Kamil Krzaczynski / AFP via Getty Images.
Although the Democratic National Convention will be a largely virtual affair this year due to the pandemic, a downsized contingent of participants will still gather in Milwaukee, Wisconsin – a major swing state that helped avert Donald Trump’s victory in 2016. Milwaukee was originally chosen to host the DNC in part to signal that Democrats understand the importance of the state (Hillary Clinton never campaigned in Wisconsin, in fact held political strategists and commentators to explain why she lost the state with less than 23,000 votes). But Democrats need not only build enthusiasm for Joe Biden in Wisconsin. They should also make sure that Biden supporters can one voice, and that their votes are counted. In 2020, this task is easier said than done.
Voting may be messy in any swing state this fall, but Wisconsin is making Democrats especially nervous. After all, their election in April was a disaster: Officials failed to send out absent votes on time, and a severe shortage of poll workers forced residents to wait hours as a rule during a pandemic to vote in person. In recent decades, state Republicans have implemented a series of voter repression laws that were mostly targeted at residents of Black and Low-Income, who were also hit hard by the pandemic. These obstacles are daunting and unfair. But they are not insurmountable. For one thing, government officials have learned a lot from the April pandemonium and are already much better prepared for November.
To understand how the November election in Wisconsin could work, you need to know how their April election went so terribly wrong. As the coronavirus spread across Wisconsin, hundreds of thousands of voters suddenly realized that they would rather vote by mail than vote together if they could infect. These individuals flooded their municipal offices with absentee ballots shortly before the election. Some voters were too overwhelmed to cast ballots on time, and voters were forced to go to the polls. But thousands of state workers – who are disproportionately older and more vulnerable to COVID-19 – stop for fear of infection. Cities responded by consolidating the polls; Milwaukee, for example, reduced its polling stations from 182 to five. As a result, voters had to wait hours outside of full, underpaid polls. Many Wisconsinites seem to pick up the virus as a result of voting by individuals.
Ann Jacobs, a Democratic member of the Wisconsin Electoral Commission, watched in horror as this catastrophe unfolded. (In June, she was elected chair of the commission that administers and enforces the state election law.) Jacobs and her colleagues immediately sought to prevent a recurrence in the fall.
First, the bipartisan committee has decided to send an absentee ballot to each voter by September 1 so that Wisconsinites can apply for their votes long before the eve of the election. They do not need an excuse to vote absent. Second, the commission streamlined the system for processing and tracking these ballots: Instead of sending requests to one of 1,850 municipal officials, voters can now turn to the commission. Third, the polls will have barcodes so that voters can track their progress via email online. As always, voters can also cast absent votes at the local registrar’s office. And these registrars have the option of setting up a dropbox where voters can deposit completely absent votes.
There’s a catch. In June, a federal appeals court upheld most Republicans’ restrictions on voting rights, including a strict voter ID requirement. Anyone requesting an absent vote for the first time will need to provide a copy of an acceptable ID. (IDs of state or federal employees do not qualify, nor do state-issued driver’s licenses.) And anyone who votes absent must call a “witness” to see if they fill out the ballot, and then sign the envelope. The Republican-controlled Legislature has refused to relax this witness’ claim in light of the pandemic. But the commission has confirmed that a witness can see through a closed window or through video chat to reduce risk of exposure.
The federal appeals court upheld another dubious restriction on voting: It approved a Republican measure that voted in-person early after just two weeks, down from six in some urban areas. The timing of this cut could not be less, as longer early voting reduces the chances of one poll becoming too many COVID-19 hot spots. Milwaukee aims to establish 16 early voting locations in the city to prevent such disruption. Anyone who votes in person will need to bring their ID, and pollsters can ask them to remove their masks for identification purposes. Voters who get their vote via email can drop them off at an early voting page. If the state serves another shortage of poll workers, Gov. Tony Evers members of the State National Guard ordered at polling stations.
There’s another threat lurking in the background of the upcoming Wisconsin election: A Republican law firm has urged the court to remove 129,000 people from the electorate. It claims, falsely, that state law requires the immediate purge of every voter who is flagged by an error-prone program designed to identify residents who may have been displaced. But the court will not hear arguments in the case until 34 days before election day. As one infamous fringe right-wing justice has pointed out, this scheme effectively guarantees that the court will not issue a decision by November 3, with these 129,000 holding on to the rolls at least through the elections.
But there is another issue that is big: counting absent votes. Like every other swing state except North Carolina, Wisconsin electoral officials are even preventing these polls from opening until election day. If the state first counts election day, then it turns to absentee ballots, it will make a blue shift: The proceeds on election night could give Trump an advantage that is slowly disappearing. A poll published by Marquette University Law School on Tuesday found that Democrats in Wisconsin are 3.5 times more likely than Republicans to vote by mail. The poll gave Trump a 67-26 election day lead, yet Biden showed state wins by five points. Trump’s attack on voting via mail-in seems to polarize voters, guaranteeing a big blue shift if absentee votes are counted after election day votes. The president could commit to this shift to undermine the legitimacy of the results if he loses.
But Wisconsin cities have a plan to make sure absent votes do not push in hours, days and weeks after election day. Some cities, including Milwaukee, will receive absentee ballots scheduled for Nov. 3. Received at a ‘central count location’, where they will be counted continuously throughout Election Day, starting at 7 a.m. (Milwaukee has already purchased a warehouse for this purpose.) On Election Day itself, clerks will also have “absentee response teams.” send out to drive between outlets and help count absent votes that were not sent to a central count location. Madison successfully tested this strategy Tuesday in the Wisconsin primary. Finally, as cities begin to publish results, they will be required to note how many polls have not yet been counted. If all goes well, Wisconsin must avoid the kind of massive blue shift that gives Trump room for chicanery.
Everything will obviously not go well. There are hitches and hiccups in every election; more than 23,000 absentee ballots were cast in April, and roughly 17,000 voters were fired by the Wisconsin Voter ID Act in 2017. But Wisconsin is now well positioned to handle an increase in absentee ballots. Plus, the state allows voters to register with the polling stations Election Day so that anyone who is unable to navigate the missing process has a fallback option.
It’s still too hard to vote in Wisconsin. No one needs to jump through so many hoops to exercise a constitutional right. And Democrats need to hammer on that fact when they meet in Wisconsin. As Jacobs told me, “There have been a lot of improvements – and I’m still worried.”
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