Tiffany Demands Answers After Madison Clerk Mails Duplicate Ballots

One of Wisconsin’s Republican congressmen isn’t satisfied with the answers about Madison’s duplicate ballots.

Madison’s clerk's office on Monday announced it had mistakenly mailed two ballots to nearly 2,000 voters in the city.

“The Madison Clerk’s Office is rectifying a data processing error that caused duplicate absentee ballots to be sent to around 2,000 voters,” the clerk’s office said in a two-paragraph news release. “The error affected only an isolated number of voters and was quickly caught and corrected so that it will not affect any other ballots going forward.”

Northwoods Congressman Tom Tiffany said that’s not good enough.

“I think it just leads to a lot of questions,” Tiffany told News Talk 1130 WISN’s Jay Weber Tuesday morning. “Have they reviewed all of the wards to make sure there's no more duplicates? What ward was it? How did they catch it? Did they get complaints? Have any double printed ballots been returned? Are they going to verify that there aren’t two ballots being counted? Has law enforcement been contacted?”

The clerk’s office has not yet explained just what happened. But managers say they are confident that voters who got two ballots will not be able to vote twice.

“Because the duplicate ballots have identical barcodes, in the unlikely event that a voter submits two absentee ballots, only one can be counted. Once that barcode is scanned, the voting system does not allow a ballot with the same barcode to be submitted,” Madison’s clerk’s office explained. “The voter is also marked in the poll book as having submitted their absentee ballot as another safeguard against the voter submitting a second ballot.”

“This is going to undermine ballot integrity in Wisconsin. The city of Madison can't just waive this away as they said ‘Oh yeah, they've got barcodes. People will not be able to vote twice.’,” Tiffany explained. “I'm not so confident of that. We're going to be sending a letter off to the city of Madison asking questions about this today. This deserves much greater scrutiny than what the city of Madison is waving it off as is just an innocent mistake.”

Tiffany said Madison’s clerk ignored Wisconsin’s election laws in the last presidential election by allowing people to vote indefinitely confined (and therefore voting without ID). And by allowing Democracy in the Park, which was essentially a mass, in-person absentee voting event.

Tiffany has also been a vocal critic of Wisconsin’s election loopholes, and the 2020 election. It was just last week that he spoke at a news conference on election integrity.