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
An employee adds a stack of mail-in ballots to a machine that automatically places the ballots in envelopes at Runbeck Election Services on Sept. 25, 2024 in Phoenix, Arizona. The company prints mail-in ballots for 30 states and Washington, D.C. (Photo by Rebecca Noble/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — With exactly two weeks until Election Day, millions of Americans have already cast their ballots via the mail or in person as Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump pursue voters through the battleground states.
Early in-person absentee voting kicked off Tuesday in Wisconsin, adding to the list of swing states where voters have already begun casting ballots, the Wisconsin Examiner reported.
Georgia, another battleground, saw record early voter turnout in its first week, amassing more than 1.4 million ballots cast, more than a quarter of the entire voter turnout total in the 2020 presidential election, the Georgia Recorder reported.
Two national polls released Tuesday show Harris with an edge, particularly among young voters. Reuters/Ipsos polling conducted from Oct. 16 through Monday found Harris up by a narrow 3 points, hardly a change from Ipsos’ findings the previous week.
The latest quarterly CNBC/Generation Lab survey found Harris commanding a 20-point lead among 18-to-34-year-olds.
All eyes on Latino voters
The Harris campaign early Tuesday alerted the press to an “opportunity agenda for Latino men.”
The proposal promises to provide 1 million forgivable loans up to $20,000 for Latino men “and others” in start-up funding, eliminate college degree requirements on certain jobs, and encourage first-time home ownership among Latinos by building affordable homes and offer a $25,000 tax break for new buyers — two policy ideas for all Americans she’s been touting for months.
Poll numbers released Monday showed Harris continuing to outperform Trump among Latino voters in the battlegrounds of Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
A group of Christian Latinos showered Trump with praise in Miami, Florida, on Tuesday. With hands on Trump’s shoulders, religious leaders prayed over him at a roundtable event held at the Trump National Doral Golf Club.
Guillermo Maldonado, who founded the King Jesus International Ministry, said the election is “not a war between the left and the right. This is a war between good and evil. We can fight that, and we need spiritual weapons.”
“Father, we anointed him today, we anointed him to be the 47th president of the United States to restore the Biblical values. No weapon formed against him shall prosper,” Maldonado, who goes by the title ‘apostle,’ continued in his prayer over Trump. The event streamed live on C-SPAN.
Immediately after the prayer, Trump’s signature campaign song, “YMCA” by the Village People, blared and the roundtable leaders began passing books and hats for him to sign.
During the roundtable, Trump accused Harris of “sleeping” and “taking a day off.” He also, again, accused her of having a “low I.Q.”
“There’s something wrong with her,” he told the crowd.
Liz Cheney, CNN and Springsteen
Harris campaigned Monday with former U.S. House Republican Liz Cheney in suburban areas of three states — Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Cheney is the daughter of former GOP Vice President Dick Cheney, who is also backing Harris.
“For me, every single thing in my experience and in my background has played a part in my decision to endorse Vice President Harris,” said Liz Cheney, who was once the third-highest-ranking House Republican. “That begins with the fact that I’m a conservative and I know that the most conservative of all conservative principles is being faithful to the Constitution.”
According to her publicly available schedule, the vice president was scheduled to record two interviews Tuesday afternoon with NBC and Telemundo. And on Wednesday night at 9 Eastern, she’ll participate in a CNN town hall in Pennsylvania moderated by anchor Anderson Cooper.
Then on Thursday, Harris and former President Barack Obama will lead a “Get Out the Vote” rally, featuring a performance by Bruce Springsteen, in Georgia to encourage early voting.
On Friday the vice president will travel to Houston, Texas, to campaign on abortion rights. She will be accompanied by Democratic U.S. Rep. Colin Allred, who’s trying to unseat U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz.
Trump cancels appearances, plans Georgia rallies
Trump canceled a scheduled appearance Tuesday at an event titled “Make America Healthy Again,” which was to feature guests Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and former Democratic lawmaker-turned-Republican Tulsi Gabbard.
Trump’s keynote speech set for Tuesday at a National Rifle Association event in Georgia was also canceled “due to scheduling conflicts.”
The former president also scrapped a planned early October interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes” and recent scheduled appearances on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” and NBC News.
Trump is scheduled to host a rally Tuesday night in Greensboro, North Carolina, and on Wednesday his schedule shows two events — a “Believers and Ballots Faith Town Hall” in Zebulon, Georgia, with the state’s Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, as well as a rally for Turning Point PAC and Turning Point Action in Duluth, Georgia.
