to convince a court to give it access to ballots.
Milwaukee County officials are nonetheless preparing for that possibility, in part because they still retain ballots from the 2020 election, though they declined to discuss those preparations or comment on the record. Those ballots contain identifying information that could, in some cases, allow otherwise unidentifiable absentee ballots to be matched to the voters who cast them. Milwaukee is one of the few jurisdictions in Wisconsin that still has ballots from that election, and the city has long been a target of voter fraud accusations and related attacks from the political right.
Elsewhere in Wisconsin — in communities whose elections have faced less scrutiny and in the vast majority of municipalities where 2020 ballots were destroyed according to the standard retention schedules in state law — election officials are less alarmed and are instead focused on preparing for the midterm elections.
Still, news of the FBI interest has created confusion and some fear on the part of voters and election officials.
What happened?
So far, the FBI has contacted multiple current and former election officials in Wisconsin.
The FBI interviewed Wisconsin Elections Commission deputy administrator Robert Kehoe within the last few weeks. The news of the interview was first reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The interview focused on the 2020 election, with agents asking Kehoe to explain how Wisconsin elections operate.
The agency has also attempted to contact Milwaukee County Election Director Michelle Hawley. An agent left a business card at Hawley’s home when she was not there. Milwaukee County Clerk George Christensen criticized the agency for approaching Hawley at her home rather than through the county.
“While we cooperate with all legitimate law enforcement actions, we will defend against any attack on our democracy and will defend the rights of voters of Milwaukee County,” Christensen said in a statement.
Agents also left a card for, called and texted a former Milwaukee election official, who confirmed the contact to Votebeat but requested anonymity because of personal safety concerns. That official declined to say whether they responded to the FBI.
“The president for whatever reason cannot seem to let it go that he lost an election,” Johnson told a WISN 12 reporter.
Wisconsin Elections Commission spokeswoman Emilee Miklas declined to comment for this story. Other officials declined to speak on the record, and an FBI spokesperson didn’t answer Votebeat questions about the probe.
David Becker, the executive director of the nonpartisan nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research and a former Justice Department voting section attorney, said the federal government’s actions appeared more to be aimed at intimidating election officials than producing actionable criminal cases.
He pointed to FBI Director Kash Patel’s public statements in April suggesting arrests related to the 2020 election were coming, as well as federal officials discussing potential cases on social media before they’re brought before courts.
“If you think you’re going to bring charges and prosecute individuals, you don’t do anything that the federal government has done over the last few months,” he said.
Becker also noted that any potential federal crimes connected to the 2020 election are “well beyond the statute of limitations for any potential federal jurisdiction or crimes,” adding, “This is a problem for any investigation relating to 2020.”
Even so, Becker said election officials’ worries were justified. He said the Election Official Legal Defense Network, which he leads, has received more requests for legal assistance from election officials than ever before “even though all of these efforts indicate that the federal government knows it’s got nothing.”
David Becker, executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, briefs the media on growing threats to election professionals in Wisconsin at the Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison, Wis., on Dec. 13, 2021. (Coburn Dukehart / Wisconsin Watch)
How do the events in Wisconsin relate to probes elsewhere?
It’s unclear how the FBI interviews in Wisconsin relate to the agency’s scrutiny of the 2020 election in other states.
Those jurisdictions share several characteristics with Milwaukee County. All are located in highly competitive swing states won by former President Joe Biden in 2020, and all became central targets of President Donald Trump, who repeatedly challenged the election results despite court rulings, audits and reviews repeatedly reaffirming his loss.
Fulton, Wayne, Maricopa, and Milwaukee County are the largest and most heavily scrutinized election jurisdictions in their respective states. Each has been the subject of persistent conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, many of which remain prevalent on social media, even after extensive investigations found no evidence of widespread fraud.
“What’s really disconcerting,” said former longtime Wisconsin election chief Kevin Kennedy, “is the fact that there is a clear pattern here to try and continue to stir up issues that were resolved in every single opportunity there was to review them, whether it was a court case, an independent audit or the actual certification and review process that exists.”
What comes next?
The short answer is that nobody really knows.
Officials have been considering the possibility that the federal government may seize the city’s 2020 ballots, which contain personally identifiable information.
Kennedy said recent actions by the Trump administration offer “no reason to think that information that should be protected is going to be protected.”
Kennedy said Wisconsin’s decentralized election system was intentionally designed to distribute authority among local jurisdictions — both to keep election administration accountable at the community level and to limit the amount of sensitive voter information concentrated in any one place.
“You put that at the national level,” he said, “and it only takes one bad actor — and we’ve got evidence there’s more than one of those already in the federal government — to totally disrupt the process when you consolidate that kind of information that’s protected through the various state and local laws and practices.”
Becker said it will be an uphill battle for the federal government to successfully obtain Milwaukee’s ballots. But he said the mere possibility that federal officials could theoretically identify how individual people voted is deeply troubling.
“That is not the way a democratic society works,” he said. “Now, I don’t think they’re likely going to be able to do that. I think that’s going to be incredibly difficult. It’s not impossible, but the fact that they seem to engender this fear is troubling enough.”
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
The Wisconsin Elections Commission is facing criticism from local officials and a lawsuit filed Wednesday after it ordered Madison not to count 23 absentee ballots that arrived late to the polls in the state’s recent Supreme Court race, a delay city officials say was caused by election administrator error. City officials also say the commission initially offered little guidance but later faulted them for making the wrong decision.
As Madison officials discussed what to do with the late-arriving ballots the day after Election Day, Madison City Attorney Mike Haas reached out to Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe for advice. Wolfe sent the relevant statute the following day and told Madison officials to “decide, within their statutory discretion” whether the 23 ballots should be counted. Madison decided to count them.
Three weeks later, WEC’s commissioners decided Madison made the wrong choice, ordering them to remove the 23 affected ballots from the count. The commissioners didn’t mince words. Chair Ann Jacobs, a Democrat, said Madison committed an “absurd error,” and GOP commissioner Don Millis called it an “epic failure.”
