>> Thanks. Nice to be here. >> Issues continue to crop
up in Milwaukee's late night ballot counting
process, this time further delaying the results of the
election for a national audience. How Milwaukee
counts its ballots has been the subject of scrutiny for
years. As the largest county in the state, it has
the most absentee ballots to process before those
totals are reported, often leading to what people call
a late night ballot dump and adding fuel to election
conspiracy fires. In a press release, the
Milwaukee Election Commission reiterated that
what caused the delay had no impact on the results.
Alexander Shur, a vote reporter with Votebeat,
watched the scene unfold and he joins us now. Thanks
for your time today. >> My pleasure. Thanks for
having me. >> So the issue occurred at
the central count, but this wasn't with how they count
the ballots. This was at the end of the night
getting the results. So kind of walk us through
what what went wrong and what you were seeing as it
happened. >> Yeah. So I'd say broadly,
what happened on Tuesday was 15 hours of nearly
flawless processing and counting in a way that
actually was more efficient than past elections, being
capped off by a really simple and regrettable
error. So essentially, all these ballots are counted.
I think Milwaukee counted about 28,000 by the end of
the night. And then the last step before you send
results to the counties, you need to extract those
results from the tabulators that count all the ballots.
So on Election Day, there were nine tabulators. And
typically an election official goes to each
tabulator and they follow a checklist, or at least they
had in the past in Milwaukee. And it takes
about ten minutes per tabulator. It adds a lot of
time at the end of the night, but it also ensures
uniformity. And what we saw on Tuesday was took about
ten minutes to download. Results from the first
tabulator took maybe 5 or 6 minutes from the second,
and then all of a sudden it was taking 2 to 3 minutes
to download results from a tabulator. And it wasn't
just one election official doing it, they were
dividing up into teams. So one, from what I had gotten
used to as somewhat of a slow, tedious process, it
got really quick. And in hindsight, it just simply
takes more than 2 or 3 minutes to download results
from a tabulator. The reason that it went from 10
minutes to 3 minutes was they were clicking the
wrong button. They were not downloading election
results from from five of the nine tabulators at the
at the city absentee ballot processing center.
>> So just to clarify, there's no evidence of
malfeasance or tampering or fraud. But that didn't stop
the conspiracy theorists from immediately jumping
all over this on the social media. Right?
>> That's exactly right. And I think they saw it, as,
you know, a way for the city or the state to to rig
the gubernatorial primary against Francesca Hong, no
matter that Crowley was on top, you know, before this
so-called ballot dump, no matter that their, you know,
ballot images and audit logs and a paper trail
tracking every single one of these ballots. You know,
I've been saying, for better or worse, what
happened was evidence that elections are run by humans
and sometimes they make mistakes when you know
they're on a lack of sleep, or there's not the
checklist that should be guiding them in front of
them. >> So many have been
calling for a change in state law that would allow
Milwaukee and other central count operations to start
counting those absentee ballots and processing them
on Monday before the election. So we're not
waiting until late in the night. One of the champions
of that has been a Republican who has pushed
to try and get that bill through. It got killed in
the state Senate, unfortunately. But even he
has concerns and wants to hear testimony. Right. So
how will this unfold as people ask more questions?
>> I mean, I think a really common rebuttal for past
legislative efforts to pass this Monday processing bill,
was this talking point about among Republican
legislators that we can't trust Milwaukee with an
extra day if they're only making errors on, you know,
they're all they only have one day and they're already
making errors. Why should we let them do this on
Monday? However, you see the logic of that talking
point every time they make an error sort of undermines
this mission to pass Monday count. So as you pointed
out, you have Scott Krug, who's a very staunch
supporter of this Monday processing bill. And every
time he sees Milwaukee make a mistake like this past
Tuesday, just he knows that is that makes his case
significantly harder because now you have this
state state legislators looking at the city as a
flawed election jurisdiction. At the same
time that the city is asking for more time to
count and process ballots. >> Yeah, and just a few
seconds left. But give me a sense of what it's going to
look like in November, because I know this is the
city of Milwaukee, but people are going to
conflate David Crowley as the Milwaukee County
ballot balloting totals coming in are going to have
even more scrutiny in the fall, right?
>> It's possible. I mean, every I think no matter
what Milwaukee does, even if they run a flawless
operation, they're going to be scrutinized. If they
make a single mistake and they know this, it's going
to just lead to an absolute blow up in conspiracy
theories, especially if Crowley emerges as the
candidate. So I think all of the pressure is on them
to to run this flawlessly in November.
>> All right. Alexander Shur with Votebeat. Thanks
for your time today. >> Of course. Thanks for
having me. >> The fatal shooting of 38