Here & Now

Alexander Shur on Vote Tabulation and Reporting in Wisconsin

Zac Schultz:
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 to process 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 Shur, a reporter with Votebeat, watched the scene unfold and he joins us now. Thanks for your time today.

Alexander Shur:
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Zac Schultz:
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 went wrong and what you were seeing as it happened.

Alexander Shur:
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 ten minutes per tabulator. It adds a lot of time at the end of the night, but it also ensures uniformity. And what we saw on Tuesday was it took about ten 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 into teams. So it went from what I had gotten used to as 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 went from 10 minutes to three minutes was they were clicking the wrong button. They were not downloading election results from five of the nine tabulators at the city absentee ballot processing center.

Zac Schultz:
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?

Alexander Shur:
That’s exactly right. And I think they saw it as, you know, a way for the city or the state to rig the gubernatorial primary against Francesca Hong, no matter that Crowley was on top, you know, before this so-called ballot dump, no matter that their, you know, ballot images and audit logs and a paper trail tracking every single one of these ballots. You know, I’ve been saying, for better or worse, what happened was evidence that elections are run by humans and sometimes they make mistakes when you know they’re on a lack of sleep, or there’s not the checklist that should be guiding them in front of them.

Zac Schultz:
So many have been calling for a change in state law that would allow Milwaukee and other central count 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 has 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 more questions?

Alexander Shur:
I mean, I think a really common rebuttal for past legislative efforts to pass this Monday processing bill, was this talking point about among Republican legislators that we can’t trust Milwaukee with an extra day if they’re only making errors on, you know, 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 count. So as you pointed out, you have Scott Krug, 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 have this state legislators looking at the city as a flawed election jurisdiction at the same time that the city is asking for more time to count and process ballots.

Zac Schultz:
Yeah, and just a few seconds left. But give me a sense of what it’s going to look like in November, because I know this is the city of Milwaukee, but people are going to conflate David Crowley as the Milwaukee County executive, any late-night balloting totals coming in are going to have even more scrutiny in the fall, right?

Alexander Shur:
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 if Crowley emerges as the candidate. So I think all of the pressure is on them to run this flawlessly in November.

Zac Schultz:
All right. Alexander Shur with Votebeat. Thanks for your time today.

Alexander Shur:
Of course. Thanks for having me.