Absentee voting numbers in Wisconsin soar over the 2018 midterms

Before the polls opened Tuesday, hundreds of thousands of Wisconsinites had already sent in their ballots, with mail-in and in-person absentee voting totals the day before the election far outnumbering those of the last midterm cycle.

By Tuesday, 741,795 people mailed in their absentee ballot or voted in-person in the state, according to data from the Wisconsin Election Commission. That number surpassed the 565,591 people who voted absentee ahead of the the 2018 midterms.

The jump in absentee voting across Wisconsin, which began Oct. 25, comes as candidates from both parties pushed their bases to get out and vote over the last two weeks. Democrats in the state have put an emphasis on turnout in a year when Republicans are expected to make gains in the House and Senate.

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But it also follows a presidential election two years ago in which record numbers of voters cast their vote by mail in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

"There is substantial voter engagement in this year's elections," said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, "but the larger number of early votes compared to 2018 is more a sign of changing preferences about the method of voting than a sign of much higher turnout," Burden said.

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(Voter turnout tends to be higher in presidential elections than in midterm years. Absentee voting drastically increased in 2020 due to the pandemic. In Wisconsin, more than 1.9 million people voted absentee in the 2020 general election.)

This year's increase in early voting from 2018, a trend across the country, is seen in both Democratic and Republican areas of the state.

In Dane County, for example, 113,209 people cast their vote by Election Day compared to 87,318 the same time in 2018. Those totals increased even more in Milwaukee County — 123,955 by Tuesday compared to 93,581 four years ago.

The movement is similar in Wisconsin's traditional Republican counties. Waukesha County tallied 78,597 by early Tuesday, an increase of more than 12,700 from 2018. Ozaukee and Washington counties, as well as Brown, Outagamie and Winnebago counties, all of which voted for Donald Trump in 2020, also saw jumps in absentee voting since 2018.

Joe Handrick, a Republican political strategist in the state, noted that Wisconsin's rural counties saw the largest percent increase in absentee voting over urban counties because rural areas started with a much lower absentee voting rate.

Trempealeau County in western Wisconsin, for example, saw an 102% increase in absentee voting before Election Day. But ahead of the 2018 midterms, only 736 people in the county had voted absentee.

Joe Zepecki, a Milwaukee-based Democratic strategist, noted the pandemic's influence on absentee voting but called the numbers "encouraging" for Democrats. He pointed to instances over the last several years in which Republicans have cast doubt on voting by mail, suggesting most of the mail-in ballots returned in the state as of Monday could be coming from Democrats.

“If it’s the in-person early vote, that’s one thing," Zepecki said. "But if it’s mail vote early in those counties, that’s still far more likely to be Democratic vote."

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Still, it is likely voters are continuing to feel the effects of voting during COVID.

"For the foreseeable future Wisconsin elections are going to be a somewhat balanced mix of absentee ballots cast by mail, absentee ballots cast early in person, and ballots cast on election day," UW-Madison's Burden said.

Follow Lawrence Andrea on Twitter @lawrencegandrea.