The Green Bay clerk likely violated state law ahead of the spring election when her office inadvertently sent duplicate absentee ballots to 152 voters and should put new safeguards in place to avoid it happening again, Elections Commission staff found.

A draft memo the staff prepared ahead of next week’s Elections Commission meeting recommends giving Clerk Celestine Jeffreys until July 24 to provide commissioners with details of the new safeguards.

The commission during its July 9 meeting also plans to discuss a second instance of Jeffreys’ office sending duplicate absentee ballots that was discovered over the weekend. The city has yet to detail the extent of that issue, which may have impacted voters in eight wards.

A city spokesperson declined to comment on the Elections Commission agenda or whether Mayor Eric Genrich continued to have confidence in Jeffreys as clerk.

A local voter in April filed a complaint against Jeffreys with the assistance of the state GOP over the sending of 152 duplicate ballots. In their response to that issue, Jeffreys and Assistant City Attorney Logan Wood chalked up the issue to administrative error. They also argued there is no statutory prohibition against mailing voters more than one absentee ballot.

They attributed the most recent incident with duplicate ballots for the Aug. 11 primary to a printing error.

The draft response prepared by Elections Commission staff recommended rejecting Jeffreys’ argument that state law doesn’t ban clerks from sending multiple ballots to voters. Staff noted voters may sometimes validly receive a second ballot, including if one is damaged. But specific procedures must be followed in those cases, and it was “uncontested” that didn’t happen with the 152 sent in April.

“At no time should there be two identical ‘live’ ballots issued to the same elector,” staff wrote in the draft memo. 

The memo also noted that Jeffreys put in place procedures to track the duplicate ballots sent ahead of the April election to ensure only validly returned ones were counted.

It recommended directing Jeffreys to “continue to maintain a complete chain of custody for all ballots issued and to continue to ensure that no voter can vote more than once in an election.”

In response to the April complaint, Jeffreys wrote she had instituted new safeguards to prevent the printing issue from happening again.

State GOP Chair Brian Schimming said Jeffreys was either “incompetent at her job or intentionally failing to follow basic election law.”

“Clerk Jeffreys cannot be trusted to oversee elections, and definitely can’t be trusted to come up with a plan to prevent duplicate ballots from going out,” he said.