MADISON, Wisconsin — Republicans in Wisconsin are looking into edited absentee ballot envelopes as President Trump continues to contest the results of the election and alleged fraud.
One aspect of last week’s election that the GOP is raising questions about is how absentee ballot envelopes were edited by clerks. Wisconsin is a state that requires a witness to sign off on every absentee ballot, along with providing their address. The information is placed on the ballot envelopes that contain the absentee votes.
Wisconsin state law stipulates that “if a certificate is missing the address of a witness, the ballot may not be counted.” A GOP official told the Washington Examiner that there have been reports that when the addresses of witnesses were missing, clerks in some cases simply looked the addresses up and filled the information in themselves.
“We’ve got reports that clerks — when absentee ballots would come in without the witness information — the clerks would fill it out for them. They would basically fix their absentee ballot for them,” the official said. “We don’t know how many there were. We know that there was reports that it happened. Whether it was 1,000, 10,000, it seems like what we are hearing is that it is significant.”
While state law doesn’t say whether a witness is required to fix the ballot envelope if it doesn’t have a signature, some Republicans, including former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, have contended that a clerk is not supposed to cure ballots without addresses.
“The one meaningful path that the president would have in Wisconsin would be to challenge the, I believe, illegal clerks writing in the addresses for the absentee voters’ witnesses,” Gableman told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Despite that claim, the Wisconsin Elections Commission has issued guidance that said clerks are allowed to correct addresses if they can find the information, although that guidance is not codified into state law.
The GOP official said during a Monday interview that in the larger municipalities, clerks used a red pen on the ballot envelopes to indicate where edits were made. The official said that when the absentee ballots began to come through on Election Day to be counted, observers at the polls noticed that “a lot” of the ballots had red pen on the envelopes, which indicated that a clerk had made a change.
In Wisconsin, absentee ballots are typically counted at the location where a person would have voted if they had voted in person, although in the larger municipalities such as Milwaukee, Madison, and Green Bay, there are central locations where all absentee ballots are sent to be tabulated.
The official said that places like those central locations are where “you get a bigger picture” and where observers were noticing a lot of red markings on absentee ballot envelopes.
“Now, all that stuff has to be saved, so that’s the other thing. … During canvassing or during a potential recount, all of that stuff is available to witness,” the official said. “So if they were to perform a recount, you can get an idea of how many of these envelopes had actually been altered in some way.”
Cynthia Warner, a Republican who was an election night worker at Milwaukee’s Central Count facility, told the Washington Examiner on Tuesday that the Trump campaign is reaching out to people who worked to tabulate absentee ballots at the facility last week.
“The Trump campaign is reaching out to our county coordinator to get in touch with people who worked Central Count,” she said.
In addition to the altered absentee ballot envelopes, Republicans in Wisconsin are also raising questions about a large number of people, new voters in particular, who avoided having to show a photo ID to vote by listing themselves as “indefinitely confined.”
People in Wisconsin can self-certify that they are indefinitely confined to their residences because of physical illness, age, or if they are temporarily disabled. Amid the pandemic in March, clerks in two counties said that the state’s lockdown counted as being indefinitely confined, and while the state’s Supreme Court later pushed back on that notion, the number of indefinitely confined voters skyrocketed this year.
The Trump campaign has claimed it will be pursuing a recount in Wisconsin. Presumptive President-elect Joe Biden leads Trump, 49.6% to 48.9%, in Wisconsin, or by just about 20,500 votes. Trump won the Badger State in 2016 by fewer than 23,000 votes. A recount increased Trump’s lead by 131 votes.
Katherine Doyle contributed to this article.
