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"A Complete Lack of Leadership"
Wisconsin’s election managers are planning to ask more questions about Madison’s missing absentee ballots.
The Wisconsin Elections Commission on Friday voted to continue its investigation into the nearly 200 absentee ballots that were lost and never counted.
Commission Chair Ann Jacobs said she was shocked by the chain of events, including how the people at Madisons's clerk's office stayed quiet about the missing ballots for weeks.
The Elections Commission’s initial investigation laid the plan with the procedures at Madison's clerk's office that allowed the ballots to go missing in the first place.
“I am genuinely troubled by the number of profoundly bad decisions that are recited in these materials leading up to Election Day,” Jacobs said during Friday's meeting.
Jacobs added that the entire thing “feels like a complete lack of leadership” by Madison Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl.
Jacobs added there's "a refusal to be where the buck stops.”
The clerk’s office found 67 uncounted absentee ballots about a week after Election Day in November. They found nearly 125 others about a month after Election Day.
Neither batch was ever counted. In fact, most people didn’t know about the missing ballots until just before Christmas when the news went public.
The clerk’s office cooperated with the first WEC investigation, but didn’t answer every question posed by the Elections Commission.
The new investigation will focus on what happened on Election Day, and commissioners said they will have election workers sit for depositions as part of the case.
A spokesman for the city of Madison said the city will “fully cooperate” with the new investigation.
It’s not just commissioners who want more answers. The liberal law firm Law Forward last week filed a lawsuit on behalf of some of the voters’ whose ballots weren’t counted. The lawsuit seeks $175,000 apiece.
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