Alexander Shur, Votebeat

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

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

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

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

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

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

And it’s all due to a law that she and other clerks in the state say is not only outdated, but also a potential threat to the constitutional right in Wisconsin to ballot secrecy.

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

Number is obsolete and creates security risk, clerks say

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Repealing little-known practice has had little momentum

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact 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.

Elon Musk’s offer of $2 million award to Wisconsin voters lasts just long enough to draw a lawsuit

Alexander Shur, Votebeat

Mar 28, 2025 at 5:45pm EDT

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

Wisconsin Democrats are taking Elon Musk to court — and taking to the airwaves — after the tech billionaire posted, and then quickly deleted, a promotion to give away $1 million each to two randomly selected people who voted in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election. They allege the post violated the state’s election bribery law.

Musk said that at a Sunday night event only for people who have voted in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election, he would “personally hand over two checks for a million dollars each in appreciation for you taking the time to vote.”

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Musk, the top spender in the race and a supporter of conservative candidate Brad Schimel, said in a second post that he would instead pay $1 million each to two registered voters who signed an online petition that his political action committee, America PAC, organized to oppose “activist” judges.

But the damage was done. Attorney General Josh Kaul, a Democrat, filed a lawsuit in Dane County Circuit Court to stop the planned giveaway. At the same time, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers criticized Musk on social media, declaring that Wisconsinites’ votes “are not for sale.”

Kaul’s lawsuit alleges that Musk’s $1 million offer amounted to a “blatant attempt” to break state election bribery laws. He’s asking the court to bar Musk or his PAC from offering or providing any financial incentives tied to voting in Wisconsin.

The case was initially randomly assigned to Dane County Circuit Court Judge Susan Crawford — ironically, the liberal Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate whom Musk opposes. Crawford quickly recused herself, and the case was reassigned to Columbia County Judge W. Andrew Voigt.

From the start of the campaign, Democrats have tried to focus voters’ attention on Musk, whose support for President Donald Trump and aggressive moves as a presidential aide to cut federal jobs and funding have drawn Democrats’ ire. Republicans, meanwhile, took quick notice of Crawford’s initial assignment to the case, accusing Democrats of using the judiciary to target their political opponents.

This isn’t Musk’s first brush with legal controversy over voting-related giveaways. Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, Musk launched a petition in support of the U.S. Constitution, awarding one $1 million check a day to hand-selected people who signed it. Philadelphia’s district attorney sued him over it, but a court allowed the petition and giveaway to continue.

Ahead of the $1 million giveaway in Wisconsin, Musk’s PAC has been circulating a petition with an offer of $100 to registered voters who sign to reject “the actions of activist judges who impose their own views and [demand] a judiciary that respects its role — interpreting, not legislating.”

The petition doesn’t explicitly mention the Wisconsin Supreme Court, but it uses talking points commonly featured in conservative judicial campaigns — that liberal justices seek to legislate from the bench while conservatives just interpret the law.

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

What happened? The Wisconsin Supreme Court unanimously ruled Friday that the state’s chief election official, Meagan Wolfe, can stay in her job even though her term has expired, heading off a yearslong effort by some Republicans to oust her.

What’s the dispute? Wolfe became the Wisconsin Elections Commission’s administrator in 2018 after working for the agency and its predecessor in other roles, and has been a holdover appointee since the summer of 2023. She is considered one of the most respected — and scrutinized — election officials nationwide, but she became a Republican target after President Donald Trump lost Wisconsin in the 2020 election and took heat for the commission’s decisions in administering that election.

The case focuses not on Wolfe’s performance as administrator, but rather on the legality of appointees staying on after their terms expire.

Wolfe’s four-year term expired in July 2023, and the Republican-led state Senate appeared poised to reject her confirmation if the Wisconsin Elections Commission had voted to reappoint her. All three Republicans on the commission voted to reappoint Wolfe, but the Democratic commissioners abstained from the vote. They cited a 2022 Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling stating that appointees can stay in their roles past the end of their terms. That meant Wolfe wasn’t formally reappointed, and therefore not subject to another Senate confirmation proceeding. Still, Senate leaders took a vote to fire her.

Who are the plaintiffs and defendants?

