Vote audit underway in Clark County
An audit of Clark County’s 2020 presidential election results will begin today (Aug. 25) after the local Republican Party raised $1,000 to pay for the process.
County clerk Christina Jensen said Tuesday that she will begin recounting the 14,960 ballots at about 8:30 a.m. and go until 4 p.m.
“I’m thinking we’ll be here at least two days, maybe three,” she said.
The hand recount will take place at her office in Neillsville. Members of the political party will be allowed to observe the process — viewing each individual ballot — but Jensen will be the only one counting the votes for Trump and Biden.
“I may take some notes. In case there are some discrepancies, I can follow up with my clerks,” she said. “It’s technically not a recount, so nothing is going to change.”
Rose LaBarbera, chairperson of the county GOP, said she and the two other members of the county party will be there to observe the recounting of the ballots.
“We don’t expect to find any fraud,” she said. “We just want to make sure that everything in Clark County was done OK.”
Peter Hellios, chairman of the Clark County Democratic Party, said he will also be there to watch over the process, even if it takes three days.
“We’ll read ‘em and weep, I guess,” he said.
Hellios questioned the whole reason behind the audit.
“It’s kind of ludicrous,” he said. “They won by a landslide in the county. I don’t know what they’re trying to show.”
Hellios said it’s unfortunate that the audit is unfairly scrutinizing all of the county’s municipal clerks and poll workers who were just doing their jobs.
“I think it was all done according to Hoyle by people who are just trying to do their job for democracy,” he said.
A website set up by the Clark County Republicans, clarkcount.com, says there is “grave suspicion” with the vote-counting machines, but cites no evidence that the votes in the county were miscounted.
All of the municipalities in the county have been using DS200 ballot scanners, manufactured by Election Systems & Software in Nebraska, since 2020, according to Jensen.
When asked earlier this year 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.
Even though President Trump won the county with 67 percent of the vote, the GOP says it wants to make sure that every ballot cast for the Republican incumbent was properly counted.
A message on clarkcount.com says Trump “allegedly” lost the state by 20,682 votes, yet 59 counties voted for him.
“All you would have to do is skim off 350 votes from each of those counties to change the outcome of the election. That is only about 3 percent of Trump’s reported votes in Clark County,” the site says. “In other words, precisely because Trump won the county so decisively, a relatively small number of votes taken away wouldn’t be missed.”
The Nov. 3, 2020, vote total in Clark County was 10,002 for Trump and 4,524 for Biden, with a few hundred more going to third-party candidates.
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.
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.
