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When the clerk of Rock County, Wisconsin, will get a public information request for pictures of election ballots, a lot of it’s simple to meet. For many municipalities within the county, it’s only a matter of importing a photograph of the poll that’s already captured when it will get tabulated.
However for 2 of the county’s largest cities — Janesville and Beloit — it’s much more sophisticated, and time-consuming, due to a state regulation governing locations that use a central counting facility for his or her absentee ballots.
For these ballots, Clerk Lisa Tollefson should redact the distinctive figuring out numbers that the regulation requires ballot employees to put in writing on every one. In any other case, the quantity might be used to attach the ballots to the voters who solid them. And since the numbers don’t seem in the identical place on every poll, Tollefson should click on via the poll pictures one by one to find and blot out the quantity earlier than releasing the photographs.
To answer information requests for this 12 months’s April election, she needed to redact the numbers from 10,000 poll pictures. In November, it was over 23,000.
Given her different job duties, Tollefson says, fulfilling these requests can take months. With out that step, she says, she may fulfill public information requests in “no time in any respect.”
And it’s all as a consequence of a regulation that she and different clerks within the state say shouldn’t be solely outdated, but in addition a possible menace to the constitutional proper in Wisconsin to poll secrecy.
Tollefson and different county clerks stated they assist an ongoing legislative effort to repeal the regulation requiring election officers to put in writing down these numbers. The proposal has come up in previous legislative classes however hasn’t gone far. Will probably be revived once more this 12 months, stated Rep. Scott Krug, a Republican legislative chief and vice chair of the Meeting elections committee.
Quantity is out of date and creates safety threat, clerks say
The regulation might need been helpful up to now, Tollefson stated, when voters who modified their minds or made errors on absentee ballots that had been solid however not but counted may void their poll and solid a brand new one. The ID quantity allowed election officers at central depend services to find the poll and cancel it earlier than issuing a brand new one.
However courts have since blocked voters from spoiling their absentee ballots, rendering the numbers out of date. Now, if a voter tries to solid an in-person poll after already voting absentee, the voter could be flagged within the ballot books as having voted and could be turned away, Tollefson stated.
Furthermore, the labeling of ballots may pose a privateness threat at central depend areas, the place observers and ballot employees may be capable of match up numbers to infer how somebody voted, Tollefson stated. The quantity written on every poll corresponds with the voter’s quantity on the ballot checklist, a public register that election officers use to enter details about voters.
There are guidelines in place to forestall an observer from connecting a poll to the voter who solid it, Tollefson stated, however she added, “We have now legal guidelines that individuals shouldn’t steal, however they nonetheless do.”
Marathon County Clerk Kim Trueblood, a Republican, stated the elevated presence of election observers in recent times exacerbates that threat.
Up to now, there’s no indication that any observers or ballot employees have deliberately used the numbers to hyperlink voters to their absentee ballots at central depend. However election officers instructed Votebeat that the regulation creates an pointless threat, to go together with the numerous added workload.
After the 2020 presidential election, Milwaukee County was requested to launch pictures of its ballots as a part of Donald Trump’s request for a recount within the county. The county had over 265,000 absentee ballots, all marked with figuring out numbers that needed to be redacted individually, Elections Director Michelle Hawley recalled.
Given time pressures, the county employed its election vendor, Election Methods & Software program, to do the redactions. It price $27,000, which the Trump marketing campaign coated as a part of its recount request.
The county has since appeared for methods to streamline the redactions and keep away from outsourcing it, Hawley stated. However the state regulation stays “extraordinarily time-consuming,” she stated. Along with complicating information requests, she stated, the regulation slows down absentee poll processing as election officers at central depend should write a quantity on each poll.
Repealing little-known observe has had little momentum
Trueblood stated the largest impediment to repealing the regulation could also be merely that too few folks understand it exists. She stated she has “talked to each” legislator from Marathon County and a few have been “horrified to study” about what the regulation entails.
“Hopefully the Legislature will do one thing about it,” she stated.
Final session, the proposal to repeal the regulation had bipartisan assist. The Meeting elections committee unanimously permitted it after its Republican creator, former Rep. Donna Rozar, inspired committee members to not low cost the invoice simply because she wrote it with a Democrat.
However the proposal was by no means launched within the Senate and by no means obtained a flooring vote within the Meeting.
Trueblood hopes the Legislature will act earlier than 2026, when there might be an April Supreme Courtroom election and legislative primaries and a common election later within the 12 months.
If they only “cross off that little line within the state statute,” stated Tollefson, “we’d be good to go.”
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based mostly in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
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