(Headline USA) Wisconsin election clerks can accept absentee ballots that contain minor errors such as missing portions of witness addresses, a court ruled Tuesday in a legal fight that has pitted conservatives against liberals in the battleground state.
Dane County Circuit Court ruled in favor of the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin in its lawsuit to clarify voting rights protections for voters whose absentee ballots have minor errors in listing their witnesses’ addresses.
The ruling means that absentee ballots with certain technical witness address defects will not be rejected in future elections, the league said.
A Waukesha County Circuit Court, siding with Republicans, barred the Wisconsin Elections Commission in 2022 from using longstanding guidance for fixing minor witness address problems on absentee ballots without contacting the voter.
That ruling left absentee voters at risk of having their ballots rejected due to technical omissions or errors with no guarantee that they would be notified and given the chance to correct any errors and have their votes counted.
The League’s lawsuit argued that rejecting absentee ballots for the omission of certain witness address components violated the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits denying the right to vote based on an error that has no material bearing on determining voting eligibility.
In Tuesday’s order, the Dane County Circuit Court wrote, “the Witness Address Requirement is not material to whether a voter is qualified. . . . As such, rejecting ballots for trivial mistakes in the Witness Address requirement directly violates the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964.”
“All voters deserve to have their votes counted regardless of whether they vote in person or absentee,” Debra Cronmiller, executive director of the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin, said in a news release. “Small errors or omissions on the absentee certificate envelope should not prevent voters from exercising their constitutional rights.”
The Fair Elections Center, a Washington-based, nonpartisan voting rights and election reform advocate, sued on behalf of the league.
“Wisconsinites should not have their right to vote denied due to technical errors, especially when they are not uniformly given an opportunity to remedy such issues,” said Jon Sherman, the center’s litigation director. “Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act to prohibit exactly this type of disenfranchisement, and the court’s order today enforces that federal law’s protections as to four categories of absentee ballots.”
Despite the claims that the ruling only addressed minor ballot issues, however, and the rhetoric that it ensured equal voting access for all, the ultimate effect was to give more discretion to election clerks in a state where the local election clerks were notoriously influenced by left-wing operatives during the 2020 race.
A subsequent audit led by special counsel Mike Gableman found that so-called Zuckerbucks—funding that originated from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg through two leftist nonprofits with ties to Barack Obama and George Soros—had infiltrated at least five major cities, including Milwaukee, Madison and Green Bay.
Those leftist groups then demanded that the clerks relax their standards with regard to the acceptance of absentee ballots and loosen election-integrity laws, resulting in an unusual spike in votes for Democrats in the wee hours of election nights, with some districts reporting more votes than people and other statistical improbabilities.
Wisconsin’s GOP-led legislature has since debated whether to impeach Meagan Wolfe, the state’s top election official who oversaw the 2020 race, accusing her of partisan bias, but ultimately decided it would be a fruitless effort.
The Wisconsin case bears similarities to one brought forth recently in Pennsylvania, where a federal court mandated in November that the battleground state must accept and count all mail-in ballots, even those with missing or incorrect dates.
In insane decision, leftist federal judge bans Pennsylvania from not counting UNDATED (or incorrectly dated) mailed in ballots! This activist decision is not only wrong but invites fraud and will undermine public confidence in the election outcome in key battleground state…
— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) November 22, 2023
Former President Donald Trump is currently polling ahead in both of the battleground states, which were pivotal to his 2016 victory and to President Joe Biden’s 2020 upset of his re-election campaign, despite Trump’s comfortable leads in both states as many went to bed on election night that year.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
