Wisconsin election clerks may have “unlawfully altered witness statements” on thousands of mail-in ballots, according to WISN-AM.
State law requires each absentee ballot to be signed by a witness, who is also required to list his or her address.
The Wisconsin Elections Commission circulated a flier in August reminding voters of this requirement and said that if their mail ballots did not have the voter’s information, the voter’s signature, and a qualified witness’s signature and address, the ballots would “not be counted.”
But just weeks before Election Day, the WEC issued a new directive informing clerks that although missing witness information needed to be correct, the witnesses did not need to log this information themselves.
“Please note that the clerk should attempt to resolve any missing witness address information prior to Election Day if possible, and this can be done through reliable information (personal knowledge, voter registration information, through a phone call with the voter or witness). The witness does not need to appear to add a missing address,” the WEC’s updated guidance, released in October, stated.
Sources told WISN that this directive resulted in the inadvertent invalidation of thousands of ballots because clerks filled in the information themselves after the ballots were cast.
“In defiance of and direct contradiction to the statute, the Wisconsin Elections Commission gave guidance — that is, cover — to all 72 county clerks and turned the statute on his head,” retired Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman explained. “They said, ‘Gee, we know the law says an absentee ballot without the witness address is not valid, but county clerk, you have a duty to go ahead and look up on your own the witness’s address if there’s no address on the absentee ballot.”
President Trump’s campaign said this directive could explain why thousands of ballots in Milwaukee County had been marked by red pens.
“We estimate that 15-20% of absentee ballots in Milwaukee County were tainted in this manner,” Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh explained. “This is also only an estimate because our legal volunteers were prevented from having meaningful access all of the time.”
The WEC made two other substantial changes that potentially impacted tens of thousands of ballots, according to Just The News.
On top of telling clerks to illegally tamper with mailed ballots, the WEC exempted as many as 200,000 citizens from voter ID rules by allowing them to claim they were “indefinitely confined” due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The WEC also failed to purge more than 130,000 names from the state’s outdated voter rolls, which is required by law.
Attorney General William Barr ordered Justice Department prosecutors on Tuesday to begin investigating these kinds of voter irregularities to see if they resulted in mass fraud.
“Now that the voting has concluded, it is imperative that the American people can trust that our elections were conducted in such a way that the outcomes accurately reflect the will of the voters,” Barr said in a memo. “Given this, and given that voting in our current elections has now concluded, I authorize you to pursue substantial allegations of voting and vote tabulation irregularities prior to the certification of elections in your jurisdictions in certain cases, as I have already done in specific instances.”
