By Marian Krumberger
Pillars of the Community
As a lifelong conservative and former Republican Party of Brown County Chair, I’ve dedicated countless hours to impacting outcomes of elections. Spurred by the attempted recall of former Governor Scott Walker to get involved in politics, I’ve always put my conservative principles above party labels and talking points. While I haven’t always liked the election results, especially when my candidate loses, after taking time to look closely at the administration of our elections, I do believe we can trust the process.
I recently heard from both state and local election officials as part of my involvement in Pillars of the Community organization. In that meeting, which not only gave us an overview of our state’s election process, we had the opportunity to ask election officials tough questions about current elections issues. The group took advantage of it, asking the election officials about hot button issues like active vs inactive voters on the rolls, ballot “dumps” in Milwaukee, concerns about non-citizens voting, and more. To the election officials’ credit, they didn’t sidestep any of the questions. They answered “hot button” questions as well as making suggestions where things can be improved.
For example, one issue that gets brought up every election is why Milwaukee has such a large influx of votes not being announced until late into the night or early the next morning. To many of us living outside Milwaukee, it looks suspicious. But the answer is simple: Unlike just about every other state, including Florida and Indiana, Wisconsin law doesn’t allow local election officials to begin processing completed absentee ballots until election day – and Milwaukee has a lot of absentee ballots to open, flatten and feed through voting machines.
A simple fix to make the Milwaukee “ballot dump” go away – or at least significantly reduced – would be to allow absentee ballots to be opened and prepared for counting the day before the election. Note this would not include any vote counting, just simply processing the ballots so they would be ready for counting on election day. But this would require a state law change and is outside of Milwaukee’s control.
Another issue that’s not come up recently, but I’m worried will impact our August partisan primary, is voters crossing over between parties. For example, in the Governor’s race, Congressman Tom Tiffany is set to easily win the Republican nomination for Governor, while Democrats have many viable candidates. This could result in many Republicans crossing over into the Democratic primary to try and influence the results.
The problem is, if those same Republicans vote in a Republican primary – say for Secretary of State or a state legislative primary – their ballot would be invalidated as you can only vote in one party’s primary in Wisconsin, which covers all offices on the ballot. Some may see the increase in uncounted ballots as evidence of voter fraud or an attempt to “fix” the election, when it simply means someone’s ballot violated our longstanding laws on voting in only one party’s primary.
I’ve personally been an election observer and have had the opportunity to “audit” elections by participating in recounts. Based on my firsthand election experience, and hearing from election officials regarding controversies, I know that while no system is – or ever will be – perfect, our state’s election system can be trusted.
Both sides of the political aisle like to bring our election system into question when they lose elections. It’s a cycle that needs to stop. While we should always demand things be made better, calling into question our entire election system because things didn’t go our way is not only bad politics, it’s bad for our democracy.
Marian Krumberger is a long time Republican activist and leader from the Green Bay area.
