(Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

Election officials have expressed confidence in Wisconsin’s election system and its ability to withstand any 2020-style attempts to overturn the results — yet some members of the state’s Republican party, and Donald Trump himself, have continued their work of the past four years to undermine trust in the system. 

On Friday, Trump posted on X that if elected he would prosecute people who “cheated” in the election. 

“I, together with many Attorneys and Legal Scholars, am watching the Sanctity of the 2024 Presidential Election very closely because I know, better than most, the rampant Cheating and Skullduggery that has taken place by the Democrats in the 2020 Presidential Election,” he wrote. “It was a Disgrace to our Nation! Therefore, the 2024 Election, where Votes have just started being cast, will be under the closest professional scrutiny and, WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again. We cannot let our Country further devolve into a Third World Nation, AND WE WON’T! Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”

After the 2020 election, Wisconsin Republicans formed the plan that became the fake elector scheme. In Wisconsin and six other states where President Joe Biden won, slates of Republicans cast fraudulent Electoral College votes for Trump. Those votes became the basis for Republican members of Congress’ effort to vote to change the results of the election and give the victory to Trump on Jan. 6, 2021. 

In the months leading up to the 2024 election, election experts here have pointed to legal developments that should prevent a similar effort this year. The Republicans who took part in Wisconsin’s fake elector scheme have been barred from serving as presidential electors, Congress passed a law making it harder for them to dispute election results and more people are watching than in 2020. 

Absentee counting

But some conspiracy theories that abounded after 2020 have persisted. Republicans in Wisconsin claimed that voter fraud had occurred in Milwaukee because thousands of votes from the largely Democratic voting city were “dumped” in the middle of the night, flipping the election to President Joe Biden. 

The votes hadn’t been dumped. Instead the city — dealing with a massive increase in absentee voting because of the COVID-19 pandemic — took longer to count those ballots at its central count location. 

While most communities in the state count absentee ballots at the same polling place where the voters who cast them would vote in person, 36 communities send their absentee ballots to be counted together at one location. 

In response to the conspiracy theories about late night “ballot dumps,” the state Legislature considered a bill that would allow local election officials to begin processing absentee ballots on the Monday before the election. Local clerks would be able to open absentee envelopes and get the ballots ready to be counted, though not actually fed into tabulating machines, ahead of time, which would have allowed the counting on Election Day to move faster. 

The bill passed the Assembly, but Republicans in the state Senate killed it. 

On Thursday, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) blamed state Rep. Janel Brandtjen (R-Menomonee Falls) for the bill’s failure. Brandtjen has been one of the Legislature’s most outspoken election conspiracy theorists. Some of Wisconsin’s most prominent election deniers had opposed the bill’s passage during public hearings — alleging that if the ballots were processed ahead of time, nefarious actors could figure out exactly how many fraudulent votes were needed to swing the result. 

Wisconsin Elections Commission Chair Ann Jacobs expressed her exasperation on social media: “It was based on her conspiracy theory that (somehow) if the 10’s of 1,000’s of envelopes were opened early, someone could figure out the exact # of fake ballots (how? Who knows!) would be filled out & added to the ballot count. Complete nonsense yet here we are!”

Because the bill failed, and because many voters have continued to use the absentee and early voting processes after the pandemic, it’s likely that Milwaukee will again report results long after polls close on Election Day. 

Wisconsin’s system

Unlike most other states, Wisconsin’s election system is decentralized. Administration of elections is handled by the 1,850 municipal clerks working across the state. Each clerk is responsible for the election within their community. 

At a virtual event hosted on Friday by Keep Our Republic — an organization that has spent four years trying to rebuild trust in the election system by explaining to skeptics exactly how the system works — former Wisconsin Congressman Reid Ribble said that if a person can’t trust politicians that the system is safe and secure, they should trust their local clerk and their friends and neighbors who volunteer as poll workers. 

