(CN) — Wisconsin voters on Tuesday will head to the polls for the second time during the Covid-19 pandemic, this time to determine whether one of President Donald Trump’s staunchest supporters in the state legislature or a small town school board president will fill a vacant U.S. Congressional seat.
Two-term state Senator Tom Tiffany, who represents northeastern Wisconsin, will face off against Tricia Zunker, president of the Wausau School Board and an associate justice on the Ho-Chunk Nation Supreme Court, on May 12.
The winner will quickly head to Washington, D.C., to fill the Badger State’s 7th Congressional District seat, which has been vacant since Sean Duffy, a Republican, resigned in September 2019. The victor of the special election will not have long to rest on their laurels, as they will face another election for a full two-year term in November.
Tuesday’s election will be the second in Wisconsin since the Covid-19 pandemic first upended civic life around the world, and two months since Democratic Governor Tony Evers declared a statewide public health emergency, closing most businesses and limiting residents’ movement to stymie the spread of the novel coronavirus.
As of Sunday, the Wisconsin Department of Health Services reported 10,219 confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the state, including 400 deaths.
Build up to Wisconsin’s April 7 primary election was a chaotic mess of political drama, including multiple lawsuits, a stalled special session of the state legislature and an 11th hour party-line decision from the U.S. Supreme Court barring an extension to absentee voting that had been ordered by a federal judge in Madison.
As the nation watched, Wisconsin’s fight over in-person voting during the pandemic skewed partisan, as liberals pleaded to delay the election and conservatives pushed to carry out the vote despite warnings of a spike in infections as voters and poll workers were forced to bend or break social distancing directives.
In the end, Wisconsin voters suited up in masks and gloves and braved polling places, which had been reduced in number due to critical shortages of personnel and safety equipment. Milwaukee, the state’s largest urban area comprising roughly 600,000 people, only had five polling places open out of a usual 180 on Election Day.
Unofficial figures from the Wisconsin Elections Commission suggest turnout was still relatively high for the April election, showing about 1.5 million people cast ballots — representing about 34% of the state’s estimated voting-age population — in races including the presidential preference primary and for a seat on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court, which resulted in liberal Dane County Circuit Court Judge Jill Karofsky besting conservative Justice Daniel Kelly by 10 points.
The feared spike in infections never amounted to the worst case scenario, although a health department spokeswoman confirmed in an email that 67 people who tested positive for Covid-19 after April 9 reported that they voted in person or worked the polls on Election Day — but they also faced other possible exposures.
Disputes over the April election are ongoing, with questions lingering about processing a record 1.3 million absentee ballots and a federal lawsuit from disenfranchised voters seeking to loosen rules for the remaining 2020 elections.
Evers’ administration has said the May 12 special election will feature in-person voting for Wisconsin’s largest congressional district in terms of area, encompassing all of 21 counties and portions of five others in the largely rural northern part of the state, but the governor is still urging those in the 7th District to vote by mail.
Voters seem to be heeding that advice, as the state elections commission reported Friday that more than a quarter of the district’s roughly 420,000 registered voters have requested absentee ballots and about 69,000 absentee ballots had already been returned.
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