Journal Times: Five Wisconsin cities to receive a total of $6.3M to fund safe 2020 elections

CAITLIN SIEVERS, JOURNAL TIMES

Wisconsin’s five largest cities, including Racine and Kenosha, have secured more than $6 million in grants to help keep voters safe during Wisconsin’s upcoming elections.

“The big winners in this are the voters who will be able to safely vote this fall,” Racine Mayor Cory Mason said in an interview Monday morning.

Shortly after the state’s April primary, the mayors of Racine, Kenosha, Milwaukee, Madison and Green Bay began working on a plan to ensure that voters and municipalities in the August and November elections did not experience the same problems that were rife across the state in the spring election.

On Thursday, the five cities were notified that the Center for Tech and Civic Life had fully funded their “Wisconsin Safer Voting Plan” with $6.3 million in grants. The Center for Tech and Civic Life is a nonprofit based in Chicago that aims to get citizens more civically engaged.

“The Wisconsin spring election — in which voters were subjected to exposure to a dangerous virus, and municipalities scrambled to conduct safe elections — presented a cautionary tale of precisely how not to run an election during an outbreak of a lethal disease,” read a joint press release from the cities.

The cities aim to use the grant funds to do things like open adequate numbers of voting sites, set up in-person drive-thru voting locations, to provide personal protection equipment for poll workers and to recruit and train a sufficient number of poll workers.

Kenosha Mayor John Antaramian on Monday emphasized how important it is that citizens are not afraid to come to the polls and vote. “We need to make sure that we have all the protections in place so that people know that they can vote safely,” he said.

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