Republican lawmakers floated a rule Wednesday to allow local election officials to correct minor errors in absentee ballot envelopes so the votes inside can be counted.
While Wisconsin Election Commission guidelines issued in 2016 that allowed corrections remain in place, a lawsuit is pending to quash that guidance as well.
Critics said killing the rule or guideline would deprive thousands of voters of hearing on Election Day simply because of an accidental error.
The rule that was suspended Wednesday by the GOP-controlled Legislature’s administrative rules committee asserted that local election officials could make corrections or complete information on the addresses of absentee voting witnesses.
“To stop this, as the Republican leaders of this legislature have asked you to do, would be to disenfranchise a voter for the tiniest of reasons,” Matt Rothschild, executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, said at a public hearing before The Joint Committee on Review of Administrative Rules voted 6-4 along party lines to kill the rule.
“This is voter suppression looking for a problem that doesn’t exist,” said Sen. Kelda Roys (D-Madison).
The proposed rule included the regulation envelope that comes with an absentee ballot and that a voter must use to return it. The envelope includes an affidavit that the voter and witness must both sign, and each must include their address.
State law It requires that if a ballot is missing the address of the witness, the ballot cannot be counted. Another statute allows the election official to return the ballot to the voter to correct address or other errors.
In 2016, the Wisconsin Elections Commission told local election officials that they must correct or complete a witness’s address in case of minor errors. The guidance said that to be considered complete, the address “must include at least a street name and number as well as a municipality,” according to the Legislative Audit Bureau in its October 2021 report on the 2020 presidential election.
When the guidance was issued in 2016, it won unanimous approval from the six-member, bipartisan commission and received the OK from then-Attorney General Brad Schimel, a Republican, Rothschild noted in his hearing testimony.
In October 2020, election commission staff updated the guidance to say that local clerks should attempt to fill in missing witness address information before Election Day, and that they can do so based on personal knowledge, voter registration information, or calling the voter or witness.
The Legislative Audit Bureau’s report on the 2020 election included a section on corrective practice and recommended that if the election commission believed it should continue, commission staff and the commission should issue an administrative rule. The commission voted to do so in December 2021, and in January, the Legislature’s rules committee ordered the commission to issue an emergency rule as well.
The emergency rule was published July 11 and three days later, Republican leaders of the legislature called for her to be thrown out.
In a letter to the administrative rules committee, Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu (R-Oostburg), Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) and Assembly Speaker Pro Tem Tyler August (R-Lake Geneva) doubled down on the law the state which requires that if the certificate lacks the address of the witness, “the ballot cannot be counted”.
The three GOP leaders also said the election commission lacked the authority under the law to determine what makes an address complete or to direct local officials to correct missing or incomplete information.
At Wednesday’s committee hearing, Sen. Duey Stroebel (R-Saukville) reiterated that position. “We are voting on a motion finding that this emergency rule is against the law and against the legislative intent,” Stroebel said. “I mean, it’s that simple.”
If a local clerk sees that a ballot envelope is missing the required information, “the clerk can return the ballot to the voter,” he said. “This is the medicine – no [that] the clerk may decide to complete the lines.”
Democrats on the committee along with witnesses who opposed killing the rule said the result would leave the votes needlessly uncounted.
“You’re doing this because of your false allegation of fraud in the 2020 election,” state Rep. Lisa Subeck (D-Madison) told committee Republicans.
In his testimony, Madison election attorney Jeff Mandel noted that the state’s current election law “provides no definition of the word ‘address,'” while the rule would have filled that gap.
Mandel also took issue with Republicans’ unwillingness to be flexible about an address witness with the election commission’s own decision in June to accept Republican Tim Michels’ nomination papers despite “the absence of his state and zip code from a required mailing address expressly” in most cases. of documents under Wisconsin law.
“It would be absolutely perverse to hold a gubernatorial candidate to a lower standard than we ordinary voters,” Mandel said. “And it would be particularly perverse to say, as the suspension of the rule here would do, that the statutes require less of an incumbent candidate who has legal control and responsibility for their nomination papers than the statutes require of an absentee voter who do not check the witness who signed the envelope of the ballot.”
Sen. Steve Nass (R-Whitewater), the JCRAR co-chair, rejected claims that ending the rule would disenfranchise voters, but several speakers and committee members predicted the outcome would be widespread.
“This [witness address correction] it’s a longstanding practice that people have been doing for years, and we really have no idea the extent of that — we have no idea how many voters that would affect,” Roys said.
“And we really don’t know who those voters are,” she added. “It’s amazing to me that Republicans seem so eager to throw people’s votes away and make it harder for people to vote, when in fact, I actually think that in many cases … you would be disproportionately disenfranchising your constituents.”
However, even with Wednesday’s vote, Wisconsin Election Commission member Ann Jacobs told the Wisconsin Examiner that the original 2016 guidance is still in effect and that local clerks can make corrections or add missing information to the witness’s address. .
“JCRAR said either rescind your guidance or file an emergency rule codifying our guidance,” Jacobs said in a direct message exchange on Twitter. “We have presented an emergency rule. Today they ruled that we did not have the authority to promulgate the rule that they instructed us to submit.”
However, the instruction was not cancelled.
“So our guidance from 2016 remains in place,” Jacobs said. His revocation would require a vote of at least four commissioners on the equally divided body.
However, the Waukesha Republican Party filed a lawsuit on July 12 against the guideline itself. With the rule revoked, the lawsuit and original guidance are now likely to take center stage.
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