Here & Now

Noon Wednesday: Holding an Election During a Pandemic

Marisa Wojcik:

Welcome to Noon Wednesday. I’m Marisa Wojcik, multimedia journalist for Here & Now on PBS Wisconsin reporting from my home. So yesterday in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic, Wisconsin held its spring elections yesterday and voted for the presidential primary, State Supreme Court and local offices. This election was unprecedented in a number of ways. Wisconsin is the only state to hold a major election in the midst of the COVID-19 public health emergency. There was a shortage of 7,000 poll workers across the state and more than a 100 communities reported that they didn’t even have staff to open one polling location. Almost 1.3 million absentee ballots were requested. Governor Tony Evers asked the Republican-controlled legislature to consider widespread absentee-only voting and he called the special session asking the legislature to delay the election. On Monday, day before the election, Evers signed an executive order attempting to delay the election until June. This was voted down immediately by the Wisconsin Supreme Court. And the U.S. Supreme Court also ruled on Monday that absentee ballots must be postmarked by April 7 but can still be received until April 13th. Because of this, we won’t know results until then, Monday of next week. And finally this morning, Bernie Sanders announced he will be ending his presidential bid leading the way for Joe Biden to become the presumed Democratic nominee. So joining me to talk all about yesterday’s elections in Wisconsin is Mayor Dean Kaufert from the City of Neenah. He was opposed to in-person voting. But when it looked like a foregone conclusion, he got creative to keep his voters safe. Mayor Kaufert, thank you so much for being here.

Dean Kaufert:

Thank you for having me, Marisa. It’s a pleasure.

Marisa Wojcik:

So you joined this group of mayors that were urging the state to postpone yesterday’s elections. Why?

Dean Kaufert:

Well, this was about three weeks ago. And so the main reason was I wanted to do it early enough, that we could find an alternative. It’s important to say this effort was led by myself, Mayor Genrich and Mayor Hannah here up in northeastern Wisconsin. A group of mayors also made the same request, I believe, like three days before the election. And I wasn’t part of that request because I thought it was at that point we were moving forward. It was too late. But three weeks ago, two and a half weeks ago, I really thought that an alternative could be found between the governor, the legislature, and that they could come up with something. My clerk’s office was in total chaos, disarray. It was very chaotic. The stress levels were high and I could see that this train was going to fall off the track. And so back then I said, “Let’s put our heads together. Let’s find out a way.” At that point it sounded to me like an all-mail ballot or absentee ballot would be the best way to go because we could see the numbers continuing to rise in the national projections and all of that. But when the governor and the legislature said, “No.” And then it became quite apparent five days ago. At that point I said, “You know what? We’re going to have an election and since we’re going to have an election, we’re going to do the best job we can to safeguard and protect our poll workers and our voters.”

Marisa Wojcik:

What was the rationale behind those who wanted to maintain the April 7 election day, whether it was three weeks ago or yesterday?

Dean Kaufert:

Well, I’ve talked to some of my friends, I mean, I’ve been in this politics and government and I’m in local government now. I used to formally be in the State government. So I have friends who are still partisan, both sides of the aisle, being mayor, I no longer at this point, be it as a mayor. I’m just Mayor Dean, in here in Neenah and there was a wide range of viewpoints on this. And I had people tell me, “Mayor, if you can go to the grocery store, you should be able to go vote. There’s been elections held through a lot of different events in this country has had. And so they should have to vote. On the other side, I had people that were very, very genuinely concerned about the health and well-being of them and their family. We had poll workers that were dropping out by the hour. They felt bad about it ’cause they really take their role responsible and very seriously because they’ve done it for years. They’re more often than not, they’re over age 65, but they said, “Mayor, I can’t put my family at risk. My husband’s not feeling well. I don’t want to get him a cold. I don’t want to transmit this.” And so it was a wide range of emotions. But my viewpoint was we have to protect their citizens. We have to make sure our citizens and our poll workers are protected while still doing the election properly.

Marisa Wojcik:

Did you consolidate polling locations?

