Overwhelmed By Ballot, Voters Quietly Adopt 'Vote For Everyone' Strategy

WAUKESHA — Peg Ostrander has a system for the upcoming ballot, and the system is a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet, titled "WI Ballot Decisions Made Easy," lives inside a 214-member Facebook group called Waukesha Moms Who Still Have To Vote Apparently, and it assigns each of fourteen ballot items to a different neighbor for research, with a column for "verdict" and a column for "confidence (1-5)."

Ostrander, 44, got the state constitutional amendment on bail conditions. Her assigned confidence level was a 2. She voted yes anyway.

"Democracy by committee," she said, describing the arrangement over the sound of a dishwasher. "Or maybe committee by roulette. I genuinely don't know which one we're doing anymore."

A Teacher Notices A Pattern

Donna Prahl teaches a one-semester civics elective at one of the city's three high schools and has started unofficially tracking how her students' households approach the fall ballot, which this year includes two constitutional amendments, a county referendum, a school referendum, and four contested local races. She asks for a show of hands each week on who in the family is voting on what.

By her count, 11 of 27 households are using some version of a "voting pool," in which family members are pre-assigned specific races or measures to research, and the rest are reported back on secondhand, often in the car on the way to the polling place. Four households, by her estimate, have adopted a simpler rule: yes on anything they don't have time to look into, no only on things they're certain they oppose.

"I had one student tell me her dad votes yes on every amendment because 'if it's already a law, it probably passed for a reason,'" Prahl said. "I did not have the heart to explain how amendments work to a sixteen-year-old at 7:45 in the morning."

The Spreadsheet Economy

The Facebook group's spreadsheet has existed in some form since a 2024 referendum cycle, according to group moderator Lonnie Teske, 52, but this fall's version is the most elaborate, with conditional formatting that turns a cell red if two neighbors assigned to the same item report back with opposite conclusions.

Six cells are currently red. Teske has proposed a tiebreaker system involving a reply-count vote in the comments, which itself produced a secondary disagreement over whether reacting with a thumbs-up counts as a reply.

"We're a 214-person group trying to replicate the entire function of the League of Women Voters, except everyone has somewhere to be by six," Teske said.

"It's not that I don't care. It's that I have three ballot items, a referendum insert I didn't ask for, and a kid who needs to be at travel soccer in forty minutes. Something has to give, and apparently it's the amendment about bail."

— Peg Ostrander, spreadsheet participant

What The Yes Vote Is Actually Buying

Prahl's informal research found that the "yes to everything" households were disproportionately likely to describe their reasoning in terms of trust rather than position: a belief that whatever made it onto the ballot must have cleared some bar of legitimacy already, so a no vote would be presumptuous.

She's turned the finding into an extra-credit assignment for next semester, tentatively titled "Who Put This On The Ballot And Why Do You Trust Them," which she expects roughly a third of her students to interpret as rhetorical.

For now, the spreadsheet remains the system of record for 214 households, six cells remain red, and Ostrander says she's at peace with her 2-out-of-5 confidence vote on bail conditions.

"I'll find out if I was wrong in four years," she said, "same as everybody else."