April primary - some got screwed over. But not a disaster, and lessons can be learned

The Wisconsin Elections Commission released their report on what went down during the April 7 primary in our state, and will discuss the findings on Wednesday. This is the infamous primary forced in the middle of a pandemic by GOP politicians and court “justices”, leading to this scene from Milwaukee.

Thank you to everyone that’s been sharing my photo! And thank you for getting the message out. https://t.co/iXaMo9vTok

— Patricia McKnight (@Pmcknightnews) April 7, 2020

But the in-person lines in Milwaukee weren't because of a large in-person turnout on April 7. Instead it was because voting sites were consolidated because of a lack of people willing to work the polls in the midst of a pandemic. WEC notes that many Wisconsinites were able to adjust to the bizarre circumstances of the post-COVID election, to the point that nearly ¾ of them voted absentee, either by early voting in person, or through the mail.

But some individuals didn’t get their ballots back in time to vote in April 7’s primary, and were forced to choose between going in-person and having a higher risk of COVID contamination, or not voting at all. To help to understand how this may have happened, it’s worthy to take a step back and look at the timeline leading into that election.

On Friday, March 20, federal judge William Conley extended the deadline for Wisconsin voters to register online to March 31. This encouraged many Wisconsinites to use the online portal to avoid having to go to polling places, and to send in a request to get their ballots for the April 7 primary.

The problem is that local officials in Milwaukee became overwhelmed by the number of requests in Wisconsin, and it coincided with weekend computer maintenance for a state system that Sunday and Monday. As a result, nearly 2,700 people were skipped.

The technical problems in Milwaukee occurred late on March 22 and carried into early March 23, when the Milwaukee officials attempted to print thousands of mailing labels for absentee ballots. The problem occurred because of “an extraordinary confluence of events” with technology, according to the report.

Milwaukee election workers processed an unusually large number of ballot requests at once, which took computers hours to generate instead of a few minutes, as is more typical, according to the report. At the same time, state tech workers — unaware of what Milwaukee workers were doing — restarted their servers to address an unrelated issue.

When the system restarted, it began processing a new set of Milwaukee ballots instead of picking up where it had left off. That resulted in the failure to fulfill 2,693 absentee ballot requests, according to the report.

Around the same time, the full WEC report says there were similar issues in Oshkosh, which meant that many applicants in that city didn’t get their request. Including the Democratic Leader of the State Assembly!

The WEC also investigated reports from the City of Oshkosh suggesting that ballot requests were received but not fulfilled. While many of the cases involved incomplete requests (e.g. no photo ID provided) other records appeared complete. WEC staff researched several dozen Oshkosh area ballot requests that were entirely valid, including those of Assembly Representative Gordon Hintz (D – Oshkosh) and his spouse. The ballot records in question were generated as part of a batch on March 24, and analysis of the ballots associated with it showed that a large part of the batch was not returned by voters. Of the first quarter of records generated, more than 90% were returned. Of the remaining three quarters of records, less than 1% were returned. This suggests that something happened to the ballots in the latter portion of the batch.

WEC and Oshkosh staff could find no evidence of a technical failure. The Oshkosh batch was produced very quickly by the system (two minutes and seven seconds), did not include any unexpected applications, and occurred during normal operating hours when no system maintenance was underway. Furthermore, the City of Oshkosh Clerk reports with confidence that the ballots were mailed to voters. Thus, in this case, there is no evidence of a system error and no evidence of a printing problem. Instead, one of two events are possible: either a user did not apply the mailing labels to ballot envelopes, or these ballots were bundled together and collectively encountered an issue in the mailing process.

There was also a tub of around 1,600 undelivered ballot requests from the Appleton and Oshkosh area the day after the election (which got media attention at the time), and the requests were eventually found in the USPS’s regional office in Chicago. So it seems like there are definitely some tracking issues that didn’t swing an election that Jill Karofsky won by double digits, but is something that better be cleaned up by November.

Overall, the WEC points out that some Wisconsinites weren’t able to vote by mail, which forced them into either having to vote in person and increase the chances of exposure to COVID-19, or not vote at all. Overall, approximately 1 in 9 Wisconsinites that requested an absentee ballot didn’t end up casting an absentee vote in the election.

However, it’s worth noting that this isn’t an unusual rate of rejection for Wisconsin. In fact, it’s on the low side for recent April elections.

It’s also interesting to note that court decisions which allowed ballots to be counted as long as they were postmarked on or before Election Day meant that more than 79,000 votes were counted, even though they were received after April 7.

Seems like an important thing to remember, because the deadline seems to have gone back to being received by Election Day in the state. And there should be clarification between now and November as to whether absentee ballots need to be mailed or received by Election Day. Because if we are in a second wave of COVID-19 at that time, there will likely be even more than 960,000 absentee ballots being mailed at that time.

But we also have a lot more time to adjust to it, as opposed to the 2 weeks that we had in April. This should give local governments the time to staff up in preparation for the onslaught of mailed registrations and ballots, and to have individuals request their ballots over a longer time period.

Bottom line, while our April 7 election was a national embarrassment for the circumstances Wisconsinites were pushed into, and many people were inconvenienced and stressed, not that many Wisconsinites were outright disenfranchised. But you can see how that might happen, and where breakdowns in our vote-by-mail and absentee system could happen. So adjustments need to be made in the next 5 ½ months in order for us to avoid a potentially larger mess in November, with the whole world watching.