Dean Kaufert:

At the end of the day, one day I had a light bulb go off and I thought about it and said, “Six polling stations, One of ’em was a police station.” Our police station has taken great steps to quarantine individual shifts to make sure that they’re not cross working with other shifts in case someone contracted it. That was a polling place. And so after all the things that they went through to kind of make sure that their location was secure and why are we voting there? We had a fire station who, we have a crew of fireman who lived there. We have a health clinic within that building. So to me it just didn’t make any sense to vote there on Tuesday and then reopen the health clinic on Wednesday with our good sanitization. So I was driving by the Shopko store. All the Shopko stores around Wisconsin have closed. And I drove by and said, “You know what? That store if it’s clean, it is empty. It is 90,000 square feet.” Our six polling places all added up to about 4,000 square feet. That would be the perfect location to have the selection to use all the CDC guidelines, all the social distancing. We’ll be able to do all the things that we need to do under one roof. And, you know what? At the end of the day, if you check social media, if you look at our website, our community, we hit a home run and we did this the right way. Five to seven minutes people were in and they were out. We came up with a lot of other creative solutions. Our finance department had just undergone a renovation and we put glass barriers between the citizens and the workers. And I walked by and I said, “You know what? We could do that for the elections, just to provide some barriers.” And so one morning, I sketched out on a piece of paper what I’m looking for, gave it to our maintenance guys. Six hours later we had a prototype. And so we instituted every contact between the voter and the poll worker. There was a barrier device and most communities did that, but they started right here in Neenah. And so that was kind of cool because we had 14 communities call us and say, “Mayor, how did you build that? Can you give us your dimensions?” We were glad to share that. We had communities ask us to make and we just didn’t have the time, but it became the standard, it became the norm and I think it’s going to continue to be the norm.

Marisa Wojcik:

You described it to one media outlet as MacGyvering the situation.

Dean Kaufert:

Yeah, one of my favorite shows when I was a kid, but that’s what it became. It became trying to come up with creative solutions, something that at times the legislature and the governor, they just don’t do it because of partisan haggling and bickering. So I said, “I’m going to put a team together and we’re going to figure it out how we can do this.” One of the other things. I searched the internet one night late at night and I found out, that Q-tips, if you took a Q-tip, I found it on Google as a big search. If you take a Q-tip, I wish I had one here and you wrap tin foil around it and you leave the end just exposed enough and you dab it in water, you can use that as a stylus so you can use that as a writing instrument. So now you have for $3, you have 500 disposable stylus. Instead of everyone using the same pen, the same black pen and us having disinfected every time, you could give them one of these stylus. And so we came up with that idea. We also said, we’re going to ask everyone to wear, put a nitrate glove on. And we found out by testing you could put that glove on and you could sign the Badger book. And so that worked. So now they had their choice of putting the glove on and sign in the screen because without the glove, people weren’t going to probably, sign the same screen that the person ahead of them did. And we’d have to clean it every time. And that didn’t seem logical. So we had the Q-tips that worked and it was really kind of fun. And then the biggest thing that I did is, I appointed an election task force. I asked my council president Todd Stevenson, I said, “Todd, I’m going to give you six people and we’re going to create a task force to find out all the what ifs, all the things that could go wrong, all the things that needed to be done.” And so, after being able to track down the owners of the Shopko building, a couple that lives in Michigan, Shopko don’t own these buildings. I found this couple and I asked them if it was possible that we could work out a deal. And then I put my task force to work. Our deputy city attorney, here was another creative idea within the location. He’s in theater and he said when they have what they call cattle calls, when they have the tryouts to be Dorothy in “Wizard of Oz”. If you walk in that door, you follow the red line. If you go to be tin man, you follow the yellow line. If you go to be the lion, you follow the orange light. We did the same thing with our polling places, so that people wouldn’t get confused. It was very simple to put on the linoleum floor, a red line, a purple line, a blue line, a yellow line. And we had a lot of fun telling people follow the yellow brick road. And so they would follow that yellow brick road. It would take them right to their polling station, six foot distancing. Nobody was near each other. And it really turned out great and we’re kind of proud of it and people were proud of us for doing it.

Marisa Wojcik:

Now, even with all of those precautions, how many people did you have come and vote in person?

