Photo credit: Joseph David Bowes
Hamilton High School is one of five in-person voting locations open in the City of Milwaukee for the spring election on Tuesday, April 7, 2020.
Due to coronavirus concerns, the Democratic National Convention was postponed to August, with presidential candidate Joe Biden even suggesting a virtual convention to address safety concerns. Despite those safety concerns, and despite Gov. Tony Evers’ attempt to delay the Tuesday, April 7, election, thousands of Wisconsinites had to go out and vote in person. As a result, at least 23 coronavirus cases seem to be connected to the election, affecting both voters and poll workers.
The Wisconsin Department of Health announced that 23 people who reportedly voted in person or worked during the April 7 election tested positive for COVID-19 in the following days. This announcement comes after the Milwaukee Department of Health initially recognized that seven people had contracted the virus due to the election—six voters and one worker.
“The decision to hold in-person voting on April 7 will remain one of the biggest, if not the biggest, public health blunders in the history of our state,” Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett declared in a phone interview. “There is no way that elections should ever have been held in-person and I hope the voters remember that.”
Infections Are Difficult to Quantify
“Since we only have data on positive cases, there is no way to know with certainty if any exposures at the polls that are reported are in fact attributable to COVID-19 illness,” said Jennifer Miller of the Wisconsin Department of Health Services.
While it is impossible to determine with certainty that all those cases were caused by the election rather than other sources of contamination, the figure is likely to keep going up as the virus has a 14-day incubation period. The City of Milwaukee Health Department “will continue to monitor cases of COVID-19 linked to election activity” until a comprehensive report in the first few days of May. “We know that gatherings of any size, let alone thousands of people, are detrimental to our efforts to slow the spread of this pandemic,” the Health Department stated.
“Up to 25% of people who are infected never develop symptoms,” warns Dr. Amanda Simanek, Associate Professor in epidemiology at the UW-Milwaukee School of Public Health. “Asymptomatic individuals won't be seeking out a test because they won't feel ill, so that will be missing from our numbers. They will still be going to the grocery store and the post office, but they are still carriers of the disease and may transmit it to others. They will never be identified as cases that were infected by in-person voting. We are underestimating the cases.”
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While 23 people appear to be directly linked to the election, the people that they infected in turn could be significantly harder to link back to the event. “One way we could do that is studying the cases that develop this week or next week and asking them who their contacts are, then ask those contacts if they voted in person. Whether we can trace secondary infections back to in-person voting remains to be seen,” Dr. Simanek adds.
Measures Are Taken But May Be Insufficient
The COVID-19 infections on election day hardly come as a surprise given the circumstances surrounding what Mayor Tom Barrett called “the largest public event in the country in April.” Going against every health recommendation, the City of Milwaukee drastically reduced its voting sites to five, down from the usual 180, forcing voters to congregate in large numbers to cast their votes and causing hours-long lines. This is in part due to the low number of poll workers available during the crisis; in a first for Wisconsin, the National Guard had to mobilize 2,400 soldiers and airmen to serve as replacement poll workers on April 7.
“The Guard members, dressed in civilian attire, served at polls in 71 of Wisconsin’s 72 counties—all except Florence County—in support of the Wisconsin Elections Commission and clerks due to a critical shortage of poll workers resulting from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic,” the Department of Military Affairs declared.
On Monday, April 6, ahead of the election, Wisconsin already had nearly 2,500 confirmed cases and 100 deaths caused by the novel coronavirus. Since then, those figures jumped up to more than 6,000 cases and 250 deaths, according to the state Department of Health Services.
Absentee ballots were the safest option for voters to exercise their right to vote without endangering themselves. For the April 7 election, an unprecedented 1.1 million votes were cast through absentee ballots, more than a quarter of the state’s voting-age population, the Wisconsin Elections Commission reports. That’s more than twice as many as were reported during the November 2018 general election.
Regardless, the turnout was relatively high, with more than 18,800 people voting in person in Milwaukee alone. Voters risked their health to vote in a key election for a state Supreme Court Justice, a constitutional amendment and numerous state and local positions, including the election of a new Milwaukee County executive, Milwaukee mayor, city attorney, comptroller and treasurer. Another important election that drew voters out of their homes was the Democratic presidential primary, which was won by Joe Biden.
The election went on despite Gov. Evers’ ban on gatherings of more than 10 people since Tuesday, March 17, as well as Evers’ executive order to delay the election until June, which was blocked by the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The Republican Legislature also thwarted Evers’ attempt to conduct the election by mail. The affair was but one event in a years-long tug-of-war between the Democratic governor and Republican Legislature, which continued as Republican lawmakers sued the governor to overturn his extended stay-at-home order despite broad-based public support for Evers’ policies according to the opinion polls. People falling ill on election day are casualties of that dispute.
Another election is planned for Tuesday, May 12 in the special election for Wisconsin’s Seventh Congressional District, despite the contraindications from public health experts.
“Any time we ask people to gather in mass, we are increasing the likelihood of infection. It is contrary to every health recommendation to have in-person voting. We cannot really quantify how well the measures taken—like new pens for each individuals, giving out hand sanitizers, poll workers wearing masks—actually prevent the spread of infection at the polling places,” Dr. Simanek said.
Jeanette Kowalik, Milwaukee’s health commissioner, came forward in agreement with that sentiment: “As a public health professional and officer, I am against any in person voting at this point in time due to the risk of exposure to COVID-19. Our preliminary data on the April 7 election shows that there are some election acquired infections, although minimal. This goes to show that no matter how much we try to prevent the spread of COVID-19 that bringing people together is a risk factor.”
