The Sconi

The Wisconsin Voters Alliance (WVA) filed a complaint with the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) over the voting in the 2020 general election and the 2021 spring elections regarding a resident of an adult care facility who a court in February 2020 declared incompetent to vote.

The WVA filed the complaint on behalf of Lisa Goodwin, the daughter and guardian of Sandra Klitzke, who resides at Brewster Village in Grand Chute, Wisconsin. The complaint names WEC administrator Meagan Wolfe, the Outagamie County Circuit Court clerk and Angie Cain, town clerk of Grand Chute.

"I could not explain why the WisVote voting records would have indicated that my mother had voted in the November 2020 election and the April 2021 election and why my mother was sent an absentee ballot for the April 2022 election," Goodwin said in the complaint. "Neither I nor any other member of my immediate family completed an absentee ballot for my mother."

WVA President Ron Heuer said the Klitzke case is an example of the breakdown in the voter maintenance system intended to protect older Wisconsinites deemed incompetent by the courts from being taken advantage of by third parties who fill out ballots in their names.

“It seems the entire process of handling the incompetents who have been adjudicated is being mismanaged by WEC,” Heuer said in a statement provided to The Sconi. “We have investigated this quite thoroughly and with a great deal of confidence can say WEC appears to be at fault.”

Heuer explained that once someone is adjudicated in court to be incompetent, it’s the duty of the court clerk to notify the register in probate in the appropriate county. The register in probate then accesses a “notice of voting eligibility form” and the Wisconsin circuit court forms database mails it to elections commission. The WEC is supposed to then add this person’s name to a list of incompetents maintained by the commission. It is then left to the municipal clerks to access that list and update the WisVote database with those changes.

“In talking to various register in probate officers, it became apparent that WEC, for whatever reason, is not entering these incompetents in the incompetent lists, therefore clerks are not updating either,” Heuer said. “But the problem is much, much greater than that.”

The Wisconsin Voters Alliance ran a query on the WisVote Nov. 8, 2020, database to determine how many people in that database were listed as incompetent. The total came back with 802 in the entire state. By analyzing the data from this list, Heuer said that they concluded there should be somewhere between 4,000 to 5,000 incompetents on this list. They compared the data by city and by county as well.

“Some of the numbers don’t make sense at all,” he said. “We found the city of Milwaukee had one person listed as incompetent and 11 counties had none listed.”

Joe Biden carried Wisconsin in the 2020 presidential election by more than 20,000 votes after Donald Trump had won the Dairy State in 2016.