The dispute has exposed a breakdown between state and local election officials with consequences beyond the 23 ballots at issue. Madison officials say they followed guidance from the commission when they chose to count the votes, only to be publicly rebuked and overruled weeks later. Now, a lawsuit argues that not counting the votes would disenfranchise voters whose ballots were delayed by election officials — and local clerks warn the episode could make them less likely to act decisively when problems arise in future elections.
Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell, a Democrat, said the turnaround from the commission was puzzling and could demoralize clerks.
“Why would anybody ask WEC for an opinion about how to handle a situation?” he said. “Here they are attacking clerks for having to make a decision because they couldn’t get advice.”
Wolfe said that the agency was limited in how much advice it can provide for local election officials, but said the commission remains “dedicated to supporting their efforts within the scope of our administrative role.”
Lawsuit alleges removing the 23 votes would be unconstitutional
The liberal law firm Law Forward’s lawsuit in Dane County Circuit Court alleges that the commission illegally ordered Madison not to count 23 absentee ballots that arrived at the polls after 8 p.m.
The group says the two voters it’s representing — Margaret and Robert Honig — along with the other voters, would be unconstitutionally disenfranchised “through no fault of their own” and asks the court to strike down the WEC order not to count the ballots.
The lawsuit references several past rulings in the state as establishing a precedent that voters can’t be deprived of their constitutional voting rights due to election officials’ errors.
This is the second recent Law Forward lawsuit involving Madison’s failure to count ballots due to administrative error. The legal group sued the city for disenfranchising 193 voters in the 2024 presidential election for a separate series of failures.
It remains unclear why there was such a delay between the ballots’ arrival at the elections office and their delivery to the precincts for counting. State law requires they be “delivered to the polling place no later than 8 p.m.” in order to be tallied.
Dane County authorized a separate lawsuit on Tuesday, and then filed it Wednesday early evening, as county election officials said they want clarity in the future on whether late-arriving ballots can count if they were only delayed because of election official error.
That same day, Madison complied with WEC’s demand to remove the ballots from the count, but instead of removing the specific ballots at issue, the city selected 20 ballots at random and removed those. Called a “drawdown,” the controversial practice was necessary because poll workers apparently failed to follow Madison Clerk Lydia McComas’ instructions to clearly mark the late-arriving ballots so they could be identified if necessary. Only three were appropriately marked.
Officials criticize the election commission for lack of direction
Local election officials say the Wisconsin Elections Commission has become less willing to provide clear guidance in difficult situations — a practice that commissioners and staff say reflects the limits of the agency’s role.
Haas, the Madison city attorney, has firsthand experience on the commission: He preceded Wolfe as the commission’s administrator. Her initial response to the city’s request for advice on how to handle the late-arriving ballots — which provided little direction — was in line with the commission’s tendency in recent years to “intentionally avoid giving definitive responses to specific questions,” Haas wrote in a May 6 letter to the commission obtained by Votebeat.
“This has caused local clerks and their legal counsel to feel frustrated that the WEC is abdicating its responsibility under the Statutes to administer the election laws and provide guidance and advice to local election officials,” he continued.
Haas also questioned why Wolfe’s response and the commissioners’ eventual order were so out of step with one another. The city relied on Wolfe’s initial guidance, Haas said, only to have the commission “contradict its Administrator without even an acknowledgment of her guidance.”
That dynamic, he added, discourages local election officials from being transparent with the agency and damages the commission’s credibility.
He also said that the commissioners were contradicting themselves. In its investigation into the 193 ballots that went missing in Madison until several days after the November 2024 election, the commission concluded that the missing ballots never arrived at the polling places but still could have been counted.
Haas said it was “difficult to sustain” the commission’s conclusions that “a municipality should count ballots that are discovered in the Clerk’s Office days after the election but not ballots that were delivered minutes after the 8:00 p.m. deadline.”
To McDonell, the Democratic Dane County clerk, the commission’s “real reticence to give advice” is undermining election officials’ trust in the state election agency.
McDonell said that in the past he used to get specific advice from the commission, but now “we get a game of ‘gotcha’ instead.”
In a statement, Wolfe told Votebeat that the commission provides guidance to clerks when the issues are clear. But when state law is ambiguous or unprecedented situations arise, she said, “it’s been our long-established policy to direct clerks to their respective legal counsel for interpretation.”
The Wisconsin Elections Commission has six commissioners, three Democrats and three Republicans. Decisions must be made by a majority of the commission, needing at minimum a 4-2 vote. Although Wolfe — whose role as administrator is nonpartisan — is often referred to as Wisconsin’s top election official, she does not have a vote.
Wolfe added that the commission can exercise its authority to issue determinations on election matters and that it’s her role to adhere to those directives, “even when I don’t always agree with those decisions.”
Jacobs, the commission chair, said the commission provides clerks plenty of help, from designing election manuals and creating administrative rules to adjudicating administrative complaints.
“We are doing everything we can to provide guidance to clerks on how to do things right,” she said. “We are not their 1-800-GET-HELP number for individual clerks’ every single legal need.”
One of the other reasons the commission can’t provide specific legal advice, Jacobs said, is that the commission acts as a judicial body that could ultimately evaluate whether election officials comply with the law.
“If you’ve got a court case, a personal injury lawsuit on a car accident, you don’t get to call the judge up and say, ‘Hey, am I doing this right?’” she said. “It cannot be our job to do their jobs for them.”
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
Wisconsin will likely face limited immediate impact at both the legislative and congressional level from the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that narrowed how the Voting Rights Act can be used to challenge political maps. But it may make it easier for people to challenge school board and city council maps in court.
The ruling in Louisiana v. Callais raises the bar for voting rights challenges by requiring stronger evidence that race, rather than political considerations, drove how districts were drawn, and making it easier for states to defend maps on nonracial grounds.
