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This story was produced in partnership with the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Investigative Journalism class taught in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

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• Recent wildfires in Canada and northern Minnesota brought a wave of smoke to Wisconsin in July, raising concerns in Rock County similar to those in 2023, when Beloit was ranked the city with the worst air quality in the nation.
• Rock County faces above average asthma rates, and air pollution from wildfire smoke combined with emissions from existing polluters can worsen these health risks. 
• The county relies on a particulate matter monitor in Rockford, Illinois, to track PM2.5 levels. Local advocates and community members are pushing for a regulatory monitor in Rock County, especially as industrial emissions increase.

Pablo Toral expected another successful summer field program at the Boundary Waters, continuing a tradition that has lasted close to 70 years. Instead, he found himself evacuating by canoe after wildfires forced his team to abandon the trip. 

Students had already started arriving at the research station for the program’s mid-summer session. They were supposed to spend the next month doing hands-on field research, canoeing and camping. Then came the evacuation alert giving everyone 20 minutes to pack up and leave. Toral, the chair of environmental studies and political science at Beloit College, said it was clear conditions were unlikely to improve, leading organizers to cancel the rest of the program.

After driving through the night, Toral returned to Beloit, only to find that the wildfires had followed him in the form of thick smoke and unhealthy air quality. 

Poor air quality is a serious concern for Beloit residents who worry about the emissions from nearby power plants and now wildfire smoke. Just three years ago, under similar wildfire concerns as this summer, the city was named the worst for air pollution in the United States.

Rock County also has above average asthma rates, making the poor air quality even more troubling for residents. 

Cristine Rameker, the Wisconsin Department of Health Services’ asthma program manager, told Wisconsin Watch that the most recent estimate of asthma-related hospitalizations per 10,000 people in Rock County — between 2022 and 2024 — was 39% higher than the statewide average, with a rate of 3.2 per 10,000 people compared to 2.3.

During those years, asthma-related emergency department visits per capita in the county were 23% higher than the statewide average at 34.2 visits per 10,000 people compared with 27.8 statewide. For children ages zero through 17, the average asthma-related emergency department visit is about 9% higher than the state average. 

The county ranked sixth-highest in the state for asthma hospitalizations and eighth-highest for emergency department visit rates between 2022 and 2024. Rock County is the ninth-largest county in the state in terms of population. 

In 2024 alone, data shows there were 138 asthma-related emergency visits among children in Rock County, or one every two-and-a-half days. 

Beloit School District data shows about 11% of students — 436 children — have asthma. Of those students, 110 have inhalers at school, while 326 do not have ready access to medication. 

Brittany Keyes, clean air policy manager with Healthy Climate Wisconsin and former vice president of the Beloit City Council, recalled a moment last fall when she was riding on a bus in Waunakee with a group of third grade girls from Beloit, including her daughter, after the girls finished their first 5K for a “Girls on the Run” event.

She described how the third graders had been training for months together, and now they were laughing, exhausted and proud of their achievement on the ride home. Until one girl began struggling to breathe. 

Keyes said a teacher was frantically searching through a bag for the girl’s inhaler — pulling one out, and then another. 

“She takes out a bag — nope, it’s not hers. She takes another bag — nope, not hers, not hers, nope, not hers,” Keyes said. “There were six inhalers for a group of 22 girls. … That’s not normal, and it doesn’t have to be that way, right?”

No particulate sensors in Beloit

Fine particulate matter (PM2.5), a type of pollution that is a combination of solid and liquid particles in the air, is a key concern for residents worried about air quality and asthma rates. 

Nick Mailloux, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment, said a major reason why PM2.5 raises so much concern is its extremely small size — about 1/30th of the width of a human hair. 

Particulate pollution comes from a range of different sources, including power plants, vehicle emissions and industrial facilities — which Keyes and Toral both noted can all be found in Beloit. Additionally, Mailloux noted that wildfires are increasingly becoming a source of PM2.5 across the United States.

“A particle of that size is small enough that it bypasses a lot of our natural defenses,” Mailloux said. “These are particles that are small enough where they can pass through your airways and into your lungs, where then they can get into your bloodstream and cause inflammation that leads to lots of different respiratory, cardiovascular and neurological health harms.”

PM2.5 can cause new or worsened heart and lung diseases, along with a list of health effects like coughing, shortness of breath, fatigue, asthma attacks and more. 

