I would like to congratulate municipal clerks here in Wisconsin for finally conducting a fair and honest election. On neither Tuesday night nor Wednesday morning did I hear any of the allegations of election fraud that have become “commonplace” in recent years.
There have been no claims that Voter ID kept tens of thousands of people from voting on Tuesday. Limited in-person absentee voting hours didn’t discriminate against the working poor this time around. We are yet to hear from any out-of-state college students or military members that never received their absentee ballot–or who got it too late to get it back in time for election day.
There haven’t been any stories of poll workers denying registration to people because their address wasn’t right on proof of residency documents. No one was turned away after trying to provide the most obscure form of valid identification at the polls. No poll observers tried to “intimidate” minority voters. Nobody that was in line at 8:00 was told that they would not be allowed to vote.
There were no pre-marked ballots reported on Tuesday. No voting machines that suddenly switched candidates’ names after the voter made their selection. There were no complaints of ballots that were too complicated to understand and there were no ballots with candidates in the wrong party column. (There were ballots handed out to the wrong Assembly district voters in Howard on Tuesday–but that was as much the fault of ignorant voters as the poll workers themselves. The very first voter of the day should have noticed the candidate they wanted to vote for wasn’t on the ballot and should have brought it to the attention of the workers–instead of more than 240 people not noticing.)
There were no complaints of marked ballots being left out in the open. No previously-sealed bags showed up at city hall with their seals mysteriously broken. No voting machines made thousands of ballots “disappear”. Bags of uncounted ballots that flipped the results of the elections were found in Milwaukee County this time and not Waukesha County.
No one has been accused of trying to hack into voting machines this year. There have been no claims that outside agencies affected the vote totals. Not a single candidate or party official has made any claim that the results of Tuesday’s vote were a fraud.
That stands in sharp contrast to the impotent administration of statewide elections in 2016, 2014, the 2012 recall elections and 2010–where all of the issues I listed before were claimed to be rampant in Wisconsin. It’s almost like we just conducted non-partisan spring elections or August primaries this week. Well, except for those April elections where Conservative Supreme Court Justices won.
Perhaps out municipal clerks here in Wisconsin–having finally figured out how to run an election “properly”–should teach the folks in Georgia, Florida and Texas how to do it–since all of our “problems” here have suddenly shown up down there.
