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Roughly 2,000 people voted at the Mount Pleasant village hall by 4:30 p.m. on Tuesday afternoon — “nothing crazy,” said poll worker Kathy Wyatt, but roughly on par with the 2022 election.

Microsoft completed its first data center in Mount Pleasant in June and is building a second nearby. In October, the village’s Plan Commission unanimously recommended approval of an amended plan for a separate expansion featuring seven additional data center buildings — two fewer than originally proposed, but with more total square footage.

Despite the high-profile hubbub about those developments, many voters report the debate is too new to shape their votes at the state or federal level. “Down the road, I’m definitely going to watch the issue,” said Rachel Kinch, 57, who voted at Cesar E. Chavez Community Center in Racine on Tuesday afternoon.

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Paul Kiefer became Wisconsin Watch’s data-driven accountability reporter in September 2026, focusing largely on immigration and data reporting. He joined the newsroom in 2025 as a Roy W. Howard fellow. Paul grew up in Washington state and first set foot in a newsroom as a teenage producer-in-training at a Seattle public radio station. He went on to cover criminal justice in Washington for the Seattle news site PubliCola and InvestigateWest. He headed east in 2023, working as a state politics reporter for Delaware Public Media before earning a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Maryland and interning on the Washington Post’s metro desk.