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Green Bay and state officials over the last month have authorized separate investigations to better understand how city election officials accidentally sent voters duplicate absentee ballots in two consecutive elections this year, including for the upcoming August 11 primary.
This set of investigations marks an unprecedented level of scrutiny for Green Bay Clerk Celestine Jeffreys, who has repeatedly come under fire for election administration mistakes and was placed on leave by Mayor Eric Genrich on July 9.
Jeffreys, whose job is nonpartisan, has served as clerk since 2021, running elections in the state’s third largest city. City spokesperson Michael Bergman said in a statement that the latest errors in the clerk’s office “are unacceptable.”
On Monday, city elected officials and nearby residents weighed in at a public meeting.
“I would hope that when you go through this process, you really evaluate how things are done, because you may not have the right person in that job,” former Brown County Clerk Sandy Juno, a Republican, said at the Monday meeting.
Others raised concerns that Jeffreys’ suspension could hurt the city’s preparedness for the upcoming primary election.
“I worry that Celestine is now sitting at home when she’s not able to prepare for the August 11th election,” said Jane Benson, a Suamico resident and a longtime poll worker. “This is a really busy time for any clerk, and I feel like we’re hamstringing the city from having more reliable elections by sending her home.”
Investigations arose quickly after second error
Before the Wisconsin Supreme Court election in April, Jeffreys’ office issued 152 duplicate absentee ballots, an error that drew scrutiny and prompted the Wisconsin Republican Party to file an administrative complaint with the Wisconsin Elections Commission. Election officials at the time made an effort to explain to voters how the state’s system prevents double votes from being counted.
When it happened again, though, officials on all sides became more critical of the Green Bay clerk.
“I am really concerned that, first of all, it happened once,” Ann Jacobs, a Democratic appointee on the Wisconsin Elections Commission, said at the commission’s July 9 meeting, before commissioners voted to investigate the clerk’s office. “But then for the exact same error to happen a second time weeks later is unconscionable.”
Jeffreys, who didn’t respond to a request for comment, sought to explain the first error in an April response to the administrative complaint filed against her, describing it as the downstream result of a printing error.
Typically, after absentee ballot certificate labels — featuring voters’ names and addresses — are placed on absentee envelopes, Green Bay election officials put a copy of regular paper with the same label information in a folder to be retained for recordkeeping purposes, Logan Wood, an attorney for Jeffreys, said in a response to the complaint.
But in the April instance, Wood said, that sheet of paper wasn’t placed in a folder after the ballots were sent out — it’s unclear why. An election worker then mistakenly thought the batch of labels hadn’t been printed at all and made a duplicate copy, Wood said. The duplicate batch of labels was then affixed to envelopes and sent out to voters.
In late June, Jeffreys announced that election officials had again printed and mailed out duplicate ballots for the midterm primary election in August due to a certificate label printing error.
“I regret the printing error occurred,” she said in the June statement, without elaborating on how such an error happened again or how many duplicate ballots were sent out. She noted that affected voters will also receive instructions by mail on submitting only one ballot.
Jacobs said the errors can likely be attributed in part to city election officials using a tool other than WisVote, the state’s voter registration database and election management system, to print labels for absentee ballots. WisVote doesn’t allow officials to generate duplicate labels, she said, but other systems can lack that failsafe.
She said it would be helpful to know which system Jeffreys used, how workers exported the labels, who printed them, and why the duplication wasn’t caught.
“We can’t fix it if we don’t know how it happened, and I don’t think we can give proper direction to the clerk of Green Bay without knowing how this happened,” she said.
The Wisconsin Elections Commission probe, unanimously authorized at the July 9 meeting, seeks a response from the clerk’s office by July 31 explaining how the office accidentally sent duplicate absentee ballots to voters in two consecutive elections and how the city will ensure that only one ballot gets cast per voter.
The commission told the clerk’s office to come up with a plan by Aug. 14 to outline how the city plans to prevent another repeat error. The commission will separately investigate whether the city clerk’s office violated any laws. Meanwhile, city officials announced on July 9 that they’re also conducting an internal review into the mistakes.
It’s unclear if or when Jeffreys will return to her post. Bergman, the city spokesperson, said the city won’t comment on the matter until the city and state finish investigating the errors. Green Bay Deputy Clerk Stacy Menke is running elections in the meantime.
Jeffreys previously came under fire for assorted complaints
The sending of duplicate ballots isn’t the first election administration issue that Jeffreys has faced in Green Bay since transitioning in 2021 from being the mayor’s chief of staff to the clerk.
In late 2023, the Wisconsin Elections Commission stated that Jeffreys’ office’s policy of letting a third party return ballots for somebody who is “sick” but not disabled likely violated state law.
In 2024, Jeffreys admitted that, for several elections in a row, she had not followed the state’s legal requirement to deactivate the voter registrations of Election Day registrants after postcards sent by clerks to their stated mailing addresses were returned as undeliverable. Lindsay Mather, an attorney representing Jeffreys at the time, said the city clerk had also not been referring those voters to the district attorney, as required.
“The failure to do so was inadvertent and due to a lack of awareness of the statutory requirements, and not the result of any willful violation of state law,” Mather said.
Juno, the former Brown County clerk, said at the commission’s July 9 meeting that when somebody makes as many errors as Jeffreys has, that person doesn’t have the skills to be a good clerk.
But Sam Liebert, a former municipal clerk who served in nonpartisan roles, said that while accountability is important, highly publicized investigations could further increase clerk turnover in Wisconsin and dissuade other people from becoming clerks. He said the commission shouldn’t create an expectation for clerks to be perfect 100% of the time.
“Frivolous lawsuits and politically charged attacks over human error do not strengthen the systems that ensure our freedoms to vote,” he said. “They undermine confidence in these very systems that successfully prevented any improper votes from being counted.”
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.
