DEMOCRAT ELECTION CONTROVERSY ERUPTS AFTER EYE-OPENING VIDEO SURFACES

Milwaukee’s ‘Human Error’ Delayed Thousands of Votes—But There Is No Evidence the Count Changed

Milwaukee election officials made a mistake on primary night.

There is little dispute about that.

Five of nine USB flash drives used to transfer absentee-vote results from Milwaukee’s Central Count facility arrived without the vote totals election officials expected.

Instead, the drives contained audit logs from the tabulators.

The mistake sent election workers back to Central Count after midnight, delayed the release of thousands of absentee votes and prolonged uncertainty in an extremely close Democratic race for governor.

But what happened next is where two very different stories began to emerge.

One is a legitimate argument about election-worker training, procedures and why the same export mistake happened on five separate machines.

The other is a claim that the delay showed votes were manipulated or fraudulent.

The evidence available so far supports the first concern.

It does not support the second.

Milwaukee Election Commission Executive Director Paulina Gutiérrez described the incident as “human error” after officials discovered the problem late on August 11.

“We’re all human, and humans can make errors,” she said during a news conference around midnight.

The technical mistake itself appears relatively straightforward.

Milwaukee processes its absentee ballots at a centralized location known as Central Count.

After tabulation, election workers export the results from individual tabulators onto USB flash drives so that those results can be transported and incorporated into the county’s reporting system.

On five of nine drives, an employee selected the wrong export option.

Instead of downloading the election-result files, the worker downloaded the machines’ audit logs.

Gutiérrez later described the problem even more simply.

The wrong button had been pressed.

That mistake mattered because Milwaukee’s outstanding absentee vote was being closely watched.

Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley and state Rep. Francesca Hong were locked in a remarkably tight Democratic gubernatorial primary.

Crowley ultimately prevailed and became the Democratic nominee, setting up a November contest against Republican Rep. Tom Tiffany.

But late Tuesday night, the race remained unresolved.

Milwaukee still had thousands of absentee votes to report.

Election officials initially said approximately 15,000 ballots remained outstanding when the USB problem was publicly disclosed.

Later local reporting placed the amount associated with the delayed results at roughly 28,000 absentee ballots.

Those numbers are sometimes presented as though officials changed their explanation of how many ballots existed.

That is not necessarily what happened.

The approximately 15,000 figure was given during the developing situation late Tuesday night as an estimate of ballots still awaiting reporting at that point.

Subsequent reporting described the broader batch of absentee results delayed by the five affected flash drives as roughly 28,000.

What is clear is that a substantial number of Milwaukee absentee results could not be reported when expected.

That was a serious operational problem in a close statewide primary.

It was not, according to the election commission, a problem with the underlying tabulation.

“The issue delayed the reporting of Milwaukee’s results, but it did not affect the results,” the Milwaukee Election Commission said in a statement quoted by Fox News.

The commission said the election results remained intact and unchanged on the tabulators.

No ballots were lost or changed.

And officials said none needed to be recounted or retabulated because of the USB mistake.

That distinction is the central fact of the episode.

There is a difference between counting votes and reporting results from that count.

The tabulators had already processed the ballots.

The mistake occurred when workers attempted to export the resulting data for transmission.

According to officials, the vote totals were still stored on the machines.

Election workers therefore did not return to Central Count to recount the ballots.

They returned to export the correct files.

Gutiérrez and other election staff went back to the facility with law enforcement present.

They downloaded the election-result files from the five affected machines and then returned the USB drives to county officials.

The corrected drives arrived back at the county operation at approximately 1:20 a.m.

Officials also had another safeguard available.

Gutiérrez said reports had been printed from the earlier process, allowing election workers to compare those reports with the newly exported results.

That gave officials a way to verify that the numbers being transferred from the tabulators were consistent with the previously generated records.

Once the corrected data arrived, Milwaukee’s absentee results were incorporated into the totals.

Crowley’s position strengthened.

The race was eventually called for him in the early morning hours Wednesday.

For election officials, that could have been the end of the immediate problem.

Politically, it was only the beginning.

The fact that five drives contained the wrong files quickly raised questions about how Milwaukee trains the workers responsible for exporting results.

Former Milwaukee election official Claire Woodall made that point directly.

“The fact that this happened five times seems more like a training issue,” Woodall told Votebeat, according to Fox News.

She questioned whether the person handling the exports had been adequately trained and was sufficiently familiar with the machines.

That criticism is difficult to dismiss as mere partisan suspicion.

One accidental export on one machine could be explained as an isolated mistake.

The same mistake occurring across five of nine drives naturally raises a procedural question.

Was one person responsible for all five exports?

Was there a checklist?

Was a second worker supposed to verify what had been downloaded before the drives left Central Count?

Could election software make the distinction between an audit-log export and a results export clearer?

And why was the problem not discovered until the drives had already been transported?

Those are legitimate election-administration questions.

Republican state Rep. Scott Krug said he planned to seek answers through the Wisconsin Assembly’s elections committee.

Krug said he wanted Milwaukee officials to submit an informational report explaining what happened and who was responsible.

His larger concern was preventing a similar mistake during the November general election, when Milwaukee’s results could again receive intense national attention.

Krug was highly critical of Milwaukee’s performance.

He called the incident the type of mistake that feeds conspiracy theories and questioned why election administrators could not consistently avoid such problems at Central Count.

But there is an important difference between saying an error creates distrust and saying the error proves fraud.

