You
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 processed 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 Schur a vote reporter with vote beat 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 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 to add 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 results from a tabulator and it wasn't just one election official doing it they were dividing up in the teams.
So one from what I had gotten used to is a 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 won from 10 minutes to three minutes was they were clicking the wrong button they were not downloading election results from from five of the nine tabulators at the city absentee 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.
But before this so-called ballot dump no matter that there are ballot images and audit logs and a 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 is 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 for more questions?
I mean 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 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 counts.
So as you pointed out you have Scott Kruge 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
state 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 was.
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 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 of Crowley merges as the candidate.
So I think all of the pressure is on them to to run this flawlessly November.
All right.
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.