I have put together some numbers and a framework for starting to assess this question (the numbers are taken from the Wisconsin Election Commission’s website today).

As of now, it appears that the State managed to send out 12,216 fewer absentee ballots than were requested.  Let’s assume that 100% of those would have been sent out in enough time that they could have been postmarked and returned by April 13^th, had the Supreme Court not reversed the district court on this issue. 

For those voters who did request and received an absentee ballot, about 81% of those ballots were actually returned.  If we use that same return rate, that means as a starting point we can expect that 9,894 more absentee ballots would have been returned (and I’ll assume there would have no problem with any of those ballots, such as not being valid because they lacked the required witness signature or for other reasons). 

But that’s not the number of votes that the Supreme Court’s decision prevented, in effect, from being cast, because some of those who did not receive their requested ballot showed up to vote in person.  If you read the local papers in WI, there are many interviews with voters in line on Tuesday who put themselves in that category (and who faced the health risks associated with voting in person).

There is no way at the moment to estimate reliably the percent of these voters who were engaged enough to request a ballot and then showed up in person when that ballot didn’t arrive.  I’ll use a figure of 20%.  If that’s in the ballpark, it would mean the number of “lost votes”  would be 81% of 9,894 or 8,014 votes – that is, based on these assumptions, the Court’s decision means that 8,014 persons who would otherwise have voted, had the April 13^th deadline remained in place, could not.

For those interested in speculating about the partisan effects, let’s make an extreme assumption that these votes would have broken 70% to 30% in favor of one party.   That’s a massive landslide, certainly unlikely in WI, and not the way the rest of the absentee ballots are likely to break out (if we had demographic information on those who did not receive requested absentee ballots, we could make a more grounded estimate).  Using that extreme scenario, that would mean the disfavored party (I’ll say the Democrats) would have gotten 3,206 more votes had the Supreme Court affirmed the district court.

If we think those ballots would have broken 55% to 45% for the Democrats, which is probably closer to realistic, that would mean 801 fewer Democratic votes than if the April 13^th deadline had been in place  [these numbers don’t actually change much even if we unrealistically assume that none of these 9,894 voters showed up in person – in a 55/45 split, that would mean 989 fewer votes for the Democrats]

To put that in the context of the overall vote, my guess as of now is that total turnout in WI will be between 1.1 M and 1.3 M votes. 

These numbers might need to be tweaked as we get more information, of course.

[In another post, I will look at how that turnout level compares to what we would have expected under normal circumstances]