Dan Lennington, the managing vice president and deputy counsel at the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, said the boundaries that could be most easily struck down as a result of the Wednesday ruling are those that were drawn explicitly for racial reasons. Some examples, he said, are the boundaries for Milwaukee city council districts and certain school districts.
Race is a common factor in drawing Milwaukee city council districts, though campaigns to add additional majority-minority districts haven’t always succeeded.
For example, departing Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett in December 2021 vetoed a proposed city council map because it didn’t include a third Latino-majority district, only for Mayor Cavalier Johnson to sign that same map several weeks later.
Lennington also pointed to state laws that use race as a factor to determine school district boundaries. One of those laws explicitly mentions “racial composition of the pupils” as a factor for drawing boundaries — a law that he said is now implicated by the Callais decision.
“If a plaintiff comes to us and says that they live in a district that’s been racially gerrymandered, we would take a very close look at that case,” he said.
Less likely impact on legislative and congressional level
There likely won’t be much impact in Wisconsin at the congressional district level because there’s just one majority-minority district in the state, UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden said ahead of the ruling. The 4th Congressional District, represented by Rep. Gwen Moore, D-Milwaukee, comprises much of Milwaukee and the surrounding suburbs in Milwaukee County.
Even if Section 2 of the VRA did not apply, he said, the district would likely stay much the same given the general principle of keeping communities intact.
A decision like the one handed down, he said, “would open the door if line drawers wanted to break up that county or city in some way, but I think it would probably be challenged on other grounds.”
Challenges to Wisconsin’s congressional maps have often had more to do with partisan than racial line-drawing. Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, said he wasn’t surprised by the federal decision but reiterated his call for new congressional maps, which he said unfairly gave Republicans a 6-2 seat advantage in a swing state.
But two recent court decisions in Wisconsin rejected challenges to the state’s congressional maps on the basis that they constitute an unconstitutional “anti-competitive” gerrymander. Those rulings focused not on race, but on whether courts can take up claims based on partisan advantage.
Doug Poland, co-founder of the liberal law firm Law Forward, said this ruling could empower lawmakers to pursue partisan goals while making racial challenges harder to prove.
But because of Wisconsin’s demographics — a largely white state, with the most significant minority populations concentrated around the Milwaukee area — the state has run into Section 2 challenges far less often than southern states, he said.
“As a practical matter, this decision doesn’t have a big impact on Wisconsin at the moment,” he said. “That could change.”
There’s more at play among state legislative districts, Burden said. The state has nine majority-minority legislative districts, where a single minority group makes up over half of the population: seven in the Assembly and two in the Senate. Two other districts — one in each chamber — are minority influence districts, where combined minority populations make up a majority.
Democrats in Wisconsin have generally steered clear of breaking up minority districts to avoid violating the VRA, Burden said, but packing minority voters in one district sometimes costs them adjacent districts where they might have been competitive if the minority population was more evenly distributed. For that reason, there’s a history of Republicans supporting majority-minority districts in the state.
But while Evers argued this addition was necessary to comply with the Voting Rights Act, it drew criticism from both sides of the aisle. A Black Democratic legislator criticized the move as diluting Black voices, while Republicans appealed the maps to the U.S. Supreme Court, which sided with the GOP and ordered the Wisconsin Supreme Court to select a different map.
If any of the districts are found to be out of compliance with the U.S. Constitution under the ruling via some additional challenge, Burden said, Wisconsin may draw new districts sooner than later.
“I don’t know who that advantages,” he said. “It probably depends who’s drawing the lines.”
Lennington also pointed out President Donald Trump’s success with Black and Latino voters relative to past GOP candidates, adding that splitting majority-minority legislative districts wouldn’t necessarily give either party an advantage here.
What he did predict, though, is that splitting such districts “might polarize us even more” if they were replaced with districts drawn on partisan as opposed to racial lines.
“It just might make the red more red and the blue more blue,” he said.
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
The Wisconsin Elections Commission on Thursday overruled controversial ballot-counting decisions in Mequon and Madison, ordering the cities to revise final tallies in their Wisconsin Supreme Court election results.
Madison counted 23 late-arriving ballots that the commission voted should not have been included, while Mequon threw out five ballots the commission said should have been counted. The commission voted 6-0 to investigate both city clerks’ offices and ordered changes to the counts — voting 5-1 to require Madison and Dane County to exclude the 23 ballots and 6-0 to require Mequon and Ozaukee County to count the five.
The deadline for the state to certify the election is May 15, but some commissioners acknowledged the likelihood that lawsuits over the decisions could come before then.
In Madison, poll workers on Election Day counted 23 absentee ballots that arrived at four polling places after 8 p.m. Tuesday, despite a state law requiring that absentee ballots be “delivered to the polling place no later than 8 p.m.” in order to be tallied.
There was some debate ahead of the Madison vote because Commission Chair Ann Jacobs and Commissioner Mark Thomsen, both Democrats, said they felt uncomfortable disenfranchising the 23 voters. But Jacobs said she was following the law in ordering Madison to redo its count, adding that she hoped “those voters will perhaps appeal this decision.”
“We’re going to disenfranchise 23 people,” said Thomsen, the lone no vote. “I don’t think the law requires us to do that.”
Voting in favor, Don Millis, a Republican commissioner, said the commission is bound by state law not to count those ballots.
“There has to be some accountability,” he added, “for the failure to get these ballots to the polling places in a timely manner.”
Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell, a Democrat, told Votebeat that he’s considering suing over the agency’s order. McDonell previously voted to count the late-arriving ballots during the county’s canvass.
“It’s disappointing that the Wisconsin Election Commission’s directive is to reject ballots that were properly cast by voters,” Madison Clerk Lydia McComas said in a statement.
