Votebeat: Clerks say an obsolete Wisconsin law creates needless work — and a threat to ballot secrecy

Votebeat’s Alexander Shur wrote about how Wisconsin election officials often struggle to fulfill public record requests because of needing to redact an outdated number that appears on the state’s ballots.

“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.

Given her other job duties, Tollefson says, fulfilling these requests can take months. Without that step, she says, she could fulfill public records requests in “no time at all.”

And it’s all due to a law that she and other clerks in the state say is not only outdated, but also a potential threat to the constitutional right in Wisconsin to ballot secrecy.

Tollefson and other county clerks said they support an ongoing legislative effort to repeal the law requiring election officials to write down those numbers. The proposal has come up in past legislative sessions but hasn’t gone far. It will be revived again this year, said Rep. Scott Krug, a Republican legislative leader and vice chair of the Assembly Elections Committee.”

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