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Wisconsin Watch partners with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. Read our methodology to learn how we check claims.

Yes.

Wisconsin’s early voting turnout for the 2022 midterm elections surpassed that the last midterm election in 2018. As of Nov. 8, 2022, a total of 741,795 people had voted early via mail or in person. That compares to 547,954 who voted early at the same point in 2018 — a 35% increase. The state’s most heavily populated counties, Milwaukee and Dane, had the highest number of early voters.

The growth in absentee ballots in Wisconsin mirrors a larger trend of early voting increases in other key battleground states, including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania. 

Fewer Wisconsinites have voted early in 2022 than in the 2020 presidential election. Such presidential contests typically see much larger turnouts than the midterms. And in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic encouraged even higher-than-usual absentee voting.

Sources

State of Wisconsin: Absentee Ballot Report – November 8, 2022 General Election

State of Wisconsin: Absentee ballot report on November 5, 2022 for 2018 general election

CNN: Three charts that show the state of pre-election voting in this year’s key states

PBS Wisconsin: Wisconsin’s 2022 voter registrations up from 2018, absentee ballots down from 2020

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Jacob Alabab-Moser joined as Wisconsin Watch’s fact checker in September 2022, as part of the effort by The Gigafact Project in partnership with different state-level news outlets to combat misinformation in the 2022 midterm elections. Jacob has several years of experience as a fact checker and research assistant at a variety of organizations, including at The Gigafact Project. He holds a BA from Brown University and is pursuing a MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science.