With six weeks remaining before Wisconsin’s Nov. 3 general election, more than 304,000 voters have already requested absentee ballots, according to the Wisconsin Elections Commission, as of Sept. 21.
Of the 304,051 absentee ballot applications received statewide, 285,537 ballots have already been mailed out to voters, but just 5,666 completed ballots, or roughly 2% of those sent, had been returned as of the latest count.
Dane County accounts for a disproportionate share of the early returns. Its 3,925 returned ballots make up nearly 70% of all ballots returned statewide so far, even though the county’s 44,874 applications represent about 15% of the statewide total. Milwaukee County, by contrast, leads the state in raw applications with 50,606 but has seen just 23 ballots returned to date.
Waukesha County ranks third with 26,921 applications, followed by Brown County (15,446), Outagamie County (9,895) and Winnebago County (9,419). At the other end of the scale, Menominee County had the fewest applications of any county, with 60, followed by Pepin (185), Florence (210) and Buffalo (298) counties.
