MISQUAH — Absentee voting for the November 3 general election opens Friday, September 18, at the clerk’s window and by mail on application. Clerk Donna Skoglund reports she has already had four people ask, three of them before Labor Day, which is early even for Misquah.

Two city council seats are on the ballot and drew three candidates: incumbents Lloyd Bunde, seeking a fourth term, and Ardis Wheeler, seeking a second, and Amber Lindgren, 31, of Third Avenue, who filed on the last afternoon of the filing period in August.

Lindgren has spent the summer as the most consistent public voice for the Hagen development. Asked whether she filed because of the pasture, she said no, and then said that of course it was partly about the pasture, and then said she would rather answer the question properly in October when somebody asks it properly. “I have said the thing at the meeting for two years and then gone home with no vote in it,” she said. “That is the entire reason. It is not dramatic.”

Bunde, reached at the landing, said he had not decided whether he was running a campaign or standing for re-election and thought there was a difference. Wheeler said she would be at the candidate forum, which the Chamber has not yet scheduled, and asked this newspaper to remind the Chamber.

Ald. Pete Hagen’s seat is not up this year, a fact the clerk’s office has been asked about eleven times since August.

Two school board seats drew two candidates — incumbents Marlene Bratlie and Doug Ferrell, unopposed. A third seat, created when a member moved to Wisconsin in July, drew nobody and will be filled by write-in or, failing that, by board appointment, which the district notes is how three of its current members first arrived.

Sample ballots will be posted at city hall, the library and the Daybreak by the end of the month. The clerk asks that people not fill out a sample ballot and hand it back to her, which has happened twice, in different years, by different people, one of whom did it twice.