Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.
Milwaukee election officials started counting the city’s absentee ballots all over again Tuesday afternoon after an observer noticed that the panel doors on the city’s 13 tabulators weren’t properly closed.
By the time city officials decided to restart the counting around 4 p.m., over 30,000 absentee ballots had already been fed into the tabulators, Milwaukee spokesperson Caroline Reinwald said. The city had more than 106,000 absentee ballots in total by midday Tuesday.
A Republican observer at the city’s central counting facility pointed out that the panel door that covers a tabulator’s on and off switch — and, in at least some cases, slots for inserting USB drives to export election results — was unlocked after workers had been using the tabulators for several hours. Milwaukee Election Commission Executive Director Paulina Gutiérrez then went from tabulator to tabulator, monitored by representatives from the Democratic and Republican parties, to secure each one between 2 and 2:30 p.m.
City election officials said that there was no indication any of the tabulators had been tampered with — and that it would have been clear if somebody had accessed them. The slots are used at the end of the night, when election officials insert USB drives to export election results before driving them to the county to submit the data.
If the off buttons were “tampered with, it would completely turn off,” Gutiérrez told Votebeat. “That would be very evident of tampering, so we just properly locked them and resealed them.”
There were no USB drives in any of the tabulators, she added.
The decision to restart the count, city spokesperson Jeff Fleming said, was “out of an abundance of caution.”
“We have no reason to believe that there was any compromise to any of the machines,” he said. “But because they were not fully sealed — human error — … we are going to zero them all out again and rerun the ballots that had already been processed.”
Re-tabulating all of the ballots may take up to three hours, Fleming said. City officials initially said the count could go until 2 or 3 a.m.
Votebeat spoke with multiple Republicans at central count who were aware of the oversight. None said they were concerned about any possibility of tampering.
Before the decision to restart the tabulation process, Republican Party of Milwaukee County Chair Hilario Deleon, who watched Gutiérrez reseal each machine, told Votebeat that he doesn’t think anything nefarious happened.
“I’m not worried about it, although it is a concerning thing when those things are supposed to be locked,” he said.
“Both observers were able to see whether or not there’s flash drives in any of the machines. There’s no flash drives in the machines. There should be no flash drives until the end of the night,” he said, adding that he appreciated Gutiérrez’s transparency.
But Deleon expressed frustration over the decision to restart counting and said local Democrats and city election officials disregarded his view on that matter.
“Let them continue doing their job,” he said. “So many more ballots still have to be counted. Why are we adding more time onto this?”
“It’s just going to be extra work for everyone, and any chance to get these numbers maybe by midnight or 1 a.m., that might have just been pushed back,” he said.
Jefferson Davis, a former Menomonee Falls village president and conservative election activist who has promoted conspiracy theories, similarly said he wasn’t concerned.
“We had observers at each station as they were taken, and we didn’t see anything that would cause us concern,” he said.
Davis told Votebeat that he welcomed the decision to restart the count as a transparency measure.
Milwaukee election officials typically follow a checklist at central count to ensure that the tabulators are secure, and that thumb drives carrying vote totals end up where they’re supposed to, aren’t tampered with, and remain tracked through a full chain-of-custody process. It appeared one of the earlier steps of closing the panels wasn’t done correctly.
Claire Woodall, Gutiérrez’s predecessor as Milwaukee election chief, said there are multiple layers of security to prevent tampering, of which the seal is “the most visible but superficial.”
“Rigorous cross checks exist in the election system, including audit logs that track every action on the tabulator,” she said. “I am confident that this was human error in how the doors [were] closed and seals placed, as no one present at Central Count has presented any concerns of tampering.”
Ann Jacobs, a Democratic commissioner on the Wisconsin Elections Commission, also watched Gutiérrez as she resealed and locked each tabulator.
“Elections are run at the municipal level, and at this point, it is up to the Milwaukee Election Commission and the Milwaukee city attorney’s office to decide what their plan is, in light of what’s happened,” she told Votebeat.
National Republicans — long critical of the heavily Democratic city and its elections — decried the mistake.
“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,” Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley and Co-Chair Lara Trump wrote in a media statement.
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.
