Wisconsin Clerk’s Office Sent Out 2,200 Duplicate Ballots

Here we go again. Another presidential election season and more ballot controversy in swing state Wisconsin’s far-left capital city. 

Rep. Tom Tiffany, R-Wis., demanded answers from Madison City Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl as to how more than 2,200 voters in the leftist enclave were recently sent duplicate absentee ballots. The city clerk’s office issued a statement earlier this week that it is “rectifying a data processing error.” A spokesman for the city told The Federalist the situation has been resolved and there are “safeguards” in place to prevent double voting. The clerk’s office also released an apology to the individuals affected.  

While Madison elections officials say the problem affected “only an isolated number of voters” and was “quickly caught” and remedied, word of the “error” comes as election integrity advocates raise concerns about a repeat performance of the 2020 election in the battleground Badger State. Wisconsin election regulators and Democrat-led cities like Madison defied election laws and caused myriad election integrity concerns in delivering decisive votes for Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden, who claimed victory over then-President Donald Trump in Wisconsin by less than 21,000 votes. 

“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, Wisconsin’s 7th Congressional District representative, wrote in a letter sent to the city clerk on Tuesday.  

Witzel-Behl was a driving force behind CTCL‘s partnership with the city of Madison, one of the so-called “Wisconsin 5” cities, in the 2020 elections, and she is a member of the left-wing organization’s advisory committee, according to nonprofit tracker InfluenceWatch. 

Questions About the ‘Error’

In his letter, Tiffany wrote that he was “alarmed” to learn of the duplicate ballots just as Wisconsin opens its extended absentee ballot season. 

“The Clerk’s Office has since issued a six-sentence statement claiming, without providing any significant details, that this ‘error’ affected ‘an isolated number of voters’ in a single ward and ‘was quickly caught and corrected,’” the congressman wrote. 

He included a number of follow-up questions and wanted to know: 

• How was this “error” discovered?
• Has the Clerk’s Office contacted law enforcement to investigate whether this “error” was the result of simple incompetence or a deliberate nefarious act?
• Has the Clerk’s Office identified what person or persons are responsible for this “error”?
• Has the Clerk’s Office taken steps to preserve all emails, internal communications, handwritten notes, and other records related to this “error”?
• What is the exact number of duplicate ballots that were sent out by the Clerk’s Office?
• The Clerk’s Office claims that this “error” affected voters in only one ward. Which ward was it?
• Has the Clerk’s Office received any reports of duplicate ballots in other wards, or conducted any due diligence to ensure that this “error” was limited to just a single ward?
• Have any of these duplicate ballots been returned to the Clerk’s Office, and if so, have they been set aside pending an investigation?

“Voters deserve clear answers regarding the full scope of this blunder, how the city plans to restore public confidence in its ability to accurately administer the election, and assurances that those responsible are held accountable,” the letter concluded. 

‘A Mistake was Made’

Dylan Brogan, communications manager for the city, told me in an interview late Wednesday afternoon that “a mistake was made,” and that the error would “not result in any ballots being counted twice.” On Wednesday evening, the city released a response to Tiffany’s letter, attaching a letter apologizing and explaining to the affected voters what happened. In the response, Witzel-Behl asserts that the clerk’s office has “adjusted … pre-election procedures to prevent this mistake from happening again.”

“This was a simple data processing error made by one of the many dedicated, professional staff who work for the City …,” the clerk wrote in the response, barely disguising apparent disdain for Tiffany’s questions.

The duplicate ballots went out to 2,215 voters in multiple city wards who requested the same kind of ballot, Brogan told me. As a result of “human error,” the city official said, a voter list with names and addresses were merged with the same list. Brogan added that election officials “double-checked” to determine no other voters were affected. The voters live in Assembly District 78 and the Madison Metropolitan School District on the city’s east side, according to the letter. Witzel-Behl asks the voters to “destroy one of the two ballots” received.

“Absentee voters in several wards received duplicate ballots. This is because the affected ballots were in a single file of ballots with header code 41. The header code is the number in upper right corner of ballot which is unique to the offices on that ballot and the wards who receive that ballot style. The 2,215 affected ballots with that header code were located in the following wards: 1, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15,” the response to Tiffany states.

City officials insist that there are safeguards in place to ensure that double voting does not occur, including barcodes on the ballots. Witzel-Behl noted that “barcodes linked to the statewide voter registration system are printed on the ballot envelope,” and “are used across the state and the country.”

“They are unique to an individual voter and printed on the absentee ballot return envelope so they can be scanned in once received by a Clerk’s office. This statewide system ensures accountability and allows voters to track whether their ballot was received by their Clerk’s office,” the clerk wrote.

She closed by admonishing the congressman that “elections are conducted by humans and occasionally human error occurs.” The clerk then moaned that the job of elections officials has been made all the more difficult by “attacks that seek to undermine the confidence of voters in our election results” — or, in other words, criticism from those who have the temerity to question how elections are administered and the political motivations of clerks who are supposed to be nonpartisan.

‘Democracy in the Park’

But Madison, Wisconsin’s second-largest city dominated by Democrats, has had its share of election integrity troubles. 

Madison was home to the “Democracy in the Park” ballot harvesting campaign in the fall of 2020. The controversial event, conducted under the guise of Covid mitigation, netted more than 10,000 absentee ballots on one Saturday in late September alone, as noted by local news outlet The Capital Times. In total, over two days, an army of poll workers stationed at parks across the city collected an estimated 17,000 ballots. 

Republicans made a feeble attempt to challenge. Madison City Attorney Michael Haas, a leftist who previously served as the state’s elections administrator and played a central role in Wisconsin’s unconstitutional John Doe investigations illegally targeting conservative activists, told the GOP to go pound sand. 

“Absent any directive from the Wisconsin Elections Commission or a court, the City will proceed with Democracy in the Park, and it will process the ballots collected with other absentee ballots pursuant to Wisconsin statutes,” Haas reportedly told the Capital Times in late September 2020. 

The Trump campaign later argued to have the thousands of ballots removed, according to reports, but the Dane County Board of Canvassers rejected the campaign’s argument. 

Madison also played a starring role in the 2020 “Zuckbucks” scandal. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan handed out hundreds of millions of dollars to leftist activist group the Center for Tech in Civic Life, which sent the brunt of the money to Democrat-heavy cities ostensibly as election administration grants. The leftist cities of Madison, Milwaukee, Green Bay, Kenosha, and Racine, dubbed the “Wisconsin 5,” received the lion’s share of Wisconsin’s grant money, substantial portions of which were used in get-out-the-vote efforts targeting Democrat-leaning voters. 

A solid majority of Wisconsin voters earlier this year supported a statewide ballot question prohibiting private funding in election administration, as The Federalist previously reported. 

For more election news and updates, visit electionbriefing.com.

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.