After the Senate voted to fire her, Wolfe and the Wisconsin Elections Commission sued Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu, a Republican who pushed for the ouster. The lawsuit, first filed in Dane County Circuit Court, also names former Senate President Chris Kapenga and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, both Republicans, as defendants.

What are they asking for? Wolfe and the commission asked the court to declare that she was properly continuing in her role, and that the commission didn’t have to appoint an administrator just because her term had expired. Republicans asked the Wisconsin Supreme Court to require the commission to appoint an administrator, a move that could have led to Wolfe’s ouster.

“WEC does not have a duty to appoint a new administrator to replace Wolfe simply because her term has ended,” conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court Chief Justice Annette Ziegler said.

What happens now? The decision doesn’t mean Wolfe will be in her role indefinitely, but it also doesn’t force her out of it. The commission can still choose to reappoint Wolfe or somebody else in the future, or she can also choose to leave.

After the 2024 election, Wolfe told Votebeat that she has “no immediate plans to leave” if she wins this case and continues having commissioners’ approval. She said she would reconsider that if her position makes it harder for the commission to operate or receive state financial support in the upcoming budget.

Read more Votebeat coverage about Wolfe:

• How Meagan Wolfe navigates intense scrutiny to make elections and her peers stronger
• Wisconsin Supreme Court case could decide fate of state’s top election official

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission unanimously authorized an investigation Thursday into Madison’s mishandling of nearly 200 absentee ballots that were never counted from the November 2024 election.

It’s the first such investigation that the bipartisan commission has authorized since becoming an agency in 2016. The review will allow the agency to probe whether Madison Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl violated the law or abused her discretion.

Ahead of the vote, Democratic Commissioner Ann Jacobs told Votebeat that her priority wasn’t “punishment” but to figure out “what on earth went wrong here.”

"Our lack of knowledge, information that wasn't given to us in a timely fashion, I think we need to do something more formal," Jacobs said at the meeting.

The late discovery that 193 absentee ballots from voters in the state capital weren’t counted appears to have resulted from mistakes at two polling locations and the lack of a comprehensive system for poll workers to track whether they’ve counted every absentee ballot.

At a polling site in Ward 56, just west of downtown, Witzel-Behl said election workers didn’t open two large carrier envelopes — used to transport absentee ballots from city offices to neighborhood polling places for counting — that contained a total of 125 ballots. At another site in the Regent neighborhood, poll workers at Ward 65 didn’t open an envelope carrying 68 absentee ballots, including one ballot that should have instead been sent to a different polling place for counting.

It’s unclear whether the uncounted ballots were checked in when they were sorted at the Madison clerk’s office. If they had been, a discrepancy between the number of recorded voters and ballots would likely have been apparent on Election Day.

The city’s election results were certified without any acknowledgment of the 193 missing ballots. Some of the missing ballots were discovered on Nov. 12, as the county canvass was still going on, though most weren’t found until nearly a month after Election Day.

When the initial batch was discovered on Nov. 12, Witzel-Behl told Votebeat, “Staff was under the impression that it was too late for these ballots to be counted, unless we had a recount.”

The oversight wasn’t reported to the commission until Dec. 18, about six weeks after the Nov. 5 election and after the commission had already certified the results. Madison officials outside the clerk’s office, including the city attorney and the mayor’s office, didn’t know about the error until the commission told City Attorney Mike Haas about it on Dec. 19.

“There’s been zero transparency on this,” Jacobs said.

Witzel-Behl said she was largely out of the office on vacation during that period and “was not aware of the magnitude of this situation.”

Last week, Witzel-Behl told Votebeat that she still doesn’t know why the three carrier envelopes containing 193 absentee ballots were overlooked on Election Day.

“My issue is not with the magnitude,” GOP Commissioner Don Millis said. “While the magnitude is significant, the issue is why was this not determined or caught by the time of either the local canvass or county canvass.”

“My assumption,” he continued, “is either there was a failure to follow procedures, or our procedures aren't good and we have to correct them.”

Marge Bostelmann, a Republican commissioner and former clerk, said the WEC can provide guidance to prevent similar mistakes, but she said, “unless we find out how it happened, I don't know that we can give that guidance.”

