UW-Milwaukee Professor Predicts Huge Voter Turnout In Wisconsin

State elections officials are predicting 40 percent of Wisconsin’s 4.5 million eligible voters will cast a ballot in Tuesday’s presidential primary, but a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professor said he thinks those predictions are underestimating voters and many more will turn out to the polls.

During a Tuesday morning appearance on “The Joy Cardin Show,” Mordecai Lee, a UW-Milwaukee professor of urban planning, said he predicts more than 2 million people will vote — not the Government Accountability Board’s predicted 1.75 million.

“I think we’re going to have a Noah’s flood of voters,” Lee said. “I think we’re going to have lines, not because of technical problems. It’s just lines of people banging on the doors, ‘I want to vote!’”

Lee bases his numbers on the state Supreme Court race in 2011, the only major race on the ballot during the height of the Act 10 controversy. In that election between incumbent Justice David Prosser and then-Assistant Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg, 1.5 million votes were cast. Lee said that’s 250,000 less than this year’s GAB prediction, which will draw more voters because of the presidential primary.

Kloppenburg is running in Tuesday’s election for Supreme Court, challenging Justice Rebecca Bradley.

According to the GAB, voter turnout has been between 22 percent to 38 percent from 1984 to 2012. From 1960 to 1980, presidential primary turnout was 40 percent to 50 percent.