The City of Milwaukee Election Commission wants to help residents feel confident voting. To do so, it’s asking voters during a series of community listening sessions what works well and what needs to change to improve the voting process.
The commission hosted the first series of sessions recently at the Office of African American Affairs, 4830 W. Fond du Lac Ave., Silver Spring Neighborhood Center, 5460 N. 64th St., and St. Matthew Christian Methodist Church, 2944 N. 9th St., in partnership with Community Brainstorming Conference.
Stephen McClinton, who lives on the Northwest Side and has been a poll worker for 19 years, attended the session on Fond du Lac Avenue.
“I wanted to check it out to see what the Election Commission has to offer about the areas that need to be improved, and also areas that have been the strongest and also the weakest,” McClinton said.
Demystifying the election process
At the drop-in listening sessions, attendees could participate in a mock election using an ExpressVote machine, join themed discussion groups and meet and greet the commission’s leaders, including Executive Director Paulina Gutiérrez and Deputy Director Maricha Harris.
“I have a lot of new team members for our department, so I thought it was really important for us to get to know the community,” Gutiérrez said. “The more we can demystify the election process, the more we can get eligible voters to register and come vote.”
They modeled the event on sessions the Election Commission held a few months ago with about 80 chief inspectors, who maintain order at polling sites.
“When we did that, we got really good feedback about experience and ideas, and as a result we put together a chief advisory committee,” Gutiérrez said.
The committee is made up of 15 experienced chief inspectors and is scheduled to have its first meeting soon.
Asking for ideas and feedback
At the small group stations, residents were asked for feedback on the topics of early voting; vote by mail and central count; voter registration; and polling locations.
Central count is the site where Milwaukee’s absentee or mail-in ballots are counted on Election Day.
Voters also asked questions to election officials about the purging of voter rolls, how to know if your ballot has been counted, if ballot drop boxes are safe and more.
Janette Herrera, a retired educator, said she gave some feedback about the accessibility of polling locations, many of which are located in old school buildings.
“I had suggested that maybe we should have a place like this, on the ground floor where you don’t have to climb up steps and stuff,” she said.
The sessions on Fond du Lac Avenue had about 50 participants, including some poll workers, while the session at the Silver Spring Neighborhood Center had about 60 attendees.
McClinton said that his experience as a poll worker has been positive overall and he was interested in hearing ideas on how to make sure poll workers follow the same guidelines.
Overcoming ballot shortages
In the spring election, Milwaukee experienced a voter turnout of 49%.
On Election Day, nine Milwaukee polling sites temporarily ran out of ballots and several others had ballot shortages. To avoid this, Gutiérrez plans to order one ballot for each registered voter in future elections.
There were delays in delivering extra ballots to the most impacted sites in part because they were located on the Northwest Side, at least a half-hour away from the election operations center in Bay View, Gutiérrez said.
“We want to expand our impact by having more staff in more locations where we can get resources or have resources readily available” while maintaining a high level of security, she said.
ExpressVote
A mock election using an ExpressVote machine was set up to familiarize voters with the machines, which are common at early voting locations. There is also an ExpressVote machine at polling sites for ADA accessibility.
“Those are legitimate voting machines that you can use at a polling location,” Gutiérrez said. “And what we discovered after the ballot shortage was that some people didn’t know about it.”
To use an ExpressVote machine, a voter selects between English and Spanish and can listen to instructions on a set of headphones. They select responses to questions on the touchscreen, check to make sure their answers look right, and then print a ballot that can be fed into the machine that tallies the votes.
Since the ExpressVote machines are fed blank paper, they can be helpful if sites run out of ballots.
Gutiérrez said the Election Commission hopes to add an additional ExpressVote machine at the city’s 42 busiest polling sites.
Find out more
The Election Commission plans to hold three to five listening sessions across the city this fall. It is still determining locations but will announce them on its website.
You can also submit feedback to the Election Commission through an online form.
Meredith Melland is the neighborhoods reporter for the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service and a corps member of Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues and communities. Report for America plays no role in editorial decisions in the NNS newsroom.
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