It wasn’t for days, but Brown County did have to hold its breath for awhile to learn the results of local races.
A crush of absentee ballots, all of which had to be opened by hand on election day, slowed the tabulation process by several hours on Nov. 3.
In total, 5,837 registered voters walked in to vote during the early voting period or sent their ballots by mail. That’s 46 percent of all voters in the county, and 65 percent of all voters who actually voted in this election.
The Brown County Election Board had expected absentee voting to be more popular than normal this year due to COVID-19 concerns, but this was a higher number than anticipated. At the time of the board’s last meeting before the election, on Oct. 22, 3,211 people had already voted, and the board was expecting that about 1,000 more would before election day. Instead, 2,500 more voted early and then some.
[sc:text-divider text-divider-title=”Story continues below gallery” ]“I was surprised that the process of validating all the ballot envelopes, reviewing signatures and physically counting ballots took so long,” said Republican election board member Mark Williams.
“Given the volume, but for our efficient equipment, we would not have finished the actual count on election day.”
Michael Fulton, Democrat proxy for the election board, said he wasn’t surprised at how long it took because of the process they had to use.
“The election board has stressed repeatedly that ‘it is more important to get the vote counts accurate than get them fast,'” he said. “We learned from earlier lessons, when you rush, you make mistakes.”
“If people want results earlier, contact your legislators and tell them to update election laws to allow the process to begin earlier,” he added.
Results from in-person election day voting came in fairly quickly. Media watchers picked up totals from each of Brown County’s 12 precincts after polls closed at 6 p.m. Less than an hour and a half later, the Brown County Democrat had posted where each candidate stood.
However, those totals only represented 3,154 votes. Firmer results did not arrive until around 11 p.m.
The election board office at Deer Run Park was abuzz as the hours ticked by. Brown County Clerk Kathy Smith sat at a makeshift desk in the lobby, accepting a red bag and blue cart filled with ballots from each of the 12 precincts, until the last one reported in at 8:20 p.m. and poll workers went home.
The absentee board was still marching on, though. Since shortly after 6 a.m., four bipartisan teams of two people each had been stationed in an office to the side, opening and stacking seemingly never-ending paper ballots before they were fed into a vote-tabulating machine. They took a brief break for dinner sometime after 8 p.m., then picked back up again.
“The absentee election board provided truly heroic service — especially on election day,” said Williams, who was one of the people feeding the ballots into the counter. “I was proud for the privilege of working with them.”
By state law, the absentee voter board was not allowed to open the inner envelopes containing any ballots until election day. It literally took an entire day to open them all.
“This is function of assuring a paper trail for mail-in and, most importantly, early in-person voting,” Williams said. “The security systems now required by law come at a cost.”
Several other ballots are yet uncounted.
Smith said that at least five ballots arrived in the mail after noon on election day. By law, they cannot be counted.
Another 209 ballots, which voters cast either early or on election day, will be reviewed one by one at an election board meeting on Friday, Nov. 13, and the election board will determine whether or not those votes should count. Those are all provisional ballots, which voters are given when there’s some question about their eligibility to vote.
This amount is far above the normal amount of provisional ballots the election board usually has to review. After the last presidential election in 2016, the board only had 40 to look over.
This was not a record-breaking year for voter turnout, but it was close. Of the 12,622 registered voters in Brown County, 71.23 percent of them, or 8,991, actually voted. The only turnout higher than that in recent decades was the 1992 presidential election between Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, when turnout was “nearly 75 percent” according to newspaper archives. However, back then, 75 percent of Brown County voters was only 6,496 people.
For the 2016 presidential election, turnout was 64 percent.
The previous record for early voting was shattered this year, though. The highest had been 3,037 people in the 2016 general election. This year, it was that many, plus 2,800 more.
“I have been ‘working the polls’ since 1988,” Fulton said, “and I have never seen so many ballots cast and never so many cast early.”
