Julie Hanson, clerk for the city of Sparta
Sparta City Clerk Julie Hanson: People are "nervous and we try to put their mind at ease the best we can.”
The population of the town of Christiana in Vernon County is just under 1,000. When residents there want to vote during Wisconsin's two-week early voting period, they call Jackie Olson to make an appointment and she meets them at the town hall.
"It's a small community," says Olson, who has been administering elections for 40 years, presiding over some 100 elections. This year's election, she says, is one for the books.
Of 590 registered voters in the township, 120 have already voted absentee.
"It’s crazy,” says Olson. “Never had so many in all the years I’ve been doing this.”
Like many election clerks in Wisconsin’s highly decentralized election process, Olson works part time at the job.
“It’s more work this year but I don’t mind,” says Olson. “You make time. It’s your job. And it’s important.”
Isthmus spoke to election clerks across the state as early, in-person voting was beginning in Wisconsin. Clerks expect voter turnout to be high, even for a presidential year. All report an already busier than average presidential election season — primarily due to an unprecedented number of absentee ballots and the extra precautions needed to keep voters safe as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to surge in Wisconsin. And all report one more thing: an extremely anxious electorate.
Nearly a million Wisconsinites have already returned their absentee ballots — about a third of the total votes cast in the 2016 election. But the dramatic rise in “mail-in” ballots comes at a time when faith in the U.S. Postal Service is being questioned by voters.
“People hear about problems on the news and they don’t trust the post office to deliver their ballots to us. At least with my voters, many are returning ballots themselves. They aren’t mailing them,” says Debbie Chamberlain, the deputy clerk of Wautoma, a city in Waushara County which has 920 registered voters. “Some people want to hand it to an actual person at our office. Which is just fine. We also have a secure, locked drop box that has a camera on it. We’re trying to give people options and make it easy.”
In addition to clerks sending out more absentee ballots, setting up more secure drop-off boxes, and staffing in-person early voting hours with new social distancing and sanitizing protocols, providing peace of mind has taken on new significance in this presidential election. Local election officials are fielding more questions from the public, who are noticeably more concerned about the integrity of the process this year.
“Because of COVID and all the media out there, people are scared,” says Julie Hanson, clerk for the city of Sparta, located in western Wisconsin along the La Crosse River. “They're nervous and we try to put their mind at ease the best we can.”
Election clerks are required by state law to wait until Election Day to open and start counting absentee ballots. Just opening that many envelopes is expected to slow things down even though there may be fewer voters coming to polling places. It’s likely to be a long night in town halls across the state when Election Day finally comes.
“We know we’re never going to make it home before 10 p.m. on election night. You just keep counting until the work is done,” says Hanson, who will likely oversee a count of around 5,000 ballots. “We’ll have some extra caffeine around in case we need it.”
Meagan Wolfe, administrator of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, is the top election official in the state. At a media briefing Oct. 8, Wolfe stressed the importance of setting accurate expectations. Voters typically believe that the results they hear on election night are official. And President Donald Trump has reinforced that expectation, telling supporters he expects to know who won the election on election night.
"I want to find out, legitimately, who won or lost on Nov. 3,” Trump said at a Oct. 16 rally in Macon, Georgia. “I'm not looking to find out on Nov. 19. Or on Dec. 1. Or two years from now."
But in Wisconsin, results aren’t official until Dec. 1.
“Never in the history of elections have election night results been the official results of an election. That is not the thing. But voters don't know that,” said Wolfe. “There are three levels of certification before results are official.”
And that takes time.
First, municipal clerks count ballots and reconcile the numbers of votes with signatures collected in poll books on Election Day and absentee logs. The local clerks then give copies of that information to county clerks by the following afternoon. County clerks then do their own canvass which this year needs to be completed by Nov. 11. By that date, results and other information need to be uploaded electronically to the Wisconsin Elections Commission. Counties work with local clerks if any irregularities are uncovered. The state then triple-checks the results before officially certifying the results on Dec. 1.
“We're looking at the registered voter population, we're looking at the number of absentees that were issued, and we're making sure that all those numbers make sense,” said Wolfe. “Elections don't happen in the dark…. Nothing happens behind a locked door, they're all publicly noticed, publicly observable processes. In every single community, within walking distance from about every single voter, there are opportunities for you to watch.”
