As Wisconsin voters head to the polls Tuesday, at least two cities at the center of 2020’s “Zuckbucks” scandal have reported ballot snafus.
In Green Bay, the Republican Party of Wisconsin and a local voter have filed a complaint against the liberal-led Green Bay City Clerk’s office after the local election administrator sent out scores of duplicate ballots. In Racine, a municipal judge contest was omitted from the election day ballot, according to reports. The race is uncontested.
Voters statewide will decide an array of local contests and a Wisconsin Supreme Court race, which will determine whether liberals expand their current 4-3 majority to 5-2 or if conservatives can hold serve.
‘Reckless Failure’
The Green Bay complaint to the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) alleges the oft-reprimanded Clerk Celestine Jeffreys’ office mailed out duplicate absentee ballots for the April 7 Spring Election to 152 individuals. GOP representatives said the error affected multiple wards and was discovered when voters received unsolicited duplicates after they had already returned their original ballots.
“Wisconsin law is clear: one voter, one ballot,” WisGOP Chairman Brian Schimming said in a press release. “This reckless failure by the Green Bay Clerk has created serious risks of double voting and fraud. The Elections Commission must immediately investigate and order a concrete plan to secure Tuesday’s election.”
Jeffreys, who has put together a hefty record of election “glitches” and infractions over her five-plus years as Green Bay City Clerk, admitted to the mistake late last week in a Fox 11 News report. The feckless Wisconsin Elections Commission, or at least its Democrat chairwoman Ann Jacobs, quickly chalked up the election-integrity fumble to “human error.”
Jacobs said the same for Racine’s ballot debacle.
“Ballots are printed by the county clerks and proofed by the municipal clerks. Both failed to note the missing race,” Jacobs wrote Monday on X.
It was not a good look, however, for a city that was among the notorious “Wisconsin 5” in the irregularity-plagued 2020 election drenched in Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s grant money. Jacobs said the city has remedied the problem by sending out a corrected “B” ballot. She said voters who filled out the original ballot have the right to submit the “B” ballot to vote in the municipal judge race.
“In both situations, it was ordinary human error, not fraud. And in neither situation will anyone be able to vote twice. A/B ballots happen (we even have a section in our manual about it). The system is designed so no voter can return 2 ballots & have them both count,” Jacobs said.
In other words, “trust us.” That might be a hard sell for election observers who have watched swing state Wisconsin’s elections regulator stretch, bend and rewrite election law.
‘A Foul-up Like This’
This certainly isn’t Jeffreys’ first rodeo. Green Bay’s notorious city clerk, who was handed the position by the city’s far-left mayor after a whistleblower quit in disgust weeks before the 2020 presidential election, has faced multiple complaints for violating state election law.
Just before the 2024 election, Jeffreys was accused of not complying with procedures for auditing voters who registered to vote at their polling places on Election Day for 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023 elections. The commission said there was probable cause “to believe that a violation of law or abuse of discretion occurred with relation to Clerk Jeffreys’s procedural actions.”
As The Federalist has reported, Jeffreys previously acknowledged that she failed to follow the law, but pled ignorance about the election law — as Green Bay’s top election official.
The Elections Commission found Jeffreys violated election law on ballot harvesting in the 2022 spring election when she accepted multiple absentee ballots brought in on behalf of voters. Wisconsin law prohibits ballot harvesting.
Jeffreys also was at the center of Wisconsin’s “Zuckbucks” scandal. The Democrat-led city allowed leftist activists to take a central role in election administration, with one long-time Democrat operative given keys to a room where Green Bay’s absentee ballots were stored.
In January 2024, a Brown County Circuit Court Judge tossed out the city’s disorderly conduct citation against election observer and attorney Janet Angus, calling the city’s action “retaliatory.” Jeffreys, again, was in the middle of the matter.
Angus had confronted Jeffreys about election integrity concerns, but did not do so in a disorderly manner, Judge Tammy Jo Hock said.
“Yet again, we have a foul-up like this,” Brown County GOP Chairman Doug Reich told The Federalist Monday evening in a phone interview. “I think if there were one time in the last six to eight years that you could chalk up to a ‘glitch’ to quote [the city], that would be one thing. But when you see a pattern develop over several years … you begin to doubt the integrity of the election process.”
Jeffreys and her boss, liberal Mayor Eric Genrich, over the years have been extremely combative and hostile to those who have questioned the city’s handling of elections, and its outright law breaking, Reich and others have said. Such hostility only further dampens faith in Green Bay’s election administration.
‘Permissive Environment’
Wisconsin has been down the double-ballot road before. In the weeks of early voting leading up to the 2024 presidential election, the Madison city clerk’s office sent more than 2,200 voters duplicate absentee ballots. The leftist enclave and state capital was another big player in the Zuckbucks scandal. The clerk would later resign her post amid a state investigation into her office’s failure to count nearly 200 ballots in the same election. A damning report by the Wisconsin Elections Commission found Madison’s top election official oversaw a “confluence of errors” leading to an “unconscionable result.”
Reich questioned how many more “glitches” Jeffreys will be allowed before she faces consequences for her election administration failures.
“Obviously, I think we need an entirely new elections administrator, someone who is professional, transparent” and not combative, the GOP officials said.
The state Republican Party complaint seeks remedies and corrective measures, something it said was missing in the Madison duplicate ballots case.
“[D]espite the scope of the Madison incident, no formal complaint was filed, no investigation was initiated by the Commission, and no corrective order was issued,” the GOP complaint states. “The absence of any formal Commission action following the Madison incident may have contributed to a permissive environment in which municipal clerks, including Respondent, fail to treat the absentee ballot issuance process with the seriousness the law demands.”
