(WTAQ) – An area lawmaker is working with other state legislators to tackle the issues surrounding the April 7th election.
There was a nearly 70-percent jump in absentee ballot requests in April, and Republican Representative Joel Kitchens of Sturgeon Bay expects that number to rise. That’s why he’s working on a bipartisan plan to help clerks streamline the process.
“We can point fingers and argue back and forth about whose fault it all was but at the end of the day there were some major troubles,” Kitchens tells the WTAQ Morning News with Matt and Earl, “Usually it’s like 6-percent of our voters that vote by mail, and in that election it was 75-percent and they expect it to be even higher in the next election. Plus we’ll have twice as many people voting in November as we did in April.”
Discussions over the plan have suggested providing money for clerks to count ballot and get them out quicker.
“Most of our municipal clerks are part time people, and all of a sudden they were turned into more than a full time job trying to get those ballots out there – usually doing it by hand. We need to be ready for that, and they just were not prepared for that massive increase in mail-in voting,” Kitchens says.
Another point in the plan would require a minimum number of polling places per voter in specific areas. That was a key point of contention with just two polling locations open in Green Bay, and five locations to serve more than 700,000 people in Milwaukee.
“It requires all of our municipalities have a plan in place for emergencies including how many sites they are going to have, how many poll workers they are going to have – and then it also implements a tracking system, and I think Colorado has a pretty good system where there’s a bar code on your ballot so you can go online and check at any moment where your ballot is. I think a lot of people were surely not feeling confident their ballots actually counted,” Kitchens says, “It sends an application for a ballot for every person. It’s not the same as sending a ballot, you still have have voter ID. So it’s essentially the same as what we’re doing right now except for those people that don’t have computer access or not computer literate, it would get a ballot to them.”
Right now, the whole proposal is up in the air – as it’s unclear whether the Assembly will reconvene prior to the elections. But Kitchens believes most of the concepts within the plan could be pulled off by the Wisconsin Elections Commission.
“At the end of the day I think they’re going to implement a lot of these things anyway, so even if it doesn’t become law I think to a large degree will become practice,” Kitchens says.
While the increased efforts and ideas focus on the potential rise in absentee voting this cycle, Kitchens still has some reservations.
“For a lot of people, it’s sort of their civic duty they and they just enjoy going in there so I don’t think we want to ever say you can’t vote in person,” Kitchens says, “I would never advocate sending a ballot to everyone because we know the voter rolls are just wildly inaccurate – people that are dead or that have moved and that kind of thing, so I think that we should be invitation to fraud.”
Partisan Primary Day is set for August 11, 2020. General Election Day is November 3, 2020.
