Here & Now

Noon Wednesday: Clerks and Voters Weigh in on 2020 Election

Marisa Wojcik:

Welcome to “Noon Wednesday,” I’m Marisa Wojcik, multimedia journalist with “Here & Now” on PBS Wisconsin. Today is September 22. For many reasons, 2020 is going to have a lasting impact and one of those is the presidential election. A recent survey asked clerks and voters about their experiences of the 2020 election and joining me to tell us about that survey and the results is Barry Burden, a UW-Madison professor of political science and Director of the Elections Research Center, and thank you so much for joining us.

Barry Burden:

Thanks for having me. Glad to be here.

Marisa Wojcik:

First, with voters, was there consensus from voters on how they experienced the 2020 election, and did any groups report particular difficulty voting?

Barry Burden:

Yeah. So, the study, the report is based on surveys of both the public and local election officials, and the public gave the election really high marks. I asked them specifically in the survey whether they encountered difficulty, especially with the shift to absentee voting, which was new for a lot of voters. The vast majority of voters in Wisconsin said it was an easy process, happy with the election, and those who voted in person, most had short waiting times, that’s been the tradition in Wisconsin, and it held in 2020, and so I think the broad message is one of great success despite all the difficulties and very high levels of turnout, the shifts that had to happen to move polling places from old locations to new locations, voters mostly had good experiences. There were some pockets of the population that continue to have difficulty, and maybe more difficulty in 2020 than in other years. In particular, three jump out. Those are young people, people with disabilities, and non-white minority voters. All three of those groups were more likely in the survey to say they had some difficulty with the absentee voting process, either getting a witness signature or getting the ballot in on time or making the request. There was some difficulty voting in person. The wait times to vote were longer for young people, people with disabilities, and minority voters. This continued to be trouble spots. I think for different reasons. You know, young voters, especially college age students, were often relocated or dislocated during the pandemic, moving maybe from campus back to their parents’ home or something else and figuring out the absentee voting process as a result of that, and that created many problems and many of them voted in person, probably, as a side effect of all of that.

Marisa Wojcik:

And shifting over to clerks. Why was it difficult for you to summarize all of the experiences of municipal clerks, and what did they report as difficulty administering the election?

Barry Burden:

Well, Wisconsin has a somewhat unusual system of election administration. It is based at the municipal level so every city, village, and town has its own election clerk, whether it is the city of Milwaukee with over 400,000 people or the small town that might only have a few hundred people. In fact, the typical clerk serves less than 1,000 voters. It is very decentralized. There is a huge range in the kind of professionalism and capacity of the offices and number of voters they served. Most clerks work part-time on an hourly basis, and most of them have other jobs on the side, and so it is a part-time gig as opposed to clerks in, say, Green Bay or Madison with staff who work year-round and really focus on elections. So, you get a wide variety of opinions of what election processes ought to be adopted depending on the size of the community and what the experience was. Most clerks had a really successful election and happy with how things came off and innovated in really interesting ways to make things work when there was difficulty finding poll workers or having to shift to new locations, and especially in bigger cities. There were innovations like the use of drop boxes to collect ballots. In some places using old store fronts from closed businesses as polling locations because they allowed for social distancing, but you see in the survey that, you know, the general attitude towards voting and administration of elections is different in small towns and villages compared to bigger cities. For example, whether we ought to allow something like drop boxes or mandate municipalities use drop boxes. Bigger cities were enthusiastic about that and want to allow the option, if not mandate there’s some number of drop boxes, but in the smallest communities, I think they have difficulty imagining serving drop boxes while doing the other things they do election-wise before election day, and so they really resist the idea of a mandate. Even kind of the routine aspects of running elections like recruiting poll workers was equally difficult in big cities and small towns, but in bigger communities, more of those poll workers were new. In largest cities, about half of the poll workers were brand new, never served before, and so they needed to be trained. They needed to be found and trained and recruited and monitored in a way that ongoing poll workers wouldn’t be, and yet clerks said the new poll workers did just as well, if not better, than their veteran poll workers who returned. There’s a silver lining to that, but it presents special challenges, I think, in larger cities than in smaller communities.

