Another round of post cards has been sent to many voters statewide with absentee ballot request forms addressed to the wrong municipal clerks. The fliers delivered this week are sponsored by the state Republican Party.
"We do the best with the information we have," says Mark Jefferson, executive director of the state Republican Party. "There's going to be some inaccuracies. The list of problem cases is quite small."
Post cards mailed two weeks ago by Republican presidential nominee John McCain's campaign had similar errors. About a dozen people complained to state elections officials after they received the mailing.
Kyle Richmond, a spokesman for the Government Accountability Board, says the agency found nothing illegal with the mailing.
Jefferson calls all the problems honest mistakes caused by voter databases that contain incorrect information.
"For example, folks have moved recently, but their last known registration is from another municipality," he says. "Lots of times the post cards will be addressed to go to the old municipality."
Democrats believe the mistakes could be an effort by Republicans to confuse voters.
"Either they are launching a systemic campaign to deny the franchise to literally thousands of Wisconsin voters or they're holding those rights hostage to a standard they themselves admit is impossible to meet," state Democratic Party chairman Joe Wineke said at a press conference in Madison following the McCain mailing.
Jefferson denies there is any intent to prevent people from voting.
"There's no suppression effort going on," he says. "We want to get more people to vote, not less."
He says the mailing this week was directed to hundreds of thousands of voters.
Local clerks now are processing absentee voting applications. The absentee ballots aren't sent until about four weeks before the election.
Up to 15 percent of the voting age population in the state is expected to vote absentee this fall through the mail or at clerk's offices, according to Richmond.
