Election Commission Working To Prevent Repeat of Madison Ballot Counting Failure
Wisconsin’s Elections Commission will work with Madison officials on an order designed to improve city policies and procedures, so that a recent snafu involving nearly 200 uncounted ballots doesn’t happen again.
The commission learned in December that 193 absentee ballots from the city of Madison went uncounted in the Nov. 5 election. Those ballots would not have changed the outcome of any race or referendum at the local, state or national level.
In January, the bipartisan commission voted to launch its own investigation into how the problem occurred and why it took more than a month for it to be reported to the agency. As part of that investigation, Wisconsin Elections Commission Chair Ann Jacobs, a Democrat, and Don Millis, a Republican, took depositions from more than a dozen city and county staff members.
The election commission released those finding in draft form last week. On Thursday, commissioners voted to formally accept the scathing report, which said the uncounted ballots resulted from a “confluence of errors.” The report describes the problem as “profound failure” and said former City Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl showed an “astonishing” lack of urgency in trying to correct or report it.
https://urbanmilwaukee.com/2025/07/18/election-commission-working-to-prevent-repeat-of-madison-ballot-counting-failure/