Dean Kaufert:

I think the final numbers were about 1,800. There was down a little bit in my, I thought that we would have the high 2,000s, but with that being said, we had about, we had sent out, we had issued 7,920 absentee ballots. We have on the voter rolls about 14,000 people. So if you figure we sent out 8,000, that would leave 6,000 plus new registrations. And so we had gotten back about 4,300 the morning of the election. So I still thought that there’d be more. So that leads me to believe there’s either two things, we’re still getting in a lot of absentee ballots, which is good. Or there were still some people that had trepidation about coming to a polling place and that it’s in itself concerns me because the concept that some people didn’t vote because they were scared. Some people didn’t get the opportunity because they weren’t going to put voting over the health and wellbeing of their family. And I know that to be the case because I got some emails, I got some texts from people saying, “Mayor, I just can’t do it.” But I will tell you this, we have lot of instances of people that went and vote and they said, “Mayor, we’re going home and I’m going to tell my daughter that it’s safe, that we did a good job.” So then the daughter took it upon themselves to come and vote. And so by us taking all these extraordinary measures, it sure helped.

Marisa Wojcik:

Are you at all concerned that, whether it’s in your community or another community in Wisconsin that people were infected because they came out and voted in person yesterday?

Dean Kaufert:

Well, of course I’m concerned about it and we’ll be able to, we’ll know in a few days, in a while if anything like this happens and if it can be traced back to a voting location. I can tell you this, In Neenah, my polling workers, the people that were there, the voters themselves, the National Guards who helped out immensely with us, they all felt quite confident that the steps that we took, at least in our community, that it’s not going to be ’cause of they voted in Neenah on election day. I don’t know what every community did and it would really be sad and it would be upsetting if that precipitated a little spike somewhere and somewhere in this State of Wisconsin. But I feel pretty darn good that we did everything we could. We took all precautions and by doing those precautions, we’re hopefully we did not add to any the numbers ourselves. I do feel good about that. I feel real good.

Marisa Wojcik:

You mentioned the National Guard. Governor Evers sent out 2,400 National Guard members to polling locations across the state to assist with the poll worker shortage. How many National Guard members were in your area?

Dean Kaufert:

I believe we had six. And let me tell you, it concerned me a little bit. I saw some of my colleagues say, they decided not to have the National Guard help. They were awesome. These folks are trained. They’re the 20 to 40 year old. They adapt very well to the mission. You tell them what needs to be done and they figured out how to do it. So training was quick, it was easy. And these folks helped us immensely and brought great value. And I’m quite proud of them. And I feel a lot better knowing that, if something happens in this state, the National Guard will answer the call so. I was pleased they were in plain clothes and the people, I think it brought a little comfort to know that they were there too.

Marisa Wojcik:

You mentioned absentee ballots. As of this morning, the Wisconsin Elections Commission reported a difference of more than 12,700 absentee ballots requested but not sent as well as a difference of more than 271,000 ballots that were reportedly sent to voters but have not been returned yet. Do you think these numbers are an accurate picture of what’s happening with absentee ballots? Have you heard from people in your community that they requested a ballot and it never came?

Dean Kaufert:

Yeah, that’s a good question. Yes, the answer is yes and I don’t know the reason. We have safeguards in place. I would say March 31st, March 30th, it was quite chaotic here. We had a lot of people helping out that didn’t normally do this ’cause we’ve closed our City Hall. So we were able to take employees from other parts of the City Hall and have them help. Some people got two ballots by mistake and some people, the husband got the ballot, the wife didn’t. We were able to, in every instance when they called, when they let us know, we were able to check our records and we are quite confident that we sent them out a ballot. Four or five days later they would call and say they still haven’t received a ballot. And that is concerning. As far as the clerk’s office is concerned, we’re confident that those ballots went out. The postal service, I can’t speak for them, so I don’t know what happened to ’em. We did get a lot of ballots back that were maybe the wrong address or the person had moved and they don’t forward those types of mail, that’s how I understand it. So people had to be properly registered in order to get their ballot. So yes, it is concerning. And on the day before the day of the election, we were telling people that if you did not get your ballot in the mail, your absentee ballot, your best bet because of the 8:00 p.m. cut-off on election day was to come to the polling place. We did offer curbside voting also for those individuals who didn’t feel that they wanted to go inside the building and we didn’t have a lot of people do that, but there was still that opportunity for them also.

Marisa Wojcik:

As you said, you served as a Republican in the State Assembly for almost 25 years. Do you think there was ever going to be a point of agreement between Democratic Governor Tony Evers and Republicans Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald in this back and forth as to what to do with the elections yesterday?

