Celestine Jeffreys, the Green Bay City Clerk who helped funnel Mark Zuckerberg's election cash into Wisconsin's largest liberal cities in 2020, just resigned after her office sent 152 duplicate absentee ballots to voters in the April 2026 election — then did it again before the August 11 primary.
Two duplicate ballot incidents in three months. From the same clerk. In a swing state.
The City of Green Bay and Jeffreys announced her departure in a joint statement on August 7, ending a five-year tenure that started in January 2021 — conveniently right after the election that put her on the map. Mayor Eric Genrich, who appointed Jeffreys after she served as his chief of staff during the Zuckbucks era, offered the kind of send-off you give someone whose resignation you've been praying for: "We wish her the best in her future endeavors."
That's mayoral for "please stop making us explain things to investigators."
Jeffreys had been placed on paid administrative leave on July 9 after the city discovered the second round of duplicate ballot labels had been printed ahead of the August primary. The first incident — those 152 duplicate absentee ballots mailed to voters before the spring election — had already triggered a formal investigation by the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which unanimously found probable cause that state election laws were violated.
The Wisconsin Elections Commission had already flagged Jeffreys for violating state law on third-party absentee ballot return policies. In 2024, it came out that her office had failed to properly deactivate voter registrations when postcards came back as undeliverable. Logan Churchwell, Research Director at the Public Interest Legal Foundation, summed it up: "Following election law is not optional."
Doug Reich, Chairman of the Republican Party of Brown County, called the resignation "the bare minimum, and it's long overdue." Nicholas Boerke, legal counsel for Brown County GOP board member Theresa Sipes, was more direct: "This is either gross incompetence or something worse."
The "something worse" part is where the history gets interesting. Jeffreys wasn't just any municipal clerk. She was Genrich's chief of staff when Green Bay became one of the "Wisconsin 5" — the five largest liberal-run cities in the state that collectively received $10 million in election administration grants funded by Zuckerberg and his wife, part of more than $100 million distributed nationally. That arrangement gave Michael Spitzer-Rubenstein, a former New York Democrat operative, access to absentee ballot storage areas in Green Bay's election infrastructure. The whole setup was so alarming that Wisconsin eventually banned private election funding.
They banned the money. They kept the clerk.
Five years, two Zuckbucks scandals, multiple state law violations, 152 duplicate ballots, and a second duplicate incident that hasn't even been fully counted yet. The resignation wasn't accountability. It was a controlled exit before the investigation finished.