GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ) — The Green Bay Common Council will take up the issue of elections in the city after a controversial February primary election.
It comes after February primary election raised eyebrows in Green Bay after staff at the city clerk’s office started counting absentee ballots hours before the publicly posted time, and then continued to do so after the disparity was pointed out.
The council will consider a number of proposals that Alderman Chris Wery says will make elections more transparent and accountable.
“We will be discussing two items regarding the elections,” Wery told WTAQ. “Things I’ve brought forward, and how things were handled during the last election.”
Wery has previously called for City Clerk Celestine Jeffreys to resign. He says the city has failed in its duty to conduct elections over the past two years.
“For having a couple of rough elections in a row, we really had to come out of the gate perfect, and we were anything but,” Wery said.
One of the measures being discussed would change how the city marks “cured” absentee ballots, those being ballots that have small mistakes that are fixed ahead of the count. Another would bar the city from taking private money to run elections, which is what happened during the 2020 general election. The city took money from the Center for Tech and Civic Life, a left-leaning group financed by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
The city’s elections also came under fire during the 2020 state and local elections, which saw wait times at the polls stretch on for over eight hours at points after the city closed all but two polling stations in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The city council will meet Tuesday at 6:00 at City Hall.
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