Jacobs pointed out the spring primary elections are scheduled for Feb. 18, adding urgency to the investigation.

“We have about six weeks until our next election, so the more information we can learn about what went wrong — even if we're only able to send out a quickie clerks memo saying, ‘Hey, there's a step here. Don't forget about it,’ as we work on more formal guidance — I think we want to do that,” Jacobs said.

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

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

On Election Day in Madison, nearly 200 absentee ballots slipped through the cracks. They weren’t processed or counted. Most of them weren’t even discovered until almost a month later.

And nobody seems to know exactly how the oversight occurred. Some city officials are questioning why it took so long for the error to come to light. It’s a mystery that the dozens of voters in the state capital would certainly like to see solved.

The critical disenfranchisement of 193 Madison voters on Nov. 5 resulted from mistakes at two different polling locations and the lack of a comprehensive system for poll workers to track whether they’ve counted every absentee ballot

At a polling site in Ward 56, just west of downtown, election officials didn’t open two large carrier envelopes, used to transport absentee ballots, that contained a total of 125 ballots, Madison Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl said. At another site in a neighborhood slightly further west called Regent, poll workers at Ward 65 didn’t open another carrier envelope, carrying 68 absentee ballots, including one that should have been sent to a different polling place.

Normally, Witzel-Behl said, poll workers at each location “triple check” that all absentee votes have been processed before running results on the tabulator.

“We do not know why these carrier envelopes were overlooked at the polls on Election Day,” she said.

The oversight became public seven weeks after the election. Until just over a week ago, neither the Wisconsin Elections Commission nor the Madison mayor’s office knew about it.

On Dec. 26, Madison’s mayor and clerk outlined in separate statements how the ballots made it to two polling places but were somehow left unopened.

“While the discovery of these unprocessed absentee ballots did not impact the results of any election or referendum, a discrepancy of this magnitude is unacceptable,” Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said. “This oversight is a significant departure from the high standard our residents expect and must be addressed and avoided in future elections.”

The statements left significant questions unanswered: Exactly how and when did the ballots go missing? Who was responsible for the error? Why was the news coming out over seven weeks after Election Day?

Rhodes-Conway, for one, made clear the long delay wasn’t on her account.

“Unfortunately, Clerk’s Office staff were apparently aware of the oversight for some time and the Mayor’s Office was not notified of the unprocessed ballots until December 20,” she said in a statement.

In fact, Witzel-Behl didn’t alert the mayor’s office first about the missing ballots. The clerk’s office told the Wisconsin Elections Commission about it on Dec. 18. The agency then relayed the news to the city attorney, who told the mayor’s office about it.

The commission found out about the missing ballots through a process that clerks must follow if there’s a discrepancy at the polls between the number of voters and number of ballots. The clerk’s office told the commission about the discrepancy two days before the deadline for reconciling those numbers, Witzel-Behl said. Prior to that, Witzel-Behl told Votebeat she was largely out of office.

“I personally was trying to burn through vacation time after the election, and was not aware of the magnitude of this situation,” she said. “In retrospect, I should have just cut back to standard work weeks after the election.”

Madison has decentralized absentee processing

Unlike some of Wisconsin’s bigger cities, where all absentee ballots are processed and counted at a single location, in Madison absentee ballots are sent to the polling sites corresponding to where the voters would cast in-person ballots. At those sites, poll workers typically process the absentee ballot envelopes, containing witness and voter information, before counting the ballots.

Workers at each polling location have a process for checking which voters submitted absentee ballots. They typically use an orange highlighter to mark names of voters in a poll book of city residents who were issued an absentee ballot, Witzel-Behl said, and a pink highlighter to mark those who returned their ballots. Each polling place has documents outlining the number of ballots that were returned to be counted as of the Sunday prior to Election Day, she said.

Each absentee carrier envelope has a unique identification number on the seal closing it for security reasons. Madison polling sites didn’t receive a list of seal numbers for each carrier envelope that was transported to them, but the clerk’s office stated they would provide such a list in the future. There was only a handwritten log of the seal numbers in the clerk’s office.

Despite the two polling places having a large number of absentee ballots outstanding on Election Day, the missing votes weren’t discovered until after the Municipal Board of Canvassers met on Nov. 8 to certify the election, Witzel-Behl said.

