Wisconsin election 'travesty'

Voting and working the polls during a global pandemic

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When it seemed inevitable a couple of weeks ago that Wisconsin would proceed with its April primary, despite the public health risks posed by the coronavirus, Ali Muldrow decided she would work the polls for the first time.

The Madison school board member says she’s been “telling people to vote in April for 10 years” and wasn’t going to change her tune this year.

“I do believe in risking your safety to vote. I think that is what the civil rights movement was. So I knew I wasn’t going to tell people not to vote and therefore I needed to be more responsible for the facilitation of people’s right to vote,” says Muldrow, whose day job is co-director of GSAFE, a group that helps LGBTQ+ youth thrive. 

Muldrow started her poll duties on April 7 at 1 p.m. at the Lakeview Public Library, on Madison’s north side. She covered her face with a scarf, while helping shepherd three or so voters into the polling place at one time. “It feels like a pretty strategic containment effort,” she says. 

Around 4 p.m. Muldrow drove to the polling location at Carl Sandburg Elementary School on Madison’s far east side, to work the traditionally busy post-work hours. On her way into the school she failed to recognize her husband, who was also working the polls. It was understandable. Sandy Welander, like the other volunteers assisting people with curbside voting, was wearing a plastic face shield.

Inside the polling place, some workers were wearing face masks, but not all. Workers at two desks were seated behind plexiglass shields. One poll worker, wearing a face mask and holding a spray bottle, appeared to be on full-time cleanup duty, disinfecting the voting booths before and after people voted.

Dawn Block, the chief poll worker at Carl Sandburg, says the Madison City Clerk’s Office was generous in providing volunteers with safety gear, including plastic gloves, which workers changed throughout the day, and face shields for people doing curbside voting. A poll worker for 18 years, and a chief inspector for 16, Block says she never considered staying home this year, despite the potential risk. 

“My husband knows how dedicated I am to it and a lot of other people know as well,” says Block, who notes some friends did express concern for her safety. But she says she kept her gloves on, kept an eye out for anything that might be concerning, and did not touch her face. “And when you have those gloves on, you’re not going to touch your face,” she says. 

Block says the uncertainty about the election date was “difficult for everyone,” but she kept preparing herself for “an election on Election Day.” When others would email about the proposals to change the date, and the various court decisions, she would tell them to stay tuned. “I did honestly say to some people that we might not know until the day before and by gosh, by golly, that’s what happened,” she says, laughing.

Wisconsin is drawing national attention — and much criticism — for holding its April election despite state and national guidelines to shelter in place and practice social distancing in order to stem the spread of COVID-19, which so far has killed more than 90 people in Wisconsin, 11 who were from Dane County, and nearly 13,000 around the United States. The ballot included the presidential primaries, contested races for Madison school board, and a contentious statewide election for Supreme Court pitting incumbent Justice Daniel Kelly against Dane County Judge Jill Karofsky. A Kelly victory would maintain the 5-2 conservative majority on the court, which is poised to consider a case that seeks to remove more than 200,000 people from the state’s voter rolls. The court is also likely to hear cases related to COVID-19; as Bill Lueders has aptly pointed out in Isthmus and The Progressive, Kelly has long voiced opposition to government assistance programs. 

Gov. Tony Evers had asked the Republican-dominated Legislature to conduct the spring election by mail and extend the election date, but leaders gaveled in and out a special session called by the governor rather than discussing the proposal. In a series of fast-moving events, Evers issued an executive order April 6 postponing the election but Republicans asked the Wisconsin Supreme Court to block it; later that day, the conservative majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court quickly reversed the governor’s order. 

Then, to sow more confusion, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a federal appeals court ruling that would have extended absentee voting in Wisconsin until April 13. In a flash, people who thought they had time to submit their ballots now needed to get them completed, in the presence of a witness, and delivered to their polling place by 8 p.m. April 7 or postmarked that same day. 

Late Tuesday night, Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway condemned the players responsible for not postponing the election.

“Today, against all public health guidance and common sense, Wisconsin was forced to open the polls and hold an election in the midst of a pandemic. Wisconsin was the only state in the nation to go forward with an in-person election the same week that federal officials were warning of ‘Pearl Harbor’ levels of death and illness. The results of this action — in both voter disenfranchisement and public health — will become more apparent in the coming days, but this much is clear right now: holding this election today was a travesty.”

Poll worker Robbie Webber, a former Madison alder, says despite all the precautions put in place by the heroic efforts of the City Clerk’s Office, it was impossible for workers to consistently maintain proper social distancing and get the job done. She says that “remaking damaged ballots, reconciling the poll books and registering new voters” are all things that must be done with two people “as required by law to ensure accountability.” 

“So, if I die from COVID-19, you can blame the Wisconsin GOP and their cronies on the U.S. and Wisconsin Supreme Court,” Webber wrote on Facebook. “Although I wore a mask all day and kept my hands away from my face, although I wiped down voter booths and pens, although we had markers for voters telling them where to stand 6 feet apart, we just had too much to do to maintain that distance among workers. I gave up after about 2 hours of my 14-hour shift.”

