The Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau (LAB) on Friday released its findings of an audit on the state’s November 2020 election.
Based on its findings, the group recommended 30 suggestions to the Wisconsin Elections Commission for improving the election process, 18 of which are “issues for legislative consideration.”
After the release of the report, members of The Amistad Project furthered their calls for an additional investigation into the process.
“The LAB report confirms what The Amistad Project’s ongoing investigations have already revealed, which is that election officials in Wisconsin ignored and violated established state laws governing the administration of elections, usurping the state legislature’s constitutional authority to manage the election process,” said Phill Kline, director of The Amistad Project, in an emailed release.
For example, on some machines, ballots that contained creases were sometimes identified as an additional mark on the ballots.
“When absentee ballots were folded for mailing and creases ran through the write-in fields for certain contests, the equipment considered the creases to be votes because it was programmed to read marks in the write-in fields,” the report read.
However, the report contends that this error did not cause a change in a candidate’s total.
“The LAB report also demonstrates that the Office of Special Counsel investigation is on the right track, and election officials need to answer Justice Gableman’s questions,” Kline said.
Officials with the Wisconsin Election Commission contended that the results of the audit proved that the state’s elections are “safe and secure.”
“Overall the report made it clear that vote totals in the 2020 election were accurate, that no processes were identified that could have changed the outcome, and that no evidence of widespread fraud of any type was discovered. The LAB report instead highlighted opportunities to improve election processes and procedures, identifying several administrative issues worthy of review,” the group said in a press release.
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Cooper Moran is a reporter for The Star News Network. Follow Cooper on Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “People Voting” by Phil Roeder. CC BY 2.0.
