By Ray Mueller
For the April 7 election, the Wisconsin Elections Commission reported there were 1,303,985 absentee ballots mailed with 1,159,800 of them returned and 120,989 (9.2 percent) not returned. Another report indicated nearly 1 million absentee mail-in ballots were cast.
I don’t know why there is such a discrepancy of about 160,000 in the number of absentee mail-in voters. I believe it was because the ballots cast by in-person early voting are processed as absentee in the poll books.
Of the mailed in ballots, 3,659 ( or .2 percent) were rejected because they came back too late. Another 20,537 (or 1.57 percent) were rejected for technical and election rule reasons such as not having the witness signature or address on the return envelope or voting in both political party primaries.
That’s a total of 24,169 (or 1.77 percent) ballots rejected for a variety of reasons. Does anybody remember what the vote difference was in the 2016 Presidential election in this state? Yes, it was about 23,000.
I don’t have any exact numbers for Calumet County on rejected ballots. But the state average would suggest there were nearly 300 rejected ballots in the county. Of the 928 ballots cast in the city of Chilton, only 8 were rejected. Of them, 622 were cast either by mail-in or in-person before election day.
Of the approximately 1.55 million votes cast in the state on April 7, about 73 percent were cast before election day. It was approximately the same percentage in Calumet County for the just over 13,500 votes cast in the state’s Supreme Court race.
For the upcoming election in November, it’s likely that the number of voters in Calumet County could come close to doubling with an outside possibility for the same within the state, depending on whether students will be back on college campuses to use as their residential address.
Regarding the Republicans’ obsession with voter fraud, particularly with mail-in, they need to be told that one national study found 31 convictions for such fraud over a period of 10 years while another study over 20 years tabulated 143 convictions for fraud on some 250 million mail-in ballots during that time.