Rachel started with Wisconsin. It's a brilliant start.

[Ilsa]

"You are incredibly safe to go out." says the republican wearing full PPE.

[oasis]

1. Dems in Wisky fighting mad. GOP will have hell to pay in Nov. nt

[Poiuyt]

8. It will be hard because of gerrymandering

I know that doesn't affect the presidential race, but it will affect the House races.

[jimfields33]

2. Hopefully starting tonight with the judge election

I find it odd that no results are out.

[tblue37]

10. They can't publish results until after the absentee ballots are counted, an they can come in as

late as April 13 and stop get counted.

[liberalmuse]

3. The GOP's aim was to stop people from voting.

Or kill them if they do so they won't have to worry in November. The entire Republican Party are enemies of The Constitution.

[Iliyah]

4. t-rump's cult is that . . .

no words, but will believe it.

[OrlandoDem2]

5. Between former Gov Scott Walker and the GOP legislature, I hope WI wakes up!

It used to be so progressive. What has happened there is a travesty.

[milestogo]

7. The Republicans have been fucking with our elections for at least 10 years.

And they gerrymandered the congressional districts too. They are evil.

[MyOwnPeace]

9. Actually,

20 years, with a major coup in Gore-Bush.

[milestogo]

6. This was all about disenfranchisng black voters in Milwaukee.

They don't stop you from voting, they just make it inconvenient and dangerous.

In Madison, where I live, the polls were not that crowded and you could even vote from your car if you wanted. Same in rural areas, I'm sure.

[Midnightwalk]

11. Time to vote by precinct

I’ve been wishing for that for a few elections now. I was thinking that could be something some journalist organizations could figure out a way to do.

Doing it through an app seems prone to privacy issues and false reporting but maybe those are solvable.

I think you are saying that voting time and convenience changes with wealth and racial and cultural boundaries and I agree. It would be great to show that.

[AJT]

12. Today in Milwaukee there were a total of 5 polling places.

There are usually 180.

[Midnightwalk]

13. Disgraceful

I know and hours long lines because of that.

Somehow I think republican parts of the state weren’t cut back proportionately.

This is a preview for November.

We hear these stories get worse every election cycle. I wish we had better data to show what many of us suspect. Rich white people probably don’t wait much time to vote.

I’m in a better part of town and Ive never waited more than 10 minutes. But that’s just an anecdote

[AJT]

14. I've live in a nice part of town also and didn't wait long.

I think we need to remember that election costs are local and in poor areas there isn't much of a tax base to cover the costs of elections. Election costs need to covered by the state and federal government.

[yellowdogintexas]

16. Question: could any voter in Milwaukee vote in any of those 5 locations?

Or were voters restricted to only one location, according to where they live?

180 voting locations would be by precinct, right? So how did they designate where each voter should vote?

[yellowdogintexas]

15. We always vote by precinct here in Texas

Maybe what you think of as a precinct is not what I think of as a precinct ( for voting purposes)
Precincts here are basically a carving up of the area into manageable sections; each party has a chair in each precinct (or should anyway) whose job is to find their party members and get them involved in party activities, get them out to vote and register new voters.

Each precinct has a voting location, or one near by. I believe there are 325 precincts in Tarrant County, 69 of which are "zero" precincts meaning there are no voters living there so no voting location is set up. (these are industrial sites, open farm land, parks etc).Of the remainder, there are 60 precincts which share voting locations with one or two neighboring precincts, so we have 190 actual voting locations.

For example, I live in Precinct 1167 and we share a voting location with 1040 which borders us. Precincts are supposed to be balanced by population but we have some which have had explosions in population (tons of apartment complexes). Our county chair told us there are going to be 3 new precincts next year which should balance things out a bit

This year we instituted a new system called Voting Centers. In the past on Election Day the only place you could vote was your home precinct. If you went to the wrong place and it was close to closing time you couldn't vote there (unless provisional) and would not have time to get to your correct location. Our new system allows a registered voter to vote any place in the county on Election Day which means there are 190 locations where one can vote. We no longer have to help voters hunt for the right place to vote. On the other hand, if a voting location is crowded, we can direct voters to nearby locations which are not packed. We also have 10 days of early voting (which includes a weekend) with about 50 locations around the county.

With all this we still have abysmal turnout but it's not because of lack of opportunity.

[Midnightwalk]

17. Precinct or voting location I think

I often have ideas I don’t know how to flesh out. Most of the time they don’t ever work out.

This one started a while back. Every election it seems like there are more reports of people lining up for hours to be able to vote but since I moved out of new york with a well paying job I’ve never had to wait. Talking to friends who live by the university just a few miles they spend a lot of time in line.

Same county, different voting places.

I wondered how voting delays correlate with economic status and political leanings ever since Just to name a couple of factors.

Not that there’s necessarily an explicit plot, but the tendency to placate people with status could create a bias in delays and maybe turnout.

First step would be to get fine grained data on voting delays by location. So far as I know, there is no tracking of “how long were you in line” so how would one go about getting that kind of data?

I don’t have the background to begin to know how to do that let alone how to actually use the data in a valid way but I’ve found I usually learn something even if my questions are dumb.

Thanks for teaching me some details of how it works at least in texas. Allowing voters to vote in different locations would lessen the impact of delay on turnout.

You mention poor turnout without delays. I wonder if it’s better to think of delays something that suppresses good turn out.