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After Democrat Tammy Baldwin won reelection to her U.S. Senate seat in Wisconsin, conspiracy theorists skeptical of the outcome pointed to a misleading results table to claim that there were more ballots cast than registered voters in some wards of Oak Creek, a Milwaukee suburb.
The table on Milwaukee County’s results website appeared to show four Oak Creek wards where more than 100% of registered voters cast ballots, including one with 1,256 registered voters and 1,271 ballots, and another with 1,006 registered voters and 1,019 ballots.
Turnout in Oak Creek “was impressive late at night for Senator Baldwin,” said a social media post from Seth Keshel, a prominent conspiracy theorist who has hundreds of thousands of followers across social media. The post, which was accompanied by an image with data from the county’s table, has already received hundreds of reactions and shares.
But the claim that the numbers show a questionable pattern isn’t true, election officials said, and is easily disprovable.
The turnout percentages in the table, which were based on numbers on the page showing the county’s unofficial results, were based on the number of registered voters these wards had the day before Election Day. They didn’t take into account the number of people who registered to vote on Election Day, City Clerk Catherine Roeske said.
Oak Creek hasn’t yet officially tallied the number of same-day registrants, but Roeske estimated that it was about 2,700.
After Votebeat told Michelle Hawley, Milwaukee County’s election director, about the increasingly viral claim, the county added a note to its results page to clarify that “the number of registered voters displayed are as of the day before the election. In Wisconsin, state law allows voters to register on election day, and as a result, it is possible for a ward to have over 100% participation.”
Turnout in many Milwaukee County municipalities was “super impressive,” Hawley said, surpassing most elections before it.
There’s another flaw in the premise of the social media posts that some kind of malfeasance in Oak Creek helped put Baldwin over the top: Her Republican opponent, Eric Hovde, is the one who carried the city. He got roughly 550 more votes than Baldwin — about 10,700 to 10,150 — according to unofficial results, and topped her total in one of the four wards that were listed with more than 100% turnout.
Oak Creek was among the last few municipalities in Wisconsin to report election results, along with neighboring Milwaukee, Green Bay, Oshkosh, and Racine. Conspiracy theorists often use late-arriving results that cause a swing as a pretext to circulate false claims about election fraud.
Before those cities’ numbers came in, early and unofficial results showed Hovde leading Baldwin by about 63,000 votes. Still, at that point, conservatives already recognized that Hovde was unlikely to win, given that the outstanding votes were from cities that mostly lean Democratic.
The largest chunk of still-unreported votes that would deliver Baldwin a win would come from Milwaukee, which she won by about 143,000 votes. Milwaukee County posted the city’s results at around 4:30 a.m., after a delay caused by a recount of absentee ballots.
At that time, Oak Creek’s results were still outstanding, even though it had far fewer ballots to count.
Oak Creek’s central counting site processed over 12,700 absentee ballots and was adequately staffed, Roeske said, but as work went late into the night, the city lost many of its poll workers to fatigue. She also cited rules that prevent election officials from pre-processing absentee ballots.
Some “amazing” staff lasted late into the night though, Roeske said.
Once Oak Creek and the other cities’ results were in, unofficial results showed Baldwin in front by just under 30,000 votes. The Associated Press called the race for Baldwin just before 1 p.m. on Wednesday. Hovde had not conceded as of early afternoon Thursday. Unofficial results showed him within the 1% margin to request a recount.
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.
