The Dane County Courthouse Probate Office is now flooded with petitions for restraining orders against volunteers registering University of Wisconsin-Madison students to vote.
According to students, these volunteers were becoming increasingly aggressive as the Oct. 18 early registration deadline approached.
“I was walking on East Campus Mall when one of them approached me,” said senior Lee Mealone. “I didn’t have my drivers’ license on hand and was planning to register later anyways when I was done with class, so I said, ‘no thanks,’ but one of them kept following me.”
The volunteer, identified as junior Hugh Jass, allegedly followed Mealone into a Humanities building bathroom.
“He crawled under the door of the stall I was in, stared into my soul with eyes like that one ‘Overly Attached Girlfriend’ meme, and said, ‘Register! It’ll only take a minute!’” Mealone recalled, breaking into a cold sweat.
“As he shook that g clipboard at me, I noticed ‘REGISTER OR DIE’ was tattooed on the inside of his wrist next to a skull and crossbones,” Mealone said. “Needless to say, for my own safety I got up, zipped my pants, made up a drivers’ license number and filled out the form as fast as I could.”
Other students encountered similar exchanges with volunteers. One sophomore, who wished to remain anonymous, said volunteers inside Gordon Commons gave her a look that she described as “the same look a pride of starving lions would give a chunky zebra on ‘Animal Planet.’”
Although the Probate Office has not yet released an official count of total restraining orders filed against voter registration volunteers, city officials confirmed 51,238 of the 42,595 students at UW-Madison have been registered to vote in the upcoming election.
