BREAKING: Madison, a Center of “Election Excellence,” Mails 2,000 Duplicate Ballots—Then Slowboats Investigators

With an election at stake, can the city elections department really be trusted to police itself?

The Madison, Wisconsin elections department is under scrutiny after accidentally mailing out over 2,000 duplicate absentee ballots earlier this week—and top Republicans aren’t buying the city clerk’s excuses in this major Democrat stronghold.

Now Restoration News has learned that its processing of our public records request for information on the 2,215 ballots is being delayed until after Election Day. “Honoring your request would divert precious resources from our primary mission of providing election-related services for the upcoming November 5 Presidential Election,” Clerk Records Custodian and Office Equity Co-Lead Jennifer Haar informed us via email, while helpfully providing her pronouns.

This is all the more troubling given the facts of the situation—and Madison’s history of election issues.

Disturbingly, it was voters, not the Madison clerk’s office, who discovered the duplicate ballot error. How many more may have been accidentally mailed out we don't yet know for certain. Nor do we know how the ballots were mailed out—only that the clerk’s office insists “this incident involved human error” by an anonymous staffer and not “criminal conduct, so though is no reason to contact law enforcement.” 

Moreover, though the clerk’s office claims the duplicate ballots use a bar code system that ensures they can’t be counted twice, “no duplicate ballots have been returned to the Clerk’s Office” as of writing.

That isn't good enough for Wisconsin Rep. Tom Tiffany (R), who's launched inquiries into the debacle, citing Madison's track record for election irregularities and Wisconsin's critical importance in the upcoming 2024 election.

In a public response to Rep. Tiffany, Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl concludes with this barb:

In closing, I would simply note that elections are conducted by humans and occasionally human error occurs. When errors occur, we own up to them, correct them as soon as possible, and are transparent about them – precisely as we have done here. Our staff works incredibly hard to conduct elections in a professional, nonpartisan and fair manner and works to continually assess and improve our processes. This task is made more challenging every day as the conduct of elections becomes more complex and as election officials have become the target of attacks that seek to undermine the confidence of voters in our election results.

(RELATED: Zuck Bucks Live Again in Nevada, Just in Time to Help Kamala’s Failing Campaign)

“Election Excellence”

Restoration News has traced the “attacks on election workers” hoax to its origin with professional activist groups on the Left, which in early 2021 invented the baseless claim that Republicans and voters concerned with election integrity are violently threatening election officials in response to the “Zuck bucks” controversy in the 2020 election.

That controversy involved $350 million from billionaire Democrat mega-donor Mark Zuckerberg flowing through a partisan nonprofit into thousands of local election offices nationwide to juice Democratic voter turnout. Zuckerberg himself admitted the grants were biased and helped sway the election in Joe Biden’s favor in an apology letter to House Republicans in August.

Madison, the largest source of Biden votes in 2020, received close to $1.3 million in Zuck bucks out of $10.1 million in grants funneled to Wisconsin in 2020. This writer calculates that Wisconsin’s Zuck buck grants averaged $3.75 per Biden voter statewide and just $0.55 per Trump voter, on a per capita basis. (Notably, the Zuck bucks scheme was also concocted in the Badger State.)

Far-left Gov. Tony Evers (D) vetoed Zuck bucks bans not once, but twice, leaving it to voters to finally outlaw private funding of elections for good in April. But not before Milwaukee snuck in an $800,000 grant from an opaque “progressive” nonprofit associated with the largest “dark money” machine in the world, run by Arabella Advisors in Washington, D.C.

Yet even that wasn’t the end of Zuck bucks in Wisconsin.

In Nov. 2022, Madison was named an inaugural member of the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence, a coalition of left-wing groups spearheaded by the Center for Tech and Civic Life—the pass-through group used by Zuckerberg to funnel his 2020 election grants.

The Honest Elections Project and other experts have exposed the “non-partisan” alliance’s deep connections to the professional Left, including the Arabella network, and efforts to “influence the election process” by inserting itself into county election operations through fake “scholarships” designed to circumvent Zuck bucks bans:

. . . the Alliance also created “scholarships” to cover those membership costs, which are instantly converted into “credits” that member offices can use to buy services from CTCL and other Alliance partners. As a result, offices receive funds they can spend exclusively on services provided by left-wing companies and nonprofits, entirely outside normal public funding channels. These services range from “legal” and “political” consulting to public relations and training guidance.

FOIA’d emails later revealed conversations between at least one alliance member—the ultra-partisan Elections Group—and clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl offering Madison “a staffer on-site with election management expertise” during the Nov. 2020 recount.

Email to Madison Clerk's office from the Elections GroupAnother email invites Witz-Belh to “join the Advisory Committee of the Center for Tech and Civic Life” on Nov. 17, 2020, praising her for her “work to make elections more inclusive in Madison.”

Email to Madison Clerk's office from Whitney May, co-founder of the Center for Tech and Civic LifeYet more emails show the clerk’s office bombarded with emails promoting CTCL’s partisan allies—and future members of the Alliance for Election Excellence—and the National Vote at Home Institute, whose agent was accused of taking over 2020 election administration in Green Bay with help from the Democrat mayor.

All of which is to say there’s cause for concern—and reason to keep digging for answers. And digging is what we do best.

(READ MORE: Will Green Bay Hire Vote at Home to Consult on Election Integrity in 2024?)