Green Bay Clerk Celestine Jeffreys sent some voters multiple ballots for the August primary after she reprinted absentee envelope labels that she mistakenly thought were missing from an outgoing batch of ballots, the city said in a Friday email to the Wisconsin Elections Commission.
The email was the first of two sets of documents that the commission ordered the city to provide after the city sent duplicate ballots to voters two elections in a row. The commission also asked the city for an explanation by Aug. 14 on how it will prevent sending duplicate ballots in the future.
The document sheds light on how the city sent out duplicate ballots in both the April Supreme Court election and the August partisan primary. City officials had already detailed the breakdowns that led to the first error, but until now it was unclear just how central Jeffreys was to the mistake.
Still, the explanations fell short to at least one member of WEC.
“I don’t know that it answers the questions of how on earth this happened.” Ann Jacobs, a Democratic commissioner, told Votebeat.
Jeffreys, whose position is nonpartisan, was placed on administrative leave on July 9. Stacy Menke, previously the city’s deputy clerk, is serving as interim clerk for the August election. City spokesperson Michael Bergman said city officials won’t be providing additional comments on the documents at this time.
Green Bay sent first duplicate ballots in March
The first time Green Bay sent out duplicate absentee ballots was in March, when 152 voters received multiple absentee ballots for the April 7 state Supreme Court election. Although the incident sparked concerns about double voting, only one voter returned two ballots, and the city voided them.
City officials largely explained the causes of this error in response to an administrative complaint filed in April with the election commission. But Friday’s email revealed Jeffreys’ central role.
Typically, after mailing labels — featuring voters’ names and addresses — are placed on absentee envelopes, Green Bay election officials put a copy of regular paper with the same label information in a folder to be retained for recordkeeping purposes, Logan Wood, an attorney for Jeffreys, said in an April response to the complaint.
In March, Jeffreys photocopied a printed batch from regular paper copies to sheet labels and then gave them to a staff member to be placed into a ballot packet assembly, City Attorney Lacey Cochart wrote in Friday’s email.
But for the duplicated batch of labels, Jeffreys either failed to clip the original printing and the sheet labels together before giving it to the staff member, resulting in the paper copy of the labels not being filed in the right place, or for some reason reprinted the entire batch without inquiring with staff, Cochart said.
She then passed the duplicate labels for the second time to another staff member, Cochart said.
The April explanation of the error, which Wood filed on behalf of Jeffreys, said an election worker thought the batch hadn’t been completed and duplicated it. The latest explanation makes clear that Jeffreys was that election worker.
Jacobs said she didn’t understand why city officials were printing labels onto regular paper and then photocopying them rather than printing them directly onto labels.
Second error resulted from another Jeffreys oversight
The second error happened after Green Bay officials, preparing to send out absentee ballots for the Aug. 11 primary, sent a document containing the mailing labels for 1,734 voters to a printing shop in late June. After Jeffreys reviewed the labels the shop sent back, she came to believe some were missing Cochart said.
It’s unclear why Jeffreys thought the labels were missing or whether any actually were. But, either way, she reprinted the labels she believed to be missing directly from the PDF that was sent to the printing shop. That reprinting was the source of the duplicate ballots, Cochart said.
It remains unknown how many voters received duplicate ballots as a result of the second error. Jeffreys didn’t respond to a request for comment.
In both March and June, Jeffreys appeared to sidestep safeguards built into WisVote, the state’s voter registration database and election management system, to prevent the sending of duplicate ballots. WisVote does not allow officials to generate duplicate labels, but it doesn’t prevent someone from copying or reprinting an already-generated physical or digital label sheet. Cochart’s email confirmed that WisVote was the only software used to generate the labels.
Asked whether the latest batch of documents reveal that the city was using WisVote in a way it was not intended to be used, Jacobs said, “It’s hard to say because it’s really not clear what they’re saying.”
Don Millis, the Republican chair of WEC, had asked the city for a plan detailing how it will ensure that the voters mailed duplicate ballots won’t vote twice. The city’s response to that request was relatively brief. It outlined that election officials should contact the clerk and the voter if they discover a duplicate ballot.
Millis didn’t respond to a request for comment on Friday.
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.
