Election Day voting in Wisconsin is going smoothly, without any significant problems, said Wisconsin’s top election official Tuesday.
“As of this afternoon, there are no major issues that have been reported,” Meagan Wolfe, the nonpartisan administrator of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, said at a press conference. “Election Day in Wisconsin is going smoothly.”
The commission had received some “very minor reports earlier today of lines at the polling places around the state,” as well as “routine calls and questions,” Wolfe added.
Polls in the state close at 8 p.m. central time, and those waiting in line at the time can still vote, Wolfe reminded voters.
As of Tuesday morning, voters had requested about 815,000 absentee ballots and returned about 742,000 of them, including about 318,000 in-person absentee ballots, she noted.
Acknowledging that some jurisdictions could take until Wednesday morning to complete their tallies of absentee ballots, Wolfe said, “election officials are always going to value accuracy over speed.”
“There are observers in that same room until the very last ballot is counted,” Wolfe said. “There really is no part of the election administration process that’s done behind a locked door.”
Right-wing internet quickly spreads video from Maricopa County, Arizona
“We’ve anticipated legitimate mistakes and issues with election infrastructure being reframed as fraud," Kate Starbird, an associate professor at the University of Washington who studies the spread of disinformation, told CNN.
The video shows an election worker in the Phoenix suburb of Anthem explaining a problem with tabulation machines rejecting ballots.
Election officials quickly responded, saying they were working on the issue and that voters whose ballots were not being accepted by a tabulation machine could put their ballot in a secure box and they would be counted after the polls close.
“No one is being disenfranchised. And none of this indicates any fraud or anything of that sort. This is a technical issue,” said Bill Gates, chairman of the county’s Board of Supervisors and a Republican himself.
A county spokeswoman added that the poll worker in the viral video did what they were supposed to. “That poll worker at Anthem was doing their job, providing voters the information they need to participate in this election, and the options they have. He was calm and transparent,” said Megan Gilbertson of the county’s election department.
CNN