How Madison Screwed Up Election Ballots

State St. in downtown Madison, WI. Photo by Mariiana Tzotcheva.

Madison city officials running the November 2024 election stored ballot tabulators, absentee ballots and other voting materials in a former brewery where doors were not always locked and a homeless person was once found sleeping, a Wisconsin Elections Commission investigation found.

The Commission investigated why 193 properly returned absentee ballots were not counted in elections for president, members of Congress and the Legislature — an error that former City Clerk, Maribeth Witzel-Behl who resigned in April, waited weeks to acknowledge.

Although the 193 uncounted ballots would not have changed any election results, the incident continues debates over potential voter fraud and election security.

Those debates are especially relevant in Wisconsin, where statewide elections are decided by margins of less than 1%. City of Madison voters cast the biggest margins for Democratic candidates in the state.

Failure to count the 193 absentee ballots cast in three city wards was “unconscionable,” Election Commissioners Ann Jacobs and Don Millis said in a report to the full commission. Jacobs, a Democratic appointee, chairs the commission; Millis is a Republican appointee.

“These ballots were treated as unimportant and a reconciliation nuisance, rather than as the essential part of our democracy they represent,” Jacobs and Millis said. “This profound failure undermines public confidence in elections,” they added. “It is essential that every voter knows their properly-cast ballot will be counted.”

Their report documented repeated failures by city clerk employees to follow state laws requiring the tracking and recording of absentee ballots, and the secure storage of voting machines and other materials.

The commission accepted the investigation last week and did not make a criminal referral to the state Justice Department. “This is about fixing what went wrong and making sure it doesn’t happen in the future,” Jacobs said.

One specific failure involved how 5-foot-long red security carts, which weigh 275 pounds each and are made of industrial strength steel, were stored at the former Ale Asylum brewery near Madison’s airport.

The locked carts contained “ballot tabulators, ExpressVote accessible voting machines, and other supplies” for each polling place, according to the commission report.

“Absentee ballots…are placed inside the ballot bins of the tabulators, along with blank ballots for that ward. The cabinet is then locked and sealed after the public test of voting equipment. Similarly, once each security cart has been filled with the necessary equipment and materials, it is locked,” the report said. “Numerous individuals have keys to access the former Ale Asylum brewery building. On more than one occasion workers have found doors unlocked at the building, and on one occasion workers came to the facility to find an unauthorized person sleeping in the facility.

“According to one of the workers at the facility, it is possible that unauthorized persons could access the room.”

Not counting the 193 absentee ballots, and then waiting weeks to report the error, amounted to a “confluence of errors,” Jacobs and Millis concluded.

“First, Madison did not have in place any procedures that would track the number of absentee ballots going to a polling place,” they wrote. “This very basic information would have alerted the chief inspectors at the polling places that they were missing ballots.

“It was a report that was easily run on the WisVote system and could have been transmitted to the chief inspectors. Second, there was a complete lack of leadership…. It was the job of [Witzel-Behl] to immediately take action once notified about the found ballots, and she did nothing.

“It was the responsibility of the deputy clerk to take action in her absence, and he did nothing.”

The elections commission report noted that “new leadership” in the clerk’s office has made changes to prevent the November errors from being repeated. Madison City Attorney Mike Haas, the former administrator of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, is serving as city clerk.

But, Jacobs and Millis said, “It is essential that the public understands what has occurred, so that municipalities throughout the state can review their own processes and make certain that they too do not find themselves in this very unfortunate situation.”

The elections commission learned of the failure to count the absentee ballots when a city employee called the commission weeks after the election, trying to reconcile the 193-vote difference with certified vote totals. The call set off alarm bells.

Steven Walters first started covering the Capitol in 1988. Contact him at stevenscotwalters@gmail.com.