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It’s a known risk for the municipal clerks who run Wisconsin elections: Starting at 7 a.m. on election day, they have around 16 hours to finish counting every vote, or they may start facing accusations of a fraudulent late-night “ballot dump.”
Those baseless allegations, which sometimes go viral, have plagued election officials across the state but especially in Milwaukee, where counting often finishes in the early morning hours after election day. Republican candidates have repeatedly cast suspicion on the timing of results in the largely Democratic city to explain away their statewide losses.
Currently, there’s little election officials can do to finish counting ballots sooner. Under state law, clerks must wait until the morning of election day to begin processing ballots and counting votes, even if they received those ballots weeks earlier.
Election officials are considering two strategies to change that. Both would require approval in the majority-Republican Legislature. At least one of them is highly likely to get signed into law in 2025.
One proposed measure would significantly simplify early in-person voting procedures. Currently, people who vote early in person receive and fill out absentee ballots, which get set aside in envelopes and aren’t processed or tabulated until election day. The proposal clerks are considering, which is similar to a measure that received some legislative support several years ago, would allow early voters instead to put their ballots right into a tabulator.
The other measure, which has been repeatedly pitched and then rejected in one or both legislative chambers, would allow election officials to get a one-day head start and begin processing absentee ballots on the Monday before the election. This past session, the proposal passed the Assembly but stalled in the Senate.
Early voting, without the envelopes
The direct early-voting measure appears unlikely to pass the Legislature in its current form. But experts say it would make elections more efficient and reduce the number of errors that the more complex process of casting and processing absentee ballots causes voters and election officials to make.
Currently, 47 states offer some form of early in-person voting, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Thirteen states, including Wisconsin, have in-person absentee voting, seven states have primarily mail voting with some early voting options, and 27 states have early in-person voting.
In Wisconsin, voters cast early in-person ballots at polling sites, but under state law, each ballot goes in an absentee ballot envelope that has to be signed by the voter, and filled out with a witness’s address and signature, almost as if they were voting by mail. The envelopes and ballots can’t be processed until election day, when poll workers have to verify that each ballot is properly signed and witnessed before counting it.
Processing these ballots as absentee ballots is time-consuming and invites errors, said Joshua Douglas, an election law professor at the University of Kentucky College of Law, who advocates for reducing the number of steps involved for voters and election officials.
The complications of the current early voting system became evident this year, when delays in the system used to print labels on absentee ballot envelopes, typically before voters fill out their ballot, forced voters to wait in long lines. That problem wouldn’t have come up if the early voting system had not relied on absentee-ballot procedures.
But even when it moves smoothly, the early voting system with absentee ballots requires extra work. For example, election workers typically serve as witnesses for absentee voters, signing and filling out their information for each voter. That requires an additional worker in many voting precincts.
Municipal clerks are discussing a proposal that would allow voters to cast ballots in person at their clerks’ offices as early as two weeks before the election, but to skip most of the absentee process — no witnesses, no signatures, no envelopes. Those voters would have to apply for an absentee ballot at the clerk’s office, but otherwise the process would be similar to voting on election day.
The ballots would be scanned by tabulators used specifically for early in-person voting, said Janesville Clerk Lorena Stottler, who’s also a co-chair of the Wisconsin Municipal Clerks Association’s legislative committee. Officials would wait until election day to generate the total number of votes from those ballots.
The proposal would reduce costs on multiple levels, Stottler said, since there wouldn’t be any absentee ballot envelopes, and fewer staff would be required in the early voting period and on election day to process absentee ballots. It would also lower the administrative costs of sorting absentee envelopes alphabetically and by ward, she said.
To ensure a high level of security, the proposal would require municipalities opting into the program to maintain a chain of custody, put cameras on the voting machines, and ensure that the tabulator saves an image of every ballot it scans, Stottler said.
Milwaukee, the state’s biggest city and typically among the last municipalities to finish counting votes, lobbied for such a proposal last year. Similar legislation came up in 2020, passing the Assembly but not the Senate.
Rep. Scott Krug, the former chair and current vice chair of the Assembly Elections Committee, said he could support some version of an early voting expansion, as long as all Wisconsin municipalities participated.
“My issue is finding a way to have availability in rural areas like mine,” said Krug, who lives in Nekoosa, a city of 2,500 in central Wisconsin. “So many towns have clerks with other full time obligations. I’d only support an expansion of early voting if access were equal across the board.”
That would include set hours, set days, and funding for smaller communities, he said, adding that he was willing to negotiate with advocates of the measure. In the past, funding election offices has been a tough sell in the Legislature.
Claire Woodall, former executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission and a current senior adviser at the election reform group Issue One, said the early voting proposal could help election officials, especially if every municipality had the same early voting program.
And to reduce confusion and the potential for errors, Woodall said, it would be better to roll out such a program over multiple years, rather than in one go.
Michigan recently implemented a similar measure, allowing voters to cast ballots early in person and insert them directly into a tabulator. The Michigan early voting program runs for a minimum of nine consecutive days, but municipalities can offer the option for as many as 28 days total before an election. The change helped speed up election results in 2024 without leading to any notable issues.
Pre-processing ballots on Monday before election
The so-called Monday processing proposal appears likely to garner more support in the Legislature than it has in the past. For years, election officials have been lobbying for the proposal to allow election officials to begin processing ballots the Monday before an election day. Resistance from Republican lawmakers appears to be withering.
The proposal, election officials say, would speed up election results that have taken longer to report as more voters choose absentee voting. And critically, the earlier results could stave off false allegations about fraudulent late-night ballot dumps, like the ones then-President Donald Trump made about Milwaukee after his 2020 loss.
The Monday processing proposal, along with the early voting one, would help election officials finish counting ballots earlier, Woodall said.
Wisconsin’s most recently proposed early processing measure would have allowed election officials to start checking absentee ballot envelopes for voters’ identity and eligibility, open the envelopes, take out the ballots, and scan them through tabulators — but not tally them until election day.
But despite growing Republican support, the measure has faced GOP headwinds in the Legislature. In 2020, the proposal received public hearings in both chambers but never passed out of committee. In 2022, it passed the Senate but not the Assembly. This past session, it passed the Assembly but not the Senate.
The most significant opposition in the Senate this past session came from Sen. Dan Knodl, the Republican chair of the chamber’s election committee. He said that he didn’t trust Milwaukee enough to support the bill, and that he was concerned about the chain of custody for ballots. Other Republicans worried that there weren’t enough GOP election observers in Milwaukee to watch the Monday and Tuesday processes. Knodl’s opposition stalled the proposal. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, a Republican, criticized the Senate’s inaction.
This upcoming session, Knodl is in the Assembly, and he’s not leading the election committee. One of the Senate’s top Republican leaders, Sen. Mary Felzkowski, said in December that she supports the proposal.
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.
