GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) — During a lengthy city council meeting last night, Green Bay City Clerk Kris Teske defended the efforts her office made to try to allow everyone to vote in the April 7th election.
Among the election-related issues, some Green Bay voters say they waited up to four hours to vote in-person. The city consolidated 31 polling places into two locations due to a lack of poll workers.
Despite the unique circumstances with this election, long lines have only been reported in Green Bay and Milwaukee.
Teske says the issues piled up as the clerk’s office was inundated with absentee ballot requests. She says city employees from all departments were helping, working nights, weekends, and putting in dozens of hours of overtime.
Teske apologized multiple times for any voter who didn’t receive an absentee ballot.
In the two or three weeks leading up to the election, Teske says the city received more than 17,000 absentee ballot requests. The clerk’s office was able to send out 14,376 ballots, according to Teske. She says 11,931 absentee ballots were returned.
“17,000 emails coming in. It was just so overwhelming. The deputy clerk was printing them out and printing them out and she just couldn’t keep up.”
Teske says she made a choice to focus on absentee requests instead of training new poll workers, including National Guard members.
City leaders have said they weren’t aware National Guard members were already trained on how to be poll workers until after the decision was made to consolidate polling locations down to Green Bay East and West high schools. At that point, Teske says the city had enough poll workers for those locations.
She says the city tried to do all it could, and asked for help from the county and state but often didn’t receive it.
Alder Chris Wery, who asked for an independent investigation into the city’s decisions, asked whether the decisions made were up to Teske or Mayor Eric Genrich.
“Blame it on the state, blame it on whoever you want, our decisions took a bad situation and made it far, far worse,” said Wery. “Horribly worse. The buck has to stop somewhere. If it’s you Mr. Mayor, fine.”
Without saying who made the final decisions, Genrich says he takes full responsibility on what happened.
“I don’t know how many times I’ve owned it or accepted the buck, but I have.”
City council members are still expected to discuss on a committee level whether an independent investigation should be pursued.
Teske says the city has nothing to hide and she’d welcome any sort of investigation.
Last Saturday, the Wisconsin Elections Commission voted to not pursue its own investigation into what happened in Green Bay or Milwaukee.
Genrich and Teske say they are focused on making changes so the August and November elections go smoother.
