LIVE UPDATES: Follow the results of the Wisconsin Democratic primary and state Supreme Court election
- Wisconsin is reporting results from its presidential primary and other statewide elections today, April 13.
- The state controversially moved ahead with in-person voting on April 7 as over a dozen other states postponed their primaries due to the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak.
- Wisconsin will release the full results from its primary after the deadline to send in absentee ballots passes at 4 p.m. Central Time and 5 p.m. Eastern Time on April 13.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
Wisconsin will release the full results from its primary and state Supreme Court election after the deadline to send in absentee ballots passes at 4 p.m. Central Time and 5 p.m. Eastern Time on April 13.
Wisconsin Democratic presidential primary:
Wisconsin State Supreme Court election:
What's at stake?
Bernie Sanders officially dropped out of the presidential primary on April 8, making former VP Joe Biden the presumptive Democratic nominee. While Sanders will continue to stay on the ballot in upcoming primaries and earn delegates from those contests, he endorsed Biden on April 13.
In the Democratic presidential primary, Wisconsin allocates 84 pledged delegates to the Democracy convention, with 55 allocated between Wisconsin's eight congressional districts and 29 at-large and PLEO (party leader and elected official) delegates allocated based on the statewide results.
The other major statewide election on the ballot this year in Wisconsin was a key State Supreme Court race, in which Democratic-backed Jill Karofsky challenged Republican-backed Judge Daniel Kelly, who was appointed by former Republican Gov. Scott Walker.
While state Supreme Court candidates in Wisconsin are technically nonpartisan, they are almost always aligned with or supported by political parties. Currently, the court is composed of five conservative-aligned judges, including Kelly, and two liberal judges.
Weeks of dysfunction and disagreement between top officials led to a chaotic election day
As dozens of states have postponed their presidential primaries to May or June, Wisconsin's Tuesday election proceeded as scheduled, despite the Governor telling Wisconsinites to stay at home after officials in the state legislature refused to act to postpone the election and rejected the Governor's request to send every voter an absentee ballot.
For weeks leading up to the election, both Gov. Tony Evers and Republican leaders planned to hold the election as scheduled. But as COVID-19 cases rose and the state told citizens to stay at home, Evers made multiple 11th-hour attempts to move to an all-mail election or postpone it all together, which Republicans in the state legislature blocked.
After a federal judge ruled against several plaintiffs attempting to delay the election on April 2 but extended the deadline to mail in absentee ballots, Gov. Tony Evers made in a last-minute attempt to postpone the vote to June with an executive order on April 6.
Vos and the Republican Majority Leader of the state Senate immediately challenged the order in Wisconsin's majority-conservative State Supreme Court, which sided against Evers and blocked his attempt to delay the election in a 4-2 decision, with Kelly recusing himself.
And in a separate court case, the US Supreme Court ruled 5-4 to overturn the decision from a federal appeals court judge that extended absentee voting to April 13, ruling that voters had to have their ballots postmarked by election day.
As of the morning of election day, the Wisconsin Elections Commission reported that over 400,000 absentee ballots sent out to voters had not been returned, with an additional 9,400 voters who requested ballots but did not receive them in time.
The Supreme Court's decision effectively left voters who had not yet received their absentee ballot or couldn't get it postmarked with a difficult choice: either risk their health to wait in long lines to vote in person, or not vote at all.
While some areas were able to hold curbside or drive-through voting, it wasn't an option in big cities like Milwaukee and Waukesha, many of which had to close down polling locations due to understaffing as many poll workers stayed home.
Milwaukee, a city of over 500,000 people, which usually has 180 open polling locations, is operating with just five on Tuesday, creating hours-long lines to vote in many neighborhoods.
Now, as groups threaten to file lawsuits accusing Wisconsin officials of engaging in voter suppression, the state's Elections Commission is dealing with the fallout, including hundreds of ballots that did not arrive in time and others with illegible or no postmarks.