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.
“We are living in unprecedented times,” Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett told the press as he welcomed them into the warehouse where Milwaukeeans’ ballots will be held. “There are concerns about the safety and legitimacy of the upcoming election. Some of those concerns are valid. Some of those concerns are totally false. We are here today to assure residents of Milwaukee that we are prepared for the upcoming election.”
For the past several months, the White House has been putting the legitimacy of American elections into doubt, with President Donald Trump predicting nothing less than “the most corrupt election in the history of our country.” Mail-in voting has been at the center of nationwide controversy due to Trump’s assertion that it allows voter fraud.
As the United States is gearing up for what might be the most important presidential election in living memory, local and state officials have made an unprecedented effort to communicate all that is done to ensure the safety and efficiency of our voting process.
What You Need to Know to Vote
Milwaukee voters have four options for voting: In person on Election Day, in person absentee (or early voting), postal mail or putting the ballot in one of the drop boxes to circumvent the postal system.
The first step is to ensure that you are registered to vote. Claire Woodall-Vogg, executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission, encourages voters to check their registration status online at myvote.wi.gov. “The deadline to register online or via mail is Wednesday, Oct.14, but voters should know it's never too late,” she explains. “We have voter registration through the Friday before the election at early voting locations, and you can register in person on Election Day. So it is truly never too late to change your mind to vote.” Voters need proof of residence to register.
“Wisconsin voters do not need an excuse to vote at home,” Woodall-Vogg states. You can apply for an absentee ballot on myvote.wi.gov by submitting a copy of a legally-acceptable photo ID (a simple smartphone photo of the ID suffices). Once the blank ballot has been received, you need to sign the certificate envelope and have a witness sign and provide their address. The witness can be anyone who is a U.S. citizen, even a family member.
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“The next step is to return that ballot. We ask voters that they put it in the mail no later than Monday, Oct. 26, if they want to make sure that it's counted on Election Day.” If a voter prefers not to rely on the Postal Service, they can use one of the 15 drop boxes available for the election; they are under 24-hour surveillance, they have tamper-evident seals, and the contents are collected every day and kept under key until they’re transported to the warehouse. It is, however, impossible to drop a ballot off at your usual polling place.
If they prefer voting early and in person, voters can go to one of the 13 early voting locations that will open on Tuesday, Oct. 20, until Sunday, Nov. 1. Hours and locations will be available online at milwaukee.gov/414votes.
The third—and most “normal”—way to vote is simply on Election Day at your usual polling place. The Milwaukee Election Commission assures that, unlike in the April election, 173 polling places will be open.
Absentee ballots require a copy of your photo ID, and in-person voting requires to show the original ID. The state’s Elections Commission clarified that the following IDs are acceptable: A Wisconsin-issued ID card or driver’s license, a military ID, a U.S. passport, an ID issued by a Wisconsin accredited university or college (accompanied by proof of current enrollment in the school).
“If a voter does not have one of those acceptable photo IDs to vote in the state of Wisconsin, you can actually get a free ID card from the Wisconsin DMV,” says Meagan Wolfe, administrator of the Wisconsin Elections Commission. “If you do show up on Election Day, and you don't have the photo ID that you need to vote. You can cast what's called a provisional ballot, and a provisional ballot means that you'll be able to fill out a regular ballot, but you'll seal it in a provisional ballot envelope. And then you have until 4 p.m. on the Friday after the election to bring in your photo ID to remedy that provisional ballot, and it'll still be counted with the official totals.”
Facing Unprecedented Times
The November general election is not the first election to occur in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. But, as we empirically saw during the April primary election in Wisconsin, it is not acceptable to maintain voting methods that were not designed to withstand a pandemic. Despite a low turnout, the April election led to a significant increase in COVID-19 infections, a study found, and Wisconsin has since become a major hotspot of disease. As such, it is not surprising to see a strong resurgence of absentee voting.
“A rough rule of thumb for the past few years is that 70% of the people vote in person and 30% vote absentee; that could be turned upside down. We’re seeing huge demand for absentee ballots,” Mayor Barrett says.
At the state level, 1.3 million absentee ballots have already been requested, and more than 750,000 Wisconsinites have already voted by mail or through a drop box. In Milwaukee Count alone, more than 110,000 ballots have been issued, and 40,000 have been filled and returned—about 70% of them are physically dropped in a collection box rather than transiting through the U.S. Postal Service (USPS). “We expect to have between 150,000 and 200,000 ballots to count” come Election Day, Claire Woodall-Vogg estimates.