While Keyes was still vice president of the Beloit City Council, she had read a 2021 report from Toral that found Rock County’s CO2 emissions increased by 325% between 2010 and 2019. After discovering that the emissions in her county were much higher than in counties like Dane and Winnebago, she contacted the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. 

She learned the agency operated one monitor for ozone on the west side of Beloit, and only for six months out of the year. She said DNR officials recommended community sensors, such as PurpleAir monitors, if she wanted to start monitoring for herself. 

PurpleAir makes sensors that actively monitor PM2.5, temperature, humidity and pressure, collecting air quality data and making it publicly accessible. 

Keyes said different nonprofits across Beloit participated in a community project to install PurpleAir monitors in the city in late 2022, using a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency community sensor loan program. Early data raised concerns, but the DNR told her that only five months of data had been collected, which is far less than the three years needed to establish an annual standard, Keyes said. However, that’s all the EPA could lend them for their study.

The group had secured funding during their time with the EPA’s loan to install three monitors in Rock County, allowing for continuous monitoring with data collected every 10 minutes. Now, Keyes said they have been able to expand their monitoring network to more than 20 PurpleAir monitors in the county.

“Our effort has really built awareness, and even the Rock County Health Department went after a mini grant … and they were awarded it, and they got 10 sensors, and were able to put them up at schools around the county, so now it’s not just urban centers,” Keyes said. “It’s super cool if you look at PurpleAir now, how we have a better distributed geographical monitoring system.”

Then in early 2024, technology company and global leader in air quality monitoring IQAir contacted Healthy Climate Wisconsin with alarming news — Beloit was ranked the most polluted city in the United States in 2023. The company had pulled data from the PurpleAir monitors through 2023 to draw that conclusion. 

What makes Beloit ‘pollution central’

Toral pointed to numerous factors — including an unusual amount of wildfire smoke from Canada that year, regional pollution from nearby cities such as Madison, Chicago and Milwaukee, as well as transportation emissions, nearby power plants and industrial activity — that all make Beloit “pollution central.”

He said bigger cities surrounding Beloit like Chicago, Milwaukee and Madison reported very high rates of pollution that summer exacerbated by the smoke. Toral noted all of those cities closely track their air pollution data. He pointed to the sensors Beloit has compared to other surrounding areas, saying through the sensors, Beloit was able to document where the smoke from the 2023 wildfires converged. 

“Unusually, we got winds coming out of the northeast, and that brought back the smoke from the fires in Quebec,” Toral said. “Those are what led to the perfect storm — very active fire season, dry winter, slow snow precipitation in the winter, low precipitation in the spring, leading up to the fires lasting longer, being more aggressive.”

He said that while Beloit is small, its monitoring is on par with bigger cities like Chicago and Madison. So, while Beloit was ranked as most polluted, he said there’s also a lack of data from other cities in that area of the state and northern Illinois to officially confirm if it’s Beloit specifically. 

“You don’t know how polluted you are until you test, and Beloit is very unusual in the sense that it’s a very small town that actually has very good air pollution sensors,” Toral said.

Keyes said the organizations involved in Healthy Climate Wisconsin’s air monitoring effort recognized the need for more coordinated action, so they formed the Stateline Clean Air Coalition — a group of organizations and community members who meet monthly to advocate for cleaner air and healthier communities. 

She highlighted that for more than two years one of the coalition’s primary concerns had been to install a regulatory PM2.5 monitor in Rock County — specifically in Beloit. While Beloit has an ozone monitor, Keyes said it’s not ideally located and only operates for part of the year. 

“(Ozone) is a harmful air pollutant, but not the most toxic. And what we’re really concerned about is particulate matter,” Keyes said.

Community members, health care professionals and advocacy groups also have shared their concerns with the DNR, urging a regulatory PM2.5 monitor in the area. Some argued that Beloit may have some of the highest PM2.5 in the state, with some estimates from advocacy groups and community sensors exceeding standards.

The DNR relies on data from a regulatory monitor in Rockford, Illinois, rather than direct measurements from Beloit. An agency spokesperson emphasized that Wisconsin meets the current PM2.5 standard of 9.0 micrograms per cubic meter, based on 2022-24 regulatory monitor data. 

The DNR spokesperson cited the EPA, saying the three-year PM2.5 design value for Rockford from 2022 to 2024 was 8.3 micrograms per cubic meter, with an annual mean of 7.3 in 2024 — below the requirement for a regulatory-grade PM2.5 sensor.

