In 2012, Madison, WI came out in force for Barack Obama and Tammy Baldwin.
This year, the most liberal part of the state of Wisconsin and home to the University of Wisconsin is going into voter overdrive and breaking early voting records. Via the Cap Times:
Thousands of voters have already cast their vote for the 2016 election, setting records for early and absentee voting in Madison.
As of Tuesday, 26,527 people had voted early, smashing the previous record of 18,752 absentees cast in person in November 2012.
Madison’s city clerk’s office has issued a total of 35,497 absentee ballots since Sep. 26, surpassing the previous record of 32,012 absentee ballots issued in November 2008. Those voting early are technically casting absentee ballots in person.
Of absentee ballots issued this year, 31,421 have been returned to be counted. This breaks the previous record of 29,199 absentee votes cast in November 2012. Some absentee voters, 537, submitted their ballots by email out of 1,415 who requested an electronic ballot copy, City Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl said.
That’s right. It’s only late October and the records from all of 2012 are already broken. You know, that year WI sent Tammy Baldwin to the Senate and helped propel Barack Obama to the White House.
Contrast this approach to the deplorable City Clerk in Green Bay, WI, who has actively sought to keep students at UW Green Bay from having any convenient way to vote. UWGB is my alma mater (undergrad), and it’s about a 15-20 minute drive to get to the Clerk’s office from campus. Campus is situated in the middle of an arboretum that is way outside of town. You can’t reasonably even expect to walk from campus into town. It’s that far away.
Instead the Clerk in Green Bay is forcing people to go to the city offices downtown to early vote. I used to also live downtown in Green Bay, and I can say that almost nobody ever goes there unless they are forced to for work or some type of event/festival. Most people live and work on either the east or the west side, and the city is sprawled out. Making people go downtown to early vote is one of the least convenient things the City, headed by a partisan Republican mayor, could do.
Many students at UWGB are commuters, making campus an ideal place to put an early voting location—that way, people can go to class and vote regardless of whether they live on campus. The City Clerk in Green Bay knowingly denied that in an effort to suppress young voters in a swing congressional district that may determine whether the democrats control the House.
Madison took a different approach by going big into allowing early voting locations across the city with expanded early voting days, and traditionally liberal Dane County is smashing voting records as a result.