To ensure the safety of each and every ballot, the Election Commission checks each incoming ballot as being returned, and they can cancel and reissue a ballot that has been lost through a system of smart barcodes. Ballots are then stored in a warehouse with 24-hour video surveillance, locked doors with a limited number of keys, and they can only be accessed in pairs to ensure that nobody is alone with the ballots. “Every number gets a voter number to make sure that no one can vote more than once. It's one of the things that slows us down but ensures accuracy and the integrity of our absentee voting,” Woodall-Vogg explains. Voters can track their ballot and, if there is a problem, can request a replacement ballot. If there is not enough time to receive and return the replacement ballot, voters can still vote in person on Election Day or return their ballot in person through a drop box or directly to Central Count. But they can only do so if they have confirmed through the MyVote online system that their ballot was not counted.
Milwaukee uses a Central Count, which causes dire issues during a pandemic, forcing the Election Commission to move Central Count out of their cramped warehouse. “We leased office space on Fifth and Michigan so that we take up an entire city block; much more open air and a little bit safer,” says Woodall-Vogg. Collection boxes for ballots, as well as poll locations, are meant to spread out voters as much as possible to avoid crowds and potential super-spreader events.
On Election Day itself, the Election Commission has recruited more than 3,500 poll workers to work at 173 voting sites, and they recruited another 500 people to work at Central Count. Voters are to expect plexiglass separating voters and poll workers, as well as mandatory masks, social distancing and sanitizing. Voters will have to show their photo ID through the glass, and they are encouraged to bring their own pen.
Fighting the Republican Legislature
Voter suppression is not a bipartisan effort. While they blow the whistle of voter fraud—which represented just 0.0001% of votes in 2016—Republicans have been doubling down on measures to limit the ability of Americans to vote. In particular, they have been seeking to repress mail-in voting, which has become one of Donald Trump’s central talking points on the campaign trail. In Wisconsin, actions of the Republican Legislature have been causing problems comparable with those created by the pandemic, our election officials say.
“The constant changing of election laws as we get closer to Election Day is a great challenge,” says Woodall-Vogg. “It adds a third layer of difficulty to this election: We have a pandemic, which has created two elections—a by-mail election and an Election Day election—and then you add in lawsuits that could change voting laws at the last minute. It's definitely no easy task.”
Indeed, less than one month before the November election, the law changed again in a pinch due to a Republican lawsuit fighting a ruling that would have made voting easier. As a result, ballots now need to be returned by Election Day; they are considered invalid even if they were postmarked before Election Day and arrived late. This ties in with the Trump Administration’s efforts to sabotage USPS ahead of the election: slower mail means fewer ballots counted.
Mayor Barrett has been an outspoken opponent of this voter suppression strategy: “Go back to the April election, where the U.S. Supreme Court changed the rules the afternoon before the election. The Seventh Circuit changed the rules, the federal district courts and the state Elections Commission changed the rules. Everything was changing, everything is changing, and that creates tremendous uncertainty.”
Another central point of contention between the Republican Legislature and local authorities and election commissions is the requirement not to start counting any of the hundreds of thousands of early ballots until 7 a.m. on Election Day. “That creates logistical challenges that are unbelievable! You’d actually think someone wants the system to fail by designing that way,” Mayor Barrett railed against the state Legislature. “From a common sense standpoint, we could start one or two or three days early. It would make sense from an efficiency standpoint, and certainly from a health standpoint. You would be spacing people out timewise, and you would think that somebody would care about that. Apparently, the Legislature just doesn’t care about that.”
“We are going to have hundreds of people working in one location on one day during a pandemic. That is what the state Legislature is requiring. This is another indication of how little the state Legislature has been dealing with the pandemic. It just defies logic. It could be done much much much safer and much much more easily if we had the cooperation of the people who want this election to succeed,” the mayor added.
Due to the unprecedented amount of absentee ballots that will not be counted in advance, the Milwaukee Election Commission warns that the results will not arrive at least “until the wee hours of the morning on November 4 at the earliest,” according to the commission’s director. “We are not able to release any results until we're finished with all of them. So, voters should wake up on the day after the election and not be surprised to see [hundreds of thousands] of votes added to the totals in Wisconsin. No election results are ever official until the state has certified the election.”