This marks the second significant error from the Madison clerk’s office in recent elections. In 2024, officials didn’t count 193 ballots that arrived at the city well ahead of Election Day, leading to investigations and a lawsuit.
Mequon redo comes amid confusion over clerk’s standard
The decision to investigate Mequon came after City Clerk Caroline Fochs decided not to count five ballots under an unusually strict standard for the witness address field on absentee ballot envelopes. Commissioners and staff found that decision to be an abuse of discretion.
For years, Fochs has used a standard contrary to the commission’s guidance, which is to consider a witness address valid if it includes a street name, number and municipality.
Instead, if a witness lists a municipality that shares a name with another elsewhere in the country and does not include a ZIP code or state — even though the absentee envelope doesn’t call for them — Fochs told Votebeat she does not count the ballot. If the municipality name is unique, she will count it without a ZIP code or state.
In this latest election, those municipalities were Baltimore, Fox Point, Verona and Houston.
“The idea that someone would Google to find out whether or not there’s multiple Veronas in the United States, but not Google the witness’s address to confirm where they were located just strikes me as an odd choice, and contrary to the applicable law,” Jacobs said.
A Votebeat review of Mequon ballots rejected since 2024 found that Fochs in some cases appeared to have misapplied her own standard — rejecting ballots from municipalities that didn’t share a name with any other city, like Chicago and Fox Point.
Fochs and her city attorney have defended the city’s standard as a proper use of discretion despite coming under fire for it. Fochs didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Speaking with Votebeat after the votes, Millis said that although mistakes happen from time to time, clerks need to understand that there can be consequences for errors “if you don’t follow the law and take reasonable efforts to make sure that all ballots are counted.”
Pointing out that he was a Republican commissioner, Millis said he also has a partisan interest in making sure votes in Mequon, a traditionally GOP city, are counted.
“We shouldn’t be doing things to make it difficult for anyone to vote, but here, from just even a partisan standpoint, on average, it’s hurting Republicans more than Democrats.”
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.
Mequon City Clerk Caroline Fochs rejected five absentee ballots in April because they did not include a ZIP code or state in the witness address — information that is not specifically requested in the address field on the ballot or specified as a necessary component by the Wisconsin Elections Commission. Her approach, which differs from how other clerks interpret the rules, has drawn intense internal scrutiny and could ultimately be tested in court.
Two weeks ago, Ozaukee County canvassing officials declined to reverse course, leaving the ballots uncounted in the recent Wisconsin Supreme Court election. Republican Party attorneys told county officials they lacked the authority to overturn a local official’s judgment call, while the liberal election law firm Law Forward said rejecting the ballots may have disenfranchised voters who had followed all requirements.
Even the county clerk, a Republican, said she believed the ballots should have been counted.
The ballots listed a street name, number and municipality in the witness address field, but no ZIP code or state. The Wisconsin Elections Commission instructs clerks that a street name, number and municipality are sufficient. Under state law, absentee ballots must be signed by a witness who is a U.S. citizen and not a candidate on the ballot.
Fochs rejected the ballots anyway, using her own system for deciding when a witness address is clear enough.
Fochs has served as clerk since 2016 in the traditionally GOP city, which has become more liberal in the Donald Trump era — emblematic of the leftward political changes in other nearby Milwaukee suburbs in Waukesha, Washington and Ozaukee counties.
The dispute in Mequon didn’t have the potential to swing any race. But it highlights two unresolved questions that election lawyers say are all but certain to land back in court sooner than later: how much latitude clerks have to impose their own standards on absentee ballots, and whether county canvassing boards can intervene when they think a municipal clerk got it wrong.
Situations like the one playing out in Mequon often arise when there’s a flexible rule rather than a bright-line rule, said Rick Hasen, an election law professor at UCLA. Flexibility, he said, can result in disparate treatment for voters. “Maybe the Legislature needs to change the law,” he said.
“It can tend to be more enfranchising to have a rule that gives discretion, but there’s a flip side to that,” he said. “These are things that courts and legislatures have to consider when they write their rules or interpret the rules.”
Statewide races in Wisconsin can sometimes be decided by several thousand votes or less, and the outcome of this conflict could have implications for the midterms in the event of a close race.
Ballots at issue had elements requested on absentee form
The battle over what constitutes a proper witness address has been debated in court for years. In 2024, a circuit court rejected Republicans’ push to require witnesses to list their ZIP code and state. The current standard allows a witness address to be considered valid if the clerk can reasonably assess where the witness lives, but the underlying lawsuit is ongoing.
Fochs said that’s not a workable standard.
Clerks across the state are “obviously doing things differently,” she said. “We don’t agree that it’s been decided. You can’t, on one hand, tell me it’s up to me to discern and then tell me exactly what I’m going to discern.”
Rather than following WEC instructions in the Election Day manual, Fochs for the past several elections has adopted her own system. She compiled a list of municipalities witnesses have used in their address fields in recent years, identifying which names are unique nationwide and which are shared.
If a witness lists a municipality that shares a name with another elsewhere in the country and does not include a ZIP code or state, Fochs said she does not count the ballot. If the municipality name is unique, she will count it even without a ZIP code or state.
She said she typically sends absentee ballots with insufficient witness addresses back to the voter for correction. But this time, she said, the five ballots in question arrived too late to be sent back, corrected and returned in time for tabulation.
Two of the rejected ballots were from Fox Point. Despite a handwritten note on the rejected ballots saying there are multiple municipalities named Fox Point in the United States, there appears to be just one: the municipality just a couple miles away from Mequon.
Told there appears to be only one municipality named Fox Point in the United States, Fochs said her Google search showed multiple results. She said that even if only one exists, she does not believe the ballots were wrongfully rejected because “the search” indicated otherwise, though she declined to explain what that search includes. “If the search came up with multiple Fox Points, then we reject it,” she said.
The three other rejected ballots came from Baltimore, Houston and Verona. Although there are multiple municipalities with each of those names, the street names and numbers are unique only to one such named municipality in the United States.
