The Madison clerk says 2,215 duplicate ballots were mistakenly sent to voters, but none have been returned to her office.
Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl late Wednesday posted a response to a Tuesday letter she received from U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, R-Minocqua, demanding answers on how the duplicate ballots were sent.
Witzel-Behl chalked it up to human error and wrote to the northern Wisconsin congressman that law enforcement hadn’t been contacted because there was no criminal conduct.
Witzel-Behl also posted a letter that her office sent to affected voters asking them to destroy one of the ballots they received. It also included a section stating that the envelopes they received to send back the ballot included a barcode that allows voters to track the status of their ballots. The letter noted the clerk’s office can only check in one ballot for each voter and if someone returns two absentee ballots, the second would be rejected at the polls.
After Witzel-Behl released her response, Tiffany posted on X late yesterday that Witzel-Behl had claimed, “The voting system does not allow a ballot with the same barcode to be submitted,” but his office “has proof that there is no barcode on the actual ballots.” The post included a picture of the ballot.
When her office first noted the error late Monday, the release included a line that “the duplicate ballots have identical barcodes.”
Witzel-Behl’s letter to Tiffany Wednesday stated, “Barcodes linked to the statewide voter registration system are printed on the ballot envelope, not the ballot.” Those barcodes on the envelope are unique to an individual voter and are scanned when they’re received at her office.
Tiffany again posted on X about the topic, pointing to the original statement from Monday and writing the clerk “only changed their quote after we exposed it. Why do they keep editing their statements and press releases?”
Tiffany sent Witzel-Behl a letter Tuesday posing nine questions, including whether law enforcement had been contacted to “investigate whether this ‘error’ was the result of simple incompetence or a deliberate nefarious act.”
“Given the history of controversial and legally dubious election practices carried out by Madison officials in the past – and your own personal history as an operative for the left-wing, ‘Zuckerbucks’ financed Center for Tech and Civic Life – I don’t have to tell you how important it is for the city to provide full transparency regarding how an ‘error’ of this magnitude was allowed to happen at such a pivotal time,” Tiffany wrote.
Witzel-Behl closed her letter noting that “elections are conducted by humans and occasionally human error occurs.” When that happens, they’re corrected and her office is transparent about them.
“Our staff works incredibly hard to conduct elections in a professional, nonpartisan and fair manner and works to continually assess and improve our processes,” she wrote. “This task is made more challenging every day as the conduct of elections becomes more complex and as election officials have become the target of attacks that seek to undermine the confidence of voters in our election results.”
