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Green Bay Issues New Guidelines for Clerk
City leaders in Green Bay say new guidelines should avoid another round of duplicate ballots being sent to voters.
Green Bay’s city council on Tuesday got an update on the investigation into how its now-former city clerk mailed two ballots to some voters back in April and again ahead of the primary earlier this month.
Interim City Clerk Stacy Menke told council members that they believe "human error" was to blame for April's mix-up.
“We print out all the ballots that we should have, have a list of them and we manually check off name by name, ward by ward, to ensure we only have one ballot per person. In addition at central count, a voter is issued a number in the poll book and they can’t be issued a second number if we were to come across a second ballot, which did not happen,” she said.
Green Bay City Attorney Lacey Cochart said the clerk will now work under a new policy aimed at avoiding those problems in the future.
“The single issue here that resulted in these duplicate ballots being printed by the former clerk we are resolving by requiring a multi-step process to re-print and to be tracked that no one person, regardless of position in the clerk’s office, can re-print even one label,” Cochart added.
Menke said the new multi-step verification process should be ready in time for the November election.
"It’s going to take time. It’s going to take consistency showing and transparency in showing what we are capable of doing and what processes we do have in place so they can understand that their voting and their voice is secure with our office,” Menke said.
Now-former Green Bay Clerk Celestine Jeffreys resigned last week. Green Bay's investigation found that she "personally oversaw" the election operations in the spring and this summer. The investigation also revealed, for the first time, that Jeffreys mailed duplicate ballots to 244 voters ahead of the August primary.
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