Trump is scheduled to deliver the keynote speech Thursday night in Las Vegas, Nevada, for Turning Point’s “United for Change Rally.”
Politico reported Tuesday that the former president will record an interview Friday with popular podcast host Joe Rogan at his studio in Austin, Texas.
A flood of television ads. Regular visits with door knockers on your front porch. A mountain of campaign mailers jammed into your mailbox. The signs of a rapidly approaching Election Day are everywhere.
Another major sign of just how close the election is started Tuesday: Early in-person voting.
As of Friday afternoon, more than 300,000 Wisconsin voters have already cast their absentee ballots. But early voting — known officially as in-person absentee voting — where voters can go and submit their ballots in person, really makes it feel like the election is here.
Are you interested in casting your ballot before Nov. 5? Here’s what you should know.
In-person absentee voting
The availability of in-person absentee voting varies by municipality. The best way to determine when you can vote early in person in your community is by visiting this page on the Wisconsin Elections Commission’s MyVote website.
Punch in your address, and MyVote will show you the locations, days and times that in-person absentee voting is available in your community. In Madison, for example, there will be as many as 21 early voting sites spread across the city, depending on the day.
How do I vote by mail?
Wisconsin voters don’t need a reason to vote by mail/be an absentee voter. Every registered Wisconsin voter has the ability to request an absentee ballot by mail. You can request an absentee ballot on MyVote Wisconsin here.
Once you’ve submitted your request for an absentee ballot, you can track your ballot here.
Before you begin filling out your absentee ballot, make sure you have a witness who can verify that you filled out your own ballot. The witness needs to be an adult U.S. citizen who is not a candidate in the upcoming election. Once you’ve completed your ballot, place it in the certified envelope that comes with your absentee ballot. Seal and sign the certificate envelope and then have your witness sign the certificate and include their address.
The next step is to mail it back to your municipal clerk. The United States Postal Service recommends mailing your ballot back at least seven days before Election Day, according to the Wisconsin Elections Commission.
If you’re worried about your ballot being returned in time, you can deliver it to your municipal clerk’s office or deliver it to your polling place on Election Day. In some municipalities, you may also be able to return your absentee ballot using a drop box, though the availability of drop boxes is up to your municipal clerk.
How do I know if I’m registered to vote?
You can check your registration status on the MyVote Wisconsin website here by entering your name and date of birth.
The deadline to register online or by mail has already passed. But the deadline to register in person at your municipal clerk’s office is Nov. 1 at 5 p.m.
If you haven’t registered to vote before Nov. 5, don’t panic. You can register to vote in person at your polling place on Election Day. You’ll just need to bring an accepted form of photo ID and proof of residence.
Where do I get information about the candidates on my ballot?
Wisconsin Watch has you covered. For months, our team has been hard at work assembling a 2024 voter guide. Check it out to learn more about the candidates running for president, U.S. Senate, U.S. House, state Senate and Assembly. We also have information about the constitutional amendment voters are being asked to consider.
Forward is a look ahead at the week in Wisconsin government and politics from the Wisconsin Watch statehouse team.
Voters in Grand Rapids, Mich., cast their ballots during the state’s August primary
7 States + 5 Issues That Will Swing the 2024 Election
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Some voters are already casting early ballots in the first presidential election since the global pandemic ended and former President Donald Trump refused to accept his defeat.
This year’s presidential election won’t be decided by a margin of millions of votes, but likely by thousands in the seven tightly contested states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
How legislatures, courts and election boards have reshaped ballot access in those states in the past four years could make a difference. Some of those states, especially Michigan, cemented the temporary pandemic-era measures that allowed for more mail-in and early voting. But other battleground states have passed laws that may keep some registered voters from casting ballots.
Trump and his allies have continued to spread lies about the 2020 results, claiming without evidence that widespread voter fraud stole the election from him. That has spurred many Republican lawmakers in states such as Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina to reel back access to early and mail-in voting and add new identification requirements to vote. And in Pennsylvania, statewide appellate courts are toggling between rulings.
“The last four years have been a long, strange trip,” said Hannah Fried, co-founder and executive director of All Voting is Local, a multistate voting rights organization.
“Rollbacks were almost to an instance tied to the ‘big lie,’” she added, referring to Trump’s election conspiracy theories. “And there have been many, many positive reforms for voters in the last few years that have gone beyond what we saw in the COVID era.”
The volume of election-related legislation and court cases that emerged over the past four years has been staggering.