Craig Czarnecki, the outreach coordinator of air management at the DNR, emphasized that regulatory monitors are used for official decision-making and produce the most reliable data, while community sensors like the PurpleAir monitors are better suited for general awareness.

“Data produced using low-cost sensors do not undergo the same rigorous quality assurance and are known to be biased high when compared with data produced by regulatory monitors. These limitations make low-cost sensors best suited for qualitative purposes such as making decisions on daily activities considering the current air quality,” Czarnecki said.

Despite ongoing requests from residents and advocates to install a regulatory-grade PM2.5 monitor in Beloit, particularly near known pollution sources and in heavily affected neighborhoods, the DNR has not committed to expanding its monitoring. The agency stated that the existing network meets federal requirements. 

Czarnecki also noted the department lacks funding to expand monitoring beyond federally mandated levels.

Residents also raised concerns about the estimated 2.4 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emitted in Rock County in 2022, with about 2.1 million coming from power plants. The DNR spokesperson noted that CO2 is not regulated in the same way as pollutants such as ozone or particulate matter. 

Keyes said concern over emissions increased as Beloit’s energy infrastructure began to expand. She pointed to Alliant Energy’s Riverside Energy Center and the additions of the West Riverside Energy Center, a 730 MW natural gas plant. 

Toral said emissions data showed the Riverside Energy Center produced about 2.8 million tons of CO2 emissions the last year it was required to report in 2023, surpassing plants in higher-populated areas, which Toral said shows a “disproportionate concentration of pollutants in one single point.” 

Although multiple coal plants used to be in the Rock County area, and burning coal was worse, Keyes noted that natural gas, primarily the burning of methane gas, is still very harmful for the environment and the health of communities. 

“The fossil fuel industry has marketed very hard to make us feel like natural gas isn’t harmful. But it is. It is still a fossil fuel,” she said. 

Alliant Energy has since proposed and been approved to build a liquified natural gas storage and processing facility in Rock County to meet growing demand. Taylor Adams, the senior communications specialist for Alliant Energy, said in a statement that the location was chosen for its proximity to infrastructure and customers and that the project will comply with environmental regulation. 

“Rock County serves our largest concentration of natural gas customers in Wisconsin and is located near established pipeline corridors, making it a logical location for this type of infrastructure,” Adams said. “The proposed facility would incorporate multiple design features intended to control and minimize emissions.”

Adams said air quality impacts are currently under review by the DNR and will be available for public comment. 

Who’s affected

Toral called the situation in Beloit, a low-income community of immigrants and people of color,  “a case of environmental injustice.”

Toral noted the effects of pollution often fall most heavily on vulnerable populations, including children, older adults and people with preexisting conditions. He added that noise pollution can worsen health outcomes by increasing stress, disrupting sleep and weakening the immune system. 

“If you basically are living close to traffic, a power plant, a factory, anything that generates noise — that really exacerbates people’s conditions,” Toral said. “That makes the body more vulnerable to then have to cope with the pollutants.”

Keyes highlighted that Beloit previously had lower emissions than Dane County, but as Madison was able to retire some of its natural gas and coal plants, the regional demand for electricity resulted in power plants — and emissions — expanding in Rock County. 

Keyes’ daughter was one of 15 youth plaintiffs who filed a lawsuit against the Public Service Commission and state Legislature last summer over laws that prohibit the PSC from considering air pollution when reviewing permits for new power plants, along with a failure to protect the youth from climate change.

“Dane County has made progress, but the celebration of progress is really greenwashing the fact that we are suffering,” Keyes said.

New record, new norm

Air quality records were broken across Wisconsin July 16 as wildfire smoke from northern Minnesota and Canada was carried into the Great Lakes region by winds. Much of the state experienced hazardous air conditions, with Air Quality Index levels reaching their highest points in at least 16 years. 

The smoke brought back memories of the 2023 wildfire season, when similar conditions covered much of the Midwest. 

Toral said this year’s fires are following a similar pattern to 2023. He said because the Great Lakes form a basin, smoke tends to converge there, making Wisconsin “ground zero” for this contamination. He added that the current fire season is already very active, and while the fires were more severe three years ago, this year’s fires are closer to Wisconsin. However, he said it’s still too early to know whether this year’s fire season is going to be worse than 2023. 

“We thought that the fire season we saw two years ago was one of a kind — was very unusual — and here it is again, two years later,” Toral said. “This is a very unusual pattern.”

