Hi, folks,

For years, election workers in Mequon employed a strict local standard for absentee ballots missing part of a witness’s address — a standard not apparently used elsewhere in Wisconsin and one the Wisconsin Elections Commission has now said is illegal.

In brief, WEC has told municipalities to count absentee ballots even if a witness only writes a street number, name, and municipality in the address field, without putting the ZIP code or state. For several elections, though, officials in Mequon — a 25,000 city in Ozaukee County, just north of Milwaukee — have been rejecting those ballots if the name of the municipality isn’t unique nationwide.

The city’s controversial practice was the subject of an election commission order in April, telling Mequon officials to count five ballots that the city had planned to reject. The city complied with the order, but the city attorney told me in May that he wasn’t sure whether Mequon officials would comply with WEC’s standard in the future.

For an upcoming story, I called some of the people who run Mequon’s elections (Mequon City Clerk Caroline Fochs has been responsive to my public records request but hasn’t responded to my questions otherwise).

Nancy Martin, a chief inspector at a Mequon polling place, said that she is unequivocally supportive of the city’s witness address policy. She invoked a state law calling absentee voting a privilege, not a right.

Because of that law, she said, “you need to make sure that you're doing your job as a voter, and I don't think that sending incomplete information is doing a complete job as a voter.”

Alisha Campbell, who was an assistant chief inspector at a Mequon polling place in April, wouldn’t clarify whether she agreed with the city policy.

“What you think independently isn't always what you are told to do,” Campbell said. “I will leave that at that.”

Sam Liebert, the Wisconsin state director of All Voting is Local, questioned whether in Wisconsin — the most decentralized election system in the nation, with 1,850 municipalities running elections — there were other communities implementing policies that don’t follow state law or court decisions. But he said the commission stepping in here shows a silver lining.

“It's disappointing what happened in Mequon, but I think also at the end of the day, the system shows that it works,” Liebert said, adding that the commission’s vote to count those ballots was bipartisan. “That should give voters confidence in the system and that people are looking out for them.”

More on this for you soon. 

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