GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ) – Election Night was a long one for everyone. But most elections officials weren’t exactly surprised.
“Anybody who works in elections knew what we had coming,” said Brown County Clerk Sandy Juno.
There were 144,437 ballots cast across Brown County – pending a few provisional ballots that could be adjudicated – which is about 72.5% voter turnout of estimated eligible voters. That’s about 14,000 more ballots than were cast in 2016, and a 2.5% bump in participation.
“Some of the polls were kind of busy in the morning and then faded out during the day and picked up again in the afternoon and early evening. But everybody seemed to be staffed,” Juno said.
But the results still took until the roosters began to crow to actually be announced. Juno credits that to the time spent counting absentee ballots.
“We had the highest number of absentee ballots cast that ever been cast in the county for an election…As a 7:30 a.m. [Tuesday] morning, there were 96,798 returned. That’s not including any that came in [Tuesday], so that number will be higher,” Juno told WTAQ News. “It’s a process that’s very time consuming because you have to do all these extra steps for documenting everything and then getting them into a ballot to scan, so that really kind of slowed everybody down no matter how much you prepared with extra staff.”
In 2016, Brown County saw about 30,000 total absentee ballots. In 2020, Green Bay alone delivered over 30,000 absentees. Juno says the city likely saw more issues than any other municipality in the county, but again, that didn’t necessarily raise many eyebrows.
“They had a lot of ballots to process and new equipment that probably took some time to learn about it, as well as operate it,” Juno explained. “We got the last of their stuff in about 5:00 or so and then those files were so large took like 45 minutes just to download one…Just the sheer volume of what we were dealing with on the absentee end clearly had an effect on the timeliness of getting election results.”
For the final unofficial results from Brown County, check out the county’s election summary document.
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