Milwaukee’s Absentee Results Expected To Be Very Late, Processing Starting Over

Paulina Gutiérrez addresses the media at central count. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.

People expecting the results of Milwaukee’s 106,000 absentee ballots are going to have to wait much longer than expected.

Late Tuesday afternoon, City of Milwaukee officials announced that all of the 31,000 ballots that had been previously processed would need to be rerun. Doors covering USB ports on the city’s 13 high-speed tabulators were not locked, though a tamper-evident sticker seal was in place and officials repeatedly stressed that there is no evidence of fraud.

“Each machine has a door that should have been locked and sealed. It appears some doors were not fully secured by senior election officials. The City of Milwaukee has no doubt regarding the integrity of the election. However, in order to eliminate any doubt to be fully transparent, the MEC has decided to start the tabulation process over for all ballots at Central Count,” said the Milwaukee Election Commission in a statement.

Observers associated with Jefferson Davis‘ Ad-Hoc Consortium For Wisconsin’s Full Forensic Physical Cyber Audit and the Republican Party noticed the door problem earlier in the day. Davis, who has previously espoused 2020 election conspiracy theories, is leading a group of several dozen observers at the city’s central count facility.

The groups had initially said they were okay to continue processing. But at 4:10 p.m, the City of Milwaukee announced it had made the decision to reset the machines.

City officials attributed the issue to a “human error” by “senior officials.”

MEC Executive Director Paulina Gutiérrez, who was not on site at the time the error was made, said she was the ultimate decider to restart the process. It is the first major election for which Gutierrez has served as the executive director.

She said the decision was made out of an “abundance of caution and to ensure the American public that this election is going to be run safe, secure and transparent.”

An earlier estimate called for the work to be completed, including reporting the results to the county, after midnight.

The executive director declined to provide an estimate for the time impact of rerun the ballots. “It’s going to be a late night,” she said, while stressing that the rework would not involve the need to sort, review and open thousands of envelopes; a task a crew of up to 300 workers has spent most of the day working on.

“I know for a fact that these machines are highly secure, there was no tampering. We were able to confirm that,” she said in a brief press conference just before 6 p.m. But she said she did not know why the error occurred.

Former MEC director Claire Woodall, now a senior advisor with Issue One, told Urban Milwaukee that even if someone attempted to tamper with the machine, a substantial series of safe guards remains.

“The tabulators have multiple layers of security, the seal being the most visible, but superficial of those layers,” she said. “Rigorous cross checks exist in the election system, including audit logs that track every action on the tabulator.” Woodall, who is not at the site, said she was confident that it was simply human error.

Gutierrez confirmed that after an observer brought the issue to her attention, she went machine-by-machine with a bipartisan group and confirmed no USB drives were in the machines. “Just so you know, these machines can’t accept just any flash drive,” she said. The city has a specialized series of USB flash drives in a secure room that it will not insert until all of the ballots are in the machine.

She said the door also provides access to the power switch, but that turning off the machine would have been clearly visible to the observers stationed near each machine. A pair of election workers operates each machine.

The Republican National Committee attacked the decision.

“This is an unacceptable example of incompetent election administration in a key swing state: voters deserve better and we are unambiguously calling on Milwaukee’s officials to do their jobs and count ballots quickly and effectively. Anything less undermines voter confidence,” said RNC chairman Michael Whatley in a statement.

“This is one of the most secure operations,” said Gutierrez, rejecting the RNC’s claim. “We have a significant amount of law enforcement. We have secure locations where observers and the public cannot attend. When we became aware of this error, we have been fully transparent, we brought Democrats and Republicans together to help us ensure this was secure. We have no concern that the machine has been touched or tampered with because it hasn’t. It’s been out here for everyone to see.”

Davis said his group observed the “zeroing out” process this morning and confirmed that each machine had no data loaded. It also observed the seals and locks. “We were shown that they were locked and sealed on both ends,” he told Urban Milwaukee. “We were all satisfied with the zeroing out.”

Urban Milwaukee was present for part of that process and observed deputy director Bonnie Chang and other employees performing the final checks on the machines and showing the zero data printouts to observers.

Davis said a machine that later encountered physical ballot processing errors caused observers to notice an issue with security doors on the machines. Before the machines were reset again, Davis’ group recorded the processed totals at each device and intends to reconcile the totals.

“Paulina was very transparent,” said Hilario Deleon, chair of the Republican Party of Milwaukee County, told Urban Milwaukee. But he said he would have preferred not to reset the machines and instead continue processing and rely on other checks. “I think it would be best to let them finish the count. Let them do what they are doing now and we will see what happens at the end of the night. They completed disregarded my opinion.”

In 2020, the results reported from Milwaukee’s central count proved the decisive figure in the election, giving Joe Biden the edge over Donald Trump. A similar situation could occur again in 2024, with a close race expected and more than 100,000 votes on hand.

Davis said he expects the race to be called before the city completes it work and the decision to be “immaterial.”

The city of Milwaukee is using the exhibition hall at the Baird Center as a centralized place to process all of its absentee ballots, while in-person voting takes place and is tabulated at 180 polling places. Approximately 40 Wisconsin cities, none as large as Milwaukee, use a similar centralized setup.

The city’s in-person voting totals are reported to Milwaukee County from each polling place via modems, but the absentee totals, on USB drives, are delivered via a police escort in a single batch.

The machines are set up in a way so that the total votes are displayed, but not the results.

Wisconsin Elections Commission chair Ann Jacobs, a Democrat, has been on site most of the day. In a social media post, she attempted to fight election misinformation: “There is nothing wrong with the tabulators in Milwaukee. They are NOT switching votes or other nonsense. They are re-scanning because the machines were not properly secured before tabulation began.”

Improperly Locked Tabulator Photo

Improperly locked tabulator. Photo provided by Hilario Deleon.

Pre-Incident Site Photos

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