The Wisconsin Government Accountability Board, which oversees elections in the state, announced Friday that at least 182,228 absentee ballots have been issued for the June 5 gubernatorial recall election.
That’s almost three times as many as the 68,000 absentee ballots tracked in the Statewide Voter Registration System for the May 8 recall primary, which saw about 29.5 percent turnout overall.
The true number of absentee voters could be even higher, since the GAO’s number is based only on information from those local election officials who track the data in the SVRS. Only about one-third of municipalities track absentee ballots in the system, the GAB noted, though the total does include all the state’s large cities.
The GAB has predicted that turnout in the recall on June 5 could reach between 60 to 65 percent, which would place it on par with a presidential election.
