Election clerks to use state-issued supplemental poll books to address erroneous voting roll purge

Poll workers in La Crosse County are getting trained to tackle a bit of an election day hiccup next week.

The state has issued supplemental poll books to help election workers wade through problems of an automated system that’s erasing names from the voting rolls, sometimes in error.

La Crosse County clerk Ginny Dankmeyer said those who have been scrubbed from the voting rolls can work with clerks to fix the problem on voting day.

“The poll worker will go to a secondary supplemental list and they’ll look at that list,” Dankmeyer said, “and if they’re name falls on it and everything is still the same, they’ll just sign that as the poll book and they’ll be able to vote as they always have.

State law requires regular voter list maintenance to remove people from the active voter list who have died, moved or stopped voting.

After the last presidential election, the state scrubbed 308,000 voters from poll books during routine voting list maintenance. That process, apparently, mistakenly erased some from the voter rolls who should not have been.

This all comes after a February primary in which many who showed up the vote found out they’d been erased from voting rolls through no fault of their own and had to re-register. The supplemental poll books, says Ginny Dankmeyer, will help poll workers fix the issue without registration.

“And then we’ll clean it up after election day and get them activated back on the main list,” Dankmeyer said. “We’re doing our best to rectify it.

“I didn’t hear a lot of complaints with the federal election but that was a smaller turnout. We obviously expect a higher turnout with the April elections so we might get more complaints.”

Only a few in the state had to re-register during the February primary because of errant poll elimination. But, those mistakes led to calls for changes to the automated voting roll maintenance system.