By Sam Levine, The Guardian
As states across the U.S. delay their primary elections in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, Wisconsin is so far staying the course — and finds itself in complete disarray.
Some 111 jurisdictions don’t have enough poll workers to staff a single polling location for the Tuesday vote, and the Gov. Tony Evers has enlisted Wisconsin’s National Guard to help run them.
In Milwaukee, home to around 300,000 registered voters, there will be just five election day polling locations, instead of the usual 180.
Days ahead of the election, Neil Albrecht, executive director of Milwaukee’s board of elections, didn’t know where those sites would be or who would staff them. The city usually requires 1,400 poll workers, but had just 400 early last week.
“We are over our heads in chaos right now,” Albrecht said. “The level of public confusion will be so rampant and the access to voting will be so limited.”
Unprecedented requests for mail-in ballots
So far, using aggressive public messaging, Wisconsin has successfully convinced more than 1.2 of its 3.3 million voters to request a mail-in ballot, as of last Friday (Apr. 3). That is unprecedented — in its 2016 spring election, the state issued just under 250,000 absentee (mail-in) ballots.
But there is still deep concern that confusion and rules around mail-in voting will leave many unable to participate. On Thursday, a federal judge ordered the state to ease some of its restrictions around absentee balloting.
On Friday night, a federal Court of Appeals overruled one key point in that lower court decision, and over the weekend the U.S. Supreme Court was asked to intervene.
‘It’s going to be imperfect. . .’
“It’s going to be imperfect, some voters will be disenfranchised,” said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “There’s going to be inequality and access to the ballot that will affect the election outcome.”
The hurdles could impact the state’s presidential primary election, local races, and a critical contest for a state Supreme Court seat where Democrats are looking to narrow the conservative majority.
Elections officials in Wisconsin told The Guardian they were stunned the state is moving forward with in-person voting at a time when the governor has issued a formal order instructing people to stay at home. The election on Tuesday would be the most significant test of whether a state can safely conduct a fair election amid a global pandemic.
Mail-in ballot rules in flux
Meanwhile, voters applying for mail-in ballots have been faced with confusion around the quickly changing rules. Normally Wisconsin requires people to submit a picture of their ID to get an absentee ballot, and all voters needed a witness to sign their ballot. These restrictions have been especially hard for senior citizens, as well as students and other people who move a lot, Burden said.
Last Thursday, U.S. District Judge William Conley eased some of those rules. He said Wisconsin voters could submit an absentee ballot without a witness signature if they provided a declaration they could not get one, and left local clerks with the authority to determine validity.
Conley, a Rice Lake native, said cities like Milwaukee, which has already received hundreds of ballots without witness signatures, could count them with the declaration as well. He also extended the absentee ballot deadline to Apr. 13.
On Friday night, the 7th U.S. Court of Appeals reinstated the witness requirement but left in place Conley’s six-day extension of the time limit for absentee ballots.
Republicans have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to block that extension and require absentee ballots to be postmarked or delivered to the polls by Tuesday. Democrats responded that this would disenfranchise thousands of voters and noted that statewide there is a backlog of 21,590 requested ballots that haven’t been mailed out.
A decision on whether to intervene and change the absentee ballot time limit is likely today.
Meanwhile, Wisconsin’s controversial ID rules have not been eased. Officials in Madison said Wednesday they received over a thousand requests for a mail-in ballot from people without acceptable ID — about half of which were from senior citizens.
Judge calls Apr. 7 election ‘ill-advised’
Conley had called the election “ill-advised” but said he had no authority to stop it.
To account for the inevitable and severe delays, he extended the deadline by which local election officials have to receive ballots from 8 p.m. on election night to nearly a week later, at 4 p.m. on April 13. Conley also blocked election officials from releasing election results until the later date.
If the Supreme Court leaves Conley’s ruling in force, this change will likely allow thousands of Wisconsin voters to have their votes counted. It should also provide relief to election officials like Albrecht, who said he needs 300 workers to count ballots and had less than 50.
Local officials still plan to run a small number of in-person voting sites — significant because voters can register to vote on Election Day. In previous spring elections, around 20% of voters in Milwaukee made use of that registration process, Albrecht said, and they were disproportionately voters of color.
“When we talk about communities in poverty, which is where we’re seeing the hotspots of the pandemic, getting to the voting center may not be as accessible to you,” he said.
Valid reason for poll workers to drop out
The Wisconsin Elections Commission reported a statewide shortage of at least 7,000 poll workers. And there is valid reason for many of them to drop out: Poll workers tend to skew older, the demographic most likely to develop severe complications from COVID-19. Two poll workers in Florida tested positive for coronavirus after the election there last month.
Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell said he has a draft email in his inbox asking county workers to step in, but feels sick at the prospect of putting those workers at risk and hasn’t been able to bring himself to send it. Meanwhile, Milwaukee closed all of its in-person early voting sites, and the city, along with Madison, is offering a site where voters can drive up and drop off their ballot instead.
In Waukesha, one of the most populous cities in the state, officials got rid of all but one of the city’s 13 voting sites.
“It’s a travesty that we are conducting an in-person election at all during this time,” said Kevin Lahner, the Waukesha city administrator.
Many states are watching Wisconsin as a case study in switching from in-person voting to mail-in ballots amid COVID-19. For now, Albrecht, whose city has been at the center of some of the most brutal voting rights battles over the last few years, is bracing for Tuesday.
“I’m completely stymied, for lack of a better word, how this election can move forward,” he said.
Sam Levine covers voting rights for The Guardian. Wisconsin Watch reporters Kayla Huynh and Dee J. Hall contributed to this report. This story was a collaboration between The Guardian and Wisconsin Watch, (wisconsinwatch.org), which collaborates with Wisconsin Public Radio, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.
Note: the home page photo was taken by Dee J. Hall, Wisconsin Watch.