Have we Americans not learned our lesson about Central Counts? The City of Oshkosh in Wisconsin, a contentious swing state in the upcoming election, recently passed a resolution to begin using Central Counts to process absentee ballots. At a Central Count Location, election inspectors must assign each voter’s absentee ballot a number, and they must mark it on the voter’s actual ballot and a document called the “absentee ballot log.” Central Counts were established in 1979 and amended in 2011 and have caused significant disruption in elections. It is incredibly likely that having all of the ballots in Oshkosh processed and tabulated in one location will cause problems—problems like late night results and delayed processing. This is no idle speculation—it has happened before time and time again.
Central Counts have been a thorn in the side of secure and transparent elections here in Wisconsin ever since their inception. Pitched as a “more efficient” way to conduct elections, Central Counts have instead resulted in ballot counts coming in at 2:30am because of machine malfunctions, delays in processing absentee ballots, election inspector error, uncounted ballots, challenged ballots, and much more. There is a reason only 38 out of 1851 municipalities in Wisconsin use Central Counts. Wisconsin is due for change; it is time for us to trust elections.
To restore that trust, Wisconsin must end the use of Central Counts and take absentee ballot processing directly to the polling sites. On April 2nd, in Milwaukee, there were just over 21,000 absentee ballots cast and 198 polling sites. If Milwaukee had not used a Central Count, every polling site would have to process and tabulate only 106 additional ballots, an operation which could have been done throughout the day.
In 2020, there were 169,000 absentee ballots cast, if broken down to the polling site, this would have been an additional 853 absentee ballots to be processed per polling site which again could have been processed throughout the day. This solution would have saved Wisconsinite’s time, the taxpayer’s money, and provide more confidence in Elections in Wisconsin. At the end of the day, the voter needs to trust that their vote was cast in a fair and secure election in Wisconsin.