Wildfire smoke raises air pollution concerns in Rock County, where asthma rates are among the highest in Wisconsin is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

Town of Lima Clerk Pam Hookstead’s election operation is a well-oiled machine. She comes to the polls at 6 a.m., a pot of cowboy beef stew in hand to warm up for her poll workers, and takes a backseat as she lets the town’s longtime staffers settle into their rhythm.

Having run well over 100 elections, administering the Wisconsin Supreme Court race on April 7 in the 1,200-person town felt like second nature. Hookstead, now 65, has spent three decades in the role — a depth of experience many towns have lost since 2020.

Twenty miles south sits Clinton, where 59-year-old Town Clerk Shannon Roehl-Wickingson was administering her first election on her own. It will take years for her muscle memory to rival Hookstead’s. But, she may get there faster than many of her peers in Wisconsin — or across the country. Rock County has a support and training system that most new clerks can only dream of.

That kind of hands-on help the county provides is increasingly rare. Nationwide, election official turnover has hit record highs since 2020, driven by harassment, political pressure and exhaustion. And Wisconsin has been especially hard hit: Since elections are run at the municipal level, the state relies on around 1,850 individual municipal clerks to run its elections. Many new clerks land the job with little guidance and figure it out as they go.

As the job has grown more complex, more scrutinized and more politicized, municipalities are left scrambling to replace experienced officials and train newcomers fast enough to keep up. Rock County — where five of 29 municipalities had first-time clerks running elections earlier this month — is testing a more hands-on approach to that transition, pairing new clerks with experienced ones and building a network that helps them learn the job in real time.

But hiring is only half the battle. Keeping clerks can be even harder, in part because the job is both sprawling and slow to master. Beyond running elections, a single clerk may take meeting minutes, issue licenses, sell public land and even oversee cemeteries. All responsibilities, especially elections, are governed by a shifting patchwork of legal obligations that can take years to learn but often change quickly. Rock County is hoping to fix that.

“If I wouldn’t have had help, I might have thrown in the towel by now because it’s very daunting,” said Roehl-Wickingson. “For God’s sake, in today’s climate, with voting, you just don’t want to make mistakes. But there’s tremendous support. You just have to ask the questions.”

The approach is deliberate: County Clerk Lisa Tollefson ensures municipal clerks are trained beyond state requirements and works to recruit long-serving or retiring clerks as mentors. During the busiest times of the year, her husband, Town of Harmony Deputy Clerk Tim Tollefson, makes the rounds to check in with new municipal clerks to make sure everything is moving smoothly.

Together, they push clerks to stay in close contact, with them and with each other — swapping advice on absentee voting, preparing for budget season, or gathering in person with a brandy old-fashioned to celebrate a well-run election.

Part of Tollefson’s motivation for creating the county’s support network comes from experience. When the Democrat first became Harmony’s town clerk in 2010, she knew resources were available but “felt really shy about reaching out” for help. “I don’t want anyone to ever feel that way.”

Now, she goes to public tests for every new clerk, making sure they understand there’s no dumb questions and telling them that she has been in their shoes.

In Hookstead’s view, Lisa Tollefson is the coach, municipal clerks are the assistant coaches, and poll workers are the team players.

“None of us could survive without the other one,” she said. “We’re a team. We work very well together in this county.”

‘Clerk gene’ essential to long tenures

Making a longtime clerk out of a new recruit takes some luck and some science.

In some cases, it also starts off with a little bit of deceit.

Many clerks have similar origin stories in Wisconsin: They were persuaded to begin their jobs by a town board member who made the job sound easy. Just taking minutes, they’re told. Little mention of elections, budgets, licenses or managing municipal property. That was the pitch that drew both Tollefson and Hookstead into their first clerk jobs.

Once on the job, they quickly realize how much more it entails. Some hunker down. Others leave.

What separates the two, Lisa Tollefson said, is the “clerk gene.” She described it as a mix of curiosity, a lack of timidity, and a desire to help the public. And while some — herself included — stumble into the role of clerk and step up to the job, Tollefson said transparency about the job is the best way to recruit and retain staff. “Being open about all the duties,” she said, “is huge.”

Roehl-Wickingson, whose previous job included helping union workers sign up for benefits, said the desire to help others has carried over for her. In both elections and unions, those who are indifferent are “definitely in the wrong place.”

