Results of Wisconsin's chaotic election to be made public on Monday
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[April 13, 2020]
By John Whitesides
(Reuters) - Results will be released on
Monday for a hotly contested state Supreme Court race, a presidential
primary and other elections conducted in Wisconsin last week despite
health fears from the coronavirus and a flurry of 11th-hour legal
challenges.
The chaotic process in Wisconsin, which featured an explosion in
absentee balloting and long lines of voters braving health risks and
stay-at-home orders, was seen as a potential preview of the national
election in November if the pandemic lingers.
Thousands of state and local offices were on the Wisconsin ballot, led
by a state Supreme Court race between Dan Kelly, a conservative
incumbent endorsed by Republican President Donald Trump, and his liberal
challenger, Jill Karofsky.
The winner will help the court decide future voting rights and
redistricting issues in Wisconsin, a vital general election
battleground, including a case now before the court that seeks to purge
more than 200,000 people from Wisconsin’s voter rolls.

State Republicans, warning of possible fraud and administrative issues
if the elections were delayed, won legal challenges blocking Democratic
efforts to postpone Tuesday's in-person voting and extend the time for
absentee voting.
But Democrats said Republicans were primarily motivated to keep down
turnout in the Supreme Court race, particularly in Democratic-dominated
urban areas such as Milwaukee, where a lack of workers meant the closure
of all but five of the city's usual 180 polling places.
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Voter Matt Phillips feeds his completed ballot into a counting
machine inside a polling station at Hamilton High School during the
presidential primary election, held amid the coronavirus disease
(COVID-19) outbreak, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S., April 7, 2020.
REUTERS/Daniel Acker/File Photo

Spurred by worries about health risks from voting in person, a
record-high nearly 1.3 million absentee ballots were requested for
the elections, state officials said. Some residents who requested
absentee ballots said they never received them.
All absentee ballots had to be hand-delivered or postmarked by last
Tuesday and received by 4 p.m. CDT (2100 GMT) on Monday to be
counted. Election results will start being released sometime after
that on Monday.
The election turmoil overshadowed Wisconsin’s Democratic
presidential primary between former Vice President Joe Biden and his
last remaining rival at the time, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, in
the race to pick a challenger to Trump for the Nov. 3 election.
Sanders dropped out on Wednesday, after the Wisconsin voting was
finished, making Biden the presumptive Democratic nominee and
rendering the primary result even less meaningful.
(Reporting by John Whitesides in Washington; Editing by Peter
Cooney)
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