Liam Beran
Envelopes of absentee ballots from the August 13, 2024 election.
The City Clerk's Office introduced new protections for counting absentee ballots during a Feb. 17 training for chief inspectors.
The Madison City Clerk’s Office has put new safeguards in place for processing absentee ballots following a widely criticized error that left 193 ballots uncounted in the Nov. 5 election. The changes were first implemented in the Feb. 18 primary.
In Madison, absentee ballots are processed at a voter’s polling place. In general, workers check the certificate on a ballot envelope into a poll book and assign it a voter slip, says Izzie Behl, chief inspector at Memorial Union’s polling place.
From there, “We open the envelopes. We separate the envelopes with the ballots to make sure that every ballot is secret,” Behl says. “We don't look at the ballots as we open them, and then we run them through the tabulator, calling out ‘Processing absentee ballots.’”
Under the new measures, ballot couriers now deliver a log of all absentee ballot carrier envelopes they deliver to a polling place, with check boxes to ensure workers processed each envelope, according to a Feb. 17 presentation given to chief inspectors.
The clerk also added language to a label on the outside of carrier envelopes requiring two election officials to mark the time they opened the carrier envelope. Additionally, two officials are required to initial a section declaring they have “double checked that all absentees from this carrier envelope have been processed.”
During the Nov. 5 election, poll workers in wards 56 and 65 accidentally left three carrier envelopes, which contain many absentee ballot envelopes, unopened. The ballots were discovered during a “reconciliation” process after the election, when the clerk's office staff compares the number of registered voters to the number of ballots cast.
Some other previously optional safeguards are now mandatory, says Ald. Mike Verveer, who served as a chief inspector during the primary and attended the Feb. 17 presentation. Though Madison City Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl did not directly acknowledge November’s error while delivering the presentation, Verveer said, “I'm sure it was top of mind for all of us in the training.”
“It was stressed in the training — without referencing the catastrophic errors that occurred in November where so many ballots were left uncounted — that we verify that all absentee ballots are counted,” Verveer says. November’s error left 125 of Verveer’s constituents in Ward 56 disenfranchised.
City communications manager Dylan Brogan says the additions are “things that were happening in the past that are just a little bit more formalized.”
“There's a checklist, and it's like, ‘Did you look all the way in the [tabulator] cart?” Brogan says. “And then really making sure that they have a way to compare how many [absentee ballots] they run versus how many they received right there at the polls.”
Brogan says he expects the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which voted in January to investigate how 193 ballots were left uncounted, will soon provide more guidance for how clerks statewide should process absentee ballots. The commission will meet on March 7 to hear a summary of the investigation’s findings and provide corresponding guidance, says Wisconsin Elections Commission spokesperson Joel DeSpain.
