Wisconsin League of Women Voters executive director says voters can trust state elections
Debra Cronmiller, who has worked with the League of Women Voters for 30 years, says Wisconsin’s election system is protected by numerous checks and balances.
For more than 100 years, the League of Women Voters has worked to empower voters and defend the democratic system. With the November 2024 election already underway, the executive director of the nonprofit organization’s Wisconsin chapter, Debra Cronmiller, says she has a high degree of confidence that it will be conducted fairly and accurately.
Cronmiller, who said she has been active with the league for three decades, talked with the Wisconsin Independent on Oct. 23 about the fail-safes in Wisconsin’s electoral system and why voters should feel confident in the state’s election results.
“Wisconsin is, I think, somewhat insulated from what I’ll call the biggest harms because of our very decentralized election administration system,” Cronmiller said. “Eighteen hundred and fifty-one clerks administer our elections, so it’s not administered by a single person, a secretary of state, a governing body, that sort of thing, and these clerks are members of our communities, they’re our neighbors, they’re our friends, they’re our family, and we trust them. And I think they trust the voters to do the right thing, and that will be insulating, in my mind’s eye.”
Democratic, Republican, and nonpartisan observers are welcome to watch the voting process, she noted, and representatives of the league often do so. All Wisconsin votes happen on paper ballots, and the tabulation is done on machines that are not connected to the internet. “These are wonderful safeguards that exist in the state of Wisconsin that don’t exist in all states, by the way.”
After the polls close, the results must be certified by bipartisan teams of election officials.
“The election results are certified at three levels, in the state of Wisconsin. Municipalities are the first to certify their results,” explained Cronmiller. “That happens, usually, within days of the election itself. Then counties will take all of the municipal data from their own county, and they will bring together a board of canvassers that represent both of the major parties, and then they certify their election results. And then those county results go to the state, and the state, in turn, certifies the results. And if it’s a federal election, then the governor actually signs off and passes that result to the federal government.”
With the many checks in Wisconsin’s system, Cronmiller believes the results can be trusted: “There will not be wholesale fraud. There are so many checks and balances for how ballots are issued, how they’re tracked, how they’re uniquely assigned to a specific voter, and that voter has to be registered in order to get a paper ballot or an absentee ballot in advance of the election. Again: check, check, check. It’s a lot for a voter to have to do in order to be able to cast that ballot, but once all those steps are actually completed, that’s what creates, for me, the accountability, the surety of the results in Wisconsin.”
