In the Jan. 25, 2023 Boulder Monitor, Jane Lee Hamman wrote an Op Ed piece on Election Integrity. In it she references several headlines that are not factual and outrageously misleading.
The first is “150,000 Ballots in Wisconsin voted in 2020 had no known address.” This is simply wrong. This was picked up from Tweet on Twitter and spread to other sources on the Internet. The statement is based on someone comparing the number of registered voters in 2018 with the number of votes cast in 2020. According to the Wisconsin Election Commission, the “State of Wisconsin had 3,684,726 active registered voters on November 1, 2020.” The New York Times reports that a total of “3,296,836” votes have been cast in Wisconsin in 2020. the number of votes counted did not exceed the number of registered voters, and all votes cast had accurate addresses.
The second headline reads, “”10 Million 2022 California Ballots Unaccounted For.” Over 10 million people who were sent mail-in ballots (as part of California’s program of sending every registered voter a mail-in ballot) did not use them to vote in the 2022 election. This does not mean they are missing. “Election officials ‘know’ what happened to those ballots,” said Paul Gronke, a professor at Reed College, who is the director of the Early Voting Information Center, a research group based there. “They were received by eligible citizens and not filled out. Where are they now? Most likely, in landfills,” Gronke said by email.
