If you happened to move within the village of Boyd or elsewhere between now and your last voting experience, it might have led to an election day surprise. Per the residency requirement stipulated in state statute 12.13 (1)(a), those with a different address than that listed in the voter rolls needed to prove their residency: Valid ID, utility bill, or postmarked envelope with current address please. No proof, no ballot—no exceptions! So how’d it go in Boyd this year?

“We’ve broken 300 in the past, but we also had a bigger population then,” Village Clerk Sandi Isaacs said of Boyd’s turnout Tuesday. Turning election yard signs into votes, the village went this year for Donald Trump, repeating 2016 when the village had 293 voters turn out to give Trump the municipality. Boyd and Stanley both went for Obama in 2012, while the two municipalities split their votes in 2004 between Kerry (in Boyd) and Bush (in Stanley).

Meanwhile for the Stanley vote in 2020, Stanley Administrator- Clerk-Treasurer Donelle Spaulding reported that there were 989 voters this November compared with just 186 this past August for the primary. Take the November voter turnout and divide it by August’s number of 186 as the base and the recent Presidential election turnout in Stanley represents a 431 percent increase compared with the Fall primary. Spaulding had a caution for those who might look to numbers for the chief takeaway, noting that pre-election registration and

Staff photo.

turnout weren’t necessarily the same due to being able to register the same day as the election.

“You can’t gauge the election of registered voters with turnout due to being allowed to register the same day as the election,” she said of turnout numbers, with those showing up at the polls being checked against the plastic binder list of local registered voter. Need to register? Valid ID, utility bill, or postmarked envelope with current address please. We’ve already gone through the ‘no proof’ scenario. Meanwhile, Isaacs said that things had gone fine in Boyd, minus a few curbside in a few instances “for the virus.” Spaulding meanwhile, said there had been no issues in Stanley.

“The election went well, and we had no problems on election day,” she said of the details.

At any rate, it was a vote to come out for the 3rd of November, as President Donald J. Trump took the decidedly gerrymandered Village of Boyd by election day storm, while former vice president Joseph R. Biden Jr. took the state of Wisconsin overall, and with it, the United States Presidency. Official results will be tallied via the Electoral College this December, as provided for and outlined within Article 2, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution. This ensures wide geographical support for the winner, among other guarantees.

In an election turnout that saw numerous ballots cast by mail due to fears over coronavirus spread and a 70 percent engagement of eligible voters in Eau Claire County, the early results leaned toward Trump in Pennsylvania and Georgia, while Arizona was called for Biden. Early results flipped somewhat as legally cast absentee ballots— counted by humans who tend to need sleep—started to come in over the following days, including from uniformed armed service members casting their ballot by mail from overseas. But while Trump dominated Chippewa County’s vote tally with 59.36 percent of the vote to Biden’s 38.99 percent, alongside otherwise miniscule vote percentages for the Constitution (0.167 percent), Libertarian (1.356 percent) and American Solidarity (0.123 percent) party tickets, Biden eked out a narrow win statewide, with 1,630,568 total votes for 49.6 percent to Trump’s 1,610,029 for 48.9 percent of the statewide vote with 99 percent of votes counted, the next closest presidential challenger being Jo Jorgensen of the Libertarian party with 38,415 votes or 1.2 percent of the statewide total. All told, Biden’s lead with 99 percent of the vote counted came out to 20,539, a near mirror image of the 2016 election in which Trump flipped the State of Wisconsin away from Hillary Clinton by 24,000 votes, helping to win him the electoral college and with it, the Presidency.

Trump’s 2016 win came in part due to an underperformance by Democratic voters in the otherwise reliably democratic state for presidential elections, while the Electoral College (which apportions votes by state population and is meant to ensure that the ultimate winner of a U.S. presidential election enjoys broad geographical support along with overall vote numbers) means that the overall winner of a popular vote can still lose the election, as happened with Al Gore in 2000 and Hillary Clinton in 2016, among other historical instances. So what does it all mean locally?

In the first place, voting was peaceful and some things remain unchanged, like the modern electorate’s protection via secret ballot from disclosing their political preferences publicly, a shift away from the long-ago era of the “living voice,” when registered voters were required to get up in front of their fellow citizens and state their preference publicly—talk about peer pressure! With the advent of secret balloting for election day, such public nosiness is long out of fashion. But what else might be known?

