Herein lies one of the major issues with elections and election laws...

Wisconsin Election Law

SECTION 78. 6.87 (6d) of the statutes is created to read:
6.87 (6d) If a certificate is missing the address of a witness, the ballot may not be counted.

So what does this actually mean? Seems rather straight forward, if someone sends in a ballot and does not include an address, then that ballot may not be counted. But are there shades of "grey" in this particular law? What happens (for instance) if there is "part" of an address on the envelope, but not a complete address?

Well this is where there is "guidance" provided. In Wisconsin, the Election Commission provided the County Clerks and such with some clarification and some guidance as to how to go about this.

In implementing this requirement, the first question that comes to mind is “What constitutes an address?” The Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) has set a policy that a complete address contains a street number, street name and name of municipality. But in many cases, at least one component of the address could be missing; usually the municipality.

The purpose of this memorandum is to offer guidance to assist you in addressing this issue. The WEC has determined that clerks must take corrective actions in an attempt to remedy a witness address error. If clerks are reasonably able to discern any missing information from outside sources, clerks are not required to contact the voter before making that correction directly to the absentee certificate envelope.

So what does this mean exactly? If you read it either with the context of the law itself, or very specifically tying the two paragraphs together, it seems to suggest that if there is a partial address on the ballot, that the clerks may take action to "correct" the address "error".  But, what exactly does this all mean?

1. The clerk is able to reasonably discern the missing address or address component by information appearing on the envelope or from some other source, such as:

o    The voter has provided his or her complete address and the clerk has personal knowledge that the witness resides at the same address as the voter.

o    The clerk has personal knowledge of the witness and knows his/or her address.

o    The voter’s complete address appears on the address label, and the witness indicates the same street address as the voter.

o    The clerk is able to utilize lists or databases at his or her disposal to determine the witness’s address. 

So what appears clear is that if there is a missing portion of the address (either the street address or another component) that clerk may use a variety of resources to ascertain that missing information and legally correct the ballot. If, for instance I send back my mail in ballot and have entered my street address of 1234 Main Street, but I fail to put in my City, that an election worker can "correct" that missing city and count the ballot.  I personally have no issues with this sort of guidance. If there is a simple mistake in not "fully" filling out your address, then that probably shouldn't disqualify a ballot (although I understand that some may not agree).

However, it would appear that this particular guidance has been used to take ballots that were completely missing an address all together and use these same resources to completely fill in an address in order to count that ballot. This would suggest that ballots that were technically illegal were being "corrected" by clerks and then counted as legal ballots. This runs completely counter to the law itself and would appear to be out of sync with the guidance (which at least appears to suggest that such corrections are okay if they only see a partial address).

However, it doesn't take much mental gymnastics to start to believe that an entire "missing address" could be considered missing components or a simple "mistake" that could be corrected by looking up the information. The guidances is so vague that it's almost impossible to determine exactly what to do in these situations.

So apparently there are thousands of ballots from the State of Wisconsin with "red" ink that signifies that the clerk had "corrected" ballots. Certainly any ballot that has an entire address filled in with "red ink" should be invalided based on the law.  If the ballot was returned without an address then it is missing the address. That is not a partial address mistake as was supposed to be the point of the guidance, but rather a missing address that is covered very clearly by the law (no address, no vote).  To be clear... the law is the law is the law, and "guidance" from politicians running the election does not override the law. Certainly no murky interpretation of some "guidance" is a substitute for the law.

But some in the GOP are arguing that the entire "guidance" was inconsistent with the election law and that all of these ballots should be disqualified. However, if that was the case the GOP wanted to make, the time to litigate that (in my humble opinion) would have been prior to election day.

But at the end of the day, we should all be able to see how this sort of guidance might cause problems, even if it is meant to solve problems. Ten different people might look at this guidances and see ten different things. The concept that this might not be carried out the same way in different situations is the underlying problem in our elections. While some are attempting to "follow the law", others are attempting to "count more votes", while still others might be stretching and bending guidelines for nefarious partisan reasons. 

The solution seems to be that we need to take politicians out of the election operations business and put it in the hands of people who at least are not so blatantly partisan as the political officials who handle these things. Who is elected in certain states should not determine how the laws are followed, bent, or otherwise ignored.