Final early vote figures lean havily to high population places in Wisconsin

The final early voting/absentee figures have now been reported by the Wisconsin Elections Commission, with over 821,000 votes already cast, which would be around 27% of the predicted 3.1 million total turnout in Wisconsin. As I've been doing over the last month, let's start with the breakdown of state votes in the November 2012 and November 2014 elections.





Now let's compare to the early voting/absentee numbers from the Elections Commission.

WOW Counties 16.55%
Milwaukee Co. 15.80%
Dane County 15.32%
Brown County 5.06%
Outagamie Co. 4.24%
Racine County 3.90%
Kenosha Co. 3.40%
Winnebago Co. 3.37%
Rock County 3.04%
Marathon Co. 2.03%
Rest of the State 27.29%

While the "rest of the state" figure is well below their typical turnout figures, La Crosse County is well above their typical levels, at 2.64%. That, and the strong numbers in Winnebago County (also well above their typical share of the electorate) may indicate that college students in those counties took advantage of early voting in large numbers. We've also seen reports here in Madison of strong turnout on the UW campus here, with early voting an important part of that equation.

.@CityofMadison Ald.Mike Verveer says this is the highest turnout of students in all his years as an election official @BadgerHerald

— Alice Vagun (@a_vagoon) November 8, 2016

On the flip side, I'm now seeing reports indicting the WOW Counties are having even higher turnout than normal, so we'll see what the final numbers look like as things shake out. I know that Dane County is growing faster than the WOW Counties, but we'll see how that translates to share of the votes.

That's all I got. All I can do is hang out and wait now, I guess. My simple message to my fellow Americans and my fellow Wisconsinites is: DO NOT FUCK THIS UP.