Ballot Errors Create Another Election Headache

Add late delivery of ballots and ballot misprints as two more issues causing problems before the April 3 general election.

Testing done in advance of the election discovered a flaw in the election ballots sent to all 19 municipalities in Milwaukee County, including Oak Creek. The ballots failed to work in the optical readers and, according to WISN-TV, nearly 450,000 printed ballots are flawed and need to be reprinted.

Those ballots were already late. They were supposed to be delivered by March 12 in time for absentee voting, but they did not arrive for most municipalities until late last week, Acting Oak Creek City Clerk Christa Miller said.

Following the advice of the Government Accountability Board, the Oak Creek clerk's office instead mailed paper copy ballots to absentee voters. The paper copies look exactly the same as the official ballots, but are actually printed-off PDFs.

But because they are on different paper, they cannot be scanned through the machines.

And that means election workers have to count absentee ballots by hand. That process involves a minimum of four people -- one who reads the ballot, one who observes and two others (one Republican and one Democrat) to mark the tally sheet.

It could all make for a longer-than-usual wait for the final results on Election Night, especially with the Republican presidential primary likely to bring out more voters. Miller said 150 absentee ballots have already been returned to the clerk's office.

However, following the GAB's recommendation to use the "replica" ballots paid off, because the clerk's office avoided problems with the misprinted ballots delivered last week.

"While I understand that it was an issue for many municipalities, the city of Oak Creek felt good about its decision to go forth and follow the GAB's recommendation to mail out paper ballots and therefore, we didn't have the 'crunch' at the end of last week as some other municipalities might have," she said.

The ballot issues were just another curveball to be thrown at election workers after a against the voter identification law that was in place for the February primaries.