Wisconsin Officials Apologize After Mailing Out Duplicate Ballots

Officials in Wisconsin have apologized after more than 2,000 voters in the state’s capital city received duplicate absentee ballots in the mail.
“This was a mistake,” Madison city spokesperson Dylan Brogan said, according to the Associated Press. “On the day we found out a clerical error occurred, we immediately reached out to voters.”
Madison city officials acknowledged that 2,215 duplicate ballots were sent to voters across 10 wards. They explained that, despite the error, the duplicate ballots have identical barcodes, preventing them from being counted more than once.
The error in the battleground state prompted calls from Republicans, including Wisconsin Rep. Tom Tiffany, to investigate.
“The city of Madison clerk said the duplicate absentee ballots were sent to one ward yesterday. Now, they say it’s 10. There needs to be an independent investigation now, not after the election,” Tiffany wrote Wednesday in a post on X.
“Although the Madison Clerk’s Office claims ‘The voting system does not allow a ballot with the same barcode to be submitted,’ my office has proof that there is no barcode on the actual ballots,” Tiffany added in a separate post on X, along with a photo of an absentee ballot.
Tiffany also sent a letter on Tuesday to Madison city officials, asking them to provide information on how the error was discovered and why it occurred.
“Voters deserve clear answers regarding the full scope of this blunder, how the city plans to restore public confidence in its ability to accurately administer the election and assurances that those responsible are held accountable,” the letter said.
Brogan said election clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl was in the process of responding to Tiffany’s letter and “thoroughly answering all of these questions.”
“It doesn’t matter if it’s Tom Tiffany, or who it is, we want everyone to know what happened,” Brogan said.
He added that the error happened when two identical files were merged, leading to a list with duplicate names and addresses. Before the mistake was identified and fixed, around 2,000 duplicate ballots in one ward were mailed late last week, Brogan said.
He added that only “an isolated number” of voters were affected and that the clerk’s office has been contacting voters individually to notify them of the error and cautioning them to submit only one ballot and to destroy the second one “to avoid any confusion.”
“The voter is also marked in the poll book as having submitted their absentee ballot as another safeguard against the voter submitting a second ballot,” Brogan said.
As of Monday, Madison had mailed out 27,421 absentee ballots, with none returned yet, according to the state elections commission. Brogan confirmed that none of the duplicate ballots had been returned since the mailing.
Newsweek has contacted Madison city for further comment.
It comes amid a time of heightened focus on election processes, especially in key battleground states. In 2020, Donald Trump and his allies pushed to overturn results in swing states, including Wisconsin, and filed lawsuits contesting the outcome in Georgia, where he lost by 0.24 percent. All the legal challenges were dismissed following a manual recount that confirmed the results.
In August 2023, Trump was indicted in Fulton County on criminal charges, including racketeering and conspiracy, related to his alleged efforts to overturn the election results in Georgia. The former president has pleaded not guilty, and the case against him is pending.
Since Trump became the 2024 Republican nominee for president, fears have mounted that he may try to interfere with the election after he suggested he would accept the results only if “everything’s honest.”
“If everything’s honest, I’ll gladly accept the results. I don’t change on that,” Trump said in an interview in May with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”
Amid those concerns, the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) this month approved new wording for rules for election observers in the state. The wording of the permanent administrative rule was approved 5-1 by the commission.
The administrative rule sets the guidelines for election observers, including their conduct, positioning within polling places, and proximity to certain activities. It also outlines the process for observers to challenge activities they witness, specifies when and how election officials may remove them from polling places, and details the permissions for members of the media, such as rules for taking photos or videos inside polling locations. It also outlines the penalties for election interference.
While the new wording has not been made publicly available, Republican Commissioner Robert Spindell, who cast the only no vote on the administrative rule, said he objected to the penalties, arguing that telling observers they’re subject to fines and imprisonment if they interfere with someone voting might discourage people from observing.
“I can’t tell you how terrible I think this is in terms of the observers,” he said, according to the Wisconsin Examiner. “It’s trying to discourage observers, and what will happen when this thing gets out, it’ll be published, and they’ll start putting that in there. If you’re an observer, you’re going to get put in jail for six months and $1,000 fine and all this stuff. So I think it needs to be completely, you know, completely revised.”
Democratic Commissioner Ann Jacobs disagreed, telling the Examiner: “If people are like, ‘I don’t like the existing rules,’ well, that’s fine, they can make a petition about that. But the thing is, what we’re writing down is you don’t have the right to disturb an election site. And if the chief inspector tells you, you know, I’m denying your challenge and you need to go and return to your observing, and they refuse, yeah, the chief has the right to remove them. That’s already the law. If people are worried about that, then they have to think about their own behavior.”
Polls are very close in Wisconsin, with Harris currently 2.2 points ahead of Trump, according to FiveThirtyEight. Pollster Nate Silver’s tracker also puts Harris 2.2 points ahead in the state. Meanwhile, RealClearPolitics only put Harris 0.7 point ahead.
But although Harris has the lead, individual polls show the state is still very close and therefore anybody’s to win. The latest poll from the state, conducted by Redfield and Wilton Strategies, showed the two candidates were tied. Another recent poll, conducted by Emerson College and The Hill, put Trump 1 point ahead.
Meanwhile, a September poll conducted my MassINC put Harris 7 points ahead.