By the time one batch of uncounted ballots was discovered on Nov. 12, she said, “Staff was under the impression that it was too late for these ballots to be counted, unless we had a recount.”

Madison voters cast over 174,000 ballots in the November election.

What we know about the missing ballots

There weren’t any apparent issues with sorting or delivering the correct ballots to the polling location near downtown. But at some point after Election Day, Witzel-Behl said, an hourly employee noticed there were a lot of outstanding absentee ballots.

On Dec. 3, she said, the employee looked through materials returned from that polling location on Election Day, she said. The employee found two sealed carrier envelopes containing absentee ballots. They contained 125 unprocessed ballots.

The 68 ballots at the Regent neighborhood polling site, including the one ballot sorted and delivered to the wrong station, were contained in a sealed carrier envelope of absentee ballots.

It’s not entirely clear where that carrier envelope was throughout Election Day, but election workers later discovered it inside of a chamber of a vote tabulating machine where ballots typically go after they’re counted. Madison election officials often use that compartment to transport absentee ballots to polling sites.

At the end of the night, poll workers put secure ballot bags and other materials into the tabulators, Witzel-Behl said.

Madison clerk, mayor vow to prevent future oversights

In its letter to the election commission, the clerk’s office outlined its plans to “debrief these incidents and implement better processes” to make sure all absentee carrier envelopes are accounted for and processed on Election Day.

Rhodes-Conway also said she plans to conduct a review of the city’s election policies. Additionally, she said, the city will send letters to the affected voters to notify them of the error and apologize.

“My office is committed to taking whatever corrective action is necessary to maintain a high standard of election integrity in Madison, and to provide ongoing transparency into that process,” she said.

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

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

In the early morning following Election Day in 2020, Claire Woodall, then Milwaukee’s elections chief, mistakenly left behind a USB stick carrying vote totals at the city’s central absentee ballot counting facility. Election conspiracy theorists quickly seized on the mistake, accusing Woodall of rigging the election.

Their claims were baseless, but the mistake increased scrutiny on the city’s election staff and led Woodall to create a checklist to make sure workers at central count didn’t overlook any critical steps in the future.

This year, despite the checklist, Milwaukee election staff at central count made another procedural mistake — and once again left the door open to conspiracy theorists.

Somebody — city officials haven’t said who — overlooked the second step outlined on the checklist and failed to lock and seal the hatch covers on the facility’s 13 tabulators before workers began tabulating ballots. For hours, while counting proceeded, the machines’ on-off switches and USB ports were left exposed.

After election officials discovered the lapse, city officials decided to count 31,000 absentee ballots all over again, a choice that led to delays in reporting results.

Results from the large and heavily Democratic city ultimately came in at 4 a.m. on Wednesday, only a few hours later than expected, but a time that conspiracy theorists implied was a suspicious hour for vote totals to change. Their posts echoed claims from 2020 that used sensationalized language like “late-night ballot dumps” to describe the reality that in big cities, absentee ballots take time — yes, sometimes late into the night — to collect, deliver, verify and count accurately.

In fact, the results in Milwaukee couldn’t have arrived much sooner. Under state law, election officials can’t start processing the hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots until the morning of Election Day. This year, they got a late start because of delays in getting workers settled, but were still expecting to be done around 2 or 3 a.m. Then it became clear the midday decision to redo the count would add more time to the process.

But those explanations have done little to curb the false conspiracy theories that have been proliferating on the right, including from losing U.S. Senate candidate Eric Hovde.

Election officials have for years known that the slightest mistakes, or even perceived errors, can trigger false claims. In this instance, the failure to follow a critical security step occurred in the state’s most scrutinized election facility, despite new procedures meant to reduce such errors.

For people with a conspiratorial mindset, such an oversight can’t be explained away as just a mistake, said Mert Bayar, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public. The errors can provide conspiracy theorists a feeling of validation because those errors make a “conspiracy theory more realistic … more believable.”

For those people, he said, election errors are instead perceived as “part of a plot to steal an election.”

Instead of considering the 2024 Milwaukee mistake a simple oversight, Bayar said, conspiracy theorists may think that the tabulator doors “cannot be left unlocked unless they’re trying something tricky, something stealth.”

