Milwaukee election officials are starting over with counting some 31,000 absentee ballots initially fed through tabulators that hadn’t properly been locked, likely adding significant time to the final tally.
City spokesperson Jeff Fleming said the 13 tabulators at the central county facility for absentee ballots were zeroed out this morning and sealed. But election workers failed to lock the panel, which covers a piece of the machine where memory sticks are plugged in to collect the results.
Fleming said it was due to human error and there were no signs of malfeasance. Still, after a discussion, the city decided to rerun the 31,000 absentee ballots that had already been counted. In all, the city had received 106,786 absentee ballots by this morning.
“We want absolutely no question about the accuracy of the result,” Fleming said in a phone interview. “We want no one to raise an issue, so we’ll redo the work to make sure it’s done without any doubt at all.”
The state’s largest city was already under intense focus with this election after Donald Trump made false claims about what he called a “vote dump” in Milwaukee as central count completed its work in November 2020 in the early hours the day after the election.
Fleming said it would be “wild speculation” to estimate when the city would complete counting votes after starting over with the 31,000 absentee ballots.
State GOP Chair Brian Schimming said Republicans were gathering information on the situation, and it was part of why they put so much emphasis on having observers in place.
“I’m happy when it’s open and we have transparency and these issues get resolved,” Schimming said. “We’ll have folks on hand to make sure things get resolved.”
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