Though a court established the current standard in 2024, Fochs said she believes the issue needs to be taken up again. “There has to be an answer to this,” she said.
Jeff Mandell, founder and general counsel of Law Forward, said that Fochs should have at least checked to see whether the street addresses used in the witness address form were unique to one of the multiple municipalities with the same name before deciding what to do about the ballots. He said she was wrongfully disenfranchising voters.
But Fochs said she shouldn’t have to jump through multiple hoops to figure out where a witness lives.
“If you give me incomplete information, that’s not my fault, and it’s not up to me to correct it,” she said.
In Rock County, on the other hand, County Clerk Lisa Tollefson, a Democrat, gives municipal clerks a help sheet to determine whether a signature is sufficient. Similar to the election commission’s manual, the sheet says a street number, name and municipality is sufficient — without stipulating whether a municipality is uniquely named.
County decides not to count ballots amid GOP urging
When the fight moved up to the county, it split in two. Ozaukee County officials had to decide not only whether the five ballots should have counted — but whether they had any authority to do anything about it.
Ozaukee County Clerk Kellie Kretlow, a Republican, said the ballots should have been counted by the city. “I, in no way, want any voter to ever feel like we’re disenfranchising them,” she told Votebeat.
Kretlow said that the Wisconsin Elections Commission told her that, if the county canvassing board determines that the disregarded ballots make the election return defective, she may send the “arguably defective” election results back to Mequon for the city to correct, according to emails obtained by Votebeat that outline her communications to attorneys for the Wisconsin Republican Party.
That position seems to align with the more liberal stance on the issue. For example, Law Forward said the county does have the power to count the votes or instruct Mequon officials to do so, under a statute that allows counties to return results to a municipality if its election returns are “so informal or defective that the board cannot intelligently canvass them.”
Republican attorneys disagreed. Nicholas Boerke, counsel for the state GOP, told Kretlow the county had no authority to send the ballots back or count them itself without a recount and warned that doing so would set a “dangerous precedent.” The GOP lawyers did not weigh in on whether Fochs was right to reject the ballots in the first place. Boerke declined to comment for this story.
In the end, Kretlow said, she decided not to count the ballots — not necessarily because she agreed with the Republican lawyers on the legal question, but because the five votes wouldn’t have changed the outcome of any race.
Issues of discretion unsolved going into November midterms
Barring a lawsuit and a quick judgment, the question over how much discretion municipal clerks and county canvassing boards have may go unanswered ahead of the midterms. Some election officials said that discretion can pose a danger if it’s abused, but others said that latitude can come in handy.
“I believe that things can be vague, but they’re vague for a reason,” Kretlow said, saying that while she wished the ballots were counted in this latest instance, more open-ended rules give clerks wiggle room for scenarios that nobody foresees.
Recent court rulings in election lawsuits have started to define the scope of clerks’ discretion over standards for accepting absentee ballots, potentially shaping how future cases will be decided.
One appeals court judgment in July 2024 gave an open-ended definition of what constitutes a proper witness address, saying that the standard “involves the perspective of each local, municipal clerk performing their duties in a reasonable manner” and acknowledging that clerks have discretion in some of the many tasks they perform in administering elections.
A July 2024 Wisconsin Supreme Court judgment, which led to the legalization of drop boxes, said that giving clerks discretion on many local matters is “consistent with the statutory scheme as a whole, under which Wisconsin’s 1,850 municipal clerks serve the ‘primary role’ in running elections via our ‘decentralized’ system.”
TR Edwards, a staff counsel at Law Forward who attended the Ozaukee County canvass board meeting, said those court cases were right in giving clerks latitude, but they should have clarified that the discretion should be used “to affect the will of the voter, not to craft their own policy for disenfranchising people — stuff like this.”
Mandell, the founder of Law Forward, said the group was still evaluating its options and did not commit to a lawsuit.
But Wisconsin courts have been hearing a growing number of election law disputes. Whether it’s over the most recent dispute in Mequon or a similar incident in another election, disputes like these are all but certain to end up in court.
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.
This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.
Town of Lima Clerk Pam Hookstead’s election operation is a well-oiled machine. She comes to the polls at 6 a.m., a pot of cowboy beef stew in hand to warm up for her poll workers, and takes a backseat as she lets the town’s longtime staffers settle into their rhythm.
Having run well over 100 elections, administering the Wisconsin Supreme Court race on April 7 in the 1,200-person town felt like second nature. Hookstead, now 65, has spent three decades in the role — a depth of experience many towns have lost since 2020.
Twenty miles south sits Clinton, where 59-year-old Town Clerk Shannon Roehl-Wickingson was administering her first election on her own. It will take years for her muscle memory to rival Hookstead’s. But, she may get there faster than many of her peers in Wisconsin — or across the country. Rock County has a support and training system that most new clerks can only dream of.
As the job has grown more complex, more scrutinized and more politicized, municipalities are left scrambling to replace experienced officials and train newcomers fast enough to keep up. Rock County — where five of 29 municipalities had first-time clerks running elections earlier this month — is testing a more hands-on approach to that transition, pairing new clerks with experienced ones and building a network that helps them learn the job in real time.
But hiring is only half the battle. Keeping clerks can be even harder, in part because the job is both sprawling and slow to master. Beyond running elections, a single clerk may take meeting minutes, issue licenses, sell public land and even oversee cemeteries. All responsibilities, especially elections, are governed by a shifting patchwork of legal obligations that can take years to learn but often change quickly. Rock County is hoping to fix that.
Town of Clinton Clerk Shannon Roehl-Wickingson ran her first election as clerk on April 7, 2026. (Alexander Shur / Votebeat)
“If I wouldn’t have had help, I might have thrown in the towel by now because it’s very daunting,” said Roehl-Wickingson. “For God’s sake, in today’s climate, with voting, you just don’t want to make mistakes. But there’s tremendous support. You just have to ask the questions.”