Genya Coulter, senior director of stakeholder relations at the Open Source Election Technology Institute, said Milwaukee can still fine-tune its processes and checklists.

“I don't think anybody needs to be demonized,” she said, “but I do think that there needs to be some retraining. That would be helpful.”

Milwaukee error initially drew complaints, but not suspicion

It was an election observer who first noticed the open tabulator doors and alerted election officials. Around 2 p.m., Milwaukee’s current election chief, Paulina Gutiérrez, went from tabulator to tabulator, monitored by Democratic and Republican representatives, to lock all of the doors. Two hours later, she made the call to rerun all ballots through the tabulators.

The tabulators had been in full view of partisan observers and the media, but behind a barrier that only election officials and some designated observers, like representatives for both political parties who accompany election officials during some election processes, can enter. Any tampering would have been evident, Gutiérrez said, and there was no sign of that.

For that reason, some Republicans at central count opposed recounting all the ballots and risking a delay. U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, who went to central count on Election Day to learn more about the error, said he didn’t think anything nefarious happened, though he said the election operation there was “grossly incompetent.”

Coulter said the decision to start the counting over again was “the right call for transparency's sake.”

Hovde, who lost his Senate race in a state that Donald Trump carried, invoked conspiratorial language to describe what happened.

“The results from election night were disappointing, particularly in light of the last minute absentee ballots that were dropped in Milwaukee at 4 a.m. flipping the outcome,” he said Monday in his concession speech. “There are many troubling issues around these absentee ballots.”

In an earlier video, Hovde criticized Milwaukee’s election operation and spread false claims about the proportion of votes that his opponent, U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, received from absentee ballots. That led to a skyrocketing number of posts baselessly alleging election fraud in Wisconsin.

One prominent conservative social media account questioned whether the tabulator doors being left open was a case of sabotage.

In a statement, the Milwaukee Election Commission said it “unequivocally refutes Eric Hovde’s baseless claims regarding the integrity of our election process.”

Why Milwaukee’s results were late

There’s no proof of fraud or malfeasance in Milwaukee or anywhere else in Wisconsin on Election Day. But a few key factors combined to delay Milwaukee’s results until 4 a.m.

First, Milwaukee central count workers started processing and tabulating ballots around 9 a.m., long after the 7 a.m. start time allowed under state law. The delay was a matter of getting dozens of central count workers organized and at the right station in the large facility.

The more high-profile one was the failure to close the tabulators, which prompted the decision to count 31,000 absentee ballots all over again.

But both of those slowdowns could have been less consequential had Wisconsin election officials been able to process absentee ballots on the Monday before Election Day, as some other states allow. Such a change could have allowed election officials to review absentee ballot envelopes, verify and check in absentee voters but not count votes. An effort to allow election officials to do so stalled in the state Senate this year.

Checklist change could ‘improve transparency’

Milwaukee election officials may have avoided the situation entirely — and could avoid similar situations in the future — by modifying their central count checklist, said Coulter, from the Open Source Election Technology Institute.

Currently, the checklist states that at the start of Election Day, the tabulator doors should be locked and sealed. It’s not clear why that step was skipped. Gutiérrez didn’t respond to questions for comment about who was in charge of the process or whether that person faced disciplinary action.

But the step likely wouldn’t have been overlooked, Coulter said, if the checklist required the official in charge of locking the tabulators to be accompanied by a representative from each major political party.

“That's a relatively painless change that … I think it would improve transparency,” Coulter said.

“There needs to be an emphasis on having two people from different political affiliations performing all duties that involve the tabulator,” she said.

Another pre-processing step on the checklist calls for people working at the tabulators to make sure the numbered seals pasted over the tabulator doors are intact. It doesn’t call for checking that the tabulator doors are locked.

To avoid a repeat situation, Coulter said, “they should also check to make sure that the door to the power button is properly locked, and what to do if it isn't.”

Election officials recognize the scrutiny they face over errors, Coulter said, and they sometimes focus more on avoiding mistakes than running election operations.

“It's like a racecar driver … If you focus on the wall, you're going to wind up hitting that wall,” she said. “You have to train your mind to think about the curve and not the wall, but unfortunately, it's really hard for election officials to do that, especially in high-pressure jurisdictions.”

