Elections

Forgotten Onalaska votes finally counted

Published

4 years ago

November 5, 2020

Onalaska has now recounted the absentee ballots in one city district, to include 50 ballots that were left uncounted by accident on Tuesday.

City clerk JoAnn Marcon says the process of recounting 3000 absentee ballots in District 1 took about six hours on Thursday.

Marcon says the 50 ballots in question were about to be fed into a ballot-counting machine on election night, but were set aside when a machine problem had to be fixed.

Later, comparing the number counted by the machine to the number of ballots received, they realized that the machine figure was 50 votes short.

Marcon tells us the new votes added apparently had very little effect on any race.

Joe Biden had already won the 1st district over Donald Trump by about 300 votes.

More than 11-thousand ballots were cast in Onalaska in this election, with only about 3000 cast in-person at the polls on Tuesday.

Brad Williams

A native of Prairie du Chien, Brad graduated from UW - La Crosse and has worked in radio news for more than 30 years, mostly in the La Crosse area. He regularly covers local courts and city and county government. Brad produces the features "Yesterday in La Crosse" and "What's Buried on Brad's Desk." He also writes the website "Triviazoids," which finds odd connections between events that happen on a certain date, and he writes and performs with the local comedy group Heart of La Crosse. Brad been featured on several national TV programs because of his memory skills.