(The Center Square) – Following a clerical error that led to thousands of duplicate absentee ballots being sent out, Madison City Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl spoke Wednesday about the state and city’s election security guardrails in place for the November elections.
Witzel-Behl listed some checks and balances in Wisconsin’s voter registration process, including the requirement that clerks regularly check the state voter registration system for matches with Wisconsin death or felon records, or voter matches at two different addresses within the state. The state also receives notifications from other states if someone who had been registered in Wisconsin registers elsewhere, and subsequently cancels the person’s previous registration.
“But behind the scenes, there’s even more going on,” she said. “There’s an interface between the Wisconsin voter registration system and the State DOT and the Social Security Administration, and it’s confirming your identity behind the scenes. If something comes back as a mismatch, your clerk will follow up with you.”
Regarding the security of absentee ballots, Witzel-Behl pointed out that each absentee ballot is sent in a certificate envelope with a unique barcode, and ballots stay in the sealed envelopes until they are checked into the poll book. A voter can only be checked into the poll book once, and each voter is sequentially numbered, ensuring that no one can vote twice.
Witzel-Behl’s remarks come after a data processing error Monday led to roughly 2,000 absentee voters receiving duplicate ballots, drawing ire from officials like Rep. Tom Tiffany, who sent a letter demanding answers.
“Given the history of controversial and legally dubious election practices carried out by Madison officials in the past – and your own personal history as an operative for the left-wing, ‘Zuckerbucks’ financed Center for Tech and Civic Life–I don’t have to tell you how important it is for the city to provide full transparency regarding how an ‘error’ of this magnitude was allowed to happen at such a pivotal time,” Tiffany wrote.
Witzel-Behl explained the error in her talk and said it poses no security risks.
“What happened was, one of the files of absentee voter names and addresses, we accidentally ran it through twice, and so we sent them two mailings. The barcode on the envelope is identical, so they got two identical ballet envelopes. And we can only check in one,” she said, noting that once the barcode is scanned, the voting system does not allow a ballot with the same barcode to be submitted. “And if somebody returns two marked ballots in the same envelope, both of those ballots get rejected.”
Witzel-Behl also addressed concerns about drop box security, saying each drop box in Madison is emptied daily by a team of two sworn election officials, and the ballots are delivered to the appropriate clerk in a bag with a tamper-evident seal and a unique serial number.
Additional election security measures taken before, on, and following Election Day include:
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Ballot tabulation machines are pre-tested by the Dane County Clerk, where each digitally-signed memory stick and every type of ballot design in use is run through thousands of machines. The device programming on the machines cannot be overwrote, bypassed, deactivated, or changed in any way once installed. The city of Madison then independently tests the memory sticks received from the clerk in its own machines, and the testing is available for public viewing.
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Voters receive a voting number when checking in at the polls, and the chief election inspector verifies hourly how many voting number slips have been issued with how many ballots have been counted by the tabulator.
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Poll workers make duplicate records of the poll book, voter registration list, and poll results so that the county clerk receives one copy and the city clerk another. If a recount is called, the two results are then compared.
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After election night, both the county clerk and the state will each choose random electoral districts, or wards, to audit. Madison is always included in these audits.
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