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

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

This article first appeared on Wisconsin Watch and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Everything had been going just fine on the morning of election day in Summit, Wisconsin, when a voter walked up to an election official and asked why Chanz Green wasn’t on the ballot as a state Assembly candidate.

A few checks, a couple calls, and then panic set in: It was an election official’s worst nightmare.

The Douglas County clerk, who’s relatively new to leading the office, assigned the wrong Assembly race to the small northern Wisconsin town. Summit’s town clerk, who’s also somewhat new, didn’t catch it. Neither did the candidates. Only a voter did, on the last day of a 47-day voting period.

This article originally appeared at Votebeat.

The error didn’t alter the outcome of the election. The Assembly primary race that Summit voters were supposed to have had on their ballot was decided by a margin larger than the number of registered voters in the town.

But it did deprive the 188 people who cast a ballot the opportunity to vote in the correct Assembly race. Election officials take seriously any error in which a voter is disenfranchised, no matter the effect on the outcome. In many ways the goal of every aspect of their work — and their ability to earn voters’ trust — is based on avoiding this very situation.

And three months ahead of the November election, it raised alarms across the state. Some Wisconsinites said it shook their trust in elections. The losing candidate in the Assembly primary race called for a new election — and for the resignation of Douglas County Clerk Kaci Jo Lundgren.

Speaking to Votebeat, Lundgren, a Democrat, took full blame for the error but also highlighted an issue that she said almost certainly factored into it: inexperienced election officials.

“I should have had additional review done on the ballots by more people,” Lundgren said. “I have new staff. I have new clerks. So unfortunately, it was missed.”

The error — along with its causes and aftermath — provides a view into the challenges of election administration in Wisconsin today. County and municipal clerks, hundreds of whom are new to the job at any given point, not only have to learn how to administer elections but must also adjust their operations quickly as rapid-fire litigation changes the rules sometimes just months or weeks before an election.

Just this year, clerks and their municipal boards have had to decide whether and how to implement drop boxes amid new guidelines and rhetoric that could foster increased third-party monitoring. They’re adjusting now to a recent ruling requiring clerks to implement technology to send markable electronic ballots to voters with disabilities in November. They’ve also had to adjust to two new constitutional amendments passed in April that limit clerks’ ability to receive outside money and assistance.

They’re doing all this in an environment of increased scrutiny and sometimes unbounded conspiracy theories. Beyond the demand for her to resign, Lundgren’s significant mistake led to calls to get rid of voting machines and the Wisconsin Elections Commission — neither of which factored heavily into the error — and an allegation that county clerks are “ushers of the communist stolen elections.”

Such rhetoric has gotten “so constant,” said Paul Gronke, a political science professor at Reed College who studies election administration. It has led some clerks to avoid discussing their work with community members, he said, or to leave the field entirely, often for lower-profile government jobs. Changing election laws add additional pressure, Gronke said.

“We have heard that a lot, that things are changing so quickly it’s just hard to keep up,” Gronke said. “That’s going to make errors more frequent.”

New maps compound difficulty for inexperienced officials

County clerks have also had to adjust to changes in legislative boundaries after a lawsuit earlier this year led to new maps in the middle of what’s usually a 10-year redistricting cycle. That’s the change that led to the election day mistake in Summit, and potentially to another ballot error in Racine County that was caught early enough to fix.

To Lundgren, the Douglas County clerk, the error was a lapse that the new staff and clerks in the county also didn’t catch. Neither did Dan Corbin, the town clerk in Summit, who didn’t return several calls to Votebeat.

After a voter caught it on election day, Lundgren called the Wisconsin Elections Commission, seeking its direction to try to resolve the issue. There was no clear fix. The problem appeared unprecedented, Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe said, and there didn’t seem to be any Wisconsin court decision or law outlining specific next steps.

Initially, the prospect of a do-over election was on the table. That was an option Scott Harbridge, the losing candidate in the Assembly race mistakenly left off the Summit ballot, supported.

But on Aug. 20, the Douglas County board of canvassers certified the election. The county disqualified the votes that Summit voters cast for the Assembly race mistakenly put on their ballots.

