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Community Corner

Voting in Waukesha: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

It was an exciting week in politics, with results of a nail-biter election surely to be contested – whichever it goes.

In watching election results Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, I’m reminded of a quote regarding laws and sausages.

“Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made,” lawyer-poet John Godfrey Saxe is reported to have said.

Iron Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck stated it baldly: Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.

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Elections are a lot like laws in that regard, as demonstrated by Tuesday and Wednesday’s messiness.

Vote tallies in the State Supreme Court race flip-flopped from one opponent to the other, sometimes by thousands of votes as results from different precincts were reported. Some precincts weren’t able to be counted until Wednesday while results from others were delayed while workers scrambled to find enough ballots for voters.

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Throughout the night, social media sites were buzzing, each side watching and posting or re-tweeting results anxiously or maliciously, depending on their viewpoint.

Even I was transfixed by the drama and I should know better. As previous election nights have taught me, it’s not over until it’s over and until then, it’s just speculation.

Of all the tattle I read last night, the worst was the innuendo about poll workers stuffing the ballot box or in this case, “finding ballots in the back of Abele’s car.”

As someone who has watched votes being counted, I can attest to the fact that poll workers as a group are dedicated people who work to ensure that everyone’s vote is properly counted. Many poll workers work for a little spending money (very little, $7.50 to $8.50 per hour) but, more importantly, civic pride.

They do it because elections are important.

With our votes on school referendums and for school board members, we are deciding the future of our children and their schools. With our votes for state justices, we are deciding the make-up of the highest court in the state. With our votes for aldermen, we are deciding how our city will respond to the challenges it faces with water and development.

It seems incongruous then, despite our hyper-connected and e-business world, machines reading paper and pencil ballots still provide the bedrock for our election process, that behind those tens of thousands – and the couple of hundred contested – votes sits a behemoth contentedly chewing up paper ballots and spitting out results.

There are good reasons to use a machine like this. Voters can easily mark their choices and see if they’ve made a mistake, requesting a replacement ballot if necessary. The machine optically reads the ballots, counts the votes and reports a tally of the votes, leaving out human error. And once your ballot leaves your hand and is entered in the machine, it can be reviewed and recounted if necessary.

There are some cons, though. There needs to be enough ballots available at all the polling stations. During this week’s election, several municipalities in Eau Claire ran out of ballots, resulting in delays because votes needed to be hand-counted.

And sometimes things just happen, like the delays in voting results from Jefferson County, with the whole state waiting for the Town of Lake Mills to count their ballots.

And now, there is the news that 200 additional votes were found in New Berlin. Information about that is pending.

It’s not all sausage-making, though. There are some bright spots of progress in voting technologies, for example advances that allow people with disabilities to vote individually and privately with a touchscreen voting machine or a speaking voting machine.

However, I imagine a day where we all can vote easily from home or work, without making a trip to the polls. Obviously, this is unrealistic as of yet, with the Wild West aspects of the Internet and hackers and spammers still needing to be tamed, not to mention complications of voter identification or disenfranchisement.

But we wouldn’t have to worry about some of the logistical issues that have plagued recent elections, like printing enough ballots or old machines breaking down. We also wouldn’t have to worry about bad weather, parking or harassment at the polls keeping people from voting.

Whatever the future holds for voting in our state, we need to make sure to keep the importance of voting in the forefront.

We don’t want to make it as trivial as voting for the next American Idol or as sensational as some of those tweets from Tuesday night.

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