Madison officials say city is ready to manage clerk’s maternity leave during election

Madison City Clerk Lydia McComas took over her job in September 2025 with the city under heavy scrutiny from state election officials after nearly 200 absentee ballots were lost during the 2024 election. During the April 2026 state Supreme Court election, 23 late arriving absentee ballots nearly weren’t counted after a staff error. 

Ann Jacobs, a Democrat on the Wisconsin Elections Commission, said at a meeting in April that the second error was “absurd.” The two problems made the city of Madison the subject of the first two investigations ever opened by WEC. 

In June, Votebeat reported that McComas told Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway that she would “firmly address the lack of communication” that caused the mistake and the clerk’s office would have more staff in place for the August and November elections. 

But McComas will be on maternity leave during the Nov. 3 election. 

Despite McComas’ absence, city officials say the processes put in place to avoid repeated errors, additional staff and help from other city departments will be enough to smoothly manage the midterm elections and the potential scrutiny that could come from WEC or the Republican Party of Wisconsin —  whose gubernatorial candidate this year, Tom Tiffany, has previously cast doubt on election results from Wisconsin’s largest cities. 

City spokesperson Dylan Brogan said of the recent errors in Madison that the city is “confident these things won’t happen again.” 

“This is a team process that involves 2,000 people,” he said. 

In McComas’ absence, deputy clerk Kaitlyn Bernarde is running the election. Brogan said that other city staff, such as City Attorney Mike Haas, who previously served as the WEC administrator, can help fill in. 

Bernarde spent more than four years as the clerk in Wausau, a credential that convinced WEC the transition wouldn’t be a problem. 

“[McComas] hired a new deputy who was the clerk out of Wausau. Based on that we didn’t have any concerns,” Jacobs told the Wisconsin Examiner. 

In an interview with the Examiner, Bernarde said prior to the August primary elections, the clerk’s office added a staff member who is responsible for managing the thousands of absentee ballots returned to the city, which she believes will prevent any further absentee-related errors. 

“That is one of our major new changes in our office, we implemented an absentee lead position before the August election, and so we have a full time staff member who’s in charge of that, as well as additional hourly staff and other city staff who are helping to ensure that we have checks in place in the system, that we can check in at different points to make sure that we’re on track to get ballots out on time to our AM delivery, our PM delivery, as well as any late deliveries throughout the day so that way some of those similar mistakes don’t happen again.” 

Bernarde also said that the city and election staff are prepared to run the midterms under scrutiny from WEC and outside observers.

“I think Madison always kind of is under scrutiny by the state, our residents and other people who are involved in the process, and so we’ve had experience working under that kind of pressure the last couple elections,” she said. “And we all want a zero [error] election, and so we talk through that with our staff, with our poll workers to ensure that we are trained and that we document any instances that happen. Because elections involve humans and so sometimes mistakes happen but we have processes in place to confront them, minimize them and then also respond to address them appropriately after.”