Nationally, the Voting Rights Lab, a nonpartisan group that researches election law changes, tracked 6,450 bills across the country that were introduced since 2021 that sought to alter the voting process. Hundreds of those bills were enacted.
Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, cautioned that incremental tweaks to election law — especially last-minute changes made by the courts — not only confuse voters, but also put a strain on local election officials who must comply with changes to statute as they prepare for another highly scrutinized voting process.
“Any voter that is affected unnecessarily is too many in my book,” he said.
New restrictions
In many ways, the 2020 presidential election is still being litigated four years later.
Swing states have been the focus of legal challenges and new laws spun from a false narrative that questioned election integrity. The 2021 state legislative sessions, many begun in the days following the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, brought myriad legislative changes that have made it more difficult to vote and altered how ballots are counted and rejected.
The highest profile measure over the past four years came out of Georgia.
Under a 2021 law, Georgia residents now have less time to ask for mail-in ballots and must put their driver’s license or state ID information on those requests. The number of drop boxes has been limited. And neither election officials nor nonprofits may send unsolicited mail-in ballot applications to voters.
Republican Gov. Brian Kemp said when signing the measure that it would ensure free and fair elections in the state, but voting rights groups lambasted the law as voter suppression.
That law also gave Georgia’s State Election Board more authority to interfere in the makeup of local election boards. The state board[AS1]has made recent headlines for paving the way for counties to potentially refuse to certify the upcoming election. This comes on top of a wave of voter registration challenges from conservative activists.
In North Carolina, the Republican-led legislature last year overrode Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto to enact measures that shortened the time to turn in mail-in ballots; required local election officials to reject ballots if voters who register to vote on Election Day do not later verify their home address; and required identification to vote by mail.
This will also be the first general election that North Carolinians will have to comply with a 2018 voter ID measure that was caught up in the court system until the state Supreme Court reinstated the law last year.
And in Arizona, the Republican-led legislature pushed through a measure[AS2] that shortened the time voters have to correct missing or mismatched signatures on their absentee ballot envelopes. Then-Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, signed the measure.
“Look, sometimes the complexity is the point,” said Fried, of All Voting is Local. “If you are passing a law that makes it this complicated for somebody to vote or to register to vote, what’s your endgame here? What are you trying to do?”
Laws avoided major overhauls
But the restrictions could have gone much further.
That’s partly because Democratic governors, such as Arizona’s Katie Hobbs, who took office in 2023, have vetoed many of the Republican-backed bills. But it’s also because of how popular early voting methods have become.
Arizonans, for example, have been able to vote by mail for more than three decades. More than 75% of Arizonan voters requested mail-in ballots in 2022, and 90% of voters in 2020 cast their ballots by mail.
This year, a bill that would have scrapped no-excuse absentee voting passed the state House but failed to clear a Republican-controlled Senate committee.
Bridget Augustine, a high school English teacher in Glendale, Arizona, and a registered independent, has been a consistent early voter since 2020. She said the first time she voted in Arizona was by absentee ballot while she was a college student in New Jersey, and she has no concerns “whatsoever” about the safety of early voting in Arizona.
“I just feel like so much of this rhetoric was drummed up as a way to make it easier to lie about the election and undermine people’s confidence,” she said.
Vanessa Jiminez, the security manager for a Phoenix high school district, a registered independent and an early voter, said she is confident in the safety of her ballot.
“I track my ballot every step of the way,” she said.
Ben Ginsberg, a longtime Republican election lawyer and Volker Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the think tank Hoover Institution, said that while these laws may add new hurdles, he doesn’t expect them to change vote totals.
“The bottom line is I don’t think that the final result in any election is going to be impacted by a law that’s been passed,” he said on a recent call with reporters organized by the Knight Foundation, a Miami-based nonprofit that provides grants to support democracy and journalism.
Major expansions
No state has seen a bigger expansion to ballot access over the past four years than Michigan.
Republicans tried to curtail access to absentee voting, introducing 39 bills in 2021, when the party still was in charge of both legislative chambers.
Two GOP bills passed, but Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer vetoed them.
The next year, Michigan voters approved ballot measures that added nine days of early voting. The measures also allowed voters to request mail-in ballots online; created a permanent vote-by-mail list; provided prepaid postage on absentee ballot applications and ballots; increased ballot drop boxes; and allowed voters to correct missing or mismatched signatures on mail-in ballot envelopes.
“When you take it to the people and actually ask them about it, it turns out most people want more voting access,” said Melinda Billingsley, communications manager for Voters Not Politicians, a Lansing, Michigan-based voting rights advocacy group.
