The complaint alleges that the Center for Tech and Civic Life illegally dictated how Green Bay ran its election when it provided the city with $1.6 million to facilitate voting during the coronavirus pandemic. Minneapolis attorney Erick Kaardal cited a grant agreement that broadly required Green Bay to use the funds for “the public purpose of planning and operationalizing safe and secure election administration.”
“We want people to accept election results, and that requires fair and transparent elections,” Kaardal said during a news conference at the Brown County Courthouse.
This is some good reporting form WBAY. We see that the failure to successfully execute the election was the result of the utter mismanagement by the Mayor and municipal leadership. There needs to be accountability for this.
“Unacceptable. To me that’s unacceptable,” said Sandy Juno, Brown County Clerk. “Clearly, the size of Green Bay only having two polling locations with one tabulator at each location was insufficient.”
Green Bay Mayor Eric Genrich declined an interview with Action 2 News on Wednesday, but in a Facebook Post he wrote, “I want to stress that this was not an option we chose eagerly. In fact, it was our last resort. Our contingency plan, once first realizing a significant decline in available poll workers, involved the use of our four high school gyms. That number fell to two locations as the number of experienced and trained poll workers fell further.”
A city staff member told Action 2 News that over the past few weeks the city lost 85 percent of its experienced poll workers. In an effort to maintain safety, the staffer said they needed to consolidate and find locations big enough to allow social distancing.
When Action 2 News asked Juno if she had any control over Green Bay’s decision to only have two polling places, she said ‘no.’
[…]
Juno said the City of Green Bay could have had more help because she had about 50 National Guard members who could have helped out at the polling locations.
“On Sunday, I did talk to the mayor because I was looking for a site to dispatch the National Guard from on Monday. And he again reiterated that they did not need them and they did not want them,” said Juno.
Action 2 News asked Juno if she could force Green Bay to use the National Guard members and she said, ‘No. That is not under my control. That is a municipal function.”
Juno said she had 140 National Guard members available to dispatch in Brown County. Of those, she used 92. Juno said she had 48 that were on-call Tuesday.
[…]
“The failure yesterday was not because of COVID-19 because we had 1850 municipalities that successfully performed, all their elections went off with excellence. We had two that failed. (she is referring to the City of Milwaukee and City of Green Bay) That was not COVID 19 that was mismanagement of the election.”
