Thousands of poll workers have called off the job. Hundreds of voting locations have been consolidated. Tens of thousands of requests for mail-in absentee ballots are backlogged.
Wisconsin's voting system is teetering under the weight of the coronavirus pandemic, but Tuesday's election will go on as scheduled after Republican state legislative leaders, the Democratic governor and a federal judge have refused to postpone it.
Ballots will be cast even as Gov. Tony Evers has issued a "safer at home" order directing Wisconsinites only to venture outside for essential tasks such as seeking medical treatment, buying food and, apparently, voting.
"We are in an unprecedented moment, and the statutes and laws weren't written with a situation like this in mind," said Charles Franklin, a political science scholar and director of polling at the Marquette University Law School. "We have had a gigantic surge in request of absentee ballots _ more than 1 million _ and we have no idea at this moment how many of those will get sent out in time or how many people will show up in person on Tuesday to vote. This is uncharted water."
Wisconsin will soldier on at a time when 15 other states have either delayed their elections or switched them entirely to vote-by-mail with later deadlines.
But unlike many of those elections, Wisconsin's contest isn't just a presidential primary between former Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. It is also a general election for 3,831 local offices _ including Milwaukee mayor, Milwaukee County executive and a state Supreme Court seat _ where elected officials' terms are set to expire in a matter of weeks.
Amid the pandemic, thousands of poll workers _ many of them elderly and more at risk of dying from the highly contagious COVID-19 _ have said they won't work, and the governor has directed the Wisconsin National Guard to help staff election sites. Numerous elected leaders, including longtime Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, have urged voters not to go to the polls and instead try to vote absentee.
The wave of those mail-in requests, however, has overwhelmed local clerks who haven't had the staff, and in some cases the supplies, to promptly send out the ballots, raising questions of whether thousands of voters will receive them in time.
In the midst of the chaos, dozens of local mayors, civil rights organizations, Sanders, the state Democratic Party and the Democratic National Committee have called for the election to be postponed _ some more recently than others. And Democrats announced Thursday they would delay by one month their national convention planned for July in Milwaukee, citing the uncertainty swirling around the pandemic.
Wisconsin's governor and state legislative leaders, however, remained unwilling to bend on Tuesday's election, landing the matter before an exasperated U.S. District Court Judge William Conley.
In a ruling issued Thursday, Conley did not postpone the election, but granted an additional six days for absentee ballots to come in from voters. The decision only further fueled a largely partisan debate over how the election should be conducted, adding to a bitter political divide that has dominated the state's government over the past decade.
Wisconsin Democrats called the court's decision a victory for "thousands of Wisconsin voters who feared they would be silenced" while Republicans vowed to appeal.
During a marathon, four-hour video conference hearing Wednesday, Conley said he did not have the authority to call off a statewide election, but did little to conceal his disdain about the predicament voters have been placed in: don't vote or risk your health to do so.
"The state of Wisconsin's legislature and governor are not willing to step up and say there's a public health crisis and make it absolutely clear that we should not be allowing poll workers and voters to congregate on April 7," Conley said. "You expect the state of Wisconsin to realize this is a hurricane and prevent it and stop it for public health reasons. I don't see a basis on which I can stop this, albeit it's a very risky decision by the state of Wisconsin."
The state's poll worker shortage is severe.
Of 1,320 voting jurisdictions that responded to a survey this week by the Wisconsin Elections Commission, 779 _ or roughly 60% _ said they did not have enough poll workers. Of that total, 111 jurisdictions reported not having enough workers to staff even a single polling place while another 126 said they did not have enough workers for all election sites.
All told, the elections commission reported a shortage of at least 7,000 workers statewide.
"What are we going to tell voters in these locations if we don't have poll workers for them? Sorry, we're not having an election today?" state election Commissioner Ann S. Jacobs, a Democrat from Milwaukee, said during a video conference meeting this week. "We are pretending with our fingers crossed and unicorn wishes that we're going to be able to cobble together a way to administer this election."
The state's Democratic and Republican parties are working to recruit workers. Evers sent out a call for state employees to staff the polls. And the National Guard, which has activated 350 members to help with the pandemic, also will assist, but the governor has warned their help alone won't be enough.
In response to the staffing woes, some areas have dramatically consolidated the number of polling locations, potentially crowding more voters in one space at a time when health officials are preaching for them to stay home and maintain social distancing of at least 6 feet when in public.
In Milwaukee, the city is down at least 1,000 poll workers, and its 180 polling sites will be cut down to between 10 and 12, according to election officials. In Green Bay, the 270 typical poll workers are down to just 19, and the city is considering reducing its 31 polling places to just two high school gymnasiums.
"If we would have had swift action by our state officials, we could have maintained the April 7 date while at the same time administering an all-mail ballot election," said Green Bay Mayor Eric Genrich, who previously served as a Democrat in the state assembly. "When you look at the public health guidance from D.C. all the way down to our local county, it's not hard to recognize that an in-person election is incompatible with that advice."
After urging the governor and legislature to take action, Green Bay sued in federal court to postpone the election and have ballots mailed to every registered voter, but the case was dismissed after the judge ruled the city didn't have the standing to delay a statewide election.
Nearby Neenah Mayor Dean Kaufert and Appleton Mayor Timothy Hanna, both Republicans, also joined Genrich in calling for a delay. So did election officials for all 19 municipalities in Milwaukee County and many others across the state.
