More than 1.5M Wisconsin absentee ballots cast in presidential election

More than 1.5 million Wisconsinites have already cast their ballots ahead of Tuesday’s presidential election. Wisconsin’s top elections official says the state is poised to set a new record for early in-person absentee voting.

All told, more than 41 percent of all active, registered voters in Wisconsin have already cast absentee ballots, according to the Wisconsin Elections Commission. Of those, nearly 950,000 were in-person absentee ballots, which were cast in clerks offices or early voting sites.

During a Monday briefing, Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe said there have been nearly 645,000 mail-in absentee ballots requested by voters for the presidential election.

“To kind of contrast that, in 2020, the volume of by-mail absentee ballots set records,” Wolfe said. “This year, it appears there’s a record number of in-person absentee ballots that were cast.”

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, absentee voting exploded during Wisconsin’s 2020 presidential election. That year, WEC data shows nearly 1.9 million ballots were returned. Of that total, there were just 644,843 people who cast early, in-person absentee ballots.

In other states, which require voters to register their party affiliation, analysts are able to get a glimpse into Republican and Democratic turnout using absentee ballot data. While Wisconsin doesn’t require party registration, there have been attempts to compare increases or decreases in counties that trend Republican or Democratic to glean similar takeaways.

Marquette University Law School pollster Charles Franklin told WPR he takes all of that with a grain of salt.

“Now, there are a lot of smart analysts out there trying to read these tea leaves, and maybe they’re doing a lot better than I am with it. But I think here in Wisconsin, without party registration, we don’t know how many Republicans have returned ballots or Democrats have returned ballots,” Franklin said. “We just know what municipality they come from, or what county they come from.”

He said the latest Marquette poll showed that people sending absentee votes by mail “lean pretty heavily Democratic.” However, Franklin said one major change in this election is that after criticizing absentee voting by mail, former President Donald Trump and the Republican party are now pushing their supporters to embrace absentee voting.

“And so, it’s really hard to know what this mix really represents, except that we know we’ve got well over a million votes already cast,” Franklin said.