Wisconsin is one of the battleground states in the 2020 presidential election. It seems that all is not well in counting votes in Wisconsin.

Just the News posted the following today:

The Constitution allows only for state legislatures to change the ways elections are conducted, but memos show Wisconsin election supervisors made three substantial changes in 2020 that impact potentially tens of thousands of ballots in a battleground state that Joe Biden won by just 20,000.

Records reviewed by Just the News show that an executive branch agency called the Wisconsin Election Commission:

• • permitted local county election clerks to cure spoiled ballots by filling in missing addresses for witnesses even though state law invalidates any ballot without a witness address.
  • exempted as many as 200,000 citizens from voter ID rules by allowing them to claim the COVID-19 pandemic caused them to be “indefinitely confined.”
  • failed to purge 130,000 names from outdated voter rolls as required by law.

The question now is whether those changes — in particular the instructions allowing clerks to cure ballots with missing information — will open the door for the courts to intervene as President Trump looks to contest ballot practices in multiple battleground states. The Trump campaign is seeking a recount in Wisconsin.

“This is a complication thing about elections like this,” said Derek Muller, a professor of law at the Iowa School of Law and an expert in legal election matters. “I’ve seen it in a lot of jurisdictions, what might be sort of a technical violation of the statute, in this case encouragement to county clerks about how to use their judgment on whether or not to cure a ballot.”

The law was changed by the Wisconsin Elections Commission with a directive in October. Their directive was contrary to state law.

There are also some other questions:

Earlier in the fall, the Wisconsin Supreme Court heard arguments from a conservative group arguing that around 130,000 voters should be purged from the voter rolls due to their having moved in between elections. 

The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty had argued that the Wisconsin Elections Commission was bound by law to remove the voters whose addresses it could not verify. The commission had asked to delay the removal until after the election, citing concerns that some voters might be improperly removed from the rolls. 

A circuit court judge had ruled last year that the elections commission was required to remove the tens of thousands of voters that had been targeted for removal. The commission at the time refused to do so, leading to their being held in contempt of court. 

I think we need a do-over in some states.