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Dozens of Sheboygan County voters are listed as living in Africa in a new database that clerks are scrambling to correct before election season.
The previous software assigned each residence to a given municipality, school district or ward based on address ranges, programming the system to recognize what district corresponds to a given range of house numbers on a given street. But Wisconsin is now converting to a geographical information system (GIS), which treats each address as a separate point.
The geographic accuracy is spotty — at times moving roads by as much as a mile. If an address is not recognized, the database places it in Africa.
“Apparently when the GIS system cannot find an address or it doesn’t match their geo-coding, their default is to put it off the coast of Africa, so that’s where you have to go to find them,” said Sheboygan County Clerk Julie Glancey, adding with a laugh, “We think maybe it’s a giant cruise ship anchored off the coast of Africa where they’ve all gone, because Lord help them if they’re all in the water.”
Glancey said about 50 county addresses have been dragged back from Africa, and overall about 20 percent of the addresses need to be tweaked somehow in the new geo-based system.
Glancey’s staff is responsible for overseeing the changeover in 19 of the county’s 28 municipalities, a task that began in December and may well stretch through to the February primaries. The problems must be fixed before the next elections, since addresses listed in the wrong municipality, ward, state assembly district or school district could cause confusion for voters trying to figure where to vote and in which race.
“We spend several hours every day, everybody, working on this,” Glancey said. “It did some bizarre things, but the state is aware of these issues and they’re capable of printing reports that they send to us showing, here is the voter’s address before we changed the system, here’s the voter’s address as it appears now.”
The issue is particularly crucial in the City of Sheboygan, which has an abnormal primary next Tuesday due to the mayoral recall election. City Clerk Sue Richards said her office has sent out more than 20,000 postcards to virtually every city address, advising voters of their polling location.
The switch to GIS comes as clerks are also dealing with the once-a-decade statewide redistricting, in which the state senate and assembly lines were significantly redrawn. The changes instituted by the Legislature are getting much of the blame for the database confusion, but Glancey said that’s not really fair.
“It’s not really the fault of redistricting, necessarily; it’s a combination of, they’re changing how they’re putting voters into the system — going from an address-range system to a geo-code system — and then you just kind of put in there the fact that now you’ve redistricted, too,” she said. “You’re kind of doing two things at the same time, so that complicates it a little bit.”
—Reach Eric Litke at 920-453-5119.