Green Bay clerk sent duplicate absentee ballots

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Green Bay’s city clerk sent duplicate absentee ballots to some voters, prompting a complaint from the Republican Party of Wisconsin on the eve of the April 7 spring election.

City Clerk Celestine Jeffreys, who’s been the subject of multiple election complaints in her tenure, sent more than one absentee ballot to the same voter “in at least 152 instances,” according to an April 6 complaint to the Wisconsin Elections Commission by the Republican Party of Wisconsin and Theresa Sipes, a board member of the Republican Party of Brown County.

The complaint said the state and county parties were contacted between March 30 and April 1 by two voters who described being sent multiple ballots after requesting to vote absentee. One of the voters said they were told that “a system ‘glitch’” was the cause of the duplication, according to the complaint.

Jeffreys then gave the state Republican Party a list of wards where multiple ballots had been sent, along with a copy of letters given to those voters impacted, according to the complaint.

The complainants said that sending multiple ballots violated state election law, saying it would cause “substantial risk of confusion, double voting and (increase) the opportunity for and possibility of fraud.” They called for an investigation by the state election commission and a plan on how Jeffreys would handle duplicate ballots on Election Day.

Jeffreys did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The duplicates were “ordinary human error, not fraud,” said Ann Jacobs, chairwoman of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, in a series of posts to X on April 6.

“It is unclear to me how that happened, but it happened,” she wrote on X, then said that only one ballot may be counted per voter. In the case that a voter would send back duplicate ballots with their votes on both, one would be counted while the other rejected, Jacobs said.

The voting system was made to reject multiple ballots from a single voter, Jacobs said.

The manual detailing the election processes and given to poll workers on Election Day describes several scenarios where poll workers are authorized to reject absentee ballots. In the case that an absentee voter shows up to the polls, votes, and later sends in an absentee ballot, the manual says that a poll worker would reject the secondary ballot and immediately contact the clerk. The manual also requires that absentee ballots must be counted “so that any interested observer is able to hear the public announcement of the names of the absentee electors.”

In the case of Madison’s city clerk who failed to count almost 200 absentee ballots during the 2024 election, the state’s attorney general and election commission sued, and the clerk resigned.

Meagan Wolfe, administrator for the state elections commission, during an April 6 call hosted by the commission declined to comment on the complaint, citing prohibitions by state law. Wolfe then pointed to state law that outlines the typical process of deliberating complaints in public meetings.

“I’m sure if there was a complaint filed that that will be addressed at an upcoming commission meeting,” Wolfe said.

Earlier in the meeting, Wolfe said there’d been “no significant issues” ahead of the spring election.