WATERTOWN, Wis. — As absentee voting gets into full swing in battleground Wisconsin, GOP Rep. Tom Tiffany is raising the alarm about what the state’s capital says is a clerical error that resulted in more than 2,000 voters receiving duplicate ballots in the city across multiple wards.
Madison’s communications director, Dylan Brogan, was quick to point out the city has been open about the mistake and cited safeguards that protect against ballots being scanned twice.
“The City of Madison really prides itself on being extremely transparent in our election administration,” Brogan told The Post.
“On the day we found out a clerical error occurred, we immediately reached out to voters.”
Brogan noted the city clerk’s office contacted the 2,000+ voters who received duplicate ballots in one day to notify them to destroy one of the ballots.
The city says the error occurred from an unsuccessful file merge that copied voter files instead of merging them and Tuesday updated the number of voters affected to 2,215.
“Each absentee ballot has unique barcodes and can only be scanned once. If it’s scanned twice, it’s rejected,” Brogan said of a safeguard.
The clerk’s notice on the city website also says that once an absentee ballot is received, it is marked in a poll book to indicate the person has already voted as another safeguard against a second vote.
Rep. Tom Tiffany, whose northern Wisconsin district does not include Madison, sent a strongly worded letter to the city clerk Tuesday, demanding answers for the errors.
Several of Tiffany’s questions asked for clarification on the handling of both the discovery of the error and the duplicate ballots. The city originally said the error was confined to one ward but has since admitted the problem was spread across 10 wards. Tiffany’s asks include:
- Has the Clerk’s Office received any reports of duplicate ballots in other wards, or conducted any due diligence to ensure that this “error” was limited to just a single ward?
- Have any of these duplicate ballots been returned to the Clerk’s Office, and if so, have they been set aside pending an investigation?
- The Clerk’s Office has claimed that the duplicate ballots have unique bar codes. Are these unique ballot bar codes linked to individual, identifiable voter profiles?
Brogan had not seen Tiffany’s letter when he spoke with The Post but said the city would provide answers.
Tiffany’s office confirmed the congressman called for an independent investigation into the error after it was known to have included multiple wards instead of one.
In the 2020 presidential election, a mistake in absentee-ballot reporting in Milwaukee on election night led to allegations of election fraud in the city. Donald Trump unsuccessfully challenged the results of the 2020 presidential election in Wisconsin, including recounts in Dane and Milwaukee counties.
Both a state legislative audit and a private audit by a nonprofit conservative legal group found no widespread election fraud occurred in the 2020 contest in Wisconsin. Both audits cited irregularities and failures to follow election laws or procedures in some instances.
Madison is in Dane County, where high turnout helped swing the state blue in the 2020 presidential election and as recently as the August primary this year, when voters defeated two Republican-backed constitutional amendments on the ballot attempting to rein in Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ spending authority on federal funds, such as pandemic relief funds, by requiring legislative oversight.
President Biden won Dane County in 2020, 75% to Trump’s 22.8%.
Absentee voting began in Wisconsin last week but early in-person voting begins Oct. 22, 14 days before the election.