The approach is deliberate: County Clerk Lisa Tollefson ensures municipal clerks are trained beyond state requirements and works to recruit long-serving or retiring clerks as mentors. During the busiest times of the year, her husband, Town of Harmony Deputy Clerk Tim Tollefson, makes the rounds to check in with new municipal clerks to make sure everything is moving smoothly.
Together, they push clerks to stay in close contact, with them and with each other — swapping advice on absentee voting, preparing for budget season, or gathering in person with a brandy old-fashioned to celebrate a well-run election.
Part of Tollefson’s motivation for creating the county’s support network comes from experience. When the Democrat first became Harmony’s town clerk in 2010, she knew resources were available but “felt really shy about reaching out” for help. “I don’t want anyone to ever feel that way.”
Now, she goes to public tests for every new clerk, making sure they understand there’s no dumb questions and telling them that she has been in their shoes.
In Hookstead’s view, Lisa Tollefson is the coach, municipal clerks are the assistant coaches, and poll workers are the team players.
“None of us could survive without the other one,” she said. “We’re a team. We work very well together in this county.”
‘Clerk gene’ essential to long tenures
Making a longtime clerk out of a new recruit takes some luck and some science.
In some cases, it also starts off with a little bit of deceit.
Many clerks have similar origin stories in Wisconsin: They were persuaded to begin their jobs by a town board member who made the job sound easy. Just taking minutes, they’re told. Little mention of elections, budgets, licenses or managing municipal property. That was the pitch that drew both Tollefson and Hookstead into their first clerk jobs.
Once on the job, they quickly realize how much more it entails. Some hunker down. Others leave.
What separates the two, Lisa Tollefson said, is the “clerk gene.” She described it as a mix of curiosity, a lack of timidity, and a desire to help the public. And while some — herself included — stumble into the role of clerk and step up to the job, Tollefson said transparency about the job is the best way to recruit and retain staff. “Being open about all the duties,” she said, “is huge.”
Roehl-Wickingson, whose previous job included helping union workers sign up for benefits, said the desire to help others has carried over for her. In both elections and unions, those who are indifferent are “definitely in the wrong place.”
Right now, Lisa Tollefson said, every chief election official in Rock County has what it takes to be a clerk. That’s a blessing for her office, which saw a lot of clerk turnover after the highly contentious 2020 election, when a wave of retirements rocked the workforce. Just eight of 29 Rock County municipalities still have the same clerks as they did six years ago.
“There were some older clerks at that time,” she said, “and they’re like, ‘I’m not doing another. I’m done.’”
Rock County Clerk Lisa Tollefson, far right, and two staff members work to build camaraderie across the county as new clerks replace longtime officials who have left. (Alexander Shur / Votebeat)
To keep new clerks from burning out, Lisa Tollefson tries to reinforce that instinct to be a supportive clerk with training and support.
She has encouraged her clerks to become trainers themselves, including to train poll workers to be chief inspectors and to use the state’s electronic pollbook system — something most poll workers aren’t usually trained to do.
The need for such advanced planning became clear in 2020, when nearly every worker at one Rock County polling location was exposed to COVID-19 during a public test and could no longer serve on Election Day. Two poll workers didn’t come to the public test, though, and because they were trained to be chief inspectors, the location was still able to open and proceed normally. That year, Tollefson also trained about 50 county employees as chief inspectors as an additional cushion against emergencies.
The benefits of this preparation and community-building also show up in smaller moments. At a recent public test of voting equipment, Tollefson said she watched experienced poll workers reassure a new clerk that everything would be OK. “There’s a lot of strength in the poll workers,” she said.
It’s an example set by Tollefson herself. She is a constant presence for clerks, Hookstead said. She offers advice and checks in, reminding clerks that she’ll be up at 5 a.m. and ready to provide any support she can offer on Election Day.
“She’s just willing to make our lives so much easier,” said Hookstead. “And it is through training — her trainings are fun.”
Rock County clerks also seem to have found another reliable strategy for finding and retaining election workers: recruiting family members.
After Tollefson left her first job as the Harmony town clerk, she recruited her husband to replace her after nobody else applied. He later became the town’s deputy clerk. Hookstead’s mom, daughter and husband have all served as poll workers in Lima. In the town of Magnolia — in western Rock County — clerk-treasurer Graceann Toberman was preceded by her mother as treasurer. Together, they’ve spent more than 60 years in the role.
Roehl-Wickingson was also recruited by family. When the town of Clinton needed a new clerk, she got a call from her daughter, who works in the county clerk’s office, suggesting it would be a good part-time job in retirement. (Unlike Lisa Tollefson and Hookstead, Roehl-Wickingson said she received an accurate summary of what the job entailed.)
“You get the bug,” Lisa Tollefson said. “It happens all the time.”
Longtime clerk says county helps her understand changing rules
Hookstead has had the bug for 30 years. She has silvering blonde hair and, on Election Day, wore a green cardigan and a name tag identifying her as clerk — not that anybody is unfamiliar with her. She said she’s not quite ready to retire as a clerk.
If anything, she’s prepared to spend even more time on the job. Having just retired from her full-time position as secretary at a school in Whitewater, she’s decided to redesign the town’s website and reorganize its paperwork system.
Still, she knows she won’t do it forever. If somebody comes along to replace her — something Hookstead acknowledged wasn’t terribly likely — she said she’s ready to step aside.
Hookstead lives and does most of her work from home on a 180-acre beef farm in town.
The 1,300-person town is sparsely populated, with no bars, no restaurants and no grocery stores — just dairy and cattle farms, a Presbyterian church and a small cluster of homes near the town center. On Election Day, its town hall had pop-up voting booths next to its wood-paneled walls and a check-in booth by the front entrance, a setup that Hookstead has meticulously spaced out to provide the best flow for voters, some of whom are in wheelchairs.
