As a longtime election worker and former clerk in Alma Center, Wisconsin, she is familiar with election legislation, particularly the regular need to allow the public to observe voting machine tests.
Usually, nothing occurs. She claimed that until one man turned up for the most recent test on August 1st, no one in the public had truly accepted such an invitation.
According to Ms. Burlingame, he had recently moved to the region and was aggressive and irate.
The middle-aged man began to take pictures and inquire about the operation of the devices. Did the machines have internet connections? He demanded to see the internet connections even though they weren’t.
these are the machines that changed everyone’s votes,” the man said, repeating a widely spread and debunked conspiracy theory about a particular brand of voting machine.
I said, ‘There’s no way they can do that’,” Ms Burlingame recalls. “He was not happy with me.
Eventually the man left, but the incident gave her pause.
It made me nervous. I wasn’t afraid. but it did make me stop and think, what is the election going to be like? Are we going to have more of this?
Incidents like the one in Alma Center, a village of around 500 people in largely rural Jackson County in western Wisconsin, have become increasingly common throughout the country in recent years, experts say.
