Governor Evers and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel are flat-out lying to you: Even if the federal government investigates 2020 election ballots (and they aren’t), they won’t be able to see who you voted for. Dan O’Donnell debunks their insanity.
Gov. Tony Evers and his media allies at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel are once again peddling panic over phantom threats to “ballot secrecy.” In breathless stories this week, they warn that if the FBI ever subpoenas Milwaukee’s 2020 absentee ballots, federal agents will magically “figure out how tens of thousands of residents there voted.” Evers even vowed to fight any such request “all the way,” claiming it would shred Wisconsinites’ constitutional right to a secret ballot.
It’s a lie. A deliberate, hysterical distortion designed to scare voters and shield Wisconsin’s notoriously sloppy election practices from any real scrutiny.
Here’s the actual law they’re fear-mongering about: Wis. Stat. § 7.52(2), which says very plainly that “the board of absentee ballot canvassers shall mark the poll list number of each elector who casts an absentee ballot on the back of the elector’s ballot.”
That’s it. During central counting in cities like Milwaukee, workers assign each accepted absentee voter a simple sequential number, starting at 1, and hand-write that number on the back of the physical ballot before dropping it in the box. They also record it next to the voter’s name on a duplicate poll list.
No name. No signature. No address. Just an anonymous number on the back of a folded ballot that no one unfolds or examines before it goes through the tabulator.
This practice is as obsolete as a flip phone. County clerks across Wisconsin have explained for years that it was created to let poll workers quickly locate and cancel a specific absentee ballot if someone showed up on Election Day trying to “spoil” it and vote in person. Then courts ended ballot spoiling. The law became pointless. Clerks have begged the Legislature to repeal it—bipartisan bills have passed committees with ease—yet it lingers like a bad habit.
Now, the Journal Sentinel jumps from this obscure numbering requirement to the wild claim that the FBI could suddenly “reveal” how people voted. They even linked to the wrong statute in their original piece—§ 6.97(2) on provisional ballots—because apparently accuracy is optional when the narrative is “Orange Man Bad wants to spy on voters.”
Let’s walk through why this is practically impossible.
Tabulators scan ballots and create digital images—almost always of the front, where the votes are marked. The poll-list number is handwritten on the back. Even if a subpoena somehow included back-side images (it wouldn’t), those images contain only a random number. No voter identity attached.
The poll list itself—names matched to numbers—is a separate public record. Wisconsin already makes who voted public; that’s not new. But to “see how you voted,” someone would have to:
- Obtain every single ballot image (tens or hundreds of thousands).
- Manually locate the handwritten number on the back of each one.
- Cross-reference it against the separate poll list.
- Do this for 176,000 ballots in Milwaukee alone.
Ballots are thoroughly mixed in the box, run through machines without human review of the marks, sealed, and stored anonymously. Clerks routinely redact these numbers before releasing ballot images in public records requests precisely because they recognize the theoretical privacy risk—even though no one has ever used this system to expose individual votes in Wisconsin history.
In short, it’s a theoretical needle in a haystack. The Journal Sentinel leaps straight to “federal authorities will be able to figure out how you voted” without ever explaining the massive, labor-intensive barriers or the fact that clerks themselves treat the numbers as a privacy headache they want gone.
And here’s the part nobody—nobody—in the Evers administration, the Wisconsin Elections Commission, or the state’s left-wing media wants to talk about: actual investigation of Wisconsin’s 2020 ballots.
While Evers hyperventilates about secrecy, no one is demanding the FBI, DOJ, or even a special counsel dig into the real irregularities: the unprecedented flood of unsecured absentee ballots, the nursing-home harvesting scandals, the drop boxes, the delayed counting, the statistical anomalies that still scream for answers six years later. Milwaukee’s 2020 ballots still exist only because of ongoing lawsuits—otherwise they’d have been destroyed per the usual five-year rule.
Instead of transparency, we get manufactured outrage over a 14-digit number on the back of a ballot that can’t be linked without hiring an army of clerks working overtime for months.
This isn’t about protecting voters. It’s about protecting a system that Democrats and their media mouthpieces desperately want to keep opaque. Gov. Evers and the Journal Sentinel aren’t defending ballot secrecy. They’re defending ballot secrecy theater—while blocking any real look at how those ballots were actually cast, counted, and certified.
Wisconsin deserves better than this cynical con. The law is obsolete. The scare tactics are dishonest. And the silence on genuine election integrity is deafening.