Marisa Wojcik:

And some clerks reported high levels of burnout with the pandemic and the political environment, and in some cases, experiencing threats. Because of those experiences, are we going to see any sort of mass exodus of municipal clerks, especially with that good experience of knowing how to administer elections, and what would be the consequences of that if we lost that institutional knowledge?

Barry Burden:

Yeah. There have been news stories from other parts of the country about election officials getting out of the job, that 2020 was just so difficult and unpleasant they decided to hang it up and retire. I was concerned that would happen in Wisconsin as well. The survey did ask about some of the specific experiences that clerks had with hostile or threatening messages, and about 20% of clerks told us that those were more common experiences in 2020 than before, and that’s obviously a stress on the job. The survey asked specifically about burnout, and about whether they feel used up in the end of the workday, and the vast majority of clerks said “absolutely” as it is a very difficult job, especially during the pandemic. We also asked about other stresses, misinformation, having to combat intentional or unintentional misunderstandings about how the election operates, put new pressure on them to keep the facts in front of voters and run a proper election, and then, of course, the glut of absentee ballots. Ballots arriving by the mail they really didn’t have to process in the past and don’t have the ability to process before election day under Wisconsin law, and that was a real trouble, I think, for a lot of clerks as those ballots began to pile up before the election, and then have to process them all on election day. The survey asked specifically whether all experiences together made the clerk more likely to want to end their career in that position or it didn’t make a difference or make them likely to stay, and I was surprised to see there was a sort of equal balance. About 20% of clerks said the experience made them more likely to want to leave, and some said they would retire early as a result, but there was another 20% that indicated the experience made them rededicate themselves to their positions, and they really wanted to stay on and they were now more likely to serve for additional elections than they would have been. That’s a wonderful bright side, I think, again, the silver lining to all of this that doesn’t get emphasized as much. In looking at the actual rosters of clerks from before the election and after, the turnover does not seem to be exceptional at this point. There’s always a churn in these positions, as I said, they are part-time, they are not careers for many of these people, and so they do sort of cycle in and cycle out, but it looks like the pattern is really not much higher in terms of the turnover this time around than it would have been after the 2016 election.

Marisa Wojcik:

And you mentioned absentee ballots. How much did that play a role in the 2020 election overall with unprecedented numbers of voting by mail. Did this impact voters? Did this impact clerks? You mentioned how different municipalities, different counties, cities, villages, vastly different sizes dealing with vastly different levels of population, did that have varying impacts on how absentee ballots were processed and eventually counted?

Barry Burden:

It did. It was probably the first election in Wisconsin history where the majority of votes were cast outside of election day. The normal pattern in Wisconsin, the system, is really set up to serve voters on election day with a small number of voters expected to cast ballots by mail or maybe in person early, which we call early voting, but it is really a form of absentee voting in Wisconsin, but 2020 turned that on its head, and it was only a minority of voters who cast votes in person so I think one thing it’s done is set up future elections in Wisconsin to always have these three pieces simultaneously, voting in person on election day, which we all recognize as traditional way of voting, voting by mail, where a voter requests ballot and sends in through the postal service, and then this third form, which is absentee voting in person of some kind before election day where clerks really did a lot of innovating. I mentioned the use of drop boxes before. Those got rolled out in lots of communities, but especially in bigger communities and heavily used by voters. I think many voters viewed the drop boxes as more secure than the mail. There was concerns about whether the postal service would immediate delivery standards in 2020, and people were worried about that ballot getting back on time, and so I think there was a kind of security in using the drop box for a lot of voters, and so that was a massive innovation, but there was others, cities like Madison used drop slots at libraries that would normally be used for returning books as a way to collect ballots. There were ballot collection activities in parks and other places where election workers went out to receive ballots, again, taking the postal service out of the final step of getting ballot back to the election office. I think it was a sense of security for a lot of voters. It really put pressure on election officials as I was saying to see those ballots piling up before election day, they needed to be stored somewhere, that is secure, and then allocated to the right polling place on election day where they are opened and inspected and tabulated, and so that was additional work for poll workers on election day to do an excessive amount of absentee ballot tabulation alongside in-person voting. There was another innovation underway before 2020 in mostly larger communities, and that is counting absentee ballots at a central location rather than at the polling place. Cities like Brookfield and Milwaukee and Green Bay had already been doing this as just an efficiency, huge number of ballots need to be processed, and take them to the one place, high speed scanner to run the ballots. More communities were interested in doing that in 2020 and in the survey saying they are thinking seriously about doing this in upcoming elections. I think we’ll go from, you know, a couple dozen who had been doing it before the election to probably many dozens, especially larger communities in future elections.

