Voting in the Time of COVID-19: Wisconsin’s Experience

Contributor: John See

​The story of Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe is incredibly heroic, and emotionally moving in the end, as she describes the chaos she and her poll workers had to deal with: the daily legal, political, and practical challenges they faced that could have completely crashed the Wisconsin election. (Just one example, where do you come up with enough hand sanitizer for the whole state, days before the election, when you have virtually none?) And yet they pulled it off in the face of overwhelming odds.

The April 7 election in the State of Wisconsin took place at an extraordinarily difficult time: the nation was just beginning to wrestle with the effects of the Coronavirus, with significant impacts on the availability of people and resources usually needed to conduct a statewide vote. In addition, fierce partisan disagreements, and the resulting litigation, created a fluid, contentious environment where the “rules of the road” were uncertain for election officials and voters alike. Through it all, Wisconsin’s election community—led by its State Elections Commission—had to navigate both pandemic and politics to hold its primary...

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