Dean Kaufert:

Yeah, I served there in a different time period. In the 90s and 2000s, everyone worked under Tommy Thompson and a lot of other governors. Part of the reason I left the legislature is the partisanship was getting to me and I wanted to go back home and do something that wasn’t as partisan. Both sides have their reasons. I’m not going to criticize either, my colleagues in the Assembly or the governor. I think they’re doing what they think is right, but unless these people, unless we figure out a way for them to start working together, and in communicating and finding alternatives, exactly what we did here in Neenah. Finding ways to work together, put your differences aside and start worrying about what’s best for the greater good for the people here in the State of Wisconsin. We’re going to be in this partisan juggernaut that we’re in for quite some time. So I don’t have the answer and how we’re going to get there. Most of the moderate, so to speak, on both sides of the aisle they’re not there in Madison, like they used to be. People like Senator Mike Ellis, who at times could get people from both parties to agree on things is not there. But I have the highest respect for the leaders of the Assembly and the Senate and also for Governor Evers. But in my opinion, they didn’t do enough to figure this out, but we survived it. Everyone had the opportunity to vote. I feel at least confident in my community that they had a safe and healthy environment that we created for them. I don’t know if that’s going to be safely set around the state. They didn’t have to wait in long lines of four hours and it worked out. I’ve had people tell me that we should use the same model for the November election and so we’ll see. But we’re hoping that the Shopko building is full with some retail outlet by then. But you never know. We might use the same model,

Marisa Wojcik:

Based on how things did play out statewide. Do you think this was a fair and safe election?

Dean Kaufert:

I think it was fair. Because I think at the end of the day people still had the opportunity. No matter what happens and no matter what race people are going to be able to throw into question whether people had the, that this was the true outcome of the election. Overall, at least here, from what I saw, it was safe. I can’t say that enough, but I do have some concerns that we did suppress the vote. Voters that were genuinely concerned, genuinely scared. They weren’t trying to be partisan. They were simply listening to the stay at home orders, orders that they were watching the Sunday morning talk shows and they were saying, “I work in the healthcare field. It’s bad enough that I’m exposing my family at work when I come home. I don’t have to do it for voting and I’m not willing to take that chance or risk.” So I do believe that some people elected not to vote because of the current situation.

Marisa Wojcik:

And you said you’re hoping to replicate some of these things in November.

Dean Kaufert:

Quite possibly. I mean, there’s the barrier devices. I think they’re here to stay and I think that’s going to become the norm all over the State of Wisconsin. Those types of things. We’ve learned a lot through this election and I think we can build on that, we can share that with other communities best practices. The idea for the barriers that was just something that I thought of in the morning, in the afternoon we had a prototype, I had a picture of a prototype and the calls started pouring in. So other communities started looking at that. The next real challenge I think we’re going to have is how do we safely reopen things? When the time comes and when is the right time? But you know what? We as mayors, we need to listen to the national experts. I looked at the numbers this morning. There seems to be a definitive flattening of the curve. The numbers are not going to be as great as the worst case scenarios and we need to start looking at that. So that can’t be partisan either. We got to make sure that governor and the legislators and the mayors of these communities are all on the same page. How we got to get this state back operating. And we’re not going to just flip a slight switch on and go back to how it used to be. We may be able to say, “Hey, that business can open or that service can open but they can do it at 40% instead of having a capacity of 90 people in your business. Maybe we start out and saying, “You can reopen and you can have a capacity of 40 people.” Those are some of the things that I hope don’t become partisan also and that people sit in a room and you don’t leave the room ’till you get it figured out and you know what? If everybody is a little unhappy, it was probably a good plan, especially in the partisan world.

Marisa Wojcik:

All right, Mayor Dean Kaufert from the City of Neenah. Thank you so much for joining us.

Dean Kaufert:

Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it and I hope everyone stays healthy and stays safe and we did our best here in our community. They’re going to get back to counting the absentee ballots so that we can have the results of this election next Monday.

Marisa Wojcik:

All right. Well, for more from Here & Now and PBS Wisconsin, you can visit pbswisconsin.org. This Friday on Here & Now we are going to have Governor Tony Evers on and more about the Coronavirus and a wrap up of the statewide elections. And until next week, thank you so much for joining us for Noon Wednesday.