Name: Senate leader wants bill by July to allow absentee counting before Election Day
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Senate leader wants bill by July to allow absentee counting before Election Day

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Milwaukee Journal SentinelMADISON - The incoming leader of the state Senate is pushing legislation to allow election officials to count absentee ballots before Election Day — a change some election officials have sought for years.&nbsp;Republican state Sen. Devin LeMahieu, who will begin the new legislative session as Senate Majority Leader, said he wants the Legislature to expand the amount of time absentee ballots may be counted by July, according to the Associated Press.&nbsp;"I have no idea where my caucus would be at on that but I would think (it would pass),” LeMahieu, R-Oostburg, told the AP. “As long as it’s secure, I would think we could get there.”The proposal, which LeMahieu has previously pushed for unsuccessfully, comes in the wake of the November presidential election during which a massive influx of absentee ballots forced election officials in Milwaukee and elsewhere to count absentee ballots well after midnight because of a state law that requires election officials to wait until Election Day to begin counting.&nbsp;President Donald Trump used the late vote tally to of ballots, delivering Wisconsin to President-elect Joe Biden.&nbsp;Wisconsin is one of just four states where election workers are not allowed to pre-process absentee ballots until Election Day. Pre-processing could cover a range of tasks including slicing open envelopes, fixing damaged ballots and feeding them through tabulator machines.LeMahieu told the AP he supports new measures that would "increase the faith in election results," which includes counting absentee ballots more quickly.LeMahieu introduced a bill in 2019 that would have accomplished the same goal but said Thursday a new piece of legislation should be drafted to accommodate local officials who may not have the resources to prepare for Election Day and count absentee ballots.&nbsp;Milwaukee election officials have asked for this change for years.&nbsp;"The City of Milwaukee would wholeheartedly support this common sense change to election process and procedure. The allegations of vote dumps in the middle of the night could have been prevented if the Legislature had already passed such a bill," Claire&nbsp;Woodall-Vogg, Milwaukee Election Commission director, said Thursday.&nbsp;The morning after Election Day, Trump took to Twitter and claimed that people were “finding Biden votes all over the place — in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.”At a news conference in Philadelphia that afternoon, Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani repeated the deceptive claim. “In Wisconsin, mysteriously at 4 in the morning, 120,000 ballots appeared,” Giuliani said. “Here come these ballots. Well, we have no idea if they really are ballots.”&nbsp;Across social media, supporters picked up the narrative. “Between 3:30-4:30AM, they ‘found’ 140,000 mail in ballots for Biden in Wisconsin,” tweeted Nick Adams, a staunch pro-Trump political commentator. He added, falsely:&nbsp;“All for Biden. None for Trump.”&nbsp;His misleading tweet was shared tens of thousands of times.&nbsp;Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett said the push for the change by the Senate leader is&nbsp;“great news.”“I appreciate the leadership that’s being shown on this,” he told the Journal Sentinel. “I think it really is a bipartisan issue. And it increases trust in democracy, and it’s good government.”The current bottleneck in the process caused by beginning the counting at 7 a.m. on Election Day never made sense, Barrett said.“What the Republicans have learned both in the 2018 (election) and the 2020 presidential election here in Wisconsin is that they don’t want to have this huge drop of votes at 1 a.m. or 4 a.m. because it just disrupts their calculations,” he said. “So I think they have an interest in seeing that.”He said allowing the counting of ballots earlier would not be disruptive. Rather, he said, it would be a way to manage resources and expectations at the same time.The false speculation that Biden's overnight surge in Wisconsin was the result of mass voter fraud caused&nbsp;drama and headaches that could have been headed off years ago if lawmakers had previously made the change LeMahieu is proposing, local election clerks told the Journal Sentinel.LeMahieu's unsuccessful bill was supported by people such as Neil Albrecht, Woodall-Vogg’s predecessor. But it was also opposed by many municipal clerks who said it lacked a clear process and needed more work.&nbsp;Brookfield City Clerk Kelly Michaels, chairwoman of the Wisconsin Municipal Clerks Association's&nbsp;advocacy committee, &nbsp;she is concerned about allowing clerks to pre-process mail-in ballots before Election Day.&nbsp;She said it could lead to “whispers” about which candidate is in the lead even though&nbsp;the tallies would not be visible to clerks or anybody else until Election Day.&nbsp;But “when you are opening envelopes and you are looking at that ballot, you are getting a sense,” Michaels said. “Not that you’re tabulating in your mind, but you’re certainly getting a sense.”Michaels supports a narrower bill introduced last year by state Rep. Janel Brandtjen, R-Menomonee Falls. Brandtjen's bill&nbsp;would have allowed voters to feed their in-person absentee ballots into the tabulator before Election Day, but would stop short of allowing pre-processing of mail-in ballots.&nbsp;Last year was the clerks association's third attempt to get the proposal passed. The bill passed the Assembly in February but then stalled in the Senate for months as the pandemic raged on.“We tried to exert pressure on them, but they just never met again,” Michaels said.In September,&nbsp;U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson prodded state lawmakers&nbsp;to pass legislation allowing clerks to count ballots before Election Day “so that Wisconsin results are known by 9, 10, 11 o'clock on Election Day, so Wisconsin isn't part of the problem.”&nbsp;Daphne Chen and Patrick Marley of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this&nbsp;report.&nbsp;You can find out who your legislators are and how to contact them .Contact Molly Beck&nbsp;at . Follow her on Twitter at .

Milwaukee Journal SentinelMADISON - The incoming leader of the state Senate is pushing legislation to allow election officials to count absentee ballots before Election Day — a change some election officials have sought for years.&nbsp;Republican state Sen. Devin LeMahieu, who will begin the new legislative session as Senate Majority Leader, said he wants the Legislature to expand the amount of time absentee ballots may be counted by July, according to the Associated Press.&nbsp;"I have no idea where my caucus would be at on that but I would think (it would pass),” LeMahieu, R-Oostburg,...

Senate leader wants bill by July to allow absentee counting before Election Day

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