“We’ve been pretty busy,” Taft town clerk Lori Czubakowski said from behind plexiglass as we ducked in briefly between voter visits on election day, shortly past noon. As of our visit, the Town of Taft with 435 total residents (including ineligible children) had seen 68 in-person voters, with about 30 absentees, increases in absentee ballots seen elsewhere as well. Present with Czubakowski in Taft were two other poll workers, keeping things on the level as the town came to decide who it wanted in the Presidency, among other ballot choices.

Meanwhile outside the Delmar polling place, Clerk Julie Krcma-Peterson could be seen walking, while a net gain of zero vehicles (one truck out and one car out; one car in and one truck in) left a relatively unchanged parking lot filled with voter and election worker’s transportation, while a “VOTE HERE TODAY” sign announced polls open from 7a.m. to 8 p.m., as down the road a herd of horses enjoyed the sun, oblivious to the local goingson nearby. Also seen locally on Election Tuesday was a group of German Holstein and Scottish Guernsey cows laying down in the field grass together, somewhat understandable in the afternoon heat. Meanwhile down at Colburn the vehicle count was less than it was at Delmar. In Worden meanwhile it was harvesttime, with both modern combine harvesters and a steel-wheeled tractor in the fields, as the town hall in the southwest corner at Koser Avenue and Eddy acted like a sundial in the afternoon sun, casting its long shadow to the northeast.

Shifting from atmosphere to numbers, the down ballot state races showed a tilt toward Republicans and incumbents locally, with Derrick Van Orden outperforming Ron Kind locally for the 3rd Congressional House District, coming in at 10,584 votes to Kind’s 10,331 votes, with three write-ins. Van Orden’s local performance represented a margin of 1.2 percent over the incumbent congressman.

District-wide meanwhile, Kind edged out Van Orden to win a 13th term, edging out the Republican candidate and Hager City resident by 10,973 votes, for a 51.4 percent vote total for Kind to Van Orden’s 48.6 percent.

Moving from House District 3 east to District 7, Tom Tiffany had a much easier time of defeating Democratic challenger Tricia Zunker, with 9,721 votes in Chippewa county to Zunker’s 4,771 votes, plus one write-in. All told across the Seventh District, Tiffany polled at 252,004 votes or 60.8 percent to Zunker’s polling at 162,729 votes or 39.2 percent, for a yet-secure Republican house seat for the local area. As of Friday afternoon, the Associated Press had called 211 seats for Democrats with 194 for Republicans, with all 435 up for reelection this year and 218 seats making for a majority.

Shifting down a tier from U.S. House to State Assembly races, Republican Rob Summerfield took 15,418 Chippewa County votes for the 67th District to Democrat Chris Kapsner’s 8,368 votes, contributing to Summerfield’s reelection with just under two-thirds of the vote, or 21,180 filled-in circles. Kapsner, meanwhile, received just over one-third of the vote, or 11,921 filled-in circles. General elections do not require that voters vote for a single party throughout, and electors can choose amongst the candidate seems best to them on a state or national level. The end result is that Wisconsin in state terms went Republican, but Democratic in terms of the Presidential race.

Switching from District 67 to District 68, Jesse James won reelection to a seat at the house table in Madison, coming in locally with 6,901 votes to Emily Berge’s 4,406 votes. The local result was mirrored on the district level with a total of 19,003 votes for James or 60.98 percent overall to 12,191 votes or 39.02 percent of overall ballots for Berge, meaning that both state assembly seats will retain their incumbent as local representative, at least until the next job performance (election) review.

Shifting down next the multi-tiered election ballot next to county races there were several uncontested and foreseeable outcomes involved (interesting at best for the level of “protest vote” scatterings), while other county races weren’t so cut and dried.

Among them was the Register of Deeds race for Chippewa County between Melanie K. McManus (Democratic) and Deborah Sorensen (Independent), with McManus edging out Sorensen with 15,721 votes to Sorensen’s 14,971 votes, with 39 write-ins. What this means ultimately is that McManus came away with roughly 51.15 percent of the vote while Sorensen came away with 48.72 percent of the vote, with the other roughly 0.13 percent of the vote going to write-ins.

Meanwhile for non-candidate ballot items, referendums for the Towns of Arthur and Sampson also passed by simple majority, while Wade C. Newell won another term as Chippewa County District Attorney, with 27,605 votes to a total of 147 write-ins— not a bad margin, if you ask us.