Election Write-In Winners Revealed

The snowstorm made the April 2 Election Day one for the record books

It only took each of two candidates four votes to get elected into two open County Board of Supervisor seats.

Patrick Voight and Collin Jeanquart were declared the winners following Tuesday’s Board of Canvassers meeting for the county’s Districts 19 and 8, respectively. 

Voight received the most votes – four – of the 28 write-in votes for the District 19 seat that covers parts of Baileys Harbor, Ephraim, Liberty Grove and Sister Bay. 

Similarly, Jeanquart received the most votes  – four – of the 14 write-in votes for the District 8 seat that represents a part of the east and west sides of the City of Sturgeon Bay.

The election was April 2, but final results and write-ins aren’t verified and certified until the county’s Board of Canvassers meet, which happened Tuesday, April 9. 

“It took us a good, solid four hours,” said Jill Lau, Door County Clerk, to go through all reporting districts.

With the exception of learning who the write-ins were who won the open county seats, there were no differences between the preliminary and final results, Lau said. 

Lau said there weren’t a lot of junk ballots for write-ins this year, meaning the “I don’t care” and “Anyone” write-ins only happened in a couple of instances for District 19, and not at all for District 8. 

In District 19 there were 16 different write-in candidates entered on the ballots among the 28 write-in votes cast. District 8 had seven different candidates among the total 14 write-in votes cast. 

This is the first time a write-in vote was needed for a County Board Supervisor seat. Lau notified the two candidates Tuesday that they had been declared the winners.

“They are considering accepting that win,” she said – but had not done so prior to the Peninsula Pulse’s deadline. 

If either or both don’t accept the position, the seat does not go to the next highest vote-getter. 

“The seat would be considered vacant, and then advertised for candidates and the county board would make an appointment,” Lau said. 

While the Pulse did not have information on Jeanquart by deadline, Voight ran unsuccessfully in 2022 for a Gibraltar School Board seat. He made it into the April election following the primary that year, coming in third among the four candidates running for two school district seats. The Door County native served for 20 years in the U.S. Navy after graduating from Gibraltar High School. He had moved back to Door County with his wife, where they are raising their three children, according to the candidate questionnaire Voight filled out at that time. 

Holding An Election During a Snowstorm

Now that it’s all over, it’s easy to forget that Election Day came with a snowstorm and proved to be one of the most difficult in Lau’s memory. The storm hit just as polls were about to close, and winds had begun knocking power down all across the peninsula. Consequently, Lau was only able to receive one transmission of the election results from Door County’s 19 municipalities. 

“The only one we could receive was the village of Ephraim, and that was very far after the polls closed,” Lau said.

All the rest had to be transported manually to the county’s administration building.

“We’ve never had an actual storm like that where nobody’s [transmission] could come through,” Lau said. 

The county’s election machine and election machines at all the polling places have battery backups and lights in the event of a power loss. But the data is transferred to the county through “old-fashioned phone lines,” Lau said. If a phone line goes down, the downed line automatically reroutes to another line. But the more rerouting that happens with large data packages like election results, the harder it’s going to be to transmit, Lau said. 

State statutes require polls to remain open until 8 pm no matter what happens – even if power is lost – and the preliminary election results must be posted that evening. Just as the polls closed and poll workers were finishing up paperwork and learning their memory cards were not transmitting, the county’s highway crews were returning to the shop between 8-9 pm to take a break from what would prove to be a long night for them. 

“Some of those [plows] were back out at 11 pm with just a couple hours of rest,” said Thad Ash, Door County highway commissioner, by email. “Everyone was [back] out at midnight and everyone worked to 3 am.”

With much of the snow remaining on area roadways, and high winds continuing to blow it all around, poll workers from all points within the county set off for the county’s administration building in Sturgeon Bay. Lau said many municipalities worked together to carpool, picking up results from other municipalities to minimize the number of people on the road. 

Everyone made it safely and the memory cards all arrived, but it was past 11 pm, Lau said, when she could finally post the preliminary results.