“Elections in Wisconsin are fair and safe and the 1,800 county and municipal clerks that are running those elections, and the thousands and thousands of local volunteers and poll workers, are working very hard to do their jobs in a non-partisan manner,” Ribble said. “I’ve often told friends of mine and other citizens … I get it if you don’t trust politicians. One person you should be able to trust is that — usually a senior citizen — poll worker at your local precinct that’s checking your ID and giving you a ballot and making sure that everything is done correctly. You often see these people at your grocery store. They might sit two or three rows in front of you at church and these are your friends. They’re your neighbors. They’re people that are concerned about defending democracy and seeing it unfold in front of their very eyes.”

Once polls close on Election Day and the votes are tallied, unofficial results get sent to county clerks, who report those preliminary numbers. It’s from those initial reports that media organizations use statistical processes to “call” races, declaring who has won. But the actual winners aren’t officially declared until the results are certified at multiple levels. 

This multi-step process gives election experts another layer of assurance that despite continued conspiracy theories, Wisconsin’s system is resistant  to meddling. 

Each municipality convenes a Board of Canvass, a multi-member body that reviews the community’s election results and makes sure that there aren’t any irregularities — making sure that the number of ballots cast equals the number of people who signed the poll books, for example. 

Board of canvass members live in that community, which experts say makes it hard for them to throw a wrench in the process and refuse to certify results, because they’d be declaring that their friends and neighbors’ votes shouldn’t count. This differs from states such as Georgia, where fears have arisen after last-minute process changes that partisan officials placed in this step of the process could throw out results, swaying the election to Trump. 

After the local board certifies the results, in Wisconsin, a similar body at the county level does the same. Then the state elections commission reviews the tallies and the chair of the commission certifies the results. Gov. Tony Evers will then certify whether the Democratic or Republican slate of electors has been chosen. 

On Dec. 17 this year, the electors will meet and cast their Electoral College votes for the winner of each state. 

Lawsuits 

Ahead of the 2020 election, many lawsuits were filed as questions arose over how to conduct a presidential election during a pandemic. After Biden won, Trump and his campaign undertook a flurry of legal efforts in an attempt to overturn the results. 

UW-Madison Law School Professor Robert Yablon said at the Keep Our Republic event Friday that 2024 has seen even more litigation than 2020. 

“In Wisconsin and around the country, election contests are increasingly being waged, not just in the court of public opinion, but in actual courts,” Yablon said. “The volume of litigation that we have seen in Wisconsin in 2024 is already higher than we saw in 2020, despite the fact that we’re no longer dealing with a pandemic that’s creating an array of controversies and questions about what sort of voting accommodations to be providing.”

The most significant lawsuit ended when the Wisconsin Supreme Court overturned a previous decision that outlawed the use of absentee ballot drop boxes. Drop boxes became very popular with the rise in absentee voting in 2020, but Republicans turned against them as conspiracy theories spread, claiming the boxes are vulnerable to fraud. Hundreds of drop boxes were in place across the state in 2020, but despite being legal again this year, only 78 are being used. 

A lawsuit has also changed rules guiding absentee witness signatures. Absentee voters are required to have someone witness their ballot by  signing the absentee ballot envelope and providing their address. If the address isn’t included, the ballot can’t be counted. 

In the past, local clerks have been given some discretion to add missing information to the address line. If, for example, a married couple filled out their ballots together and a voter’s spouse wrote “ditto,” the clerk could write in the complete address. Or if the clerk knows where the person lives, they could add that information themselves, similarly if the person left off a zip code or city name, the clerk could complete it. 

This practice was banned by a 2020 court decision, but subsequent lawsuits have clarified that the ballot must be counted “as long as the certificate contains enough information for the clerk to reasonably be able to identify the place where a witness may be communicated with,” Yablon said. 

A number of other lawsuits amount to what Yablon said are efforts to sow distrust in the system, even if they won’t be resolved ahead of the election. Two of these lawsuits involve the state’s voter rolls and when election officials are required to deactivate a voter’s registration. 

Some Republicans have become obsessed with the voter registration system in recent years, claiming that election officials are keeping voters active in an effort to allow fraudulent votes. 

“To some extent, it seems like these cases are serving to perpetuate and reinforce dubious doubts about legitimacy of the election, and to feed into narratives that the results shouldn’t be trusted,” Yablon said. “They’re trying to implicitly suggest that our voter rolls are bloated, and so there are many people on them who might vote who shouldn’t be voting.” 

