MADISON, Wis. — A fifth-generation Wisconsinite from Eau Claire, Sarah Godlewski has been at the helm of the Office of the Secretary of State for a year now and put her own stamp on how things run.
Godlewski was picked for the post by the governor last year after Doug La Follette abruptly resigned from office just three months into his 11th consecutive term. At the time, some Republicans criticized the move and called for a special election instead.
A year later, Godlewski said she has had a lot of digging out to do since taking the position.
“It wasn’t because we didn’t have hard-working folks doing this. It was more that the resources that we earn, we’re not even able to keep, to do the work at the detriment of Wisconsin,” Godlewski explained. “When I got here, we were over a month behind in a backlog. I mean we had boxes, as I’ve said, thousands of records that had not been digitized.”
However, Godlewski isn’t pointing fingers at her predecessor. Rather, she puts the blame on the Wisconsin Legislature for defunding the office in the past and not returning the funds it generates from service fees.
“They made a massive cut in 2015 where they not only kicked them out of their office, which was an accessible public building across the street, they got rid of key roles like an accountant, a lawyer, people that would run the international commerce activities that we do, those 15,000 cases, and then moved this office down to the basement,” Godlewski said.
The 900 square foot spot in the basement of the Capitol building is a far cry from the 4,000 square foot space the office used to have.
Godlewski relies on an annual budget of $278,000 to keep everything up and running with just two full-time employees, including herself.
As for the equipment, some of it is older than the Capitol building itself, including the press from 1881 that Godlewski uses to seal thousands of documents a year.
“I asked, ‘What happens if this breaks?’ And the response was, ‘Just don’t ask, Sarah,’ because our backup here broke a while ago,” Godlewski added. “We don’t have the funds to fix it.”
Though it might seem like an uphill battle, Godlewski isn’t giving up on her goals.
“Modernizing the office—so, right now, you either have to come to our office, so a person from Superior would have to drive to Madison to get their adoption paperwork signed, or have to do snail mail,” Godlewski said. “And so, we want to put as many services online as possible so you would have a similar like Amazon experience because it takes time and resources, and the government needs to meet folks where they are.”
Those services also require a lot of security, which is why Godlewski takes her job so seriously.
“We are basically like a notary for county clerks, and we are responsible for capturing the clerk's signature and seals so we then can validate that information,” Godlewski explained. “Bad actors try to impersonate the government, we saw it out West for example, and so one of the things that we’re working on is a partnership with the clerks [for] how we are capturing their signatures and seals and encrypting them in a way that’s secure.”
Without that process and a seal to provide trust, the secretary wonders what would happen to Wisconsin.
“If we didn’t authenticate those international documents for families who were adopting a child overseas or for the businesses, like Trek or GE Healthcare or even a local cheese shop that we did, so they can sell their products overseas, they can’t go to Minnesota, they can’t go to Illinois for that work to be done because we are the keeper of the seal,” Godlewski said. “That’s part of the role that we play, and so if we can’t provide that service, who’s going to do that?”
For Godlewski, it’s also a role that is keeper of a promise to the state’s constitution.