Incorrect absentee ballots sent to nearly 220 voters in two Milwaukee aldermanic districts

Nearly 220 Milwaukee voters were mailed absentee ballots for Common Council districts other than their own ahead of the April 2 election, a problem the city's top election official said would have been caught before the ballots were sent out had employees followed procedures.

"I can't express how frustrating and infuriating it is that it just seems like there was no critical thinking involved or communication," Milwaukee Election Commission Executive Director Claire Woodall said.

The Election Commission on Thursday conducted an analysis of absentee ballots to determine whether there were any other problems after incorrect ballots surfaced in two wards earlier this week, one ward in District 6 north of downtown and another in District 14 that covers Bay View, Woodall said.

That analysis showed an additional ward in District 6 where 53 voters had received ballots meant for a ward in a different aldermanic district, she said Friday.

She said she understood concerns about the issue, noting that just a handful of votes can decide local elections.

All 15 members of the Common Council will be on the ballot in the upcoming election. There are races for eight of the seats, including District 6. In the others, incumbents are not facing a challenger.

The Election Commission is working to ensure the problem was isolated and following up with voters to ensure they receive and understand how to vote the correct ballots they receive, she said. The correct ballots were mailed Monday to the original 165 voters who were earlier discovered to have received the wrong ballot.

Woodall said that she was going out Friday morning to deliver correct ballots to the 53 additional voters she discovered on Thursday night, with hopes of speaking personally to the affected voters.

Disciplinary action has also been taken, she said.

Voters affected in two Milwaukee council districts, north of downtown and in Bay View

Written procedures on which staff had been recently trained were not followed in the mailing of the erroneous ballots, Woodall said.

The 96 ballots that were incorrectly sent to Ward 236 in District 14 were instead for Ward 96 in District 7 in the central city, she said.

In District 6, there were 69 absentee voters who were mailed a ballot for Ward 19, which is in District 1 on the city's north side, instead of their correct ballot for Ward 119.

Also in District 6, there were 53 voters in Ward 115 who received the absentee ballots for Ward 15, which is in District 9 on the city's north side.

These ballots were part of the initial batch of 19,000 to 20,000 absentee ballots mailed last week, she said.

The procedure for mailing this initial batch of ballots involves three staff members, each of whom is supposed to act as a check on the assembly process, she said.

There are staff members who are responsible for pulling ballots from the shelves. Separate staff members then review the ballots, stamp them with Woodall's initials and complete the assembly process by making sure each prepared envelope has a ballot.

Finally, a full-time, permanent staff member is responsible for spot-checking ballots in every ward of the initial batch to ensure everything within the absentee packet is complete and accurate, Woodall said. That includes ensuring that the labels are correct, all the letters that accompany the mailing are present and that the correct ballot and initial are included.

This process was not followed.

Woodall said in the District 6 case involving 69 voters, which came to election officials' attention on Sunday, it appears the wrong ballot was pulled, temporary staff reviewed and stamped the wrong ballot, and the full-time, permanent employee did not conduct a final spot-check.

In the District 14 case, which surfaced Monday, instead of pulling 96 ballots to send to Ward 236, election workers pulled 96 ballots for Ward 96, she said.

The incorrect mailing of the additional 53 absentee ballots in District 6 mirrored the error that occurred in the other District 6 ward, where the wards that were conflated differed by one number, she said.

The full-time employee did not catch these errors, she said.

District 14 Ald. Marina Dimitrijevic said she had learned of the issue from her constituents, who called her office to report her name was not on the ballot they received. At the same time, the Election Commission reached out to her office, she said.

Dimitrijevic said she wanted to see the immediate issue addressed but also changes in protocols to prevent the mailing of incorrect ballots in the future. Asked if she was confident the issue in her district was isolated to the 96 ballots, Dimitrijevic said she was concerned and had asked for a review.

"I do not doubt the integrity of any of our elections, and I'm saying that as somebody ... that is the most impacted, as of what we know right now," she said. "I'm not happy about it, but I am just looking for that immediate remedy."

