Judge orders Wisconsin elections officials to move quickly on changing absentee ballot rules
MADISON, Wis. — A Wisconsin judge on Tuesday ordered the state elections commission to implement his ruling allowing election clerks to accept absentee ballots with partial witness addresses, a decision expected to expand the number of ballots that will be counted in the battleground state.
Each of the last two presidential elections in Wisconsin was decided by fewer than 23,000 votes. Polls show another tight race between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump this year.
Since Trump’s defeat in Wisconsin in 2020, Republicans have been fighting in court to tighten rules to limit the number of absentee ballots.
State law requires absentee ballots to be submitted with a witness’ signature and the address on the outer envelope containing the ballot. Three separate lawsuits have been filed regarding these rules.
Dane County Judge Ryan Nilsestuen ruled earlier this month in two cases brought by liberals that a ballot can still be accepted even if a witness’s address omits municipalities and zip codes, or simply says “same” or “ditto” if the witness lives with the voter. The Republican legislature fought to have the case dismissed.
Nilsestuen on Tuesday directed the Board of Elections to adopt guidelines by Feb. 9 that would allow clerks to determine which ballots can be accepted. Nilsestuen emphasized that he wanted to take quick action given the upcoming primaries on February 20 for the local elections. Wisconsin’s presidential primary and spring general election are April 2.
The attorney for the Republican-dominated Legislature, Kevin LeRoy, said he planned to ask for a delay in the ruling pending an appeal. The judge has scheduled a hearing on this matter on Friday.
The case is expected to go before the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
But first, the state elections commission will likely vote Feb. 8 on whether to approve guidelines for Wisconsin’s more than 1,800 local clerks, in accordance with the judge’s order. The local clerks are the ones who organize the elections and receive the absentee ballots, which do not always contain all the addresses of the witnesses.
“We will try to turn it around as quickly as possible,” said Thomas Bellavia. “WEC wants this system to work.”
The election commission published guidelines in 2016 stating that a witness address “contains at least a street number, street name and municipality,” but that clerks could fill in missing address information, known as ballot processing. The practice went unchallenged until after Trump’s election campaign. narrow loss in 2020 when he tried to have more than 220,000 ballots thrown out in a failed attempt to overturn his defeat.
Among the ballots he declined to count were about 5,500 ballots where clerks filled in missing information about the witness’s address.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court’s December 2020 ruling dismissing Trump’s lawsuit noted that state law was not clear on what constitutes a witness address.
A Waukesha County judge sided with Republicans in 2022, ruling that election clerks cannot fill in missing address information on absentee ballot envelopes. The Election Commission withdrew its guidelines after that ruling.
However, the judge did not say in that order what an address is.
That led to the filing of a pair of related lawsuits in Dane County, arguing that clerks didn’t know what to do because there were no longer any guidelines in place and the Waukesha County ruling didn’t say what counts as a full address. Doing.
The lawsuits were filed by Rise Inc., a liberal group that mobilizes young voters, and the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin.
The judge on Tuesday outlined four ways in which a witness statement can be accepted if there is some missing information.
He said a witness address can be accepted if it includes the house number, street name and municipality, but neither a state name nor a zip code or anything but a municipality and state name. It would also be acceptable for the witness to provide the same house number and street name as the voter, but no other address information is provided.
And it would also be permissible for the witness to indicate that his or her address is the same as that of the voter by saying ‘same’, ‘same address’, ‘same as voter’, ‘same as above’, ‘ see above’, ‘ditto’. or by using quotation marks or an arrow or line pointing to the other address.
The Legislative Audit Bureau reviewed nearly 15,000 absentee ballots from the 2020 elections in 29 municipalities in 2021 and found that 1,022, or about 7%, were missing portions of witness addresses. Only 15 ballots, or 0.1%, did not have a witness address. Auditors found that clerks had corrected the addresses of 66 envelopes, or 0.4% of the sample.