MISQUAH — Absentee voting for the November 3 general election opens Friday, September 18, when city hall opens, and continues through the day before the election. Clerk Donna Skoglund posted the sample ballot Monday on the board inside the front door and reports the materials have been ready since the first week of the month.

A voter may vote absentee in person at the clerk’s window or by mail on application. No reason is required. The application is one page, it is at the window, and the clerk asks that it be returned to her and not to the school, the library or the Daybreak, all three of which have received one in a previous year.

On the ballot locally: two city council seats, four-year terms, with three candidates — incumbents Lloyd Bunde and Ardis Wheeler and challenger Amber Lindgren. Two school board seats drew incumbents Marlene Bratlie and Doug Ferrell, both unopposed. A third school board seat, created when a member moved to Wisconsin in July, drew no candidate at all and will be decided by write-in, or, if the write-in count does not produce somebody willing to serve, by board appointment.

That third seat is worth understanding before November rather than after. A write-in campaign requires no filing and no fee; it requires a person willing to have their name written and willing to say yes afterward. The district notes that three of its current members first came to the board by appointment, and that appointment is a legal and ordinary way to fill a seat, and also that a seat filled by appointment was not filled by anybody’s vote.

The Chamber’s fall meeting Saturday morning took up the candidate forum and set it for Thursday, October 8, at the Legion hall, 7 p.m., which is two days after the council takes up the Hagen recommendation and which the Chamber says is a coincidence. All five local candidates have been invited. Three have confirmed.

Sample ballots are also going up at the library and the Daybreak by the weekend. Skoglund repeats her annual request that people not fill out the sample ballot and hand it back to her, which has now happened three times, in three different years, and twice by the same person.

Turnout in a general election year in this precinct runs between 71 and 78 percent, which is high and has been high for as long as the clerk’s records go back, and roughly a fifth of it now arrives absentee. That share has doubled since 2018 and Skoglund says it is still climbing, mostly among people who are not traveling and simply prefer to vote on a Tuesday afternoon in the clerk’s office with nobody behind them in line.

One procedural reminder, because it produces a phone call every cycle: a mailed absentee ballot must be received by the clerk, not postmarked, by the close of polls on November 3. The clerk recommends that anybody mailing one after October 26 bring it in instead, and notes she will accept it at the window through eight o’clock on election night, which surprises people every two years.