“The ballot access expansions happened in spite of an anti-democratic, Republican-led push to restrict ballot access,” she said.
In 2021, then-Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak, a Democrat, signed into law a measure that transitioned the state into a universal vote-by-mail system. Every registered voter would be sent a ballot in the mail before an election, unless they opt out. The bill made permanent a temporary expansion of mail-in voting that the state put in place during the pandemic.
In February’s presidential preference primary, 78% of ballots cast were ballots by mail or in a ballot drop box, according to the Nevada secretary of state’s office. In June’s nonpresidential primary, 65% of ballots were mail-in ballots. And in the 2022 general election, 51% of ballots cast were mail ballots.
Last-minute court decisions
Drop boxes weren’t controversial in Wisconsin until Trump became fixated on them as an avenue for alleged voter fraud, said Jeff Mandell, general counsel and co-founder of Law Forward, a Madison-based nonprofit legal organization.
For half of a century, Wisconsinites could return their absentee ballots in the same drop boxes that counties and municipalities used for water bills and property taxes, he said. But when the pandemic hit and local election officials expected higher volumes of absentee ballots, they installed larger boxes.
After Trump lost the state by fewer than 21,000 votes in 2020, drop boxes became a flashpoint. Republican leaders claimed drop boxes were not secure, and that nefarious people could tamper with the ballots. In 2022, the Wisconsin Supreme Court, then led by a conservative majority, banned drop boxes.
But that ruling would only last two years. In July, the new liberal majority in the state’s high court reversed the ruling and said localities could determine whether to use drop boxes. It was a victory for voters, Mandell said.
With U.S. Postal Service delays stemming from the agency’s restructuring, drop boxes provide a faster method of returning a ballot without having to worry about it showing up late, he said. Ballots must get in by 8 p.m. on Election Day. The boxes are especially convenient for rural voters, who may have a clerk’s office or post office with shorter hours, he added.
“Every way that you make it easy for people to vote safely and securely is good,” Mandell said.
After the high court’s ruling, local officials had to make a swift decision about whether to reinstall drop boxes.
Milwaukee city employees were quickly dispatched throughout the city to remove the leather bags that covered the drop boxes for two years, cleaned them all and repaired several, said Paulina Gutierrez, executive director of the City of Milwaukee Election Commission.
“There’s an all-hands-on-deck mentality here at the city,” she said, adding that there are cameras pointed at each drop box.
Although it used a drop box in 2020, Marinette, a community on the western shore of Green Bay, opted not to use them for the August primary and asked voters to hand the ballots to clerk staff. Lana Bero, the city clerk, said the city may revisit that decision before November.
New Berlin Clerk Rubina Medina said her community, a city of about 40,000 on the outskirts of Milwaukee, had some security concerns about potentially tampering or destruction of ballots within drop boxes, and therefore decided not to use the boxes this year.
Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell, who serves the state capital of Madison and its surrounding area, has been encouraging local clerks in his county to have a camera on their drop boxes and save the videos in case residents have fraud concerns.
A risk of confusing voters
Many local election officials in Wisconsin say they worry that court decisions, made mere months before the November election, could create confusion for voters and more work for clerks.
“These decisions are last-second, over and over again,” McDonell said. “You’re killing us when you do that.”
Arizonans and Pennsylvanians now know that late-in-the-game scramble too.
In August, the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated part of a 2022 Arizona law that requires documented proof of citizenship to register on state forms, potentially impacting tens of thousands of voters, disproportionately affecting young and Native voters.
Whether Pennsylvania election officials should count mail ballots returned with errors has been a subject of litigation in every election since 2020. State courts continue to grapple with the question, and neither voting rights groups nor national Republicans show signs of giving up.
Former Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar, who is now president of Athena Strategies and working on voting rights and election security issues across the country, said voters simply need to ignore the noise of litigation and closely follow the instructions with their mail ballots.
“Litigation is confusing,” Boockvar said. “The legislature won’t fix it by legislation. Voter education is the key thing here, and the instructions on the envelopes need to be as clear and simple as possible.”
To avoid confusion, voters can make a plan for how and when they will vote by going to vote.gov, a federally run site where voters can check to make sure they are properly registered and to answer questions in more than a dozen languages about methods for casting a ballot.
Arizona Mirror’s Caitlin Sievers and Jim Small, Nevada Current’s April Corbin Girnus and Pennsylvania Capital-Star’s Peter Hall contributed reporting.
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