(The Center Square) – There’s now a lawsuit over the nearly 200 absentee ballots that election managers in Madison didn’t count last fall.
The law firm Law Forward filed a class action suit on behalf of eight voters in Dane County.
“The right to vote is fundamental in the State of Wisconsin and ‘may not under our Constitution and laws be destroyed or even unreasonably restricted. No matter how the franchise is exercised, the Wisconsin Constitution’s guarantee remains constant: the right to vote is ‘a sacred right of the highest character.'” Law Forward wrote in its court filing. “Nevertheless, despite the hallowed protections in our state constitution, [the city of Madison] irrevocably deprived each Plaintiff, and every member of the putative class, of their right to vote in the November 2024 general election.”
In all, Madison’s former clerk and her staff didn’t count 193 absentee ballots cast during the November 2024 election.
An investigation by the Wisconsin Elections Commission discovered that the clerk’s office found some of the ballots about a week after Election Day but did nothing. A second batch of ballots were found about a month after Election Day, but then-Clerk Marybeth Wetzel-Behl still did nothing to count the ballots or alert state election managers.
“In late-December 2024, the City of Madison publicly announced that ‘a number of absentee ballots from the November 5, 2024 general election were not properly processed.’ The week after this announcement, the City mailed a letter to each named Plaintiff and each remaining member of the putative class. 84. The letter acknowledged that each Plaintiff’s votes, like the votes of all putative class members, should have been counted and that the failure to count the votes was the City’s fault and/or the fault of the City Defendants,” Law Forward added.
The lawsuit also noted that the Wisconsin Elections Commission found that Madison’s clerk and her election office “disenfranchised” the 193 voters who didn’t have their ballots counted. And the WEC investigation added that Witzel-Behl likely broke state law, though Elections commissioners did not ask for formal charges in the case.
Law Forward is asking for money in the case “to remedy harm, suffering, the deprivation of the right to vote, and punitive damages.” But the lawsuit does not set a specific price.
