Mequon clerk rejected some ballots that appear to have met her own disputed standard

“Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here . Since at least 2024, the Mequon city clerk has applied an unusually strict standard to determine the validity of a witness address on an absentee ballot certificate, rejecting the ballots that she finds provide insufficient information. A Votebeat review of 32 ballots rejected on those grounds since August 2024 found that Mequon City Clerk Caroline Fochs is using a stricter standard than most Wisconsin clerks — many of these ballots likely would have been accepted elsewhere. And she appears to have misapplied her standard in the rejection of at least 10 of those ballots. Since at least 2024, WEC has instructed clerks to count ballots even if the witness address just lists street name, number and municipality. The envelope that a witness addresses and signs does not include spaces for state or zip code. Fochs created a different standard that she trains her election officials to follow: If a witness lists a municipality that shares a name with another elsewhere in the country and does not include a ZIP code or state, even though the envelope doesn’t call for them , Fochs told Votebeat she does not count the ballot. If the municipality name is unique, she will count it without a ZIP code or state. Two rejected Mequon absentee ballots from the 2026 Wisconsin Supreme Court election list witness addresses in Fox Point. Despite Fox Point being a uniquely named municipality near Mequon, the ballots were flagged as having insufficient addresses. This note, obtained through a public records request, was affixed to a ballot by an election worker. Three of the ballots rejected between 2024 and 2026 had witness addresses in Fox Point, which Fochs said was a duplicate municipality. While the suburb of Fox Point shares its name with a small handful of neighborhoods and geographical features around the country, it is the only such named municipality in the United States. Four ballots from Chicago were also rejected on this basis, though Chicago, Illinois, is the only incorporated city with that name in the country. Fochs did not immediately respond to questions Thursday about why those ballots were rejected. In a previous interview, she disputed that Fox Point is uniquely named, saying , “If the search came up with multiple Fox Points, then we reject it.” The city has been under fire for rejecting five ballots from the Wisconsin Supreme Court election in April. But an analysis of public records obtained by Votebeat show that Fochs’ practice extends further back, encompassing more ballots than previously reported. The Wisconsin Elections Commission is expected to decide Thursday whether to launch an investigation into Mequon or take other action. The state hasn’t yet certified the April election, and WEC could feasibly order the ballots to be counted after all. The records obtained by Votebeat include the August 2024, November 2024, February 2026, and April 2026 elections. Records from the 2025 election have been destroyed, per state retention laws. It is unclear how many ballots Mequon has rejected based on Fochs’ standard, or exactly how long it’s been in place. Sam Liebert is the Wisconsin state director of All Voting is Local and a former municipal clerk in Shorewood Hills and the Village of Sussex. He said that when he was an election official he followed WEC guidelines to the letter. Liebert said Fochs is failing to do that here. “These are eligible voters who did what they were supposed to do, and when their ballots got rejected over technicalities, it risks disenfranchising people and undermining the system,” he said. Fochs told Votebeat that Mequon’s standard, abides by a 2024 court decision that states a witness address is valid so long as the clerk can reasonably assess where the witness lives. Fochs said she does not believe she can reasonably assess the address of the witnesses on the ballots she has rejected.Some of the rejected ballots align with Fochs’ stated reasoning: municipalities like Baltimore, Madison, and Verona share their names with other places. But in many cases, the full witness address — including the street number and name — appears to be unique to a single location within that municipality, even if the city name itself is not unique nationally. For example, one witness address lists Houston. The combination of the street address and city corresponds to a single location in Houston, Texas. The top search result for the name of the witness along with Houston shows that she’s a student at Rice University, which is in Houston, Texas. In addition to Fox Point and Chicago, some other rejected ballots had witness addresses from Willmar, New York, and San Rafael. Willmar is uniquely named. And although New York and San Rafael share names with unincorporated communities or ghost towns, each has only one incorporated municipality nationwide. Liebert said what’s happening in Mequon is almost certainly the exception rather than the rule. “I hope she is not purposely doing this to try to set a new precedent for her interpretation of what a valid address is, because that’s already been determined by our courts and should be enforced as such,” he said. We ‘certainly do not claim to have the best answer’ In an email dated April 8 to the liberal law firm Law Forward , obtained by Votebeat, Brian Sajdak, an attorney with the law firm Stafford Rosenbaum who said he was responding to Law Forward’s correspondence with Fochs, said Fochs is following current law. He described rejecting ballots as a “policy of last resort” and said “every effort is made to contact the voter” so the issue can be corrected. Law Forward had called Mequon’s judgment potentially illegal, and threatened legal action. “We have spent a significant amount of time thinking through and discussing this issue but certainly do not claim to have the best answer,” wrote Sajdak, who did not respond to a request for comment. He said Fochs trains her election officials to apply the same standard to all witness addresses. He wrote that Fochs instructs her staff to review all the information on the envelope “to determine if the location at which a party may be communicated with is reasonably ascertainable” before rejecting the ballot, and rejection is not automatic even if the municipality is duplicative. Sajdak also wrote that “we all agree that the potential disenfranchisement of even a single eligible elector poses significant threat to our democratic institutions—a threat that the City and Ms. Fochs take seriously.” The Ozaukee County canvassing board in mid-April decided not to dispute Mequon’s election results, even though County Clerk Kellie Kretlow, a Republican, disagreed with Fochs’ decision not to count the ballots rejected due to her standard. Kretlow said she was told by the Wisconsin Elections Commission that she had the authority to require Mequon to conduct a new canvass. She chose not to, she said, because the disputed ballots wouldn’t have changed the outcome of any race. Jeff Mandell, co-founder of Law Forward, said Fochs’ judgment “underscores the problem with clerks taking into their own hands an arbitrary standard.” He added that it gives the impression there is an election official “who’s almost looking for reasons not to count votes, and that’s not the way the system is supposed to work.” “We do not believe that votes are less valuable or less important just because the election wasn’t close or they won’t swing the outcome of an election,” Mandell said. “People have a fundamental right to vote.” Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

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