For early in-person absentee voting, residents don’t go to a government office. They go to Hookstead’s house.
Town of Lima Clerk Pam Hookstead sorts through election materials at her home. (Alexander Shur / Votebeat)
Voters go to her kitchen and take a seat at what she calls her voting table. Given its placement, with several seats surrounding it and a sack of onions on top, you’d be forgiven for calling it a kitchen table. Hookstead concedes it’s both.
Voters cast their ballots there, overlooking a cattle field and a swamp frequented by geese and sandhill cranes. If two voters come to her house at the same time, they sit on opposite corners of her kitchen table while Hookstead waits for them in the living room, near a mounted buck that her husband killed with a bow.
It’s a laid-back setting, Hookstead said — one where voters can both cast a ballot and talk about the price of corn.
When she started her job, things worked differently. There wasn’t much early absentee voting, and almost every voter cast a ballot on Election Day, hand-marking the ballots and dropping them into several wooden boxes at the town hall. Hookstead would unpack the ballots at the end of the night and hand-count for several hours.
Now, electronic tabulators and shorter ballots have sped things up. Even so, the job has grown more complicated — especially as election rules have shifted in recent years. Hookstead said she’s been frustrated by rapidly changing election rules since 2020, particularly when they don’t seem to follow clear logic. She pointed to one rule blocking voters from returning their elderly parents’ ballots, with only limited exceptions.
That’s where the county support system comes in.
Tollefson, the county clerk, notifies Hookstead and other clerks of new rules and guidelines — sometimes before the Wisconsin Elections Commission does — and always makes herself available for questions.
“I have told Lisa that when she leaves, I’ll be going,” Hookstead said.
New Clinton clerk runs successful election after weeks of nerves
In the Clinton Town Hall, just off County Road X, Roehl-Wickingson this month was running her first election as town clerk. She spent the day answering questions from poll workers, working through new problems and greeting older residents curious about the new person running their elections.
“I’ve been nervous all day,” she said, as she sat in the clerk’s office on Election Day with paperwork instructing her what to do at every step. She added that each time her chief inspector comes around to ask her a question, “I think, please let it be easy.”
Roehl-Wickingson was a longtime General Motors employee, working at the Janesville plant as an assembly worker until its mass layoffs in late 2008. She then worked as a union representative at a GM plant in Kansas City, where part of her job was spent registering union workers to vote and getting out the vote. She retired in 2024, wanting to get back home to her family in Rock County.
But retiring doesn’t mean she’s “ready to sit still in the rocking chair,” Roehl-Wickingson said from her office, where she sat beneath a street sign reading “Clerk Way.” She shuffled through stacks of paper, checking lists, double-checking them, pausing only to answer a question before returning to the lists.
When her daughter told her about the clerk opening, she felt she was the right person to take it on. Roehl-Wickingson said her position as a union rep prepared her for the contentious election landscape.
“I won’t say I’m thrilled to death about it, but I knew the atmosphere,” she said. “I don’t have anything to hide.”
Even so, the lead-up to Election Day was consuming. She said she barely slept the night before, instead rereading the election manual again and again, afraid she might miss something.
“My husband was like, ‘You’re gonna get sick,’ because I’ve been nervous the last couple of weeks and running ragged, making sure I had everything,” she said.
By early afternoon on Election Day, Tim Tollefson had turned up to meet with Roehl-Wickingson. He was making his way around the county to check on new clerks, a task he took on after his wife encouraged him to help mentor the wave of new clerks.
Much of the job, he said, is procedural, not entirely different from managing inventory at his former job as a manager at the outdoor recreation retailer Gander Mountain. Tollefson said some bits came easy for him, and the rest came with time. Two years, he said, is around how long it can take to start feeling like you have a grip on the role.
Until then, it can be overwhelming.
Both Tollefsons have been essential to her success, Roehl-Wickingson said. Without the support system, she said she would have felt lost doing things like compiling the town budget.
“You definitely need guidance,” she said. “You just don’t know what you don’t know,” she said.
That guidance extends beyond any one person. Over time, Roehl-Wickingson said, the job has started to make more sense — in part because of formal training, but just as much because of the network of clerks across the county.
“If (Lisa) didn’t pull us together, I’m not sure we would have that on our own,” she said.
By Election Day, Roehl-Wickingson had done everything she could to prepare. Too nervous to set up the polling place the day before, she went in on the Saturday before Election Day, spending hours making sure every table, sign and voting booth was exactly where it needed to be.
As the day wound down, she glanced at the analog clock on the wall: just before 8 p.m.
The room had emptied. No last-minute voters came through the door.
When the clock struck the hour, her chief inspector closed the polls.
There was plenty left for Roehl-Wickingson to do. But first, she checked the numbers — ballots cast versus the number of voters checked in.
Both were 225.
“I’m so glad,” she said, thanking her chief inspector.
For all her nerves, the first outing of Roehl-Wickingson’s late-blooming career as an election official was a success.
“At times, it’s very consuming and daunting and overwhelming, but at the same token, today, I feel kind of a sense of excitement,” she said. “And it’s rewarding to know that you’ve been a part of it, and you put it together, and you’ve been that cog in the wheel.”
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.
An attorney for the Republican Party of Wisconsin told local officials ahead of a key vote last week that Madison should not count 23 absentee ballots from last week’s Supreme Court election that arrived at polling places after they had closed — a dispute that could set up a legal challenge.
The GOP weighed in hours before the Madison Board of Canvassers voted unanimously on Friday to count the affected ballots. On Monday, the Dane County Board of Canvassers followed suit, voting 2-1 to count the ballots.
Election officials make these judgment calls all the time, and, historically, courts have allowed them. Officials are routinely called upon to address whether a witness address is complete, whether a damaged ballot can still be counted, or the like. These issues are usually resolved locally and without controversy.
