Clerks say an obsolete Wisconsin law creates needless work -- and a threat to ballot secrecy
When the clerk of Rock County, Wisconsin, gets a public records request for images of election ballots, much of it is easy to fulfill. For most municipalities in the county, it’s just a matter of uploading a photo of the ballot that’s already captured when it gets tabulated.
But for two of the county’s largest cities — Janesville and Beloit — it’s a lot more complicated, and time-consuming, because of a state law governing places that use a central counting facility for their absentee ballots.
For those ballots, Clerk Lisa Tollefson must redact the unique identifying numbers that the law requires poll workers to write on each one. Otherwise, the number could be used to connect the ballots to the voters who cast them. And because the numbers don’t appear in the same place on each ballot, Tollefson must click through the ballot images one at a time to locate and blot out the number before releasing the images.
To respond to records requests for this year’s April election, she had to redact the numbers from 10,000 ballot images. In November, it was over 23,000.
https://wisconsinwatch.org/2025/05/wisconsin-election-absentee-ballot-secrecy-clerk-law-central-count-vote/