Village of Jackson, WI – Village of Jackson Clerk, Jilline Dobratz, understands election information is important to voters across Washington County especially with the April 5, 2022, Spring Election on the horizon.
Below is a 101 primer on absentee ballots, in-person voting, and tracking your ballot.
- Absentee ballots for the April 5, 2022, Spring Election go out March 15, 2022. People can continue to request absentee ballots up until March 31, 2022.
- If you are submitting a completed absentee ballot request application, you must include a copy of your photo identification with your form.
- Indefinitely confined: Voters who wish to cast absentee ballots for every single election must be indefinitely confined to do so. “Those who are on the indefinitely confined list or have applied for [it], their clerk sent out a letter. It has to be returned within a certain amount of time. If the letter is never returned, then we can remove them from the indefinitely confined list because we haven’t heard from them,” said Dobratz. “Those who have fallen off the indefinitely confined status for voting can always sign up again.”
- If you have questions about whether you’re indefinitely confined, you can contact the clerk in your local municipality or look on the My Vote website at Home (wi.gov)
- In-person absentee voting starts March 22, 2022 and runs through 5 p.m. on Friday, April 1, 2022.
- Can I come in and change my vote? “As long as it’s still during that absentee period. You couldn’t come in on Election Day and ask for us to find your absentee ballot,” said Dobratz.
- The Village of Jackson will cover school board races in the West Bend School District, Germantown School District, and the Slinger School District.
Drop boxes are a hot topic and Dobratz said they will not be allowed in the upcoming April election.
“Unless it goes back to the courts, drop boxes cannot be used,” she said. “Also, people cannot return an absentee ballot for somebody else in the clerk’s office. So even if you have a spouse or your parents or something like that, you can only return your own ballot now in the clerk’s office.”
In the City of West Bend there is a drop box attached to City Hall. Dobratz said “those drop boxes are not being allowed.”
If a ballot is placed in there by accident, Dobratz said the clerk is going to have to reach out to those people and have the ballot mailed back to them. “Ballots can only be put in the mail or brought into the clerk’s office,” she said.
- Absentee ballots that do not reach the clerk’s office by 8 p.m. on Election Day will not be counted.
- Check your vote at myvote.wi.gov
Following a report this month by former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman regarding election integrity, some neighbors are asking how to check and see if their parent or grandparent voted, even if they are incapacitated in a nursing home.
Dobratz said special voting deputies were not allowed to go into any facilities in 2020 so those ballots were mailed in. “This year, starting the week of March 14, 2022, is when municipalities can start sending their special voting deputies into care facilities again,” she said. “The special voting deputies would be the ones doing the absentee process.”
Dobratz said a voter must be able to state their name and address in order to vote. “All the rules of voting still apply,” she said. “So, if they can’t state their name and address, we wouldn’t be able to even give them a ballot to vote.
“I wouldn’t be able to speak to what happened in 2020,” she said.
Jilline Dobratz has been the clerk in the Village of Jackson for about four years. Dobratz has also worked as a deputy clerk in the Village of Germantown, Village of Fox Point and Village of Grafton.
