Rock County Clerk denies New London man's request for voting system IP addresses

Sep. 17—JANESVILLE — The Rock County Clerk's Office is denying part of an open records request by a New London man who, among other things, is seeking IP addresses for servers linked to the county's electronic voting system as part of an apparent personal investigation of the November 2020 election.

In a response released this week, Rock County Clerk Lisa Tollefson told New London resident Peter Bernegger the county has denied his June 8 and June 26 requests to obtain Rock County voting system IP addresses for election servers that funnel ballot data to a computer router that manages the county's central ballot count.

According to a July 5 Associated Press report, Bernegger has made similar requests of county clerks throughout Wisconsin. In an editorial in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel this summer, he wrote he was suspicious of election fraud because he had heard of claims that voters had been turned away from some polling places after they had been told registration records show they had already voted.

In her response, Tollefson said the county is denying part of Bernegger's request because he asked for IP addresses that would be stored on a computer router that the county had not installed or used until a few months after the November election.

Tollefson also wrote that the request is being denied because divulging electronic addresses tied to county servers would result in the county releasing individual voter data that could identify voters—something that is prohibited under federal voter privacy laws and homeland security rules designed to protect voting machines as "critical infrastructure."

Tollefson said she believes other counties have declined Bernegger's requests to collect IP addresses for voting servers. She said Bernegger didn't explain in his request why he is seeking the records, but Tollefson said she believes he is attempting to conduct an independent count of 2020 presidential election ballots.

She said the request seems to raise the question of whether the county retained election results for the legally required time. Tollefson said the county has retained voting records from the election. The data has since been input through a new central router put in place late last year, weeks after the election.

The county has repeatedly certified the results, and county canvassing has confirmed an accurate vote count, she said.

Making copies of 85,000 ballots

The clerk's office intends to comply with another portion of Bernegger's request: to make available photocopies of each ballot cast in Rock County in the November 2020 election.

Tollefson said it has taken weeks and "hundreds of hours of redaction time" to fulfill that part of the request because it requires the county to go through photocopies of all 85,000-plus ballots cast in the county in the election by hand.

Tollefson said that is because clerks are required by law to redact all the routing numbers for each voter's ballot to protect individual voters' privacy. She said some routing numbers are printed on different locations of the individual ballots, which makes it necessary to go through all the ballots by hand.

Tollefson said her office has worked through about 65,000 ballots cast, but the county is still going through all the absentee ballots cast by Janesville voters.

"If the voter numbers are not redacted from the ballot images, then the voter's ballot could be directly linked back to the voter who completed the ballot," Tollefson wrote. "All voters deserve anonymity when voting, and the images of the absentee ballots will not be released until the redaction is completed."