Jenny Peek
Voters fill out their ballots at East High School. A judge ordered East High to stay open an extra hour, after voting was disrupted there early in the morning by a fire alarm.
Madison voters reinforced stereotypes at the polls Tuesday, voting in large numbers and overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates. Gov. Tony Evers, Attorney General Josh Kaul, Secretary of State Doug La Follette and Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, running for U.S. Senate, all won every ward in the city and collected over 85 percent of the citywide vote.
That overwhelming support for one party is important for Democrats running for statewide office. A glance at election results mapped by county shows how critical it is for liberals to run up big leads in the urban centers of Madison and Milwaukee to counter the strength of Republicans in the state’s rural areas.
Playing into that voter drive, yard signs on the city’s east side challenged neighbors to hit the polls in the hopes of achieving 100 percent turnout in their wards. Competitive residents often insist turnout in their neighborhoods is the best in the city, if not the state. On Tuesday, the city’s most engaged wards included some usual suspects, but a few interesting upstarts as well.
What follows are a few observations from looking at turnout data for Madison wards. Find raw numbers at the Dane County Clerk’s website and a good map of city wards on the city website. Isthmus pulled out the races relevant to this analysis in a spreadsheet here.
West is best
For the purposes of this analysis, we define turnout as the number of people who voted on Tuesday as a percentage of all registered voters as of Nov. 1, 2022, according to the Wisconsin Elections Commission. Because Wisconsin allows voters to register on Election Day at the polls, these percentages could change when the registration numbers are updated on Dec. 1. Also: True voter turnout is measured by comparing the number of voters to the voting age population, but we could not locate a ward-by-ward breakdown of those statistics.
Wards 80 (Nakoma) and 114 (Cardinal Glen, Birchwood-Oaks) each turned out over 88 percent of their registered voters, topping 2,200 ballots cast each, to claim the title of the city’s biggest voting wards, when looking at both raw ballot count and turnout percentage. Ward 19 (Olbrich Park) saw 2,214 ballots, good for nearly 87 percent. And Ward 40 (Schenk’s Corners) had 2,129 for 84 percent turnout. No other wards topped 2,000 ballots and 80 percent turnout.
In terms of total votes, Ward 80 cast the most with 2,277, followed by 113 (Hawk’s Landing) with 2,237, for a turnout of just under 80 percent. Wards 91 (Spring Harbor) and 98 (Meadowood) each delivered over 1,900 ballots with turnouts of 81 percent and 78 percent, respectively.
The lowest turnout for a ward with over 2,000 registered voters was in 46, which surrounds the southwest corner of James Madison Park downtown, with 68.5 percent.
UW students have returned
In the 2020 presidential election, the UW-Madison campus was still very much dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic and turnout reflected that. Students were attending school remotely so many voted at their permanent addresses or just sat out the election. But on Tuesday, Madison’s dorm-dwelling voters stormed back to the polls. In the early afternoon, Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell tweeted “Overheard- ‘Campus is voting like you wouldn’t believe!’”
The numbers that came in later backed that up. Turnout percentage in wards 57, 58, 60 and 61, representing the bulk of the Southeast and Lakeshore residence halls, each surpassed 100 percent of their Nov. 1 voter registration numbers. That indicated a strong desire to register at the polls by a population that included many first-time voters.
East side backs legal weed
One of the advisory referendums appearing on Tuesday’s ballot asked voters if they favored legalizing, taxing and regulating marijuana use for people 21 and over. The city overwhelmingly favored the proposal, with over 87 percent of voters voting yes.
Predictably, wards on the city’s near east side were most enthusiastic, with the neighborhoods bordering Williamson Street coming in at around 95 percent in favor. On the other end of the spectrum are the wards that favored legalization with just 75 percent of the vote: 109 (Junction Ridge), 119 (Blackhawk) and 140 (Elderberry). All of those are located on the far west side.
