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everyone and thanks for joining this morning's media availability. I'm Riley
better can the public information officer for the Wisconsin Elections
Commission. I'll hand things over to administrator Megan Wolf in just a moment
but first just a couple reminders. We'll go to questions after Megan's
remarks. If you do have a question as always please raise your hand and I'll
call on you in the order in which you raise your hand. We can only call on
people that we can identify as well. So please do make sure to have your
phone name listed if you'd like to ask a question. Thanks so much and with that
I'll hand things over to Megan. Well good morning everyone and thanks so much
for joining us. I'm very happy to report that election day in Wisconsin went
very well and was successfully administered and thank you to our
thousands of Wisconsin poll workers municipal and county clerks for running
yet another great election. While run elections do not happen by accident
they're the result of years of training and preparations by our local election
officials. Wisconsinites can be proud of the efforts of their local election
officials who are your friends your neighbors and your family members. Our
elections are administered by bipartisan election inspectors and
representatives from both parties were involved in telling ballots and observing
each step of the election process. Our democratic system worked yesterday in
part because of election officials who showed up each day to ensure that every
eligible American could participate in our election process. I also want to thank
the members of our media like election officials your days and weeks have been
long as you work to ensure that Americans had accurate information about
elections. So thank you to all of you as well. With that let's talk briefly about
next steps in Wisconsin. What happens to verify and certify the election results.
All Wisconsin counties have posted unofficial results to their website for
each of their reporting units. This means that the unofficial returns from
every city, town and village in Wisconsin are now in. Of course this does not mean
that the results are official. There are important steps that have to happen over
the next few weeks to certify the results. Wisconsin's certification process
involves multiple levels of canvassing. canvassing is the process by which
election officials by following specific laws and procedures review and validate
election results. Canvas is publicly observable and in Wisconsin's many small
communities many of them actually began that canvassing process last night.
Once each municipality has certified their election results they are sent to each of
the 72 counties to canvas as well. The county will again review and validate the
election results as part of the publicly noticed meeting. The deadline for counties
to provide certified results to the Wisconsin elections commission is November 19th.
In the final step of the certification process the Wisconsin elections commission
receives results from the 72 counties that they have certified.
The Wisconsin election commission then again reviews and verifies the reported
result totals. At this point the state will also combine the results for each legislative
congressional and statewide race. The statutory deadline for the chairperson of the Wisconsin
elections commission to certify statewide results is December 1st. Another item that can
occur during the certification process is a recount. Wisconsin does not have automatic
recounts for a candidate to request a recount the margin between the top two candidates
who received the most votes in the race has to be one percent or less. If the margin is between
a quarter percent and one percent then the candidate pays the estimate cost of the recount
before it begins. If the margin is less than a quarter percent then the candidate does not
need to pay for a recount but they must still make a request to initiate it.
So those are the next steps that we could see over the coming weeks and with that you know again
I really appreciate your engagement. We look forward to continuing to work with you as election
results are certified and a final thank you to Wisconsin election officials for all your work
to ensure that yesterday's election was well administered. And with that I'll turn it back
over to Riley to facilitate questions. Great thanks Megan and yes we'll go to questions now
if you have a question please raise your hand and we'll call on you in the order in which you
asked it and of course make sure I have your full name. Our first question will go to Mike Lechner.
Yeah Megan a couple of questions or one question for us in Marathon County we had a 95
percent turnout yesterday was is that something that you've seen across the state was that uncommon
or or we an outlier. So great question I don't know that I have a really good answer for you at
this point and so until the canvas and certification process is completed we at the state don't really
have an aggregate of what turnout looks like across the state so we're not really able to make
a lot of comparisons but if we look at you know some of the unofficial totals
and just kind of what's been reported in the media it does look like yesterday was potentially
a very high turnout election across the state of Wisconsin.
Thanks for that question we'll now go to Alex there.
Hi Megan um question there there's a lawsuit over your standing ability to be
WEC administrator now that this election I mean it's not done but now that we're toward the
certifying part of it are you devoted as long as the court allows it to being WEC administrator
for the long haul or are you kind of reevaluating your current position?
Well Alexander I haven't even slept yet so for me it's still election day and I'm still completely
focused on making sure that yesterday's election gets verified and certified that's where my focus
will continue to remain so I'm completely committed to seeing through this election and making sure
that this election is certified. Okay thank you Alex and we'll go to Scott Bauer.
Yeah thanks uh Megan for doing this question on the recount timing just refresh my memory if
if how do you want to seek a recount what what are the deadlines he has to do that is it five days
after the last county certifies or can you just walk through that I can't remember?
Yes so the commission did actually last week ahead of the election make sure that all of the
details of the recount were sorted out so we sent a communication to the clerks about exactly what
a timeline could look like but I believe it's actually three days after the final canvas is
received from the county so after the deadline for the counties to submit their canvas statements
is I believe November 19th and then a candidate would have three days to initiate that request
if they fell within the appropriate recount margin which is the one percent.
Thanks Scott and we'll go over to you Maura Barron.
