MacIver News Service | October 30, 2012
[New Berlin, Wisc…] The New Berlin City Clerk is confident in her office’s ability to ensure election integrity after catching a duplicate absentee ballot request for a nursing home patient. However, that patient’s daughter says if she wasn’t proactive, the extra ballot could have slipped through the cracks.Patti Logsdon told the MacIver News Service that her mother is a resident of a memory care unit in New Berlin. Patti told the nursing home she had already taken care of her mother’s voting needs. Minutes later in the hallway, she said a worker told her the facility had made an absentee ballot request on behalf of her mother.
Patti said she went to city hall to ensure they did not send out a second ballot. She found out the request from the nursing home misspelled her mother’s name. However, Kari Morgan, the City Clerk, said the second application was flagged and no second ballot had been mailed out.
Morgan told MNS the Special Registration Deputy (SRD) from the the care unit called to ask if “three or four residents at the facility were registered to vote.” According to Morgan, her office checked each name to see if they had been registered. The name the SRD gave to the City Clerk’s office, “Benz,” was not registered to vote.
“If I had not checked into this, I think a second ballot would have been mailed to my mom at the nursing care facility. Who knows what would have happened to that ballot had it been mailed,” Patti said.
New Berlin City Clerk Kari Morgan believes that the system worked, catching the potential duplicate before the second application was entered into the system and before the ballot was mailed out.