Sign for the Wisconsin Elections Comission. (Wisconsin Examiner photo)
The Wisconsin Election Commission (WEC) on Tuesday delayed taking action on two complaints against municipal clerks for not following state and federal laws guiding the return of absentee ballots.
A complaint against the city of Greenfield alleges that the local clerk created separate deadlines for disabled voters’ lawfully designated assistants to return absentee ballots. State law gives absentee voters until polls close at 8 p.m. on Election Day to bring their ballot to their designated polling place and drop it off.
In Greenfield, a man returning his wife’s ballot because of her disability was turned away and sent to the clerk’s office because of a local policy that states someone returning another voter’s ballot must take it there.
A separate complaint was filed against the city of Brookfield alleging that the city refused to accept any absentee ballots at polling places and instead required them to be returned to the clerk’s office with enough time for the clerk to bring the ballot to the correct polling place to be counted. The man who brought the complaint alleges that when he arrived at the polling place around 5 p.m. he was told he must bring his ballot to the clerk’s office but that no one would be there to receive it because city staff was in a meeting.
With less than 50 days until the election, Brookfield has drawn other criticisms over its absentee voting policies after the city council voted not to allow the use of absentee ballot drop boxes to collect ballots. A group of voting rights focused organizations held a press conference in the city Tuesday to protest that decision.
At the WEC meeting Tuesday afternoon, which at times grew heated, Republican commissioners questioned if it was possible to create a system that perfectly accommodates voters with disabilities returning their ballots while allowing clerks to affirm that people who have permission to assist a disabled voter are returning another person’s ballot.
“We cannot make this world perfectly equitable for all,” Commissioner Don Millis said.
Republican Commissioner Robert Spindell drew repeated pushback from the Democrats on the commission for arguing that whatever the body decides, it has to make sure it doesn’t encourage “ballot harvesting” — a practice that is prohibited by state law involving organizations gathering and returning large amounts of absentee ballots — which Republicans regularly warn against without much evidence that is widespread. .
The Democrats on the commission also said that the state has had the same interpretation of the absentee ballot statutes since long before WEC was created in 2015 — that voters can return their ballots until polls close at 8 p.m. on Election Day. Commission Chair Ann Jacobs pointed out that the Uniform Voting Instructions, approved by the commission last year and made mandatory for clerks to follow, reaffirm that longstanding interpretation of statute.
“I’m sort of floored that, coincidentally, in a political year, there’s attacks on absentee voting,” Jacobs said. “Suddenly, we’re changing our minds on the rules. I’m just flabbergasted by that. We made those instructions mandatory, and it tells every absentee voter in this state that they can take their absentee ballot to the poll site.”
The Republicans on the commission signaled they’d be unwilling to vote to accept the complaints against the two cities while the Democrats said they didn’t want to take a vote that would upend the interpretation of the uniform voting instructions so close to the election, with hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots already sent to voters with those instructions included on the envelope.
“I am extremely against even the consideration of us undoing our uniform instructions prior to Nov. 4, when we have — what is it? — as of this morning, 450,000 ballots out with our uniform instructions,” Jacobs said.
The commission ultimately voted to delay the consideration of the complaints until after the election.
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