Voting carrels set up at Madison’s Hawthorne Library on Election Day 2022. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)
Early in-person voting for the November election opens Tuesday for Wisconsin voters. Hours and locations for casting an early vote are set locally by municipal clerks. You can check the hours and locations in your area at MyVote.wi.gov.
Officially known as in-person absentee voting, Wisconsin’s early voting allows a voter to request and cast an absentee ballot at a polling location during the two weeks before an election. The in-person absentee process includes checks of a person’s voter registration and identity. Because absentee voting in Wisconsin requires a witness to sign the ballot envelope, a municipal clerk staff member working at the early voting site serves as the witness. The ballots, like absentees sent through the mail or returned to drop boxes, aren’t processed and tabulated until polls open on Election Day.
The deadline to register to vote online or by mail has already passed, but people can still register in-person at their municipal clerk’s office. Wisconsin also has same-day voter registration that allows people to register to vote at the polls on Election Day. Wisconsin requires voters to show a photo ID to register and vote. Acceptable IDs include driver’s licenses, Department of Transportation-issued identification cards, student IDs from Wisconsin universities, passports and military ID cards.
While in-person absentee voting opens this week, voters have already been receiving and returning absentee ballots through the mail for weeks.
As of Friday, the most recent data available from the Wisconsin Elections Commission shows that 593,550 voters have requested absentee ballots and 305,344 of those ballots have already been returned. Those totals are a far cry from the 2020 presidential election when the COVID-19 pandemic pushed many voters to the absentee process. By the Friday before early voting opened in 2020, 1,395,272 absentee ballots had already been requested and 821,300 had been returned.
In the months ahead of Election Day, voting rights advocates and election officials have fretted about the speed of the U.S. Postal Service and its ability to deliver absentee ballots fast enough. For most voters, the legal deadline to request an absentee ballot is Oct. 31, however officials warn that isn’t enough time for the ballot to arrive, be filled out and returned by the close of polls at 8 p.m. on Election Day. Voters worried about mail times can return ballots to drop boxes (in communities that are using them), to their municipal clerk’s office or their designated polling place on Election Day.
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