Marisa Wojcik:

And now that everything is more virtual, some of us remember seeing video of these massive rooms in Milwaukee, for example, of people counting ballots, very, very interesting time, and so switching gears a little bit. No voter fraud has been found, and we are still talking about the 2020 election in September, late September of 2021, and there are several ongoing investigations in our state alone, Assembly Speaker Robin Voss says just he wants to show the public they can trust how elections are run in Wisconsin. Are these investigations eroding or gaining public trust?

Barry Burden:

Well, that’s a really good question, and I’m going to answer it in a moment. Let me just say the message from my survey of clerks and voters, the two major stakeholders in the election, was that it was highly successful, very confident in what happened, they had a good experience, despite all the difficulties, despite the public health concerns, financial concerns, misinformation, the change in the way people voted, they pulled it off. I think we want to keep going back to that theme because it is the dominant experience of both the election officials and the voters. Really, nowhere in my surveys did I hear from clerks they thought there was substantial fraud happening or they thought the laws were not being implemented properly. There were opportunities in the survey for them to say whatever they wanted, in addition to the closed ended questions I asked, there was a lot of opportunities for open ended verbatim comments, and it was rare for a clerk to say anything about the security of the election or the integrity of the election that bothered them. Now, in terms of whether these investigations and audits and other things underway are going to boost confidence, I think it is unlikely. We know from surveys of voters around the country that the major predicter of whether they are confident about an election is if they hear from people in their party, in particular, public officials, candidates, other leaders, that telling them they should have confidence in the election. You know, that’s the kind of credible source they’d hear from in politics that’s going to be meaningful to them. Most voters in the survey had a great experience with no qualms about how the election was conducted. If you are hearing from someone in public life telling you that, even though your experience was fine, elsewhere, we have suspicions or irregularities. As a voter, you don’t have a lot of ammunition to combat those kinds of concerns. So, I think one of the best things we can do is simply remind voters that the election had both the normal testing of equipment that happens before the election and after where it is publicly run and everyone can see that the machines are working properly. There’s a spot audit of the state that happens after every election where random wards around the state are selected and ballots are reviewed, and there was a full recount of all ballots in two biggest counties in Wisconsin, Milwaukee and Dane, the Trump administration paid for those, and they verified the results, but, really, the basic outcome unchanged as a result of the reviews. I think by continuing to raise questions and demand investigations and other kinds of things happening nine months, ten months after the election, that’s likely to lower confidence or certainly not to boost it. It may have some value, but I think the timing, the kind of partisanship that’s embedded in it are really not helpful for reminding voters about all the good things that happened in the election.

Marisa Wojcik:

And just drilling down a little bit further, Voss’ investigation is led by Wisconsin former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice, Mike Gableman, and this week he released a six-minute long video and talked about the fact they are not challenging the results, but some election officials acted unilaterally in deciding not to follow established state law. What is your take on that? This is an investigation that seems to be different than looking for fraud. Is this just creating more confusion? Certainly, we have not seen something like this before.

Barry Burden:

Well, I have a couple worries about that. One, the Gableman investigation seems to have a moving target in mind. The kinds of things that his team is interested in have shifted over time. He’s traveled to Arizona to see the recount audit business that was happening there in Maricopa County. He’s traveled to a seminar that Mike Lindell, the My Pillow CEO put on in South Dakota and conducted with other folks who are in that industry of raising questions about the election. His most recent video, as you mentioned, is now talking about clerks not following the law, and, to me, that seems like a different set of concerns, and if that were happening, I think the legislature would have the right to hold hearings to look into that, and they have already done some of that, and there could be court cases filed. Someone could file suit claiming the clerks or election officials were not following the law. Viewers will remember there were seven or eight suits filed right after the presidential election in Wisconsin in state court and federal court claiming that laws were not being followed, that the collection of ballots in city parks was not allowed under the law, maybe drop boxes shouldn’t have been permitted, maybe clerks were assisting when they shouldn’t have. All the suits were tossed out not seen as having merit they didn’t make any changes to the election as a result. That’s not to say we shouldn’t do some improvement after each election. It is an imperfect, it’s a very human process, we went through a really different kind of election than ever before, and I think the system adapted, but it was not designed to deal with the challenges we faced in 2020, and so some changes to the election law are probably right, but Idon’t think that doing it through somewhat secretive investigation that’s not done in full public view and with moving targets is really problematic.