Hi there I'm with NBC News just wanted to check in to see if the commission has gotten any
um caught in the moment of of any potential lawsuits over absentee ballots and even if not I mean
how is the commission prepared to respond to any lawsuits contesting you know how certain ballots
have come in? Sure I'm not aware of any new litigation that's been filed um but I guess to how we prepare
we've certainly we're certainly no strangers to litigation here so just like we navigate any
lawsuit um we would you know continue to present um arguments that are in line with what
Wisconsin law requires election officials to do so I think should we see any sort of
challenges or litigation we're very well prepared and well practiced to be able to handle those.
Great thanks for that question we'll not go to Corey Vires.
All right thanks for holding this I was just wondering if the WAC had any comment on what
happened at the I'm sorry the Milwaukee Central Count location last night. Right so as we talked
about a little bit last night you know obviously we're not there we also have to be really careful
not to prejudge anything that could come before the commission in the form of an administrative
complaint um but you know one of the things I'll say about Milwaukee Central Count and kind
of the the the procedure not opining on their decision making um but the the procedure is it
sounds like they made the choice to when they identified that a procedural misstep that didn't
impact any of the ballots was identified you know again by their bipartisan election inspectors
the ones actually tabulating the ballots and the bipartisan observers when there was a misstep
in procedure that was identified they made the decision to make sure that during election day
in the public eye to make sure that they fixed that misstep and that they corrected it in the
public eye so that those legitimate ballots couldn't be challenged later so um you know I think I think
there's a lot of information out there about you know exactly what happened and also they'd be
the ones that would have to you know talk about any decision making that went into what they
decided to do um but again all of that was done by bipartisan pairs of election inspectors
and in the public eye including many many many bipartisan election observers from both the
major political parties other political parties independent observers there were many people at
Central Count that were part of those proceedings. Thanks for that question I'll go over to Brigitte
Bowden. Hi thank you um you've gone over a bit what the process for initiating a recount would
look like but could you sort of talk about if we had a statewide recount what what the actual
recount process looks like you know who counts the ballots what's the timeline like that sort of
thing. Right so um the timeline I'll point you to a memo that the commission just put out last
Friday that goes through exactly what the timeline looks like depending on when certain things are
filed you can find that on elections.wi.gov if you look under the clerks tab and then clerk
communications you'll see a memorandum that the commission sent them with all the things they
need to consider to prepare for the possibility of a recount um how is it administered in general
the county for statewide recount the county is actually the one that's responsible for
administering those recounts and what they're going to do is they're going to bring in the election
inspectors from each of the municipalities and then as part of a public process where you're
going to have representatives from the political parties involved in that contest will be there
and then they're going to have a bipartisan recount board and um you know if you if you remember
in 2020 uh the jurisdictions that had recounts actually live stream those proceedings so you
could see where the recount was happening where essentially they're going through they're making
sure that um all the numbers make sense they're actually reviewing each ballot to make sure it
was tabulated correctly and then each of the representatives from the parties involved are
able to bring up a challenge um and then it goes before the recount board for them to make
a determination about how that individual circumstance or ballot should be handled um so it's a very
very public process that has a lot of involvement from the party representatives and the political
parties as well thank you great thanks for that question we'll go over to Mary's because uh
thanks for taking my question um do you have any information about what happened in whitewater
I spoke we spoke to some UW whitewater students who were in line for three hours and voting until
like midnight I do not um but it is my understanding that there was a you know we're not involved in
those decisions in terms of if a municipality chooses to go to court to ask for an extension
but it's my understanding that in that case that a court decided to grant an extension
um I'm not aware of that ever having quite occurred in that way before um so I I don't know any
more details about it I think you'd have to talk to whitewater about exactly what happened and
what the court decided there okay thank you great thanks for that question and we'll go over to Zach
Schultz hello this is Zach with PBS Wisconsin um you mentioned inspectors before and just touring
the state of polling places we saw a lot of uh inspectors of various independent and from the
parties are the total numbers um collected by WEC or is that only held by the counties I know
they have to sign in I'm just curious if you can say for sure this was the record number
I cannot say for sure that it's a record number because uh to your points you know I think you
described it well um Wisconsin law is different than a lot of other states in that we don't actually
um you know collect a lot of the unofficial data um so in terms of you know the number of of
and I'm sorry we have a uh no arm going off but um so I think I heard your question correctly
but in terms of the number of election inspectors that's information that's
kept by each of the individual municipalities they're in charge of making sure they have
enough full workers and that they're tracking their training um and so we don't always have
you know a full number of how many they have um in terms of the unofficial results Wisconsin law
is structured to say that um each of the individual municipalities send their unofficial results
to their county clerk and then the county clerk posts those on their website and so
we actually don't have an aggregate number of things like turnout either um at the state level
we will be collecting some very unofficial data that will post on the same web page where we have
the links to the 72 counties that will essentially go through what the margin is between some of the
major uh contests uh just so that there's an unofficial resource that folks could turn to
if they have questions about if a um contest is within the the recount margin um but we really
won't have any official numbers about turnout and things until after the election has been certified
Great thank you for all those questions uh that wraps up today's media availability
if you do have any additional questions moving forward please make sure to email elections
pio at wisconsin.gov again elections pio at wisconsin.gov thanks so much thank you
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