We don’t have all the votes counted yet—as I write this at 05:50 CDT, 56 of 667 precincts statewide have yet to report final totals—so we can’t compare this pandemic primary’s voter turnout with past primaries yet. However, a look at some totals reported so far indicates that far more people chose to vote either by mail or on less crowded days at the courthouse preceding the election than running the risk of spreading coronavirus while standing in line on Primary Day.
Eight counties does us the courtesy of providing absentee ballot totals separately from their in-person primary day votes:
| County | Absentee % of Votes Cast |
| Brookings | 60.18 |
| Brown | 66.03 |
| Hughes | 56.50 |
| Lawrence | 64.88 |
| Kingsbury | 54.26 |
| Potter | 49.04 |
| Sully | 45.45 |
| Yankton | 65.24 |
In those eight counties, 16,622 ballots out of 26,854 received were cast absentee. That’s 61.90% of voters choosing to avoid the coronavirus crush and vote early. The two smallest counties in this small sample, Potter and Sully, had absentee voting rates below 50%.
With possibly more than half the vote statewide coming in by mail, crybaby loser Trumpists (and there appear to have been a handful) will want to file their lawsuits now over all the fraud that Il Duce falsely claims is inherent in voting by mail
This shoots holes in the conservative theory that making voting easier and safer is a Democratic plot to steal elections, doesn’t it? When it comes down to voting for their own folks (and most of those absentee votes are going to be for Republican contests) it seems people in many counties actually prefer to skip election day crowds and engage in “Democrat voter fraud.”
I much prefer the election day hassle of voting at my precinct. I like slipping my ballot into the optical scanner and watching my vote get tabulated. When I voted absentee this last election, I felt that Republicans could rip up my ballot or at least not run it through the machine. Those Republicans do things like that you know.
Well, actually, in Wisconsin’s spring election less than twenty cases of “possible” voting fraud are being investigated. Most of those are likely the result of the mix-up that occurred because of the court case Republicans brought. A few people who voted absentee thought their absentee ballots wouldn’t be processed so they thought they had to vote at the polls. It turns out, their ballots were processed, but in the week after the vote.