Marisa Wojcik:

Did clerks in your survey have a consensus or idea what changes could be proposed in order to make elections run better or what they think would be fairer?

Barry Burden:

Yeah. So, there is a tendency among election officials to like things the way they are. We call this a status quo bias. One of the things that came out again and again in the survey is clerks just wanted the rules to be fixed. They don’t want changes being made, especially during the election season. They were really frustrated in the spring during the presidential primary when the legislature or the governor or the courts were intervening and changing the rules on them. It forces them to re-educate voters, retrain poll workers, change the forms and informational materials they are using, and change all the processes. They would like those things really to be locked down once we get in election season, which is completely understandable. It also means they mostly like the procedures in place. So, for example, one of the questions in the survey asked clerks whether they think the deadline for returning absentee ballots should remain on election day. Right now, absentee ballots have to be brought back to the clerk one form or another in mail or person by the time polls close at 8:00 p.m. on election day. That practice was extended by the court back in the April presidential primaries so ballots came in for another six days, and up until about five years ago, they allowed ballots to trickle in until Friday after election day as long as they were postmarked by election day. To my surprise, clerks were nearly unanimous in saying we absolutely think the election day deadline should hold. We don’t want to extend it. It doesn’t matter whether the clerk leans democratic or leans republican, is from a big city, small town, that was a pretty common view, and let’s keep things as they are, and that was true also with the deadline for requesting absentee ballots and variety of other state laws. Clerks would like to keep those things as they are. Where you see differences among clerks are in the sorts of things that would allow or prevent innovation. Allow them to do things at the local level to serve their voters. So, the use of drop boxes, I mentioned already, some clerks are really resistant the idea, but others want to allow it or mandate it. One of the other questions in the survey was about the processing of absentee ballots before election day. I mentioned already Wisconsins one of the a few states that doesn’t allow clerks to start to work through the paperwork in advance leading to late nights and a lot of stress on the election night. There were a couple proposals offered in the survey, one was should election workers be allowed to at least open the absentee ballots before election day, inspect them, make sure everything is okay, they are not damaged, flatten them so they can be fed into the tabulators on election day, and some clerks were okay with the idea, and there was another proposal which would have allowed, actually, the ballots to be inserted into the tabulating machines before election day, or even in person to put it in the machine, and several clerks said they thought that would be a rewarding experience for the voters to see is going in the machine and give them a sense of confidence that it had been received properly. Both of those things were supported by clerks from big cities, larger communities, bigger villages, but in smaller, less populated areas, clerks were resistant because I think it is difficult to imagine having capacity to allow those because they have such limited staffs, because they work part-time, and some don’t have offices or official government phones to use to do business. They work, you know, outs of their kitchen or living room coffee tables or something else, allowing multiple days of early voting or drop boxes and other things just seem somewhat unimaginable. One conclusion in the report is that state policymakers need to think about simultaneously, on the one hand, having a uniform set of laws for the state. We certainly need to have a common deadline for all absentee ballots. That makes a lot of sense, but also giving room for clerks who have the resources or interest or the need or the demand from their voters to serve them in different ways by allowing early calculation of votes, allowing drop boxes, or other kinds of things, and right now, I think policymakers are not in that mind set yet of how to balance uniformity on things we need while allowing innovation for clerks who are interested and able to do it.

