Administrative changes in Wisconsin election put tens of thousands of votes in question
From allowing clerks to fix spoiled ballots to permitting voters to escape ID rules, Wisconsin election officials took actions that were not authorized by legislature.
By Daniel Payne
Updated: November 8, 2020 - 12:05am
The Constitution allows only for state legislatures to change the ways elections are conducted, but memos show Wisconsin election supervisors made three substantial changes in 2020 that impact potentially tens of thousands of ballots in a battleground state that Joe Biden won by just 20,000.
Records reviewed by Just the News show that an executive branch agency called the Wisconsin Election Commission:
permitted local county election clerks to cure spoiled ballots by filling in missing addresses for witnesses even though state law invalidates any ballot without a witness address.
exempted as many as 200,000 citizens from voter ID rules by allowing them to claim the COVID-19 pandemic caused them to be "indefinitely confined."
failed to purge 130,000 names from outdated voter rolls as required by law.
The question now is whether those changes — in particular the instructions allowing clerks to cure ballots with missing information — will open the door for the courts to intervene as President Trump looks to contest ballot practices in multiple battleground states. The Trump campaign is seeking a recount in Wisconsin.
"This is a complication thing about elections like this," said Derek Muller, a professor of law at the Iowa School of Law and an expert in legal election matters. "I’ve seen it in a lot of jurisdictions, what might be sort of a technical violation of the statute, in this case encouragement to county clerks about how to use their judgment on whether or not to cure a ballot."
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https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/many-200000-wisconsin-residents-may-have-voted-absentee-without-having
