Election officials should be allowed to accept absentee ballots with partial witness addresses as long as they can discern the correct addresses, a liberal group argues in a lawsuit filed Tuesday.
The lawsuit comes after a Waukesha County judge in early September ruled that election officials can’t fix or fill in missing address information on absentee ballot envelopes.
But voters shouldn’t be disenfranchised because of “immaterial errors” on ballot envelopes that clerks can no longer fix, like a forgotten ZIP code on the witness certificate, the lawsuit states. State law also doesn’t specify what constitutes an address, the group argues.
A small percentage of voters and witnesses made mistakes on their absentee ballot certificates in 2020. Here are some examples of the kinds of errors that were either allowed or corrected by the clerk in order to permit the ballot to be counted.
Rise Inc., which encourages students to vote, and Jason Rivera, a voter who lives in Madison, filed the lawsuit in Dane County Circuit Court against the state Elections Commission and Madison City Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl.
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The now-rescinded guidance that had allowed clerks to fix errors on witness certificates was issued in 2016. Voters must have a witness sign a certificate, typically printed on the back of an absentee ballot envelope, for the ballot to be valid. The witness has to include his or her address on the certificate, but under the guidance, election officials were able to fill in missing or incorrect pieces such as the state or ZIP code.
Republicans only began scrutinizing the guidance after the 2020 presidential election that saw their candidate lose.
Top legislative Republicans in January told the Elections Commission to withdraw the guidance or resubmit it as an administrative rule.
It became a rule in July. That same month, the GOP-controlled Administrative Rules Committee struck it down.
A Waukesha County judge ruled against the separate guidance in September. He ordered the Elections Commission to tell officials not to correct errors or fill in missing information on witness certificates. But he did not specify what information is required for the witness address to be valid.
The ruling has led to confusion among election officials, with no consensus on whether, for example, they can count a ballot if the witness certificate is missing a ZIP code.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit filed Tuesday argue those ballots should be counted.
“The federal Civil Rights Act prohibits the state from denying any person the right to vote as the result of failure to comply with a requirement that is not material to the voter’s qualifications,” the plaintiffs said.
The lawsuit seeks an injunction requiring the Elections Commission to tell local election officials to accept ballots as long as the witness address “includes sufficient information from which the clerk can reasonably discern the place where the witness may be communicated with.”
Elections Commission spokesperson Riley Vetterkind pointed to a memo the commission sent to local election officials after the Waukesha County judge ruled against fixing witness addresses in early September. In that memo, the agency stated the court didn’t overturn its existing definition of an address, which calls for the street number, street name and municipality name. It does not mention ZIP code or state.
Witzel-Behl did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The plaintiffs are asking the court to clarify what constitutes an address. They’re also asking the court to clarify whether ballots are “improperly completed” under Wisconsin law if the witness addresses are missing some information.
The nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau last year reviewed 14,710 absentee ballot certificates in 29 municipalities and found that 1,022 certificates, or 6.9%, were missing parts of witness addresses, 15, or 0.1%, did not have any witness address at all, eight, or less than 0.1%, did not have a witness signature and three, or less than 0.1%, did not have a voter signature. Clerks corrected 66, or about 0.4%, of those certificates.
The 2020 election is over. Here’s what happened (and what didn’t)
The 2020 election was “the most secure in American history,” according to the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which coordinates the nation’s election infrastructure.
While a handful of voters risked going to prison by attempting to vote twice or in the name of a dead relative, as happens in any election, no evidence of widespread fraud has ever been produced in Wisconsin or elsewhere.
Yet, many continue to question some of the practices clerks relied on to encourage eligible voters to cast ballots and make sure their votes were counted amid the first election in more than 100 years held during a pandemic.
The Wisconsin State Journal has covered every twist and turn of this debate in scores of stories. But here are a few that offered some broader context about what happened, and didn't happen, in the election of 2020.
The state has multiple, overlapping safeguards aimed at preventing ineligible voters from casting ballots, tampering with the ballots or altering vote totals.
Nothing in the emails suggests there were problems with the election that contributed in any meaningful way to Trump's 20,682-vote loss to Joe Biden.
"Despite concerns with statewide elections procedures, this audit showed us that the election was largely safe and secure," Sen. Rob Cowles said Friday.
The grants were provided to every Wisconsin municipality that asked for them, and in the amounts they asked for.
"Application of the U.S. Department of Justice guidance among the clerks in Wisconsin is not uniform," the memo says.
YORKVILLE — The Racine County Sheriff’s Office announced in a Thursday morning news conference that it has identified eight cases of what it believes to be election fraud at a Mount Pleasant nursing home.
The memo states that state law gives the Audit Bureau complete access to all records during an audit investigation and federal law and guidance does not prohibit an election official from handing over election records.
Drop boxes were used throughout Wisconsin, including in areas where Trump won the vast majority of counties.
Thousands of ballot certifications examined from Madison are a window onto how elections officials handled a pandemic and a divided and unhelpful state government.
"I don't think that you instill confidence in a process by kind of blindly assuming there's nothing to see here," WILL president and general counsel Rick Esenberg said.
The Associated Press reviewed every potential case of voter fraud in six battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvan…
The report is the latest to show that there was not widespread fraud in Wisconsin.
The clear insinuation was that someone not qualified to conduct an election improperly influenced these vulnerable voters. But the Wisconsin State Journal could not confirm the data.
The turnout at nursing homes in Brown, Kenosha, Milwaukee and Racine counties in 2020 was not much different from the turnout in 2016.
Alexander Shur | Wisconsin State Journal
Alexander Shur covers state government for the Wisconsin State Journal.
