County clerk accepts responsibility for ballot error

When Taylor County voters headed to the polls last week, there was a race missing from local ballots.

The race for Court of Appeals, District 3 race did not appear on the ballot. Incumbent judge Lisa K. Stark was running unopposed for her third term.

County clerk Andria Farrand issued a statement on Monday taking full responsibility for the oversight and spelling out corrective measures her office will be taking to reduce the chance of similar errors occurring in the future.

Farrand’s statement is as follows: April 4, 2025 The ballots in all 27 municipalities of Taylor County, Wisconsin were missing the race for the Court of Appeals, District 3 race. This was in no way done intentionally, this was a mistake on the part of the County Clerk, Andria Farrand, who is responsible for the creation and printing of the ballots with the help of our third party vendor, Elections Equipment and Software (ES& S).

This error was first noticed about 8:20 P.M. on April 1, 2025, after the polls closed when we had our first municipality phone in their results. When I was recording their results, they had no votes for Lisa K. Stark, and this is when I first realized that I may have made a mistake on our ballots.

I double checked the list of contests for the State of Wisconsin that is sent to all County Clerks by the Wisconsin Elections Commission, and that race was indeed on there. I then checked the Type A notice that I had published in our local paper on November 21, 2024, and that race was also listed there.

I sent an email immediately to the Wisconsin Elections Commission advising them of my error.

The race for the Court of Appeals, District 3, is on the Taylor County ballot every six (6) years, so when I copied over the ballot template from two (2) years ago in my ES& S portal, which is my normal process, it was not there. The reason I copy over the previous ballot, is it will automatically assign the correct school districts to the correct municipalities, which is very helpful.

As the result of my omission, Lisa K. Stark, did not receive any votes from Taylor County. Since she was unopposed in this election, my error did not have an impact on the election results, thankfully.

I have since worked on several corrective actions to ensure this will not happen again.

• I will always cross reference the Type A notice with the ballot before we approve them to be printed by ES& S.

• As soon as the call in sheets are available to print in WisVote, I will print and compare to the ballot.

• I will involve my Chief Deputy Clerk and Deputy Clerk in the initial review of what is going to be on the ballot, so we are all aware, when we do the final review before printing.

Andria M. Farrand Taylor County Clerks