An odd standoff brewed Tuesday afternoon at a polling place in Kenosha’s Lincoln Park neighborhood: Two groups of election observers began scrutinizing each other.
Tanya Mclean, executive director of Leaders of Kenosha, stood outside the Oribiletti Center with two volunteers who joined her effort to protect against voter intimidation at the polls. Minutes after they arrived, a woman wearing an election observer sticker walked up to monitor the volunteers. She photographed them and occasionally typed in her phone.
Soon, two police officers arrived to monitor both groups. As if to settle the dispute, an officer took out a tape measure and walked 100 feet from the door. Wisconsin law bars “electioneering,” or attempts to influence elections within 100 feet of a polling place door. The rules extend to nonpartisan observers, who additionally can’t talk about the contests on the ballot, handle election documents, make calls, or interact with voters unless requested.
But if anyone thought Mclean and her colleagues were doing so, she couldn’t understand why. Dressed in yellow sweatshirts that read “Election Defenders,” the women had done little more than stand near the door and keep an eye on their surroundings.
In the end, the volunteers moved 10 feet further from the door, ending the standoff without incident.
While joy and enthusiasm for the democratic process permeated many Wisconsin polling places on Election Day, the brief episode in Kenosha exemplified how suspicion and unspoken tension played out elsewhere, said Mclean, whose four-woman group pushes for racial justice and progressive social issues.
Wisconsin 2024 voter guide: Find the results in your district
Election Day is Nov. 5. Get all the information you need.
A chief inspector asked Mclean to leave a separate polling place earlier in the day, accusing her of electioneering with little explanation, she said. And just minutes before police arrived in Lincoln Park, a man approached her group to ask if they were working as election officials — or simply out to create “visual antics.” When they said they were there to observe, he left, ripping a Kamala Harris/Tim Walz yard sign from a nearby lawn, carrying it away.
“It’s been interesting, and not in a good way,” Mclean said. “It’s not the voters who have been the problem. It’s people tasked with observing elections who assume we’re here for nefarious reasons. They just assume we’re here to disrupt.”
Mclean doesn’t remember this kind of suspicion during the 2020 election, which unfolded months after Kenosha police shot Jacob Blake, sparking a protest that left two dead and another wounded. While Mclean said the city has since taken steps to move past the protests, some tensions still linger.
“A lot of issues that needed to be addressed during that time and that fed into those feelings of uprising are still there,” she said. “In some ways, I feel like we’re in the same place.”
Several volunteers from Chicago joined Mclean Tuesday in helping drive voters to the polls and look out for voter intimidation.
“By comparison, Illinois is a safe state,” said Ivy Czekanski, who drove to Kenosha to volunteer. “We don’t see the same kind of intimidation there as we do in Wisconsin.”
She added, “I was also here in Kenosha in 2020, and this is the first time I’ve seen people so whipped up about voter intimidation. They’re observing us, and we’re observing them, and it becomes this dueling effort to watch each other.”
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
