City Clerk's Office Sets Up Hallway Processing Station Ahead Of Oct. 14 Deadline

WAUKESHA — The City Clerk's Office has moved part of its voter registration operation into the second-floor hallway of City Hall, where a folding table, a laminator and a growing line of residents now sit between the water fountain and the stairwell, as staff race to process 340 registration forms that arrived between Tuesday and Thursday ahead of the state's Oct. 14 deadline.

City Clerk David Voss, who has staffed the office for 34 years, confirmed the 340 figure without hesitation Friday morning, a departure from his usual approach to vote-related numbers. "Normally I'd want a few weeks to review that internally," Voss said. "But at this point I've counted it so many times out loud to so many different people that I don't really see the harm in just saying it to you, too."

The Hallway Station

The auxiliary station, set up Wednesday afternoon, consists of two folding tables borrowed from the Parks and Recreation Department, three laptops on loan from the IT office, and a laminator that Voss said has produced 212 temporary voter confirmation slips since being plugged in. The tables run on a single 9-outlet surge-protected power strip (paid link), which Deputy Clerk Patty Resch, 29, said has not tripped once, a fact she called "the one thing going right back here today."

The line, which on Thursday afternoon stretched past the stairwell and briefly into the doorway of the building inspector's office, is managed with a paper sign-in sheet rather than a numbered ticket system, which Resch said was a deliberate choice. "Tickets imply we have a system," she said. "We have a clipboard and Dave's handwriting, which not everyone can read, which actually slows things down, which is its own problem we're aware of."

Walk-Ins Through Wednesday, Online Through Midnight

The office will accept in-person walk-in registrations through 5 p.m. Wednesday, after which the hallway station will be dismantled and the tables returned to Parks and Recreation regardless of how many people remain in line. Online registrations will continue to be accepted through 11:59 p.m. Wednesday, a window Voss said the office's website has handled in the past but never with the volume currently anticipated.

Voss said the office is bracing for a surge of online submissions between 11 p.m. and midnight Wednesday, based on data from the 2024 cycle showing 61 registrations filed in the final nine minutes before the deadline closed, several of them, according to timestamped server logs, from inside the City Hall parking lot.

Staff Pulled From Other Departments

To keep pace, the clerk's office has temporarily reassigned two employees from the city's licensing division and one from the assessor's office, none of whom had prior experience processing voter registrations before Tuesday. Voss described the training process as "forty-five minutes and a binder," and said all three new staff members have been instructed to flag anything unusual to him directly rather than make a judgment call.

"It's like we're running a double-shift assembly line, except the product is democracy and the machine is a folding table from the Rec Department that one of the legs doesn't quite lock on."

— David Voss, City Clerk

Voss said the office does not track how many of the 340 registrants were previously registered elsewhere and are simply updating an address, though he estimated, without consulting any document, that the number was "probably a good chunk, maybe a third, don't quote me on the third part specifically."

What Happens Wednesday Night

Once the 11:59 p.m. online cutoff passes Wednesday, Voss said the office plans to lock the submission portal, print a final report, and leave the folding tables in the hallway overnight because nobody from Parks and Recreation will be in the building to accept their return until Thursday morning. The laminator, he said, will be unplugged and carried back to the IT office personally, by him, on foot.

Asked whether the office expects to set up a similar hallway station for future deadlines, Voss said that decision would depend on whether anyone remembers to ask him before the next one arrives. "Every cycle I think we'll plan ahead," he said. "Every cycle it's a folding table and a laminator again. I've stopped being surprised by it. I've started just keeping the laminator closer."