Trent Miner, the clerk in Wood County in central Wisconsin, said an error like the one in Douglas County could have occurred anywhere, even with a more experienced clerk, especially because of new legislative district lines.

“You live in mortal fear that you’re going to miss something,” said Miner, a Republican. “This is Kaci’s first presidential election — certainly not the first election she’s administered — but this is probably the first one since those new districts went into effect.”

A similar mistake happened elsewhere, too, ahead of the Aug. 13 election.

In the village of Caledonia in Racine County, absentee voters assigned to a polling place that serves two Assembly districts initially received ballots with the wrong Assembly race on them.

County Clerk Wendy Christensen had put in wrong information when she was preparing ballots, and nobody caught it until after the ballots first went out.

“I have a slightly bigger team here than some of the counties up north, so we have even more sets of eyes on things,” said Christensen, a Republican. “We proof in teams of two, and then we give it to two other people and [do] multiple rounds of it. But even with more people and more sets of eyes, again, it can be missed.”

A voter caught the mistake about 10 days after the first round of ballots went out, giving election officials enough time to issue corrected ballots to absentee voters, Caledonia Village Clerk Jennifer Olsen said. All in-person voters got the correct ballots, she said.

Christensen said late rule changes, like the new maps, leave less time to look over things.

“Just when you sort of think you got it figured out, sometimes the rules change, or the maps change, or something else changes,” Christensen said.

Pressure on clerks increasing as November election approaches

On social media, some Wisconsinites said mistakes like Lundgren’s perpetuate distrust in elections. One person said “county clerks are a big part of the problem,” adding, “F ‘em.”

“There’s a lot of people that don’t have faith that our elections are fair,” Harbridge told Votebeat on election day. “And, you know, I don’t want this just to be another thing that puts that dagger in our elections, because we need to have everybody confident that our elections are fair.”

In that call, Harbridge said he had little confidence in Wolfe. He also criticized outside vendors preparing ballots, and said he supports eliminating voting machines in favor of hand-counted paper ballots. He later posted on social media that clerks should print their ballots locally, something many county clerks aren’t equipped to do.

“The rhetoric isn’t productive,” Miner said. “Kaci made a mistake. She owned up to it. She admitted as soon as she found out. Kaci’s a great clerk. She is, and I know that because she’s taking this incredibly hard.”

For her part, Lundgren, who had spent 10 years working in the county clerk’s office before taking it over, was forthright with voters and the press. She took blame for the mistake, alerted the candidates once she found out about it, and said she’d examine how the error occurred to make sure it never happens again. County clerks and local officials contacted her with words of support and ideas for preventing similar issues in the future.

Still, she made a crucial mistake that amounted to a town not having the right race on their ballot. What’s the best way to address that error?

For Angie Sapik, a Republican state representative and Douglas County Board member, there is no clear answer except avoiding the same mistake in the future.

“It was just an honest error on her part,” she said. “It doesn’t take away from the severity of the error, because I think it is an enormous, enormous problem. But it is just a mistake, and I think it’s a mistake that is probably easy to make with how many changes there have been. She’s a great lady. She works really hard.”

For Harbridge, the solution is Lundgren’s resignation. But Gronke said such a step would be counterproductive.

“The immediate assumption that the best solution here is to get rid of the person because that person was new and not as experienced as they should be, and then you bring another new and inexperienced person, is certainly not the best way to do it,” he said. “The way to do it is to figure out what kind of protections can be put in place to ensure that this doesn’t happen in the future.”

The Wisconsin Elections Commission was slated to consider sending clerks a document on procedures to proofread ballots, which would go out to clerks if commissioners sign off on it at an upcoming meeting, agency spokesperson Joel DeSpain said.

Lundgren said she’s determined to stay in her job despite the criticism following her error.

“I love what I do,” she said. “I love serving the public. I love my community and the people that I’m with. The political side of things can be difficult because of the heated nature that politics is in right now, and that’s what is difficult for me, but I know that I’m in the right spot for my community and to serve them.”

About Harbridge’s call for her to resign, she said, “If he is concerned about one error, getting a brand new clerk in this position, especially before a presidential election, that would be a huge disservice to Douglas County residents.”

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

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