GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) — Green Bay has already set a record for absentee ballots with more than two weeks to go before Wisconsin’s partisan-primary election on August 11th.
It’s good news for the city as it promotes early voting to avoid long lines voters experienced on election day in spring.
“Just to let you know what we have right now is 13,763 absentee ballots for August,” said Kris Teske, Green Bay City Clerk, while speaking during Thursday night’s Ad Hoc Elections Committee meeting.
By comparison, Teske says the 2016 Presidential election in November had about 9,000 absentee ballots. That includes both absentee by mail and early in-person at city hall, which starts on Tuesday for this election.
“We’re getting about 200 requests each day,” said Teske.
The requests jumped after the city sent a flier to each residence in the city, showing people how to vote early.
While the extra early voters are expected to help avoid long lines from April, there is concern it could delay results when the polls close.
“Say we have 15,000 to do,” said Teske. “We have from 7 (am on Election Day) and our goal is 8 o’clock at night to get them in. We’ve never done this many before, so that is why I am really worried. We have five machines to get 15,000 through in that amount of time.”
Plans to purchase a new tabulator fell through, according to city officials. It would have allowed an extra 4,000 ballots to be counted per hour, according to Teske.
“If it is not humanly possible to get it done by midnight, then it will get done when it gets done,” said Barb Dorff, Green Bay’s city council vice president and member of the elections committee. “We’re not the only city that is going to be in this situation where maybe our results are coming in later.”
The elections committee is feeling more comfortable with its numbers for poll locations and workers. Coronavirus concerns left the city with only 19 trained poll workers in April, causing it to downsize locations from 31 to 2. For August, there’s 286 poll workers signed up, including 100 from the state, and 17 poll locations. November has 13 poll locations, but committee members say they’re working with the Oneida Nation and Green Bay Packers on additional large locations.
“Obviously their schedule and plans and events have all been up in the air, so they couldn’t commit too much and they still can’t with the Atrium, but they said we could have use of the outer building, the Tailgate Village, which is a pretty good sized building,” said Chris Wery, a Green Bay alder and member of the elections committee.
Teske says 10 poll workers did drop out this week for the August 11th election because coronavirus cases are increasing.
As for November absentee voting, Clerk Teske says ballots should start being mailed out around September 17th.
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