Graceann Toberman climbed out of bed at 3:50 a.m. on Tuesday, when the sky over her 120-acre farm in southern Wisconsin was inky black, the animals outside were sleeping and the only sound was the flapping of the American flag in the wind. Her to-do list was beckoning.
Feed cattle.
Feed chickens.
Check electric fence to make sure that the darned deer didn’t knock it over again.
And when the chores are done: Hurry over to the town hall in Magnolia and administer the presidential election.
Ms. Toberman, 61, is one of the more than 1,800 municipal clerks in Wisconsin, which has more local election officials than any other state. For the last 21 years, if there were ballots to count, voters to register or elections to run in Magnolia, a rural farming community of 734 people, Ms. Toberman, who was elected to the nonpartisan role, has been the woman in charge.
“I think we’re all ready,” she said, wearing jeans and rubber boots, hauling buckets of feed outside her chicken coop just before 5 a.m., one of her last chores before changing clothes and driving into town. “I try not to be in a mad dash.”
If the presidential election of 2024 has been saddled with accusations of election fraud, illegal voting or scammers stuffing ballot boxes, the Rockwellian setting of Magnolia is an antidote.
In Ms. Toberman’s tidy kitchen, she keeps careful records for Tuesday’s election, logging the number of registered voters in Magnolia (466), the absentee ballots sent out (58), and the people who came to vote early this year (39.)
Early voting happened at the Toberman farm on County Road B, where Ms. Toberman’s routine is simple: check the voter’s photo ID, give them a ballot and an envelope, and then scoot to the other end of the kitchen so that they can have a little privacy at her table.
She logged her last early voter on Sunday. At Mass at that morning, Ms. Toberman told Karen Kopp, the daughter of Eileen Kopp, a 95-year-old Magnolia resident, that it was not too late for her mother to vote in person. Come by later, Ms. Toberman said, telling her that the elder Ms. Kopp could even vote in the car from the driveway, since she used a walker.
That afternoon, Ms. Toberman was peering outside of her farmhouse window at the appointed hour when a black Buick pulled up.
“Here comes my voter,” Ms. Toberman said, hustling outside with a ballot and an envelope.
Ms. Kopp filled out her ballot from the car, handed it back and was off.
Back inside the kitchen, Ms. Toberman logged the vote on her laptop. “That will go in the safe,” she said. “And on Election Day, it will be opened.”
Only one person has approached Ms. Toberman with concerns about the security of elections. She explained how ballots are collected and stored, and the near-impossibility of tricking the system. The person came away satisfied with her explanation.
“I’ve been doing this quite a few years,” Ms. Toberman said. “They know me.”
In the weeks approaching Election Day, she filled her days with preparations.
With her husband, Kurt, she made sure that the corn was harvested and the calves were weaned so her schedule was clear for election duties. At the former two-room schoolhouse that is now the town hall in Magnolia, where voting takes place on Election Day, Ms. Toberman hung several new curtains — she had hemmed them herself — on the voting booths.
Talk of election fraud bothers her.
“It always makes me feel bad when people say this is false, or this couldn’t be real,” she said. “There’s so many checks and balances.”
On Election Day, Ms. Toberman pulled into the gravel lot behind town hall, where a fresh rain had left muddy puddles everywhere. She walked inside and arranged floor mats so that the floor would stay clean. When her election inspectors arrived, they found red, white and blue pins with their names written on them laid out on a table.
“Graceann is a perfectionist,” said Kathy Earleywine, 68, one of the workers. “She is trusted by everybody.”
The absentee ballots that had already been mailed to the farm were in a black portable lockbox that Ms. Toberman used to transport them to the town hall — a precaution, she noted, that would prevent ballots from flying everywhere, temporarily unsecured, in case she got into a car crash on the way there.
She knows about 90 percent of the people who walk through the door on Election Day, she guessed, but they still have to state their name and show photo ID before receiving a ballot. After voting inside a booth, they feed their ballot into the machine while several election workers in the room watch.
Minutes before the polls opened at 7 a.m., Ms. Toberman glanced at the wall clock. Voters were already lining up outside, eager to cast a ballot.
“Oh, this is so much fun,” said Linda Reilly, the chief inspector.
“OK,” Ms. Toberman said, nodding to everyone as the clock struck 7. “We can start.”
The post What Democracy Looks Like in Rural Wisconsin: One Woman Counting Her Neighbors’ Votes appeared first on New York Times.