“The reality is that this is a lawsuit that is not likely to create any action,” he added. “We’re not going to start purging voters days before the election.”

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Voting rights activists and others gather at the Midtown Center in Milwaukee on the first day of early voting in July 2022. (Photo | Isiah Holmes)

The first day of in-person early voting in Wisconsin saw 97,436 people cast ballots for the Nov. 5 election. So many people voted on Tuesday that it caused a slowdown of the state election software system, leading to long lines in some places. 

The number of ballots cast on the opening day of early voting far surpassed other recent elections. In the 2022 midterm election, which had gubernatorial and U.S. Senate races on the ballot, 33,644 people cast ballots on the first day of early voting. In the 2020 presidential election 79,774 people showed up on the first day of early voting. 

Despite Tuesday’s high turnout, the popularity of absentee voting in general still lags behind the 2020 presidential election when the COVID-19 pandemic pushed many voters to vote remotely. 

After more than four years of Republicans and Donald Trump attacking the voting system and making accusations that any voting methods other than  going to the polls on Election Day are vulnerable to fraud, the GOP nonetheless encouraged Republicans this year to vote early. 

Democrats have also been encouraging people to vote early. On Wednesday, the Democratic National Committee announced an ad campaign directed at students on 30 college campuses across the country, including UW-Madison, touting early voting. The city of Madison has six early voting locations across the campuses of UW-Madison, Edgewood College and Madison College. 

The traditionally Republican-voting Waukesha County had 11,397 people cast their ballots on Tuesday. Despite its status as a GOP stronghold, the county’s leftward drift has played a major role in Democratic wins in statewide elections in recent years. 

Dane and Milwaukee counties, the biggest Democratic areas in Wisconsin, saw the most early votes on Tuesday, with 11,862 Dane County residents casting their ballots and 12,282 Milwaukee County voters casting theirs. 

In a news release on Tuesday afternoon, the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) said the higher than expected turnout for the first day of early voting used up the capacity of the state’s WisVote system, which some municipal clerks use to print a label that is placed on the outside of in-person absentee certificate envelopes. 

“Today’s system lag was purely related to demands on the WisVote system due to high turnout,” the release stated. “This should not prevent any voter’s ability to vote in-person absentee today. WEC staff worked quickly to increase system capacity to ensure that clerks can continue to facilitate in-person absentee voting efficiently.” 

WEC Chair Ann Jacobs said that the agency has worked with the state’s Department of Enterprise Technology to boost the capacity of the WisVote system. 

“So many of you voted that you overloaded our computer systems!  Amazing! We worked with Dept. of Enterprise Technology and have created more server space so all should be running smoothly now,” she wrote. “We apologize for underestimating the incredible enthusiasm you all have for voting. This is unheard of turnout for the first day of in-person absentee voting!! All is well in our WisVote system and you should be able to vote without a problem.”

Early in-person absentee voting is open from now until the Sunday before the election (though some communities end early voting the Saturday before). Hours and locations are set by local municipal clerks. Voters can find how to vote early in their communities at MyVote.WI.Gov

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Voting carrels set up at Madison's Hawthorne Library on Election Day 2022. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

Early in-person voting for the November election opens Tuesday for Wisconsin voters. Hours and locations for casting an early vote are set locally by municipal clerks. You can check the hours and locations in your area at MyVote.wi.gov.

Officially known as in-person absentee voting, Wisconsin’s early voting allows a voter to request and cast an absentee ballot at a polling location during the two weeks before an election. The in-person absentee process includes checks of a person’s voter registration and identity. Because absentee voting in Wisconsin requires a witness to sign the ballot envelope, a municipal clerk staff member working at the early voting site serves as the witness. The ballots, like absentees sent through the mail or returned to drop boxes, aren’t processed and tabulated until polls open on Election Day. 

The deadline to register to vote online or by mail has already passed, but people can still register in-person at their municipal clerk’s office. Wisconsin also has same-day voter registration that allows people to register to vote at the polls on Election Day. Wisconsin requires voters to show a photo ID to register and vote. Acceptable IDs include driver’s licenses, Department of Transportation-issued identification cards, student IDs from Wisconsin universities, passports and military ID cards. 