This election, the Wisconsin Elections Commission is also planning to randomly audit 5 percent of the voting equipment used to count ballots by hand counting votes to ensure it matches machine counts.
Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell, who participated in the Wisconsin Elections Commission’s Oct. 8 media briefing, likes to remind people that the state election process stood up to scrutiny during the 2016 election when the Green Party demanded a recount — which the party spent $3.5 million to complete. The initial official count had Donald Trump winning the state by less than 23,000 votes.
“The Green Party and others were saying that there were problems with Wisconsin tallies,” said McDonell. “Well, we had a recount, there were no problems. Our system is very strong, especially here in Wisconsin.”
After the 10-day statewide recount in 2016, Donald Trump added 844 votes to his total while Hillary Clinton added 713. The final result was a net gain of 131 votes for Trump out of nearly 3 million votes — a discrepancy of just .004 percent of all ballots cast.
Trump has repeatedly stoked fears on the campaign trail, without evidence, that the increase in mail-in voting because of the pandemic will lead to massive fraud. The president hasn’t stopped there.
“The only way we're going to lose this election is if the election is rigged," Trump told supporters at an Aug. 17 rally in Oshkosh. "Remember that. It's the only way we're going to lose this election, so we have to be very careful."
Congressman Glenn Grothman (R-Glenbeulah) was recently ranked by Axios as the most loyal to Trump out of all the members of the U.S. House and U.S. Senate. He wouldn’t comment on Trump’s comments about the election being “rigged” but tells Isthmus “it’d be nice” if we knew the results of the election on election night.
“Because there would be suspicion otherwise,” says Grothman. When asked why voters might be suspicious, the congressman keeps it vague.
“Because we live in a world of suspicion,” says Grothman. “Clerks do a great job. I’m a fan of clerks. I’ll say that.”
Grothman argues that it would be better if all voting occurred on Election Day. He worries about voters being intimidated if they fill out a ballot outside a polling place.
“You might have people looking over your shoulder or watching you fill out the ballot,” says Grothman. “It could be a spouse. It could be a college roommate. It could be your boss. It could be the pushy guy down the hall in your apartment building. And I think that's unfortunate, and we'll never know whether cheating is going on there or not.”
Alice Gilman is the clerk for the village of Belmont, which has 516 registered voters. She says the election is going smoothly in her community, located in southwest Wisconsin, despite the extra challenges election officials face this year. She says municipalities have had time to prepare since this isn’t the first election in 2020 under COVID conditions.
“In April, we were blasted with a bunch of absentee ballots. But we dealt with it fine then and know what we’re in for,” says Gilman. “The state's been great about providing us sanitizing alcohol wipes and gloves and masks and all that stuff. So we've been fortunate that way. We’re ready.”
Scott Kluver, the city clerk in Washburn, says his office has seen a rise in absentee ballots and expects an uptick in early, in-person voting before Nov. 3. There are 1,432 voters registered in the small city along Lake Superior.
“But we’ve been able to handle it. With so many people voting in advance of Election Day, the workers that we have will be focused basically on processing ballots on that day,” says Kluver. “I'm not anticipating much of an issue for us.”
Several clerks in smaller communities expressed solidarity with election officials in larger cities, who are contending with thousands of absentee ballots — not just hundreds. There have already been lines to early vote in Madison and Milwaukee. And it might take some extra time to vote early or on Election Day even in more rural areas of the state.
“One thing to emphasize is voters might have to be a little more patient. I think people especially in a smaller community expect to just come in and do their thing. Trust me. The wait in the city of Arcadia is gonna be way less than La Crosse. But it still might be a longer wait than usual,” says Angela Berg, the clerk in Arcadia, located in western Wisconsin along the Trempealeau River. “You may not just be able to get in and get out with five minutes, but I think people are pretty understanding about that.”
Olson, the longtime clerk from the town of Christiana, says a lot has changed since the first presidential election she helped administer in 1980. Back then, she says the whole process was done on paper. But the biggest change has been an attitude shift surrounding elections in this country.
“I don’t know exactly how to say this politely and it’s been gradually getting worse over the past 15 years or so,” says Olson. “There wasn’t as much conflict in elections in the past. People weren’t as nasty as they are today.”