Right now, Lisa Tollefson said, every chief election official in Rock County has what it takes to be a clerk. That’s a blessing for her office, which saw a lot of clerk turnover after the highly contentious 2020 election, when a wave of retirements rocked the workforce. Just eight of 29 Rock County municipalities still have the same clerks as they did six years ago.

“There were some older clerks at that time,” she said, “and they’re like, ‘I’m not doing another. I’m done.’”

To keep new clerks from burning out, Lisa Tollefson tries to reinforce that instinct to be a supportive clerk with training and support.

She has encouraged her clerks to become trainers themselves, including to train poll workers to be chief inspectors and to use the state’s electronic pollbook system — something most poll workers aren’t usually trained to do.

The need for such advanced planning became clear in 2020, when nearly every worker at one Rock County polling location was exposed to COVID-19 during a public test and could no longer serve on Election Day. Two poll workers didn’t come to the public test, though, and because they were trained to be chief inspectors, the location was still able to open and proceed normally. That year, Tollefson also trained about 50 county employees as chief inspectors as an additional cushion against emergencies.

The benefits of this preparation and community-building also show up in smaller moments. At a recent public test of voting equipment, Tollefson said she watched experienced poll workers reassure a new clerk that everything would be OK. “There’s a lot of strength in the poll workers,” she said.

It’s an example set by Tollefson herself. She is a constant presence for clerks, Hookstead said. She offers advice and checks in, reminding clerks that she’ll be up at 5 a.m. and ready to provide any support she can offer on Election Day.

“She’s just willing to make our lives so much easier,” said Hookstead. “And it is through training — her trainings are fun.”

Rock County clerks also seem to have found another reliable strategy for finding and retaining election workers: recruiting family members.

After Tollefson left her first job as the Harmony town clerk, she recruited her husband to replace her after nobody else applied. He later became the town’s deputy clerk. Hookstead’s mom, daughter and husband have all served as poll workers in Lima. In the town of Magnolia — in western Rock County — clerk-treasurer Graceann Toberman was preceded by her mother as treasurer. Together, they’ve spent more than 60 years in the role.

Roehl-Wickingson was also recruited by family. When the town of Clinton needed a new clerk, she got a call from her daughter, who works in the county clerk’s office, suggesting it would be a good part-time job in retirement. (Unlike Lisa Tollefson and Hookstead, Roehl-Wickingson said she received an accurate summary of what the job entailed.)

“You get the bug,” Lisa Tollefson said. “It happens all the time.”

Longtime clerk says county helps her understand changing rules

Hookstead has had the bug for 30 years. She has silvering blonde hair and, on Election Day, wore a green cardigan and a name tag identifying her as clerk — not that anybody is unfamiliar with her. She said she’s not quite ready to retire as a clerk.

If anything, she’s prepared to spend even more time on the job. Having just retired from her full-time position as secretary at a school in Whitewater, she’s decided to redesign the town’s website and reorganize its paperwork system.

Still, she knows she won’t do it forever. If somebody comes along to replace her — something Hookstead acknowledged wasn’t terribly likely — she said she’s ready to step aside.

Hookstead lives and does most of her work from home on a 180-acre beef farm in town.

The 1,300-person town is sparsely populated, with no bars, no restaurants and no grocery stores — just dairy and cattle farms, a Presbyterian church and a small cluster of homes near the town center. On Election Day, its town hall had pop-up voting booths next to its wood-paneled walls and a check-in booth by the front entrance, a setup that Hookstead has meticulously spaced out to provide the best flow for voters, some of whom are in wheelchairs.

For early in-person absentee voting, residents don’t go to a government office. They go to Hookstead’s house.

Voters go to her kitchen and take a seat at what she calls her voting table. Given its placement, with several seats surrounding it and a sack of onions on top, you’d be forgiven for calling it a kitchen table. Hookstead concedes it’s both.

Voters cast their ballots there, overlooking a cattle field and a swamp frequented by geese and sandhill cranes. If two voters come to her house at the same time, they sit on opposite corners of her kitchen table while Hookstead waits for them in the living room, near a mounted buck that her husband killed with a bow.

It’s a laid-back setting, Hookstead said — one where voters can both cast a ballot and talk about the price of corn.

When she started her job, things worked differently. There wasn’t much early absentee voting, and almost every voter cast a ballot on Election Day, hand-marking the ballots and dropping them into several wooden boxes at the town hall. Hookstead would unpack the ballots at the end of the night and hand-count for several hours.

