Wisconsin primary holds in-person voting amid coronavirus

Courtesy of Creative Commons

By Samantha Woolf 04/08/2020

Voters in Wisconsin went to the polls to vote in the Democratic primary during the coronavirus pandemic.

Democratic Governor of Wisconsin, Tony Evers, pushed to delay the vote until June, but the Wisconsin state supreme court blocked Evers’ proposal. The US Supreme Court also overturned a lower court’s ruling that would have given voters an extra six days to turn in their mail ballots.

This made Wisconsin the only state with a primary vote scheduled in April that did not delay in-person voting or switch to mail-in only voting.

So many polling workers did not feel safe conducting the process during the election that Wisconsin shut down hundreds of polling locations. Members of the Wisconsin National Guard were called in to run the polls in place of some of those who had quit. This consolidation of locations led to much longer lines that stretched around the blocks. Some Wisconsin residents had to wait an hour to cast their vote.

Those running the poll locations tried their best to keep voters at least 6 feet apart and wore masks and other protective gear to keep themselves and the residents as safe as they could.