MADISON, Wis. — The Madison City Clerk and Dane County Clerk said they’re “as ready as we can be” for Election Day.
Dane County Clerk Scott McDonnel said although this election may seem different considering that it’s happening in the midst of a pandemic, “It’s as safe as it can be for anything when you’re inside.”
McDonnel says the 6,000 poll workers scheduled for Tuesday are well equipped to handle this election safely with plenty of PPE.
Madison City Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl said they’re ready at the city level, too.
“We have prioritized making sure that no matter how a voter wants to cast their ballot, they have safe options,” she said. “There will be social distancing in place which means when you show up at your polling place, the line is going to look a lot longer than it ordinarily would.”
Every pen, clipboard and polling station will be sanitized after each use. Face masks are required and available if you don’t bring your own.
“You may bring your own pen to the polls if you’d like but to mark your ballot you need a blue or black ballpoint pen,” Witzel-Behl said. “No gel pens or fancy pens recommended because a gel pen doesn’t dry fast enough and it gums up in the tabulator causing ballot jams. No sharpies because it can bleed through the ballots and no red or green ink because we can’t guarantee that those ballots will be picked up as votes.”
There are 92 polling locations city-wide. Both clerks said they’ve double checked the machines to make sure they work properly and can handle the number of ballots that need to be processed that day.
“We did test the equipment last Saturday at the public test to ensure each piece of equipment would be tallying the votes correctly,” Witzel-Behl said.
“We have extra equipment deployed in the field that are always tested,” McDonnel said. “We test it and the individual clerks test it.”
More than half of the 190,000 registered voters already returned their ballots, which means there will be that many less people showing up to vote in person on Election Day. McDonnel said if you plan to vote in person, the process shouldn’t take long.
Poll workers will be processing absentee ballots throughout the day and will also help any curbside voters.
“We are going to have our polling places call us to check in and let us know how long it’s taking people to get through the line,” Witzel-Behl said.
When polls close at 8 p.m., it could be a long night for these clerks, but McDonnel said he is hoping to have his results in by midnight.
“We audit the results afterward. So I just would hope people have confidence in the results. I certainly do. Not just here but around the state.”
If there is a line of voters when the polls close, a poll worker will make sure that anyone who was in line before 8 p.m. will still be able to cast their ballot. At the end of the night, poll workers will double check the ballots, the clerk’s office will post unofficial results online and will check those numbers against paper results from each polling location.
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