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
ballad 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 Shurer, a reporter with
VoteBeat, watched the scene unfold
and he joins us now.
Thanks for your time today.
A 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 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 10 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 10 minutes to download
results from the first tabulator,
took maybe five or six minutes from
the second, and then all of
a sudden, it was taking two to
three minutes to download the
results from a tabulator.
And it wasn't just one election
official doing it, they were
dividing up into teams.
So it went 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 two or three minutes
to download results from a
tabulator.
The reason that it went from
10 minutes to three minutes was they
were clicking the wrong button.
They were not downloading election
results from five of the
nine tabulators at the
City S&T Valid 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 a
way for the city or the state
to rig the gubernatorial
primary against Francesca
Hong, no matter that Crowley was
on top before
this so-called ballot dump,
no manner that there are ballot
images and audit logs and
paper trail tracking every single
one of these ballots.
I've been saying, for better or
worse, what happened was evidence
that elections are run by humans,
and sometimes they make mistakes
when 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 account
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 was 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 think a really common rebuttal
for past legislative efforts to pass
this Monday processing bill is this
talking point among
Republican legislators that we
can't trust Milwaukee with an extra
day if they're only making errors
on, you know, 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
undermines this mission to pass
Monday Council.
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, he
knows that
makes his case significantly harder,
because now you have
the state legislators looking at the
city as a flawed election
jurisdiction at the same
time that the city's 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 executive.
Any late night ballot, balloting
totals coming in are going 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 gonna be
scrutinized.
If they make a single mistake
and they know this, it's
gonna 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 run
this flawlessly in November.
All right, Alexander Sherv with Vote
Beat. Thanks for your time today.
Of course, thanks for having me.
Perfect on time.
Thank you so much for your time.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you, thanks for featuring me.