APPLETON, WI (WTAQ) – The City of Appleton saw a fairly efficient flow of voters on Election Day – and avoided the hours-long waits like we saw in Green Bay and Milwaukee.
The city kept all of their polling locations open and staffed, despite concerns over the potential spread of COVID-19.
“From the start, I thought that was the safest way to administer the election if we had to,” says City Clerk Kami Lynch, “Plexiglass screens, we were able to get enough supplies of gloves and masks and santizing wipes for all of the polling places.”
Along with collecting supplies and setting up appropriate health and safety measures at voting locations – elections officials also had a lot of help, even after seeing many poll workers pulled out.
“City staff really stepped up. So we had staff from all different departments help fill in the holes. Each polling place had three National Guard members per shift, or all day as well,” Lynch tells the WTAQ Morning News with Matt and Earl, “All hands on deck. Lots of working weekends and we had staff from other departments helping us enter requests and then staff helping to actually mail out the requests.”
But even with the efforts and efficiency, there was still a drop in voter turnout.
“Around fifty percent – still calculating some final numbers – which is a little bit lower than the last mayoral and presidential preference election, which was closer to sixty percent,” Lynch says, “I’m sure some of that was due to the circumstances, but also some of it may have been due to presidential preference for the Democratic primary kind of being decided at that point.”
Another major change seen was the spike in absentee ballot requests. The polls didn’t see the normal amount of traffic because people were voting early – or sending votes in from home.
“We ended up mailing out just under 17,000 absentee ballots. We have about 40,000 registered voters. So that’s almost half of people that requested an absentee ballot to be mailed to them,” Lynch says, “Effectively and efficiently deal with large numbers of absentee ballots – having them distributed amongst fifteen locations for counting instead of one central location I felt was the best choice.”
The city did their best to keep up with changing information and orders – and Lynch says they did send out all absentee ballots in time for voters to be able to respond. Some voters still ended up not having a voice, as a number of ballots intended for Appleton residents were never delivered – or were delivered late.
“The decision last-minute to have to have ballots postmarked by election day, April 7th – that was a little frustrating because we operated under the previous circumstances and order that just allowed them to be returned by the 13th,” Lynch says.
After seeing the long lines in some areas, there has been a push to move the November general election in Wisconsin to mail-in only. While Lynch has seen it work in a few other states, she’s a bit cautious about trying to fast-track it’s implementation right now.
“It works for them, however, I know it was a big undertaking for them to get there. Having something like that in place for November I think would be a challenge,” Lynch says, “As long as there’s enough time to put the plans in place and decide things – it’s one of those decisions that would impact the whole election process, so the whole things would have to be examined for it to really be successful.”
Any impact of the in-person election on the spread of COVID-19 in Wisconsin will likely not be known until next week.
