Of the nearly 1,400 absentee ballot certificates, maybe 45 or 50 were worth a second look.
Seven of the certificates, printed on the back of the return envelopes containing absentee ballots, lacked a witness address, which should have disqualified the associated ballots immediately. Eight others listed addresses but no ZIP codes, city or state. Some were not dated, or displayed dates that had been crossed out and corrected.
In some cases, clerks corrected the errors; in others, they didn’t. But in all cases, the ballots contained in the envelopes were counted, and the clerks who counted them say the voters who cast them were all eligible to vote.
The mistakes by voters in the Dodge County towns of Herman, Lomira and Rubicon, which went heavily for former President Donald Trump in the 2020 election, were not surprising. A similar review by the Wisconsin State Journal of thousands of ballots cast in the Democratic stronghold of Madison turned up scores of ballot envelopes in which voters made the same kinds of small errors.
But the reviews suggest that failure to follow the fine print in filling out a government form doesn’t discriminate by party, even as some Republicans in the Legislature are seeking to prohibit clerks from “curing” ballot certificates with incomplete information.
Clerks are allowed to return ballots to voters to correct defects as time allows, although they’re not required to. Since 2016, the Wisconsin Elections Commission has also instructed clerks that they may make minor corrections to witness addresses and initial any changes they make.