Earlier this week, Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett announced that the city would be installing more than a dozen drop boxes for absentee ballots. At a press briefing earlier today, Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said that Madison will be implementing a similar plan in the coming months.
“We will be installing secure drop boxes to facilitate the return of absentee ballots,” she said. “The goal for November 2020 is to provide fourteen drop boxes equitably distributed across the city. Those details are still being finalized.”
Elections officials are predicting a record amount of absentee ballots for the November General Election. During Wisconsin’s primary, the state issued nearly 900,000 absentee ballots, of which more than 600,000 were returned.
That’s about nine times the amount of absentee ballots issued in the August 2016 primary.
Mayor Rhodes-Conway says that in this past primary election, eighty percent of the ballots cast in the city were absentee.
The spike in absentee ballots comes as postal services across the country are experiencing delivery delays, a result of recent operational changes at the United States Postal Service. Earlier this week, Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul announced that the state would file a lawsuit to challenge the new procedures.