Madison Ald. MGR Govindarajan had heard some complaints about long lines for early voting at the UW-Madison Memorial Union and went to check it out on Friday. The election officials there put him to work.
“At a certain point they needed more hourly staff getting people registered and ready to vote, so I put on a vest and took over line management so the staff there could do it” says Govindarajan, who represents a campus-area district, and helped as a Madison poll worker for the first time this year. “It was completely unexpected, but fully necessary.”
Govindarajan says that at peak turnout there was a three-hour wait at the Memorial Union.
Not all early voting locations have been as busy. The line to vote at the Madison Municipal Building on Thursday was fairly short at 3:30 p.m. — about 15 people with a wait of about 20 minutes.
But waits have been long at campus locations and many of Madison’s branch libraries.
City communications manager Dylan Brogan says that the Central and Pinney libraries have gotten “quite busy” and that peak times vary by site. Some voters, he says, chose to come back another day or vote at a location that was quieter.
UW–Madison Health Sciences Learning Center tended to be less busy than Memorial Union, so “some voters opted to vote there,” says Brogan.
As of Saturday afternoon, voters in Madison had cast 55,068 in-person absentee ballots — what is also known as early voting, according to a city website. Though all numbers are still preliminary, that is more than twice the number of in-person absentee votes cast in 2020, during the height of the COVID pandemic, when 25,635 early votes were recorded, Brogan says.
As of Saturday afternoon, voters had returned 32,834 absentee ballots by mail, Brogan says, compared to the 93,620 absentee ballots sent by mail and returned on time in 2020. There are still two days for ballots to make it back to the clerk’s office — ballots must be received there by 8 p.m. on Election Day.
Election officials are allowed to release absentee ballot numbers as they’re returned but cannot begin processing and counting ballots until 7 a.m. Election Day on Nov. 5.
In-person absentee voting at on-campus locations closed on Friday, but voters were able to cast in-person absentee votes at any open Madison location through late Sunday afternoon, depending on the polling station’s hours. After that, voters need to wait until Tuesday, Nov. 5, to cast votes in person.
Statewide, according to NBC News, 1,224,779 absentee ballots, both in-person and mail-in, had been cast in Wisconsin as of Thursday afternoon. That’s behind the 1,957,514 total in 2020, when mail-in voting was more ubiquitous. In-person absentee voting, however, has readily surpassed Wisconsin’s 2020 numbers: as of Thursday afternoon, 705,326 had already voted in-person absentee this year, compared to 651,422 in 2020.
Memorial Union, Govindarajan says, has the most poll workers and voting machines of any polling location in the city due to its consistently high turnout. Union South, he says, is the second-most “resourced-polling station” in the city. Many students registered at Memorial Union on the same day they voted, he says, so the time it took them to vote might have been a bit longer than for those who were already registered. Still, he says the city made investments in the 2024 budget so that the clerk’s office could accommodate high turnout and that these are “good problems” to have.
“Friday, Nov. 1, was 1,100-plus votes at Memorial Union and 700-plus at Union South, 7,400 total in Madison,” Govdinarajan says, though he cautions those numbers are also preliminary. “Just these two student locations accounted for 25% of turnout yesterday, which itself was already a new record set by the city.”
Govindarajan says space constraints and consistently high student turnout forced the clerk’s office to request that UW-Madison move the polling location from a “small closet-like space” on the first floor of Memorial Union to Tripp Hall, and later, to the main lounge. Even with eight staff members and more than 10 voting machines, Govindarajan says voters were waiting for more than two hours, leading Union staff to snake the wait line outside the building “due to fire code requirements and overcrowding.”
Wisconsin residents can check their voter information, find out where to vote and register at myvote.wi.gov.