But disputes like this — over how to interpret the law and whether late-arriving ballots should count — are harder to contain. Experts say leaving those decisions to individual counties risks inconsistent outcomes across Wisconsin, especially in a high-stakes election season.
Rick Hasen, an election law professor at UCLA, said that kind of patchwork approach is a recipe for conflict.
“This is not tenable in the current political atmosphere,” Hasen said.
Dane County votes to count ballots despite GOP opposition
The kind of disagreement worrying Hasen was on full display at Monday’s meeting of the Dane County Board of Canvassers. Two canvassers said there was a clear answer about what to do with the ballots — but they arrived at different ones.
“I don’t think this is hard,” Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell said.
“I don’t either,” said canvasser Mike Willett, a former Dane County supervisor and a Republican appointee on the board.
McDonell voted to count the ballots, while Willett voted against it, saying the board had previously rejected late-arriving ballots and he didn’t want to create exceptions.
Erik Paulson, the other Democrat on the board, sided with McDonell to count the ballots.
University of Wisconsin-Madison student Cassie Semenas casts a ballot during the spring election at Lowell Center residence hall on April 7, 2026, in Madison, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Republican opposition was already taking shape before the vote.Emails obtained by Votebeat show that Nicholas Boerke, an outside attorney for the Wisconsin GOP, urged city and county officials on Friday not to count the ballots.
“We recognize this situation may have resulted from an unfortunate logistical failure. However, administrative error does not create statutory authority that otherwise does not exist,” he wrote.
“Voting absentee is a privilege granted by the Legislature that comes with inherent risks and the election day deadline for the receipt, processing, tabulation, and counting is mandatory,” he continued.
The canvass, Boerke told officials, was a “ministerial process, not a vehicle for processing absentee ballots” that weren’t received by the time dictated in law, “nor a mechanism to conduct an unauthorized recount.”
Amber McReynolds, an assistant attorney for Madison, responded that counting the ballots was in line with court decisions and past Wisconsin Elections Commission recommendations.
Boerke responded, telling officials the GOP maintains “that the statutory language is clear — absentee ballots that are not timely delivered to polling locations before 8 p.m. may not be counted.”
Boerke didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about whether the GOP would sue Madison.
Error led to 23 Madison absentee ballots arriving late
The ballots at issue arrived at the city clerk’s office on Monday, April 6. The absentee ballot courier carrying the ballots left a city facility at 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 7, to deliver ballots to 17 polling places, but the courier did not make it to the last few polling places until after the 8 p.m. deadline.
Officials said these 23 ballots were correctly, legally cast and checked into the pollbooks just like any other absentee ballot — the only problem was that that happened after polls formally closed.
Madison Clerk Lydia McComas said it was a critical error to put just one person in charge of delivering ballots to so many polling places. Madison is the largest city in Wisconsin that still chooses to count absentee ballots at individual precincts rather than at a central location — a decision that requires ballots to be transported across the city on Election Day.
It remains unclear, however, why the ballots departed from the city’s facility so late in the day. Across the state, clerks design their Election Day logistics to ensure ballots are delivered by that cutoff. McComas said it was her and her staff’s understanding that the law required ballots to be delivered to polling places by 8 p.m.
There appears to be little appetite among clerks to formally extend that deadline.
“I do not plan to take advantage of whatever ruling comes here tonight,” McComas said ahead of the county vote, implying that she wouldn’t take advantage of the canvassing board’s leniency and plan for future late deliveries accordingly.
McDonell said rejecting the ballots would penalize voters for something outside their control. “And I think that’s very problematic,” he said.
Disagreement over Wisconsin election law is ripe for legal challenges
The statute at issue in this situation says ballots must be returned so that they’re delivered to polling places “no later than 8 p.m. on election day.”
“If the municipal clerk receives an absentee ballot on election day,” the law continues, “the clerk shall secure the ballot and cause the ballot to be delivered to the polling place serving the elector’s residence before 8 p.m. Any ballot not mailed or delivered as provided in this subsection may not be counted.”
At the county-level meeting on Monday, county attorney David Gault, arguing that the ballots should be counted, took the position that the law does not apply here because the ballots were received before Election Day.
“The clear intent of everything in the statutes,” he said, is not to punish the voter for mistakes made by election officials.
“That’s certainly an interpretation,” said Willett, the conservative member of the county canvassing board. “When we start making these exceptions, these exceptions just grow.”
What’s clear to Bryna Godar — a staff attorney at the University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative — is that the statute is “ambiguous about this type of situation.” She said one part of the law appears to govern voters returning ballots on time, while another addresses ballots received on Election Day — leaving situations like this unclear.
“Because there is no voter fault here from what we know so far, there would be good reason to still count those ballots,” she said, adding that rejecting them could raise constitutional concerns.
At the city meeting on Friday, McReynolds noted that courts ruled in the 1970s and 1980s that ballots should be counted as long as there’s “substantial compliance” with election laws and no evidence of “connivance, fraud, or undue influence.”
In 1985, however, the Legislature passed a law emphasizing that absentee voting is a privilege exercised outside the usual safeguards of the polling place and that ballots not meeting legal requirements “may not be counted.”
Boerke cited that law in his exchange with the city and county, as conservatives have done repeatedly in issues of absentee ballot missteps and controversies.
Still, the courts have continued to show flexibility. In a 2004 dispute, the Wisconsin Supreme Court held that “the failure on the part of the election officials to perform their duties should not deprive the voters of their constitutional right to vote.”
Lawyers often say that it’s more important for a law to be certain than for it to be right, said Hasen, the UCLA professor. Uncertainty — especially when there are good-faith arguments on either side — is one of the most dangerous situations in election law.
“That just creates all kinds of issues of equal protection and due process and election fairness,” he said. “So the more that these issues can be resolved one way or the other, not in the heat of a very close election, the better it is.”
If an election hinges on ballots like these, he said, a lawsuit is all but inevitable.
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
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