Milwaukee Election Commission sent correct ballots, working to ensure the problem was isolated to two voting wards

A letter explaining what happened accompanied the new ballots sent to affected voters earlier this week, and the office worked Thursday to determine whether any other wards were affected, Woodall said.

"I understand this has eroded a lot of trust in what should be a perfect process," she said.

In the first two wards that were discovered, the Election Commission called affected voters who provided a phone number, Woodall said. Starting next week, the office will consider going door-to-door to contact voters who have not returned the new ballot to ensure they got the second ballot and understood the instructions, she said.

To determine whether the problem was isolated to these two wards, she said, the office created an inventory of the absentee ballots that should be on the Election Commission shelves in its secure ballot room, which was compared against a count of the ballots there.

If concerns surfaced about another ward, she said Thursday, additional steps would be taken.

Then, on Thursday night, the third ward was discovered. She said the majority of the voters she was able to reach by phone Thursday night had returned the first ballot and were not aware of the error. However, she said she was able to see on one that had been returned, without opening the envelope, that the ballot had a stripe at the top that confirms it is for the incorrect ward.

There will not be a final "audit" of all the absentee ballots until election day, when clerks can open and process them.

"We are doing everything we can to investigate and crisis manage and prevent and determine any areas of concern, but we won't have an audit until election day," she said.

A letter the Election Commission sent to affected voters says the office has a tracking system in place to ensure only one ballot is counted if both are returned.

If a voter returns both ballots, the Election Commission will be able to tell which is new by pink highlighting on the new envelope and ballot, she said. The two ballots will be kept together until election day, when the envelope with pink highlighter will be opened and the ballot will be counted as long as it is the correct one. The second envelope will only be opened if the correct ballot is not in the envelope with highlighting, she said.

Voters who are casting their ballots absentee by mail and want to ensure that their ballot is correct should check that the ward number on their ballot matches the ward number on their certificate envelope that includes the label with their name, she said.

Ballot error prompting disciplinary action

The Election Commission has taken disciplinary action against the employees involved in the error, Woodall said.

The temporary employees now have incident reports in their personnel files while the permanent, full-time employee has been subject to "very severe" disciplinary action, she said.

The full-time employee, she said, is on a "very short timeline for a performance improvement plan to ensure that policies and procedures are not just followed but also documented."

The full-time employee did spot checks but did not document any of them and did not spot-check every ward, a requirement that has been part of the office's procedures for more than a decade, she said. The employee has two decades of election experience, Woodall said.

That person is still working on the election under the close supervision of the office's deputy director to make sure processes and procedures are followed, she said.

"I don't think there was any mal-intent in this, I think it was gross negligence and completely unacceptable," Woodall said.

Milwaukee council member dismayed at ballot error

The importance of each vote in local races is not lost on Ald. Andrea Pratt, who represents the District 1 ward from which District 6 voters received absentee ballots.

Pratt won her seat last year by 17 votes in a race that also had a ballot issue. At most, 21 voters in a single ward received ballots that incorrectly omitted that race, Woodall told the Journal Sentinel at the time. The error was the result of a ward split between aldermanic Districts 1 and 6.

Pratt, who is running unopposed this time, said she learned of the issue in the current race from an affected citizen, who reached out after receiving the wrong ballot. The voter received a second ballot but will be going to early in-person voting instead, Pratt said.

"I'm just kind of at a loss for words," Pratt said. "I don't know if I have full confidence in what's happening at the Election Commission. They said it was human error, which is fully possible ... but when I think about the fact that I won by 17 votes, saying that (69) ballots went to the wrong people, that's a big deal."

"It definitely has to be corrected."

Woodall said the office created additional procedures to prevent the errors from Pratt's 2023 election from reoccurring, adding that "we continue to make staffing decisions that reflect past mistakes."

That error involved temporary staff at early voting sites, and the managers at some of those sites have been changed, she said.

Editor's note: This story was updated March 22 to reflect additional absentee ballots that were discovered to have been improperly sent to a third ward in Common Council District 6.

Alison Dirr can be reached at [email protected].

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Incorrect absentee ballots sent to nearly 220 voters in Milwaukee