By Daniel Payne
The Constitution allows only for state legislatures to change the ways elections are conducted, but memos show Wisconsin election supervisors made three substantial changes in 2020 that impact potentially tens of thousands of ballots in a battleground state that Joe Biden won by just 20,000.
Records reviewed by Just the News show that an executive branch agency called the Wisconsin Election Commission:
- permitted local county election clerks to cure spoiled ballots by filling in missing addresses for witnesses even though state law invalidates any ballot without a witness address.
- exempted as many as 200,000 citizens from voter ID rules by allowing them to claim the COVID-19 pandemic caused them to be “indefinitely confined.”
- failed to purge 130,000 names from outdated voter rolls as required by law.
The question now is whether those changes — in particular the instructions allowing clerks to cure ballots with missing information — will open the door for the courts to intervene as President Trump looks to contest ballot practices in multiple battleground states. The Trump campaign is seeking a recount in Wisconsin.
“This is a complication thing about elections like this,” said Derek Muller, a professor of law at the Iowa School of Law and an expert in legal election matters. “I’ve seen it in a lot of jurisdictions, what might be sort of a technical violation of the statute, in this case encouragement to county clerks about how to use their judgment on whether or not to cure a ballot.”
State officials, he said, might have construed the directive as something of a fraud prevention measure, so that election authorities could track down witnesses if need be. The issue of whether or not the election commission violated the law could depend on how the statute is worded and interpreted, he added.
Wisconsin Statute 6.87(6d) stipulates that any ballot “may not be counted” if it is missing the address of the voter’s witness. The Wisconsin Elections Commission in August issued a directive to voters that reaffirmed that statute: “If [the witness signature and address] is missing, your ballot will not be counted,” the directive read.