The first is a reasonable criticism of election administration.

The second requires evidence.

So far, none has emerged from this incident.

Wisconsin election officials say the tabulators themselves functioned properly.

The election-result data remained on the machines.

The wrong type of file was exported onto five USB drives.

Workers returned to the machines.

They exported the correct files.

The totals could then be checked against printed records.

That sequence explains a reporting delay without requiring ballots to have been added, removed or altered.

Wisconsin Elections Commission spokesperson Emilee Miklas emphasized that the state’s election system contains multiple layers of checks designed to catch precisely this type of mistake.

“While human mistake can happen,” she said, Wisconsin’s system includes local and state oversight intended to ensure mistakes are identified and corrected.

That does not mean election officials should treat the incident as harmless.

Election integrity involves more than whether the final number is correct.

Procedures matter.

Chain of custody matters.

Training matters.

Accurate public communication matters.

And in a close election, avoidable delays can create an information vacuum that rumors quickly fill.

Milwaukee experienced exactly that on August 11.

National television networks were waiting for the absentee vote.

The Democratic gubernatorial contest was still too close to comfortably project.

Then the USB drives arrived without the expected results.

NBC election analyst Steve Kornacki visibly expressed frustration during live coverage after learning that the long-awaited drives did not contain the vote totals broadcasters expected.

“We waited 90 minutes for them,” Kornacki said, according to Fox News, before criticizing officials for failing to have the needed data on the drives.

That frustration was understandable.

Election-night reporting depends on election administrators performing routine processes correctly and on media organizations receiving dependable information about when outstanding votes will arrive.

Milwaukee failed at that part of the process.

What it did not establish is that the ballots themselves had been compromised.

Milwaukee County Clerk George Christenson made that distinction after the corrected results arrived.

He emphasized transparency, security and the importance of acknowledging the mistake publicly.

Gutiérrez had explained the problem, workers returned for the correct data, and officials ultimately reported the results.

The controversy gained additional force because Milwaukee has dealt with flash-drive and tabulation-procedure mistakes before.

During the 2020 presidential election, Woodall, then Milwaukee’s chief election official, realized after transporting a group of flash drives that one containing absentee-vote totals had been left behind in a tabulator at Central Count.

A member of the election staff retrieved it.

A police officer then transported it to the county election operation.

That incident became the subject of claims that something suspicious had happened to Milwaukee’s absentee vote.

Contemporaneous reporting found otherwise.

Woodall said the drive had never been left unattended and remained within the custody of election staff or law enforcement.

The bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission said it had no reason to believe Milwaukee’s results had been compromised.

Wisconsin Watch reported that nothing indicated the contents of the drive had been altered.

The broader 2020 presidential election subsequently became the subject of widespread fraud allegations after Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump.

Federal and state election-security officials publicly rejected claims that voting systems had deleted votes, lost votes or changed the result.

In a November 12, 2020 joint statement, the federal Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council and related election-security organizations called the November 3 election “the most secure in American history” and said there was no evidence that voting systems had deleted, lost or changed votes or had otherwise been compromised.

That history helps explain why another Milwaukee USB problem immediately attracted national attention.

It does not prove that the 2026 incident was fraudulent.

Nor does the absence of evidence of fraud mean officials should dismiss criticism of their procedures.

Those are two separate questions.

On the first question—whether the August 11 error manipulated votes—the available evidence points in one direction.

Officials said it did not.

The vote totals remained on the tabulators.

No ballots had to be recounted or retabulated.

No evidence has emerged showing that ballots were altered or that the error changed Crowley’s margin over Hong.

On the second question—whether Milwaukee’s procedures were good enough—the answer is much less comfortable.

Five of nine drives contained the wrong files.

The mistake was not detected before those drives left Central Count.

Election personnel had to return to the facility after midnight.

A major statewide race remained unresolved while the correction was made.

And the error occurred in a jurisdiction where election administration already receives extraordinary political scrutiny.

That creates a legitimate case for examining training and verification procedures.

A simple second-person check before a flash drive leaves Central Count might be one possibility.

Clearer written procedures could be another.

The important point is that safeguards should be aimed at the problem that actually occurred.

The evidence presently identifies that problem as a data-export mistake.

Not a tabulator failure.

Not disappearing ballots.

Not changed vote totals.

And not demonstrated election fraud.

Crowley ultimately won the Democratic gubernatorial nomination and will face Republican Rep. Tom Tiffany in November.

The political significance of the primary therefore moved on quickly.

The administrative significance should not.

Milwaukee officials now have a chance to determine why an apparently simple export error happened five times and why existing checks failed to catch it before election personnel transported the drives.

Republicans are justified in demanding an explanation.

Election officials are justified in pointing out that the ballots and vote totals remained intact.

Both things can be true at the same time.

That is the more useful lesson from Milwaukee’s latest election-night mistake.

Calling every procedural failure fraud without evidence weakens the distinction between incompetence and actual manipulation.

But treating a preventable election-administration mistake as insignificant simply because the final count was unaffected would be a mistake of its own.

The August 11 incident delayed tens of thousands of absentee-vote results during one of the closest races of the night.

It frustrated journalists.

It invited political criticism.

And it gave election skeptics another event to scrutinize.

What it has not produced is evidence that somebody changed the election.

So the question Milwaukee now has to answer is not whether thousands of votes mysteriously appeared after midnight.

Officials have explained where the votes were: their results remained stored on the tabulators while workers had accidentally exported the wrong files.