[EL] How Many Votes Did The Supreme Court's Decision in WI Affect

[Pildes, Rick]

WI normally has about 160,000 absentee ballots cast.  This year, because of the extraordinary circumstances that arose in the month before the primary, the state got 1.2 million requests for absentee ballots.

From: James Bopp Jr [mailto:jboppjr at aol.com]
Sent: Thursday, April 9, 2020 11:17 AM
To: Pildes, Rick <rick.pildes at nyu.edu>; law-election at uci.edu
Subject: Re: [EL] How Many Votes Did The Supreme Court's Decision in WI Affect

Wouldn't a simple fix for this problem to be to require applications for absentee ballots to be filed sooner, to give the inefficient government-run post office sufficient time to do their job?  Jim
In a message dated 4/9/2020 11:03:08 AM US Eastern Standard Time, rick.pildes at nyu.edu<mailto:rick.pildes at nyu.edu> writes:


I thought I’d run some estimated numbers for this question.



There were 12,216 fewer absentee ballots sent out than requested.  Let’s assume that 100% of those would have been sent out in enough time that they could have been returned by April 13th, had the Supreme Court not reversed the district court on this issue.



For voters who did request and receive an absentee ballot, about 81% of those were actually returned.  If we use that same rate, that means as a starting point we can expect that 9,894 more absentee ballots would have been returned (and I’ll assume there would have no problem with any of those ballots, such as not being valid because they lacked the required witness signature or for other reasons).  But that’s not the number of votes that were not cast, because some of those who did not receive their requested ballot showed up to vote in person.  If you read the local papers in WI, there are many interviews with voters in line on Tuesday who put themselves in that category (and who decided to face the health risks in order to vote in person).



There is no way at the moment to know how to estimate the percent of these voters engaged enough to request a ballot who decided to show up in person when they did not get a ballot.  I’ll use a figure of 20%.  If that’s in the ballpark, it would mean the number of “lost votes”  would be 80% of 9,894 or 7,915 votes – that is, based on these assumptions, the Court’s decision means that 7,915 who would otherwise have voted, had the April 13th deadline remained in place, could not.



For those interested in speculating about the partisan effects, let’s make an extreme assumption that these votes would have broken 70% to 30% in favor of one party.   That’s a massive landslide, certainly unlikely in WI, and not the way the rest of the absentee ballots are likely to break out (if we had demographic information on those who did not receive requested absentee ballots, we could make a more grounded estimate).  Using that extreme scenario, that would mean the disfavored party (I’ll say the Democrats) would have gotten 3,166 more votes had the Supreme Court affirmed the district court.



If we think those ballots would have broken 55% to 45% for the Democrats, which is probably closer to realistic, that would mean 791 fewer Democratic votes than if the April 13th deadline had been in place  [these numbers don’t actually change much even if we unrealistically assume that none of these 9,894 voters showed up in person – in a 55/45 split, that would mean 989 fewer votes for the Democrats]



My guess as of now is that total turnout in WI will be between 1.1 M and 1.3 M votes.


















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