"The starkest divide, honestly, is between those who are elected locally and those who are not," Genrich said. "Those of us who are tasked with administering this election and assisting our clerks are very practical about the challenges we face."
In a bid to improve the safety of polling locations, state elections commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe said it has acquired 6,000 liter bottles of hand sanitizer, 10,000 spray bottles of sanitizer, 750,000 isopropyl wipes and enough pens for every voter to have their own, all sorted by the state's National Guard. Tape also is being sent to voting sites to mark the recommended 6 feet between voters waiting in line.
A new Marquette University Law School poll released Wednesday found voters nearly split on whether to postpone the election, with 51% in favor of holding it Tuesday and 44% opposed. The survey, however, found a divide when it comes to the coronavirus, with 87% of Democrats saying they were very concerned about the disease compared with 56% of Republicans.
"I think the safety best practice precautions for the polling places are very, very good," state election Commissioner Robert Spindell Jr., a Milwaukee Republican, said during the recent meeting. "I'm very happy in terms of what's going on here, and I think we can have a good election on the 7th."
The six-person commission, made up of three members from each party, held a number of deadlocked votes in recent days, including on whether to urge the federal court to keep the election on Tuesday.
"To say everything is going to be fine on April 7 is sticking our head in the sand," said Commissioner Mark Thomsen, a Milwaukee Democrat. "We know there are going to be tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of ballots that have been voted that are going to come back and not get counted."
Democrats repeatedly have raised concerns about absentee ballots in recent days.
After the DNC filed its lawsuit, Conley last week extended the amount of time for voters to register online.
His ruling Thursday gives election officials an extra six days to receive ballots, moving the deadline from when the polls close on Tuesday until April 13, the following Monday. The judge, whom former President Barack Obama appointed, also pushed the deadline for voters to request an absentee ballot back an extra day until 5 p.m. Friday.
More than 1.1 million absentee ballots and growing had been requested as of Thursday morning, far more than the previous record of around 200,000 in the 2016 presidential primary.
State election officials also reported there was close to a 30,000 ballot backlog but warned that number could be much higher as voting jurisdictions have lagged in reporting their totals. The state numbers showed Brown County, home to Green Bay, as having a backlog of 1,400 ballots, but in the city alone the mayor said the number was 7,000.
The sheer volume of absentee ballots and the additional time granted by the court means full results won't be available for nearly a week after the election, including in the primary contest between Biden and Sanders.
In his ruling Thursday, Conley also relaxed a witness requirement for absentee ballot applications, concluding that voters could provide a written testimonial that they could not safely obtain a witness signature because of coronavirus fears. The judge, however, rejected efforts to suspend the state's voter ID law, which requires voters to digitally upload a copy of their ID when requesting an absentee ballot.
Republicans already had scored a legal victory on that issue this week. The law has an exception for those who are "indefinitely confined" and unable to obtain an ID, largely intended for elderly citizens.
Last week, the clerks in Milwaukee and Dane counties, the state's two Democratic strongholds, told all voters who were unable to upload an ID to claim they are indefinitely confined because of the coronavirus. The Wisconsin Republican Party equated the guidance to "illegally rigging an election" and sued in the state's Supreme Court, which ruled unanimously that the advice was against the law.
In the run-up to Thursday's federal court ruling, Wisconsin Republicans argued against a dramatic change in the amount of time allowed to count absentee ballots.
"We've already had to go to the court once to rein in a couple of rogue clerks," Wisconsin Republican Party Chairman Andrew Hitt said in an interview. " I wouldn't have a lot of confidence that they would follow the letter of the law."
After Thursday's ruling, the Republicans released a statement vowing to appeal and calling for a stay in the lower court's decision. Conley's ruling to allow the extra six days for the absentee ballots to be returned without requiring them to be postmarked by Election Day "effectively changes the date of the election," Hitt said.
In an interview prior to the ruling, Wisconsin Democratic Party Chairman Ben Wikler accused Republicans of "trying to hold the election the normal way, right away" in a bid to suppress voter turnout.
"The polling suggests that Republicans are less likely to be concerned about coronavirus than Democrats," Wikler said of in-person voting on Tuesday. "Whether you're Republican or Democrat, we should be taking every possible step to help everyone cast safe absentee ballots."
As he ratcheted up the state's response to the coronavirus, Gov. Evers last month proposed legislation that included suspending the voter ID requirement, expanding online voter registration and allowing absentee ballots postmarked by Election Day. The Republican-controlled legislature did not act on the proposals.
Then a little more than a week before the election, Evers posted a video on Facebook calling for every voter in the state to be sent an absentee ballot. "The bottom line is that everybody should be able to participate in democracy. Period," he said.
Election officials said there were not enough ballots to carry out such a request even if state lawmakers approved it. Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, accused the governor of lying to voters and said, "acting like this is doable is a hoax." Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, called it "an invitation for voter fraud."
For now, Conley's ruling has struck a middle ground of sorts, allowing for additional time to send and count absentee ballots but leaving the day of the election in place _ much to his own frustration.
"Without doubt, the April 7 election day will create unprecedented burdens not just for aspiring voters, but also for poll workers, clerks and indeed the state," Conley wrote in his opinion. "As much as the court would prefer that the Wisconsin legislature and governor consider the public health ahead of any political considerations, that does not appear in the cards."
