Wisconsin’s first in-person absentee voting experienced lags and “severe delays,” according to the city of Glendale and the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC).
The city of Glendale, Wisconsin, wrote on social media that high voter turnout led to “severe delays and periodic outages.” The city apologized for “any extended wait times.”
The Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) later announced that the WisVote system “experienced a period of slowness that has now been resolved.”
“Clerks use WisVote to print a label that can be placed on the outside of in-person absentee certificate envelopes,” WEC said, noting that the required information can also be placed on the outside of the envelope with a pen.
“Today’s system lag was purely related to demands on the WisVote system due to high turnout,” the WEC’s statement read. “This should not prevent any voter’s ability to vote in-person absentee today. WEC staff worked quickly to increase system capacity to ensure that clerks can continue to facilitate in-person absentee voting efficiently.”
The WEC reported that 97,436 people voted in-person on Tuesday, according to the Associated Press. The number is up from 79,774 people who cast their vote on the first day of in-person voting in 2020.
Ann Jacobs, the WEC’s Democratic chair, told WISN, “We did have to go ahead and increase our server space. We worked with the Department of Enterprise Technology, which is where our servers are stored. That’s here in Wisconsin.”
“We were able to get more server space,” she said. “So everything is moving along well right now and we are continuing to monitor it.”
Jacobs noted the wait to vote was “about two hours, two and a half hours.”
