Clark Co. GOP seeks audit of 2020 votes

By Kevin O’Brien

In the hopes of exposing any discrepancies in the official vote count, the Clark County Republican Party is raising money for an audit of the county’s 2020 presidential election results.

Rose LaBarbera, chairperson of the county GOP, said last week that her group is about half way toward its goal of raising $1,000 for the county clerk’s office to conduct an audit. She said their main goal is to assure local voters that the election was done correctly.

“We’re not expecting to find any fraud,” she said. “We’re getting a lot of complaints from citizens that don’t think their vote was counted.”

The party announced the effort to seek an audit in a June 7 message on a newly created website, clarkcount.com.

Although President Trump won the county with 67 percent of the vote, the party says it wants to make sure that every ballot cast for the Republican incumbent was properly counted.

“There is grave suspicion in the various machines that are used to conduct the election,” the website states. “The only way to alleviate that suspicion is to count the ballots by hand and see if it matches what was transmitted to the county. Even a minor discrepancy could have significant implications.”

County clerk Chris Jensen said all of the municipalities in the county have been using DS200 ballot scanners, manufactured by Election Systems & Software in Nebraska, since 2020.

“Nobody is hand-counting anymore,” she said.

Jensen noted that a random audit of three of the county’s municipalities — the towns of Mayville and Hendren and the village of Withee — was already done last fall as part of a state requirement.

All 836 ballots cast in those three municipalities matched exactly what was reported on Election Day, she said.

Once the local Republican Party pays for the audit, Jensen said she will set aside a couple of days of her time to do a hand recount of the 14,960 ballots cast last November.

The Nov. 3 vote total in Clark County was 10,002 for Trump and 4,524 for Biden, with a few hundred more going to thirdparty candidates.

Jensen said members of the political party will be allowed to observe the process — viewing each individual ballot — but she will be the only one counting the votes for Trump and Biden.

“They’re not allowed to touch any of the ballots or anything,” she said.

The recounted ballots will be compared against the official tally reported by the canvassing board back in November, but it will not change the election results, which were certified in January.

In a June 7 press release, LaBarbera urged other counties to do similar audits to make sure Trump supporters throughout the state had their votes counted.

“If Trump lost, it was only by 20,000 votes,” she wrote. “A couple of hundred votes siphoned away from all the Trump counties wouldn’t be missed but could really add up.”

When asked if there were any problems with the voting machines reported on Nov. 3, 2020, Jensen said a voter in one municipality reported that the machine was not properly recording their selection for president.

Jensen said she personally drove out to that municipality to check on the problem, but she and other election officials were unable to recreate the mistake the voter was reporting.

“I think it was just operator error,” she said.

No other complaints were reported to her office on Election Day, Jensen said, though she said there were concerns about the larger-than-normal number of absentee ballots submitted in 2020.

On the clarkcount.com website, the county Republicans point out that 3,492 absentee ballots were cast in Clark County, and 694 of those were from people listed as “indefinitely confined.” That designation became a source of controversy in 2020, since voter ID requirements do not apply to those who report themselves as “indefinitely confined.”

The number of voters who identified themselves as “indefinitely confined” skyrocketed throughout the state in 2020, most likely because many voters did not want to expose themselves to the COVID- 19 virus by voting in person.

No verified reports of widespread voter fraud or irregularities were documented in Wisconsin, and a recount of votes in Dane and Milwaukee counties, paid for the Trump campaign, resulted in Biden gaining a total of 87 votes.

According to the official count, Biden earned 1,630,866 statewide, compared to 1,610,184 for Trump, resulting in Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes going to the Democratic challenger and helping him claim the White House.