In-person absentee voting in Green Bay on Tuesday, March 19th, 2024. PC: Fox 11 Online
(WTAQ-WLUK) — As the final days of early in-person voting wrap up in Wisconsin, voters in the Fox Valley are seeing shorter wait times after last week’s long delays.
City of Menasha City Clerk Kaija Snyder says the wait for those looking to vote has been reduced to 5-10 minutes on average, and sometimes there is no line at all.
“We’re around 275 [voters] a day, yesterday and Monday, but we’re expecting that might go up by the end of the week as things wrap up here,” she said. Snyder added that they’ve seen around 2,000 early voters in total so far.
She said the city was able to avoid the backups seen last week, which were caused by label printing lag.
“Menasha has been using paper methods, so we are not using any kind of digital system. We weren’t clogged up by some of those failures other municipalities had,” Snyder said.
According to the Wisconsin Elections Commission, on the first day of early in-person voting, the WisVote system saw slowdowns due to high voter turnout. Those delays continued throughout the next few days.
On Oct. 25th, the agency provided this update:
Wisconsin’s local election officials reported minimal delays with absentee label printing times on Friday, according to the Wisconsin Elections Commission.
The WEC on Thursday began conducting regular refreshes of the computer function that clerks use to print labels for absentee certificate envelopes. These refreshes have kept print times to a minimum and the WEC at this time is not anticipating any label printing delays moving forward.
With the proactive restarts, print times were back to normal (a few seconds per label) on Friday. The agency continues to be in close contact with municipal clerks to monitor how the label printing function is performing.
Since Thursday clerks have reported drastic improvement in label printing and in the administration of in-person absentee voting, which continues to see high levels of activity.
Previously reported delays have only affected label printing times. Every other function of the system that clerks use to print continues to work optimally. As was also the case Thursday, there is no reason to believe the printing delays are affecting other areas of election administration or state government, nor is there any reason to believe the printing delays were caused by a cyberattack.
The WEC continues to be incredibly thankful to municipal clerks for their patience and professionalism as they continue to efficiently administer in-person absentee to a high volume of voters.
Further, Wisconsinites should be aware that, while the absentee label printing function has a role in the in-person absentee process, it is not used on Election Day.
Comments