Little has changed in Wisconsin to facilitate a faster vote count since 2020, and election leaders in the state’s biggest and bluest cities — where ballots take the longest to count — are bracing for another onslaught of attacks.
Voting rights advocates and political leaders told NOTUS they’re concerned the small handful of changes the state could have made to mitigate some of the disinformation around election results didn’t happen — and those wanting to discredit elections will again weaponize anything they can.
In the wee hours of the all-night vote count in Milwaukee four years ago, Donald Trump was already laying the groundwork for the onslaught of lawsuits, personal attacks and misinformation to come.
“We are up BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the Election,” Trump wrote on X at 1 a.m., after most states were called and four hours before Milwaukee’s election results came in. In the morning, Trump posted multiple times about “ballot dumps” in swing states going for Biden, but those were just absentee ballots getting counted on Election Day, as Wisconsin (and a few other states) require.
This year, the Milwaukee count is again expected to take place in the middle of the night. State lawmakers failed to pass a bill that would have allowed election clerks to start processing absentee ballots before Election Day.
“We were one of the only states that didn’t adjust any election laws,” Claire Woodall, former executive director of Milwaukee’s election commission and current senior adviser at the civic-advocacy group Issue One, told NOTUS. “One really pivotal thing that we really wanted to get passed had bipartisan support for was early processing of absentee ballots.”
There’s an added layer for those wanting to cast doubt on Milwaukee’s election results: A new executive director of the city’s election commission was appointed this year; she has never run a federal general election before and there was internal turmoil over her ascent.
In the absence of any legal changes to improve trust in elections, election leaders told NOTUS they’re beefing up where they can — increasing security, ensuring election observers have access to watch the count and trying to stay as nonpolitical as possible.