Election officials do not expect to know which presidential candidate will win Wisconsin before early tomorrow morning. Milwaukee’s vote count, which could significantly shift the results, is not expected before 5 a.m. Wednesday.
According to the New York Times, 62 percent of the estimated vote total has been reported as of 11 p.m. Trump leads Biden 51.6 percent to 46.8 percent. However, about 67 percent of uncounted votes are in counties won by Clinton in 2016. 2.2 million votes have been reported.
At 9 p.m., an hour after polls closed in Wisconsin, Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe said election officials are now working tirelessly to count every ballot, but some larger jurisdictions are predicting they will count into the morning in order to do the job right.
“Local election officials are using this time, the time that they need, to make sure that your ballot is counted,” Wolfe said.
On Oct. 30, the WEC reminded voters that it will take poll workers and clerks longer than normal to process some ballots because of the number of absentee ballots cast during this election season.
In mid-October, Gov. Tony Evers said he hoped results would be known Tuesday night “and maybe at the latest the very next day.”
Wisconsin does not have a statewide system for reporting unofficial election results. Winners are not official until the results are certified, which happens on Dec. 1 according to state law.
Municipal clerks must report results to county clerks within two hours of the results being tabulated, and county clerks must post results within two hours of receiving them.
Results are processed differently in 39 jurisdictions that count absentee ballots at a central facility, including Milwaukee, Green Bay and Kenosha. Unofficial results from smaller central count municipalities may be added into reporting units without delays, but some absentee counts from these large jurisdictions will come later, according to Wolfe.
Tracking Milwaukee
Poll workers at the City of Milwaukee Central Count facility began counting absentee ballots at 7 a.m. They will continue to count after polls close at 8 p.m.
Milwaukee County Board of Elections Director Julietta Henry announced after polls closed that final results will be ready by 5 a.m. Wednesday at the earliest.
As of about 8 p.m., 102,310 absentee ballots have been counted at the facility in Milwaukee, with about 67,000 left to count.
Under state law, totals from absentee ballots will not be released until every such vote has been counted. Officials cannot adjourn counting once they start the process.
Milwaukee’s reports could impact the vote count significantly. Biden may trail in Wisconsin before Milwaukee’s absentee ballots are reported. In 2018, those late-incoming absentee results from the left-leaning city gave now-Gov. Evers a victory in the gubernatorial race against incumbent Scott Walker.
In the final Marquette Law School poll, 64 percent of respondents who said they already voted by absentee or in-person early voting said they voted for Biden. Twenty-five percent said they voted for Trump. Nine percent declined to say who they voted for.
Absentee ballots
As of 7:30 a.m. Tuesday, the Wisconsin Elections Commission reported 2,071,727 absentee ballot applications. 2,066,614 ballots were sent out and 1,924,838 were returned, leaving about 141,776 outstanding ballots.
Most voters could return ballots to their normal polling place as long as it arrived before 8 p.m.. Voters in municipalities with a central count location should return ballots to a clerk’s office or the central count location. Voters could also fill out a ballot in-person if they did not mail them.
On Oct. 27, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled not to grant a six-day extension to count absentee ballots in Wisconsin, requiring all ballots to be received by the time polls close.
Other states, including key battleground states Michigan and Pennsylvania, will take longer to report results. Pennsylvania has a Nov. 6 deadline for mail ballots to arrive, and election officials estimate most ballots will be counted by then. Michigan could also take until Nov. 6 to count all ballots. These states may shift toward Joe Biden as mail votes are added to results.
Wolfe said Tuesday night that about 970 of the nearly 2 million ballots returned had a deficiency — such as a missing signature, witness signature or witness address — that could prevent them from being counted. Clerks can alert voters of problems on their ballots before Election Day, and problems might be fixed before 8 p.m..
Northeastern Wisconsin
In Outagamie County, clerks duplicated the votes on ballots that had a misprint. According to County Clerk Lori O’Bright, the process to fix ballots takes about two workers and four minutes per ballot.
On Oct. 29, the Wisconsin Supreme Court declined to give Outagamie and Calumet clerks advice on a ballot error that affected about 13,500 mailed ballots. The misprint on the timing mark would have caused machines to inaccurately read them.
At the Paper Discovery Center in Appleton, poll workers had processed most absentee ballots by the middle of the day Tuesday. An election inspector estimated that they had fewer than 20 ballots with the misprint, according to the Appleton Post Crescent.
Wisconsin law requires clerks to report their initial tallies by 4 p.m. Wednesday.
Evers announced Thursday that about 400 Wisconsin National Guard troops would be activated to make up for poll worker shortages. About 220 were deployed to fill in as of 6:32 p.m., according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Wolfe said Tuesday night that no emergency poll worker shortages were reported. She said a few National Guard members were sent to Outagamie County, as well as Green Bay, to supply “another set of hands.”
Voting in a pandemic
Despite the pandemic, Wisconsin is expected to experience record turnout in the 2020 election. As of Nov. 1, Wisconsin had 3,684,726 active registered voters, about 81 percent of the voting-age population.
The Elections Commission developed public health guidance with officials from the state Department of Health Service. The WEC recommended that voters, poll workers and observers wear face masks, but voters cannot be refused ballots for not wearing a face covering at the polls.
Wisconsin voters headed to the polls despite a spike in new COVID-19 cases across the state. Daily deaths have risen; 52 deaths were reported Tuesday.
During Friday campaign stops in Wisconsin, Trump held a large in-person rally while Biden criticized Trump’s response to the pandemic.
Hope Karnopp is the news manager and dabbles in music reviews at The Daily Cardinal. She previously hosted the Cardinal Call for WORT-FM and edited state news.
