“The more complicated we make the ballot-
casting process, the more stuff is going to go
wrong,” said Wisconsin activist Karen McKim.
Election management in Wisconsin is as
decentralized as it gets, relying as it does on
72 county clerks, 1,850 municipal clerks and
thousands of poll workers. McKim says it’s
“unrealistic and unfair” to expect those workers
to be ready for a flood of absentee ballots in just
a few months.
BALLOT REQUESTS
Ahead of multiple primaries this year, some
election administrators were buried under
an unprecedented flurry of absentee ballot
requests. Some blank ballots got misaddressed;
others were lost.
In Georgia’s Fulton County, which includes
Atlanta and is the state’s most populous,
thousands of absentee ballots didn’t reach
voters until after the polls had closed, according
to local news reports. Washington, D.C., voters
were similarly afflicted.
In Wisconsin, requested absentee ballots never
got to thousands of voters who asked. Jonas
Zahn, a 46-year-old IBM executive, risked his
health to vote in person on April 7 after twice
requesting absentee ballots. “They still haven’t
come so they must still be in the mail,” the
Beaver Dam resident said in late July.
In Milwaukee, nearly 2,700 absentee ballots
were never mailed because election staff goofed
and halted a batch printing of mailing labels, the
state election commission later reported. It was
just one of multiple snafus.