Milwaukee appeared hardest hit by the demands of the election. There, only five of the usual 180 polling locations were open. People waited for hours on long lines to vote and some were still waiting late into the evening. 

Barbara Quindel, the lead coordinator for Wisconsin Election Protection, a nonpartisan organization that is part of a nationwide coalition of organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin Foundation, says the unprecedented circumstances took their toll around the state.

“It is absolutely clear that the combination of the COVID emergency and legislative and court-imposed restrictions stifled voters’ rights — and voting. For the first time in more than 15 years we’ve been doing election protection, we had voters call us in tears because they were scared to leave their homes — but couldn’t vote because they never received their absentee ballots. We had voters refused curbside voting because they were told they either were not sick enough or too sick. We had voters give up because lines in polling places were hours long and they couldn’t wait. This must never be allowed to happen again.”

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) worked as an election inspector in Racine County, wearing protective gear, which he said was mandatory for all poll workers at that precinct. He told media Tuesday morning that everybody at the polling location was “safe.” 

“They have very minimal exposure. Actually there is less exposure here than if you went to the grocery store or Walmart.”

Supreme Court candidate Karofsky says in an interview that Vos and his Republican colleagues fell down on the job. “I don’t think Gov. Evers had any choice. Some will say he should have done something sooner. I’m not sure. The other two branches of government were not going to step up here. We have a global pandemic. We were told next week is going to be like Pearl Harbor. People were doing their part of social distancing. The courts were closed. In light of all of that, the Legislature won’t meet. Robin Vos says it’s no problem to vote.”

Karofsky says the speed at which the Wisconsin Supreme Court reversed Evers’ order — just two hours after receiving the filings — is another example of how the political system, and the court system, is corrupt and controlled by special interests, a cornerstone message of her campaign. 

“It’s hard to imagine they were able to look at all the law, work through all the precedent and look at all the arguments,” she says. “It feels to people they made a decision before it even got to them. That’s the corruption I’ve been talking about through all of this race. People don’t feel they are getting a fair shake.”

Isthmus reached out to Kelly — who recused himself from the court’s decision on Evers’ order — for comment. His campaign instead sent a link to a Facebook video he posted at 10:30 p.m. on election night, in which he states that he and his colleagues on the high court apply the law impartially. “We don’t make the law. We don’t ignore the law. We don’t play favorites with the law. We just apply the law as it is given to us to resolve the cases in front of us without respect to our personal preferences or politics.”

At around 5 p.m. on Election Day, Debora Hoard was still staffing curbside voting in front of the Madison Municipal Building on Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. She’d been on the job since 6 a.m.

Hoard has lived in Wisconsin less than a year and worked the polls elsewhere as well. She calls herself a politically interested person and says anything that allows more people to vote is worth doing. “I think of the old adage — people died for this. The least I can do is work at the polls. If ever there was a moment to stand up for democracy, we have to do it now.” 

A few minutes later a Green Cab pulled up in front of the building and the driver handed a sheet to Hoard. It was a list of all of the boxes of absentee ballots that drivers had delivered from the clerk’s office to the polling sites; there poll workers would count the absentees. 

All absentee ballots postmarked April 7 will still be counted, with results released starting at 4 p.m. on April 13. The unofficial Madison turnout numbers as of April 8 (with those additional absentee ballots pending) are 87,552 ballots cast, or about 50 percent of eligible voters. The turnout for the April 2016 election, which featured competitive presidential primaries and a Wisconsin Supreme Court race, was 66 percent. 

Rhodes-Conway said in her April 7 statement that the low turnout is not “surprising given that news articles from midday yesterday said that elections were postponed today. And while absentee ballots may make up for low in-person turnout, it remains to be seen how many will be postmarked under the new deadline given by the U.S. Supreme Court less than 24 hours ago.” As of the morning of April 8, around 22,000 absentee ballots have not yet been returned. 

Candidates now have nearly a week before receiving results. Wayne Strong, who is running for Madison school board, says having to wait is “weird.” “We won’t know until Monday so I’m just sitting tight and waiting to see what happens.”

Karofsky says the delay is “challenging” and it reminds her of being in law school and waiting a couple of weeks to get her grade on an exam. But she takes comfort in knowing that she and her team “left it all on the field.” 

“We ran a hard campaign, a campaign with integrity. We talked about issues that are really important to judicial elections in Wisconsin. I feel good about that. We have to wait six days for the results. For the next six days I will be content in the type of race we ran and how we ran that race.” 

She says there is often the feeling that voter turnout is not what it should be as a chunk of eligible voters often sit out elections. But this Election Day, when people risked their health to vote, she got a different sense, she says: “Voting was a right that people hold near and dear and they wanted very much to be a part of this election.” 

[Dylan Brogan contributed to this report.]