Officials ready for Tuesday’s big vote

Prompt results, clerk says

Barring an unforeseen calamity, Marathon County should have a smooth general election on Tuesday, Nov. 3, with results reported by early the next day, according to Marathon County Clerk Kim Trueblood on Monday.

The clerk said a public test of voting machines was “looking very good”and the county now has a list of 40 polling station volunteers ready to help any municipality needing poll workers.

“We’re in good shape thankfully,” she said. Trueblood acknowledged that on Tuesday, Oct. 20, the state’s computer voting system did bog down to a crawl. She said this was caused by clerks overloading the system on the first day people were able to early vote in person. The clerk said the Wisconsin Elections Commission beefed up state servers to overcome the problem. “It was fixed overnight,” she said.

Trueblood acknowledged, too, that the Wisconsin Elections Commission on Thursday, Oct. 22, alerted clerks around the state that the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency had reported evidence that Iran and Russia had taken actions meant to influence pub- lic opinion related to elections.

The clerk said the county’s election system was protected against foreign interference. She said that City/County IT continually monitors the county’s election computers for security.

Trueblood said election workers are ready to count a large number of absentee ballots submitted by people taking precautions due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

She said the absentee ballots will take more work to count, but that final unofficial tallies should be reported by sometime early Wednesday, Nov. 4.

“It all depends on the absentee vote turn out, but I am fairly confident we will have unofficial results reported by early morning,” she said.

All absentee ballots must be delivered to polling stations by 8 p.m. on Election Day to be counted.

Trueblood said the U.S. Supreme Court failed to take a Wisconsin case where a judge said absentee ballots could be counted six days after Election Day. She said she is unaware of any current pending court case that would disrupt a normal general election.

“Fingers crossed, I think everything will work smoothly,” she said.