The GOP simply wants the 2024 election to go on without a hitch. But already, problems are arising.
And Ballot issues in this swing state have Republicans sounding the alarm.
As absentee voting ramps up in the battleground state of Wisconsin, GOP Rep. Tom Tiffany is raising concerns over what Madison officials are calling a clerical mistake.
The error led to more than 2,000 voters receiving duplicate absentee ballots across several city wards.
Madison’s communications director, Dylan Brogan, emphasized the city’s transparency, explaining that the issue was identified and addressed swiftly.
“The City of Madison really prides itself on being extremely transparent in our election administration,” Brogan said in a statement to the New York Post. “On the day we found out a clerical error occurred, we immediately reached out to voters.”
According to Brogan, Madison’s city clerk contacted the 2,215 voters affected by the error and instructed them to destroy the duplicate ballot. The problem arose from a failed file merge that duplicated voter records instead of merging them.
Brogan highlighted the safeguards in place to prevent any fraudulent activity, noting, “Each absentee ballot has unique barcodes and can only be scanned once. If it’s scanned twice, it’s rejected.”
The city’s website also outlined additional measures, such as marking ballots in the poll book once received to ensure no one votes twice.
Despite the city’s assurances, Rep. Tiffany, who represents a northern district outside of Madison, expressed his concerns in a letter to the city clerk.
Tiffany demanded answers about how the duplicate ballots were handled and questioned the scope of the error. His inquiries included whether any returned ballots had been set aside for investigation and if the unique barcodes on the ballots were linked to individual voter profiles.
You can read the entirety of Rep. Tiffany’s letter, <a href="https://tiffany.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/tiffany.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/Madison_Clerk_Duplicate_Ballots.pdf" here.
Brogan, at the time of his statement, had not yet seen Tiffany’s letter but confirmed the city would respond. Tiffany has since called for an independent investigation into the matter, particularly after learning that the error spanned 10 wards, not just one.
This incident echoes concerns from the 2020 presidential election, where absentee ballot reporting issues in Milwaukee sparked allegations of voter fraud.
However, both a state legislative audit and a private review by a conservative legal group found no evidence of widespread fraud in Wisconsin’s 2020 election, though they did highlight some procedural irregularities.
Madison, located in Dane County, played a pivotal role in the 2020 election, with a high voter turnout helping push Wisconsin into the Democratic column. President Joe Biden won 75% of the vote in Dane County, compared to Donald Trump’s 22.8%.
As Wisconsin prepares for another critical election, absentee voting is already underway, and early in-person voting is set to begin on October 22.
But with Wisconsin being a swing state in this year’s presidential election, Republicans in the state will continue to monitor things in hopes that votes are cast fair and square.
Currently, former President Trump is trailing Vice President Kamala Harris by just 0.7% in Wisconsin, according to the latest RealClearPolling average.
Stay tuned to The Federalist Wire.
