Late in December, election officials in Madison, Wisconsin, announced that nearly 200 ballots went uncounted in the November election. The Wisconsin Election Commision (WEC) has ordered an investigation into how this could possibly have hapened and especially why City Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl sat on the information for so long:
The commission voted unanimously during a special meeting Thursday to begin the bipartisan investigation into the city clerk’s office and whether “Witzel-Behl has failed to comply with the law or abused her discretion regarding the 193 uncounted absentee ballots.”
Although the Elections Commission confirmed that the voters’ choices on the 193 ballots were not enough to alter any election outcomes, commission Chair Ann Jacobs called the incident egregious and said the city’s response lacked the transparency she has experienced with other mishaps.
“When we’ve had other mistakes made by municipalities, we knew about it within minutes of it happening, of them figuring out what happened. We were in the loop,” Jacobs said.
“We were able to work with them to figure out the solution. We figured out what the problem was; we put it in our canvas so that when we canvassed at the state level, we were able to incorporate that.”
This is the first time that the WEC has exercised its authority to conduct such an investigation without a complaint but felt that it was imperative to do it as soon as possible due to primary elections coming up in February.
