Clerks say an obsolete Wisconsin law creates needless work — and a threat to ballot secrecy

When the clerk of Rock County, Wisconsin, gets a public records request for images of election ballots, much of it is easy to fulfill. For most municipalities in the county, it’s just a matter of uploading a photo of the ballot that’s already captured when it gets tabulated.

But for two of the county’s largest cities — Janesville and Beloit — it’s a lot more complicated, and time-consuming, because of a state law governing places that use a central counting facility for their absentee ballots.

For those ballots, Clerk Lisa Tollefson must redact the unique identifying numbers that the law requires poll workers to write on each one. Otherwise, the number could be used to connect the ballots to the voters who cast them. And because the numbers don’t appear in the same place on each ballot, Tollefson must click through the ballot images one at a time to locate and blot out the number before releasing the images.

To respond to records requests for this year’s April election, she had to redact the numbers from 10,000 ballot images. In November, it was over 23,000.

Given her other job duties, Tollefson says, fulfilling these requests can take months. Without that step, she says, she could fulfill public records requests in “no time at all.”

And it’s all due to a law that she and other clerks in the state say is not only outdated, but also a potential threat to the constitutional right in Wisconsin to ballot secrecy.

Tollefson and other county clerks said they support an ongoing legislative effort to repeal the law requiring election officials to write down those numbers. The proposal has come up in past legislative sessions but hasn’t gone far. It will be revived again this year, said Rep. Scott Krug, a Republican legislative leader and vice chair of the Assembly elections committee.

Number is obsolete and creates security risk, clerks say

The law might have been useful in the past, Tollefson said, when voters who changed their minds or made errors on absentee ballots that had been cast but not yet counted could void their ballot and cast a new one. The ID number allowed election officials at central count facilities to locate the ballot and cancel it before issuing a new one. 

But courts have since blocked voters from spoiling their absentee ballots, rendering the numbers obsolete. Now, if a voter tries to cast an in-person ballot after already voting absentee, the voter would be flagged in the poll books as having voted and would be turned away, Tollefson said.

Moreover, the labeling of ballots could pose a privacy risk at central count locations, where observers and poll workers might be able to match up numbers to deduce how someone voted, Tollefson said. The number written on each ballot corresponds with the voter’s number on the poll list, a public register that election officials use to enter information about voters.

There are rules in place to prevent an observer from connecting a ballot to the voter who cast it, Tollefson said, but she added, “We have laws that people shouldn’t steal, but they still do.”

Marathon County Clerk Kim Trueblood, a Republican, said the increased presence of election observers in recent years exacerbates that risk.

So far, there’s no indication that any observers or poll workers have intentionally used the numbers to link voters to their absentee ballots at central count. But election officials told Votebeat that the law creates an unnecessary risk, to go along with the significant added workload.

After the 2020 presidential election, Milwaukee County was asked to release images of its ballots as part of Donald Trump’s request for a recount in the county. The county had over 265,000 absentee ballots, all marked with identifying numbers that had to be redacted individually, Elections Director Michelle Hawley recalled. 

Given time pressures, the county hired its election vendor, Election Systems & Software, to do the redactions. It cost $27,000, which the Trump campaign covered as part of its recount request.

The county has since looked for ways to streamline the redactions and avoid outsourcing it, Hawley said. But the state law remains “extremely time-consuming,” she said. In addition to complicating records requests, she said, the law slows down absentee ballot processing as election officials at central count must write a number on every ballot.

Repealing little-known practice has had little momentum

Trueblood said the biggest obstacle to repealing the law may be simply that too few people know it exists. She said she has “talked to every” legislator from Marathon County and some were “horrified to learn” about what the law entails. 

“Hopefully the Legislature will do something about it,” she said.

Last session, the proposal to repeal the law had bipartisan support. The Assembly elections committee unanimously approved it after its Republican author, former Rep. Donna Rozar,  encouraged committee members not to discount the bill just because she wrote it with a Democrat. 

But the proposal was never introduced in the Senate and never got a floor vote in the Assembly.

Trueblood hopes the Legislature will act before 2026, when there will be an April Supreme Court election and legislative primaries and a general election later in the year.

If they just “cross off that little line in the state statute,” said Tollefson, “we would be good to go.”

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at [email protected].

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

This article first appeared on Wisconsin Watch and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.