Now that they’ve finished recounting roughly 3 million presidential election ballots, several clerks throughout eastern and central Wisconsin continue to worry about one aspect of the voting process. Human error. Some voters struggled to mark ballots correctly. Some made the correct marks, but used pens that scanning machines couldn’t read. Some forgot to have a witness sign an absentee ballot. Some election workers allowed unsigned absentee ballots to be counted. “One thing that surprised me (was) the amount of human errors that I’m still seeing with this election,” Fond du Lac County Clerk Lisa Freiberg said. Whether they might be able to improve the process, however, remains to be seen. Clerks agreed that machines used to tally votes worked as they were supposed to. But they also said the recount helped them discover human errors that, while they did not affect the overall outcome of the state’s presidential vote, might have been problematic in a local election in which fewer votes were cast.
Marinette County’s vote total changed by almost 300 because some voters were given the wrong pens to mark ballots, the Wisconsin Elections Commission said.
Some voters in Marathon County marked ballots incorrectly in November, or failed to have a witness sign their absentee ballots, Clerk Nan Kottke said. And workers at some polling places, she said, allowed unsigned absentee ballots to slip through.
In Brown County, some voters failed to mark ballots correctly, Clerk Sandy Juno said, while poll workers in some communities “missed a lot of write-in votes.”
Full Article: Recount raised ‘human error’ concerns among Wisconsin’s county clerks.