Marisa Wojcik:

And as you mentioned, 1800 municipalities and running things slightly differently, that decentralization, the Wisconsin elections commission repeatedly said that also helps Wisconsins election integrity. When it comes to education, I think a lot of us learned about the election process last year more than ever before. It can sometimes be seen as a very dry process, but now that there is such a laser focus on trust, is more education around how this process actually works needed in order to ensure greater confidence in the system?

Barry Burden:

Yes, I think so. And that’s a real lesson that election officials around the country have learned during the 2020 cycle that trying to get in front of misinformation or disinformation campaigns is really essential. Not just giving that information to reporters who can share it with the public, but to communicate with the public directly in ways they have not in the past, whether its streaming live on Facebook, giving tours of election facilities, showing the counting of ballots, issuing, you know, informational guidance before the election. Now, Wisconsin clerks did a lot of that, and so did the elections commission before the election. For example, one of the bits of misinformation that people were concerned about was the late counting of ballots in Milwaukee. Milwaukee is the biggest city in the state that receives a lot of absentee ballots. They are not permitted to do anything with the ballots before election day, so the counting begins on election morning alongside the other ballots. Milwaukee has a history of not finishing until late at night. That was true back in 2018, the governor’s race, ballots coming in around midnight. We knew that was the case in 2020, probably later at night. There was an advisory put out by the elections commission in advance to be prepared those ballots come in as a batch in Milwaukee. It might be a six figure number, a lot of ballots, and nothing suspicious about it, but it is just when the city finishes the central count of the absentee ballots. Despite the warnings, despite the experience of the state actually seeing that happen in prior elections, a surprising number of respondents in the survey said they thought there was something suspicious about that. That’s, I think, a sign public education is not fully working. I did ask clerks in the survey whether they were interested in doing more public education and put more staff, resources, and time into doing it. I was surprised many clerks said “no,” they were quite content with the amount of public education nay were doing. Some were interested in doing less, in fact, and that, too, varied by the size of the community in bigger cities, clerks wanted to do more public education, they wish they had more time and money to get out there and educate voters. I think some of that is the necessity in bigger communities. The population simply churns more. There are more new incoming people, people moving in and out, more young people coming of age who are voting for the first time, so there might be a greater need in those places to orient voters, educate them, how to register, here’s the ballot, here’s the IDs needed to vote, but in smaller communities where the population is much more stable, I think there’s just less interest in doing that. Again, I think it is viewed as something as of a mandate they just don’t have the capacity to manage.

Marisa Wojcik:

Are you, in your sense, in your expertise, concerned at all about either the policies, practices, or process of elections in Wisconsin becoming more and more partisan?

Barry Burden:

I am. I think it is something that people who watch elections closely or are in the field are seeing happening all over the country. This is, you know, there’s sort of a good side and bad side to all of this. Over the last 20 years, since the meltdown that happened in Florida back in 2000, elections have become much better. We have better voting machines. We have more secure systems. We have better ways for voters to track ballots. There’s more voter information. There’s more uniformity in the way voters are treated from one place to another. There’s been a lot of improvement in standardization, security, and other elements of the voting system, but at the same time, there’s also been this heightened partisanship about, really, every aspect of elections. It used to be Americans were divided about things like maybe redistricting or campaign finance or other aspects of elections, but now it’s the small stuff. It is about signatures on absentee ballots or deadlines for requests or what kinds of ID qualify to vote when a person thinks they are confined as a result of the pandemic. These are the minutia that administrators normally would have worried about and tinkered with, but they are hot button issues making it difficult for policymakers to deliberate about these issues and study them in a careful and frank way when they know there’s members of the party, the bases of both parties, watching closely and putting pressure on them and also party leaders, like Donald Trump, who’s out of office, but still watching what’s happening in Wisconsin and would like policymakers in his party to do things he thinks are the right approach. I think the heightened partisanship does make it hard for people who are in the community, real stakeholders, to do the boring, but serious work that makes elections better from one cycle to the next.

Marisa Wojcik:

All right. Barry Burden, UW-Madison political science professor and Director of Elections Research Center, thank you, as always, so much for joining us.

Barry Burden:

It was great being here. Thanks for having me.

Marisa Wojcik:

For more from “Here & Now” and PBS Wisconsin, you can visit pbswisconsin.org, and thank you so much for joining us on “Noon Wednesday.”