We all know by now how Wisconsin’s Nov. 5 election turned out. Republican Donald Trump defeated Democrat Kamala Harris in the presidential race. But how did the elections go on the ground, for the people running them?
WUWM checked back in with two Milwaukee-area municipal clerks who we talked to before the election.
Oak Creek
Nov. 5 was a long day for Oak Creek city clerk Catherine Roeske. Oak Creek was the last municipality in Milwaukee County to report its election results, around 7:30 a.m Wednesday. Roeske had hoped to be done by around 2 a.m.
"This election, for some reason, it was just a slow go," Roeske says. "There wasn’t a great explanation for it, it just went really slowly. When I learned at 5 o'clock in the morning that everyone was waiting on me, I was like, 'Oh it is nice to feel wanted.' However not in the way I was hoping for. So that was unfortunate."
Roeske and election clerks around Wisconsin are adapting to a new reality in which way more voters are casting absentee ballots, either by mail or by voting early in-person.
It takes time to check each absentee envelope for the required information, assign it a voter number, open the envelope, check that the ballot has been properly filled out, and feed them into a tabulator machine. Election workers aren’t able to start processing absentee ballots until the day of the election, according to Wisconsin law.
In Oak Creek, about 58% of voters, voted absentee, resulting in about 12,400 ballots to process on election day.
"I always put it in perspective and say, 'You know, in 2020, the City of Oak Creek had over 14,000 absentee ballots to process on Election Day with about 12 people helping. City of Milwaukee had 44,000 ballots with hundreds of people and fast machines,'" Roeske says. "We are doing one ballot at a time — DS200 machines. We have three of them for elections. So when you look at those numbers, you can understand why we would be a slower process even though we have a smaller amount [of absentee ballots]."
Even so, Roeske says she didn’t expect it to take as long as it did. She thinks it’s partly because they were using a new software, called BadgerBooks. And, staffing wasn’t consistent throughout the day.
"By 9, 10, 11 o'clock at night, I had poll workers that were fatigued and ready to leave," she says. "I did bring in some additional help, but when you start to look at 1 o'clock hours, two in the morning, more resources started to fall out. ... So unfortunately the start of our day moved so slowly that it pushed us later into the night and the later it went, the less resources we had."
Roeske says it got down to just four people processing absentee ballots for a couple hours early Wednesday morning. She didn’t get any sleep that night and continued working even after all the ballots were counted, until Wednesday afternoon.
Oak Creek had record high turnout in the election, with 98% of registered voters casting a ballot. The city also had a lot of same-day registrations, which are not factored into the initial turnout number.
"For this election, for the parties to be pushing early voting whether by mail or in-person, I think that had a significant impact on the turnout overall," says Roeske.
Hales Corners
The slow processing of absentee ballots was the main challenge in Oak Creek on Election Day. In the smaller municipality of Hales Corners, clerk Sandy Kulik says her main challenge came down to the same-day registrations.
"We had to register almost 400 people at the polls," Kulik says. "And that was a longer wait than anything else."
People are allowed to register to vote on Election Day in Wisconsin. But they have to have the right documentation, including an acceptable form of ID and proof of residence.
Kulik says there were some challenging cases of voters who didn’t have those documents.
"One was a gentleman who insisted I was trying to disenfranchise him because he tried to register with an expired driver’s license. You can vote with one, but you can’t register with one," says Kulik. "And the others had to do with inappropriate proof of residency documents that they thought I should accept. And it got — not heated — but it got very adversarial."
Kulik had a plainclothes police officer helping out at the polls, but she says he only needed to help de-escalate a situation one time.
Because of the complicated voter registrations, Kulik had to step away from her main job of processing absentee ballots for a few hours, which she says slowed things down on that side. Hales Corners had almost 3,000 absentee ballots to process. They were done by about 2:30 a.m. Kulik went home and got about two hours of sleep before coming back to work later in the day.
Turnout among registered voters in Hales Corners was 83%, with a little more than half of people voting absentee. Kulik says that turnout is about average for the village in a presidential election.
She plans to hold a more intensive training for poll workers early next year to try to better prepare them for complex voter registration scenarios.
"I printed off all of the weird registrations that we had and I’m going to see if they can figure out what the problems were and try to recreate those hurdles for them and get them more confident in registering people," Kulik says. "That’s my goal for 2025 — I'm gonna get them confident."
Kulik is planning to retire in a couple years, and she’s hoping to leave Hales Corners as prepared as it can be for future elections. She’s looking forward to no more 20-plus-hour election days.
