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Wisconsin Municipalities Wrangle Voting Procedures

Election prep hasn’t exactly been smooth sailing here in Wisconsin: a federal lawsuit, duplicate absentee ballots, and a mayor facing a criminal investigation for moving a ballot drop box…all just a few weeks before the election in November. Image courtesy: Faye Parks / WORT News.

Broadcast on:: 26 Sep 2024
Audio Format:: other

Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, a nonpartisan voting rights watchdog, hosted a press conference today outside the City County Building to condemn Walsaw Mayor Doug Denny for his action Sunday. Here's Nick Ramos, Executive Director of the campaign. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would see a sitting mayor dress up like Bob the Builder, physically take a ballot drop box from being bolted in the ground when he was clearly instructed not to do so by the City of Walsaw's legal counsel and illegally place it in his office. That ain't right. Ramos says Mayor Denny moved the drop box one day before the city's election officials plan to unlock it and begin accepting ballots. Denny said yesterday that he did nothing wrong and quote, "I'm hoping for a good result," unquote. Drop boxes are legal again in Wisconsin after a two-year ban. The state supreme court affirmed this summer that clerks can choose to use them or not. More than 60 municipalities in nine counties opted out. According to Advocacy Group, all voting is local and Sam Liebert, State Director of all voting is local, emphasized today that the choice lies with election officials alone. Let's be clear. Mayor Denny is not the municipal clerk. He has no authority over how elections are administered in Walsaw. This has been nothing more but a photo op. The Marathon County District Attorney plans to conduct an official investigation and is seeking assistance from the state's Department of Justice reports the Associated Press. Today's speakers also argued that absentee ballot drop boxes are a vital resource for all voters, especially those with disabilities. Here's Nikki Vandermeerlin, a Madison school board member. The reason I'm also passionate about this is as an individual with disabilities, both autism and cerebral palsy, it makes it very difficult sometimes due to weather and other issues to get to the polls. Yet our voice matters. Our voice counts. In related news, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit last Friday against two towns in northern Wisconsin that didn't use electronic voting machines in this year's primary elections. The lawsuit argues that the towns of Lawrence and Thornapple both violated the Federal Help America Vote Act, which stipulates that all municipalities must have at least one electronic voting system to accommodate voters with disabilities. The town of Lawrence has already struck a deal with federal officials agreeing to follow the law in all future elections, but the town of Thornapple hasn't. The town's board of supervisors voted last summer to stop using the machines entirely. And here in Madison, city officials are pushing back against criticism from Republican Congressman Tom Tiffany. Rep Tiffany speculated in a social media post yesterday that the city wouldn't be able to prevent voter fraud following the news that officials accidentally sent out more than 2,200 duplicate absentee ballots to Madison voters. That's because city clerk Mary Beth Witzelbale's statement on Monday assured voters that the duplicate ballots also have duplicate barcodes and can't be counted twice. But Rep Tiffany posted a photo of an absentee ballot on X yesterday, pointing out that it doesn't have a barcode. The city of Madison later amended their statement to clarify that the barcode is on the envelope and not the ballot. Here's Madison city spokesperson Dylan Brogan. It's been like that for a very long time. It's like that all over the state and any other parts of the country. Under a very unlikely scenario that someone sent in two absentee ballots, one of them would be rejected because of numerous safeguards we got. Rep Tiffany's social media post has already been viewed 1.6 million times as of this afternoon, and he has since implied that the city amending their statement after being quote-unquote exposed is suspect. Brogan tells W-O-R-T that the city has gotten a lot of feedback from the public since last night, some positive and some negative. I would say locally, people in Madison, they know our clerks office and I think they appreciate how transparent we are in every step of the process. You got some folks from out of town trying to make a lot of hay out of nothing, but that's okay. We got a great bunch of election workers here and we're just we're just doing our job. That's all people have a right to ask questions, including the congressman. We've done everything I can to reassure folks. For WRT News, I'm Faye Parks.