While in-person absentee voting opens this week, voters have already been receiving and returning absentee ballots through the mail for weeks. 

As of Friday, the most recent data available from the Wisconsin Elections Commission shows that 593,550 voters have requested absentee ballots and 305,344 of those ballots have already been returned. Those totals are a far cry from the 2020 presidential election when the COVID-19 pandemic pushed many voters to the absentee process. By the Friday before early voting opened in 2020, 1,395,272 absentee ballots had already been requested and 821,300 had been returned. 

In the months ahead of Election Day, voting rights advocates and election officials have fretted about the speed of the U.S. Postal Service and its ability to deliver absentee ballots fast enough. For most voters, the legal deadline to request an absentee ballot is Oct. 31, however officials warn that isn’t enough time for the ballot to arrive, be filled out and returned by the close of polls at 8 p.m. on Election Day. Voters worried about mail times can return ballots to drop boxes (in communities that are using them), to their municipal clerk’s office or their designated polling place on Election Day.

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A Wisconsin resident casts their ballot in the state's primary election at a polling location on April 2, 2024, in Green Bay, Wisconsin. (Scott Olson | Getty Images)

Voting rights advocates across the state are warning of efforts to intimidate voters while right-wing groups have been  filing lawsuits attempting to force people off the voter rolls. 

With just 20 days until Election Day, more than 573,000 people have already requested absentee ballots and 267,524 of those ballots have been returned. In-person absentee voting will open next Tuesday, with locations and hours set by local election officials. 

Wednesday was the deadline for people to register to vote online or by mail — with mail-in registration forms required to be postmarked by Oct. 16. Voters can still register in-person at their municipal clerk’s office or at the polls on Election Day. 

On Tuesday, voting rights advocates asked the state and federal Departments of Justice to investigate reports that thousands of voters received text messages that could be seen as voter intimidation. The messages, which seem to have targeted young voters, warn recipients that anyone who votes in Wisconsin when not eligible to do so can be punished with fines up to $10,000 and 3.5 years imprisonment. 

In a state with elections as close as Wisconsin, college-aged voters can often play a major role in deciding who wins. College students, even if they’re from another state, are eligible to vote in Wisconsin elections. 

“Many students and other young voters are fearful that they will face criminal prosecution if they register and exercise their right to vote — because of a malicious, inaccurate text sent by an anonymous party,” the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin wrote in a letter about the messages. 

At a press conference Wednesday, Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) Administrator Meagan Wolfe said that the commission is aware of third party communications that could be seen as intimidating. She said that voters should go to official sources of information to decide if they’re eligible to vote. 

“Election officials do continue to receive reports from voters who have received these third party communications, like text messages that they’ve described as intimidating or that contain false information,” she said. “Unfortunately, many voters that receive these kinds of communications during election season, and sometimes they can be misleading, and to avoid being misled by any sort of communication that might come from a third party to a voter, voters should make sure to get their election information from the official source.” (For more information go to Wisconsin’s MyVote website.)

At the press conference, Wolfe also gave an update on the use of absentee ballot drop boxes across the state, which were declared legal by the state Supreme Court earlier this year after a previous court majority had barred their use. Wolfe said local clerks have reported to WEC that this year in Wisconsin at least 78 drop boxes are in use, a steep decline from the more than 500 that were used in the 2020 election and earlier before Republicans turned against them over baseless allegations of fraud. 

Drop boxes have remained a major issue in this year’s election, with the Wausau mayor drawing criticism after he removed the city’s drop box without permission from the local election clerk. 

The 78 boxes means that less than 50 communities across the state are using the boxes because Madison and Milwaukee have a total of 14 drop boxes available across the two cities. 

“The decision to have drop boxes or not, as our state Supreme Court said, is a decision that rests with the municipal clerk, and just like any decisions they make for their community, they have to weigh the considerations or the needs of their local community, and so I won’t undercut any of those decisions that have been made by our municipal clerks, because they’re making a decision for their community and the best needs of their community,” Wolfe said. 

As Republicans have continued to attack the voting system in Wisconsin and across the country, two lawsuits have been filed seeking to make last-minute changes to the voter registration system. 

