I counted votes in Wisconsin. Here’s what surprised me

Until Tuesday, I’d always assumed absentee ballots were counted by some magical voting machine. I was wrong

Voters cast ballots at the Catholic Multicultural Center on 3 November 2020 in Madison, Wisconsin (Andy Manis/Getty Images)

When my alarm went off at 5:25 on Tuesday morning, I briefly forgot why I’d set it. For one foggy and joyful moment, I thought maybe I had an early flight to somewhere warm before remembering: “Oh, right, the pandemic.” I wolfed down some oatmeal and drove to a high school gymnasium.

Lucky for me (and everyone else), I wasn’t there to play sports. Instead, I was there to greet voters, check a lot of addresses, and hold official-looking clipboards. I was there to work the polls.

As I looked around the gym, scattered with registration tables and voting booths, I wondered what the next eight hours held. What would it be like working the polls during this — OK, fine, I’ll go with the most overused word of 2020 — “unprecedented” election?

Like many Americans, I’d followed Wisconsin’s April primaries on the news: the limited polling places, the snaking lines. When I moved to the state a few months ago, I decided to volunteer as a poll worker, doing my small part to prevent that from happening again.

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one with that idea.

Despite the state’s surging numbers of coronavirus cases, poll workers volunteered in droves for this year’s presidential election. The city of Madison, where I live, had to cap its roster at 6,000 — double the number of poll workers it has had in previous elections.

Several dozens of us, mostly in our twenties and thirties, had shown up at my assigned site. We snuck coffee underneath our masks as we awaited instructions from our chief election inspectors. (One of whom, Rosalie Powell, was just 18 — and had already been working elections for three years.)

After a few minutes, I was assigned my first task: using painter’s tape to mark a socially distanced box on the floor where election observers could sit. Throughout the day, we had observers from both parties. Luckily, there wasn’t much  to, well, observe, and they all looked bored to tears.

At exactly 7 am, chief election inspector T. R. Loon called out: “Hear ye, hear ye, this polling place is now open,” and I couldn’t help but feel like I was taking part in something a little historic.

Then I began the duty I’d perform for most of my shift: processing a record number of absentee ballots. At our polling site, we had more than 2,000 to get through — in a ward with 2,876 registered voters.

Since Wisconsin is one of only four states where officials can’t start counting absentee ballots until Election Day, and since the Supreme Court recently ruled that all of Wisconsin’s absentee ballots had to be in by the time the polls closed, the processing of absentee ballots started as soon as the polls opened — and, depending on the ward, continued into the next morning.

It was a time-consuming process. Until Tuesday, I’d always assumed absentee ballots were counted by some large and magical voting machine. I was wrong.

If you cast an absentee ballot in Wisconsin, know this: There was probably a poll worker who physically walked your ballot through the registration line (to check your address and make sure you hadn't voted already), before opening your envelope alongside several others (to conceal who you voted for), waiting in the voting line, and hand-feeding your ballot into a vote tabulator.

If the machine couldn’t read your ballot, that same poll worker “remade” it alongside another election official. One person read your responses aloud, while the other copied them over to a fresh ballot. The occurrence was recorded in a log with a description and each election officials’ initials. Both ballots then received a sticker with a number and more initials. The one marked “good ballot” was ferried back to the tabulator; the one marked “bad ballot” was put into an envelope with the other ballots the machine had refused.

“We have to do that in case there’s a recount,” Powell, the 18-year-old chief election inspector, said.

At that moment, I didn’t think much of her comment, or of the likelihood of a recount. I didn’t know that, in Wisconsin, candidates could request a recount if the race was within 1 percentage point. I didn’t know that Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, had requested a recount in Wisconsin in 2016 — which ultimately shifted the tally by 131 votes.

After a few hours of processing absentees, I switched roles and became a greeter. That meant standing at the door, smiling under my mask, and telling people where they could register or vote. (Wisconsin is one of 21 states plus the District of Columbia that offer same-day voter registration.)

On occasion, I saw people quickly leave and come back with a piece of paper or driver’s license in their hands. Dominic Davis, a 33-year-old librarian, said that was a notable difference from the three prior polls he’d worked.

During previous elections, when voters were turned away because they’d forgotten their ID, Davis said they often wouldn’t bother coming back. But on Tuesday, he saw most voters return almost immediately. “It seems like there’s more of a willingness for people to be engaged in the democratic process,” he said.

That was correct: Our county, which is home to both the state’s capital and flagship university, saw a record turnout. Nearly 80 percent of the voting-age population cast ballots.

Eventually I returned inside to process more absentee ballots. The stack was never-ending, and the next shift’s workers would have to stay until they were finished. Election officials in Milwaukee, which has one central location for processing absentee ballots, didn’t complete their count until 3:30am on Wednesday.

While others worked the poll books or the registration desk, I stuck to what I knew. I continued making the commute between the absentee ballot boxes, the registration line, the voting line, and the tabulator.

All in all, it was a pretty uneventful day — which I guess is a good thing when you’re talking about administering an election in a swing state that’s seeing record-breaking surges of a deadly virus.

Another first-time poll worker, Julia Carlson, 25, felt the same way. “It's a little less chaotic than I was expecting actually,” she said. “Everyone's really organized and energized.”

Despite all the hand sanitizer and masks and face shields, being inside that too-bright gymnasium almost felt like a respite from the outside world. A place where things were running like clockwork, where elderly people thanked you for volunteering, where you were rewarded with stickers for making your voice heard. A place where you weren’t allowed to talk about parties or politics or predictions, or let your personal preferences divide or unite you.

In some odd way, the polling site was a place where you could escape from the very reason you were there and tune out the overwhelming election chatter for a while. All that was left was people performing their civic duty, working together to ensure the integrity of the vote.