Statement on Law Forward Case

Madison has a well-earned reputation for its voter-friendly policies and service. Over 3,000 poll workers staff more than a hundred polling locations on Election Day. The City offers over one thousand hours of in-person absentee voting at close to 40 locations, far more than any other municipality in Wisconsin. We have a robust program of offering absentee voting in nursing home and adult-care facilities, via ballot drop boxes and during COVID pioneered a unique program to collect completed ballots in City parks to facilitate absentee voting.

The City also values its volunteer poll workers and employees and recognizes that elections are conducted by humans and that humans make mistakes. A mistake was made with a number of absentee ballots in the 2024 election. Everyone agrees that these ballots should have been counted. the City has acknowledged the mistake and apologized to the voters whose ballots were not counted. Madison has fully cooperated with the investigation of the Wisconsin Elections Commission and has implemented its recommendations, and improved its processes and documentation, to ensure those mistakes never happen again.

In the end, this lawsuit is not about fixing an error, correcting the voting process, or improving the ability of voters to vote absentee - it is solely about seeking millions of dollars of taxpayer money for human error. The truth of the matter is that election mistakes can and do occur whenever you have voters, ballots, and humans processing those ballots. This happens not just in Madison but elsewhere in the state and the country.

Our processes for when a mistake occurs are set by State law and give individuals such as these plaintiffs a way to hold government accountable for their mistakes and to ensure the mistake does not happen again. However, our laws do not provide voters with monetary compensation for mishandling an absentee ballot. The reality is that attaching a dollar value to a vote, when human mistakes occur in elections, would end up regularly costing cities, towns and municipalities hundreds, thousands - or in this case millions - of dollars that could otherwise be spent improving voter access and elections processes.