(The Center Square) – Wisconsin’s election managers are going to look into Madison’s 200 missing absentee ballots found in the days and weeks after Election Day.
“The integrity of the election process is important and we needed to know and understand this,” Wisconsin Election Commission Chairwoman Ann Jacobs said.
Madison’s city clerk found 193 ballots in two batches, the first Nov. 12 and the second Dec. 3.
“I’m not looking at this as a punishment or something we need to investigate because of wrong doing,” Republican commissioner Marge Bostelmann said. “We need to investigate it to make sure it goes smoothly in the future and that we don’t have any other problems.”
Republican commissioner Don Mills said he continues to have questions about how the ballots went unnoticed for a week in one case and nearly a month in the other.
“My biggest concern here is why it took a month and a half for this to come out. That’s very, very disturbing and I’m hoping we can determine why that happened,” Mills said.
Madison’s election managers didn’t alert anyone about the missing absentee ballots until late last month. In fact, it wasn’t until the day after Christmas that Madison’s mayor announced that the ballots had been found.
“A discrepancy of this magnitude is unacceptable,” Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said in a statement after Christmas. “This oversight is a significant departure from the high standard our residents expect and must be addressed and avoided in future elections.”
The mayor said the missing 193 ballots would not have swayed any election or ballot question, either in Madison or statewide.
The investigation into Madison’s election operation will be the first the commission has undertaken since it was created in 2016.
Republican commissioner Bob Spindell suggested the commission investigate Milwaukee’s election operation as well.
Milwaukee’s central count had to recount more than 30,000 ballots on Election Night after a worker noticed that doors on a vote counting machine were not properly closed.
Wisconsin Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson complained that Milwaukee’s central count operation was “sloppy,” and said the recount raised questions that need to be answered.
Jacobs said commissioners could discuss that at a later meeting.
No one is saying how long the investigation into Madison’s missing ballots will take, or what will happen once the investigation has wrapped-up.