Now, electronic tabulators and shorter ballots have sped things up. Even so, the job has grown more complicated — especially as election rules have shifted in recent years. Hookstead said she’s been frustrated by rapidly changing election rules since 2020, particularly when they don’t seem to follow clear logic. She pointed to one rule blocking voters from returning their elderly parents’ ballots, with only limited exceptions.

That’s where the county support system comes in.

Tollefson, the county clerk, notifies Hookstead and other clerks of new rules and guidelines — sometimes before the Wisconsin Elections Commission does — and always makes herself available for questions.

“I have told Lisa that when she leaves, I’ll be going,” Hookstead said.

New Clinton clerk runs successful election after weeks of nerves

In the Clinton Town Hall, just off County Road X, Roehl-Wickingson this month was running her first election as town clerk. She spent the day answering questions from poll workers, working through new problems and greeting older residents curious about the new person running their elections.

Some had been skeptical, particularly because she lives 20 miles north in Harmony. A law passed last year allows municipalities to appoint clerks who live outside of town borders.

“I’ve been nervous all day,” she said, as she sat in the clerk’s office on Election Day with paperwork instructing her what to do at every step. She added that each time her chief inspector comes around to ask her a question, “I think, please let it be easy.”

Roehl-Wickingson was a longtime General Motors employee, working at the Janesville plant as an assembly worker until its mass layoffs in late 2008. She then worked as a union representative at a GM plant in Kansas City, where part of her job was spent registering union workers to vote and getting out the vote. She retired in 2024, wanting to get back home to her family in Rock County.

But retiring doesn’t mean she’s “ready to sit still in the rocking chair,” Roehl-Wickingson said from her office, where she sat beneath a street sign reading “Clerk Way.” She shuffled through stacks of paper, checking lists, double-checking them, pausing only to answer a question before returning to the lists.

When her daughter told her about the clerk opening, she felt she was the right person to take it on. Roehl-Wickingson said her position as a union rep prepared her for the contentious election landscape.

“I won’t say I’m thrilled to death about it, but I knew the atmosphere,” she said. “I don’t have anything to hide.”

Even so, the lead-up to Election Day was consuming. She said she barely slept the night before, instead rereading the election manual again and again, afraid she might miss something.

“My husband was like, ‘You’re gonna get sick,’ because I’ve been nervous the last couple of weeks and running ragged, making sure I had everything,” she said.

By early afternoon on Election Day, Tim Tollefson had turned up to meet with Roehl-Wickingson. He was making his way around the county to check on new clerks, a task he took on after his wife encouraged him to help mentor the wave of new clerks.

Much of the job, he said, is procedural, not entirely different from managing inventory at his former job as a manager at the outdoor recreation retailer Gander Mountain. Tollefson said some bits came easy for him, and the rest came with time. Two years, he said, is around how long it can take to start feeling like you have a grip on the role.

Until then, it can be overwhelming.

Both Tollefsons have been essential to her success, Roehl-Wickingson said. Without the support system, she said she would have felt lost doing things like compiling the town budget.

“You definitely need guidance,” she said. “You just don’t know what you don’t know,” she said.

That guidance extends beyond any one person. Over time, Roehl-Wickingson said, the job has started to make more sense — in part because of formal training, but just as much because of the network of clerks across the county.

“If (Lisa) didn’t pull us together, I’m not sure we would have that on our own,” she said.

By Election Day, Roehl-Wickingson had done everything she could to prepare. Too nervous to set up the polling place the day before, she went in on the Saturday before Election Day, spending hours making sure every table, sign and voting booth was exactly where it needed to be.

As the day wound down, she glanced at the analog clock on the wall: just before 8 p.m.

The room had emptied. No last-minute voters came through the door.

When the clock struck the hour, her chief inspector closed the polls.

There was plenty left for Roehl-Wickingson to do. But first, she checked the numbers — ballots cast versus the number of voters checked in.

Both were 225.

“I’m so glad,” she said, thanking her chief inspector.

For all her nerves, the first outing of Roehl-Wickingson’s late-blooming career as an election official was a success.

“At times, it’s very consuming and daunting and overwhelming, but at the same token, today, I feel kind of a sense of excitement,” she said. “And it’s rewarding to know that you’ve been a part of it, and you put it together, and you’ve been that cog in the wheel.”

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

How one Wisconsin county is making running elections easier for new clerks is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.