Consider this scenario: An absentee ballot in Wisconsin gets returned with an error, like the voter failing to sign the envelope, but it mistakenly gets counted anyway, because a municipal election worker initially didn't catch the error when taking the ballot out of the envelope.
Later, perhaps during a recount, a worker catches the error and has to mark that voter as invalid. And now the number of ballots in the counting pile is one greater than the number of valid voters.
The solution? Just pull one random ballot out of the pile and set it aside to not be counted. Now the numbers match up. But someone — it's impossible to know who — got their valid vote tossed. Votebeat dives into the disenfranchising effects of this dated practice.
It may not seem fair, but it actually happens from time to time in Wisconsin — and almost nowhere else — because of an election law that's nearly as old as the state. Election officials aren't crazy about the practice, called a ballot drawdown, and say it is reserved only for extraordinary cases.
Fond du Lac County Clerk Lisa Freiburg said she tries never to use the procedure.
"I don't like it, because it could be my ballot that's being drawn down," said Freiburg, a Republican, "but unintentional human error will cause drawdowns, unfortunately. It's taking somebody's vote away."
The purpose of drawdowns is to resolve a discrepancy when polling place records show more ballots than voters who correctly checked in, or when absentee ballots outnumber correctly completed "ballot certificates" — the information on the envelope affirming a voter's and witness's identity. These discrepancies result from tiny recordkeeping errors and process fumbles that inevitably happen on a small scale during the heat of elections.
It's not uncommon during recounts in high-turnout presidential elections for municipalities in a midsize county to discard several ballots this way. Bigger counties might discard 20 or more.
After the 2020 election, President Donald Trump invoked the law to request a drawdown of over 200,000 Wisconsin ballots, enough to give him a win in the state had he been successful. The Wisconsin Supreme Court narrowly rejected the claim, ruling that Trump brought it too late.
Other states used to conduct drawdowns, but Wisconsin appears to be among the very few still doing so. The practice is almost unanimously frowned upon by experts outside of Wisconsin because they say it means poll workers' slip-ups trickle down to disenfranchise voters who didn't make any errors of their own.
Election work "is a really human process, intentionally," said Jennifer Morrell, CEO of The Elections Group, a consulting firm. "A lot of people are involved. And there are lots of checks and balances, but sometimes mistakes still happen. And the most important thing that we can do is document the mistake, learn from the mistake, look for opportunities — what went wrong, why did this happen? But certainly we shouldn't be punishing random voters because of that mistake."
Wisconsin officials have drawn down ballots to address a range of issues. Election officials have used the process during a recount after discovering that voters or witnesses incorrectly filled out absentee ballot envelope information. At least one drawdown resulted from an election official temporarily misplacing ballot envelopes. Drawdowns have been raised as a potential remedy — likely court-ordered, in response to a lawsuit — if a voter improperly returns multiple ballots to a drop box or clerk's office.
Voters will never know if a drawdown excluded their ballot. Ballot anonymity generally makes it impossible to identify who cast a particular ballot once it has been processed and, in the case of an absentee ballot, separated from its envelope.
In other states, Morrell said, election officials try to focus on rejecting only the specific voter or ballot that for whatever reason didn't comply with the law. They try to resolve any numerical discrepancies but don't resort to discarding random ballots, she said.
With Wisconsin's drawdown process, she added, "whether it's an error or an intentional attempt to do something against the law, you're transferring that now to just random voters."
"It just feels so arbitrary," she said.
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