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The Wisconsin Elections Commission on Friday will decide whether to provide key ballot processing guidelines to election officials statewide, a measure aimed at preventing the kinds of mistakes that led Madison officials to lose track of nearly 200 ballots on Election Day.
The commission highlighted the need for such guidance as part of its ongoing investigation into the absentee ballots that went missing and uncounted in two Madison polling places during the November election.
Commission staff will also ask the agency’s six commissioners to authorize continuing the investigation because they are still missing critical information.
Madison clerk’s staff and election workers made a number of errors on Election Day that led the courier bags containing absentee ballots to go unopened and the ballots uncounted at two polling places. Although those unopened bags went back to the clerk’s office afterward, the clerk’s staff didn’t discover the uncounted ballots until somewhere between a week and over a month after the election. They also didn’t inform the state about the ballots until well after the deadline for them to get counted.
The guidance, if the commissioners vote to create it, would include best practices on better equipping polling places to account for absentee ballots received by the clerk’s office, and end-of-night procedures to check the number of ballots counted against the number of ballots the site received. The guidance would also contain instructions on checking election materials at the end of the night for uncounted ballots, entering voter participation data soon after the election to verify that all ballots were processed, and providing adequate materials to canvassing boards so that they could double check that nothing was missed during the counting process.
Beyond that, the instructions would include best practices on how clerks should respond if they discover uncounted ballots after Election Day. In Madison’s case, the clerk’s staff didn’t inform the state about the ballots until mid-December, after the commission certified the November election. The city election staff also kept the news from key city officials: City Attorney Mike Haas learned about the lapse from the commission, not clerk’s office staff, and he informed the mayor’s office.
What we know about the missing Madison ballots
In a summary of the investigation so far, commission staff said the error might have been avoided had each polling place received an itemized list of the courier bags containing absentee ballots and the unique seal numbers on those bags. Madison Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl said in January that each polling place would receive such a list in the future.
The commission also found that the problem could have been far less severe had the clerk’s staff checked all of the election materials it received from polling places on Election Day, since the bags containing the missing ballots were among them. Witzel-Behl said her office would adopt that step as well.
But the commission said it has yet to receive information about other key details, specifically, “what exactly happened at these polling places” that led the ballots to go uncounted. Commission staff said that they haven’t learned how the bags containing the missing absentee ballots went unnoticed all day and where in the polling place those bags were on Election Day.
Read more of Votebeat’s related coverage here:
- Who knew about Madison’s 200 uncounted ballots? Voters get conflicting accounts. Jan. 27, 2025
- Some missing Madison ballots could have been counted, if clerk’s staff had acted in time, Jan. 22, 2025
- Wisconsin Elections Commission launches investigation into uncounted Madison ballots, Jan. 2, 2025
- Nearly 200 Madison ballots went uncounted. Officials still don’t know exactly how. Dec. 27, 2024
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.