One of the lawsuits, filed by Daniel Eastman, an attorney involved in former President Donald Trump’s legal fight to overturn the results of the 2020 election, alleges that more than 140,000 voters on the voter registration list are ineligible because cross-checks with U.S. Postal Service data shows they don’t live at the address where they’re registered to vote. The lawsuit states that more than 50,000 of those registrations are in Milwaukee. 

Election officials use the USPS data to keep voter rolls updated but the data has a high error rate and is generally confirmed through other sources. 

The lawsuit asks the Milwaukee Elections Commission to mail postcards to all the voters found in the data to confirm if they’ve moved and asks WEC to instruct all the other clerks in the state to do the same. 

The second lawsuit alleges that there’s a “legitimate concern” the state and local election officials are activating inactive voter registrations and asks a Marinette County judge to order WEC not to activate any voter registrations 

Courts are generally unlikely to make rulings affecting voting so close to an election. Clerks use a variety of sources of information, including data from a national coalition of states tracking when people move to or die in other states, to keep voter rolls up to date.

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Sign for the Wisconsin Elections Comission. (Wisconsin Examiner photo)

The Wisconsin Election Commission (WEC) on Tuesday delayed taking action on two complaints against municipal clerks for not following state and federal laws guiding the return of absentee ballots. 

A complaint against the city of Greenfield alleges that the local clerk created separate deadlines for disabled voters’ lawfully designated assistants to return absentee ballots. State law gives absentee voters until polls close at 8 p.m. on Election Day to bring their ballot to their designated polling place and drop it off. 

In Greenfield, a man returning his wife’s ballot because of her disability was turned away and sent to the clerk’s office because of a local policy that states someone returning another voter’s ballot must take it there. 

A separate complaint was filed against the city of Brookfield alleging that the city refused to accept any absentee ballots at polling places and instead required them to be returned to the clerk’s office with enough time for the clerk to bring the ballot to the correct polling place to be counted. The man who brought the complaint alleges that when he arrived at the polling place around 5 p.m. he was told he must bring his ballot to the clerk’s office but that no one would be there to receive it because city staff was in a meeting. 

With less than 50 days until the election, Brookfield has drawn other criticisms over its absentee voting policies after the city council voted not to allow the use of absentee ballot drop boxes to collect ballots. A group of voting rights focused organizations held a press conference in the city Tuesday to protest that decision. 

At the WEC meeting Tuesday afternoon, which at times grew heated, Republican commissioners questioned if it was possible to create a system that perfectly accommodates voters with disabilities returning their ballots while allowing clerks to affirm that people who have permission to assist a disabled voter are returning another person’s ballot. 

“We cannot make this world perfectly equitable for all,” Commissioner Don Millis said. 

Republican Commissioner Robert Spindell drew repeated pushback from the Democrats on the commission for arguing that whatever the body decides, it has to make sure it doesn’t encourage “ballot harvesting” — a practice that is prohibited by  state law  involving organizations gathering and returning large amounts of absentee ballots — which Republicans regularly warn against without much evidence that is widespread.  . 

The Democrats on the commission also said that the state has had the same interpretation of the absentee ballot statutes since long before WEC was created in 2015 — that voters can return their ballots until polls close at 8 p.m. on Election Day. Commission Chair Ann Jacobs pointed out that the Uniform Voting Instructions, approved by the commission last year and made mandatory for clerks to follow, reaffirm  that longstanding interpretation of statute. 

“I’m sort of floored that, coincidentally, in a political year, there’s attacks on absentee voting,” Jacobs said. “Suddenly, we’re changing our minds on the rules. I’m just flabbergasted by that. We made those instructions mandatory, and it tells every absentee voter in this state that they can take their absentee ballot to the poll site.” 

The Republicans on the commission signaled they’d be unwilling to vote to accept the complaints against the two cities while the Democrats said they didn’t want to take a vote that would upend the interpretation of the uniform voting instructions so close to the election, with hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots already sent to voters with those instructions included on the envelope. 

“I am extremely against even the consideration of us undoing our uniform instructions prior to Nov. 4, when we have — what is it? — as of this morning, 450,000 ballots out with our uniform instructions,” Jacobs said. 

The commission ultimately voted to delay the consideration of the complaints until after the election.

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