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.
Walking down Milwaukee’s Brady Street nightlife district on Oct. 23, near hundreds of rowdy fans cheering on the Brewers in Game 1 of the World Series, Wisconsin Elections Commission appointee Bob Spindell raised a topic that’s often on his mind: his distrust in the city’s election operations.
Spindell — a former Milwaukee election commissioner who signed false certificates of election for President Donald Trump in 2020 — told Votebeat that he had been trying to make a $100 bet that something would go wrong with the city’s 2026 election, but nobody would take him up on his offer.
His faith in the city had not improved by Monday, as he followed Milwaukee officials leading a walkthrough of the facility where all its absentee ballots would be counted the following day. “I assume something will go wrong tomorrow,” he told Votebeat.
Spindell would have won his bet.
Not long after polls opened on Tuesday, officials discovered that a tabulator — which hadn’t counted any ballots yet — lacked a proper security seal over a panel door. A couple of hours later, officials realized that two election workers hadn’t written unique identifying numbers on the back of 242 ballots that can be used to tie the ballot back to a voter, as required by state law in some municipalities. As officials discussed what to do in that situation, another problem arose: Two tabulators weren’t accepting large batches of ballots. Later in the night, a tabulator spat out error messages after officials tried downloading results from it.
Some of these issues, like the tabulators not accepting large batches of ballots, aren’t terribly unusual in a city with a massive election operation. But an unsealed tabulator and election workers forgetting to write poll numbers on hundreds of ballots are the exact sorts of mistakes Milwaukee officials have been trying to avoid. Despite efforts to work out the kinks in the city’s heavily scrutinized election process, officials there have committed a steady stream of errors in recent years that have contributed to a culture of mistrust.
Milwaukee’s defenders say Republicans have blown the mistakes out of proportion — and that they only care about them when they want to scapegoat the city for the GOP’s losses. But more neutral observers are concerned about them, too. While some errors are inevitable, experts say a pattern of problems may point to the need for additional oversight.
“If there are repeated errors, investigation is necessary to determine the actual root cause,” said Chris Piper, the former top election official in Virginia and co-founder of the election administration consulting group Advance Elections.
Errors are often part of the election process, officials say
Going into Election Day, Milwaukee election chief Paulina Gutiérrez downplayed the degree to which human errors undermined the city’s overall election process. She argued that redundancies in the system ensure that small missteps don’t become catastrophes.
“Humans can make mistakes,” she said. “That’s why there’s multiple layers and levels and paper trails to ensure that the accuracy and the security of the election isn’t tampered with.”
On Tuesday, she noted that the 242 ballots missing numbers still got counted.
“We processed those ballots because they are legitimate ballots,” Gutiérrez told reporters at a press conference. “Those are eligible voters. It was a clerical error, and we have a way to track those ballots if we need to.”
Ann Jacobs, a Democratic appointee on the Wisconsin Elections Commission who is typically at Milwaukee’s central count operation on Election Day, argued that the error was not the sign of a larger problem.
“Small errors are going to happen,” Jacobs said. “If you’ve got 100 or 150 people who have been trained to process absentee ballots, and two people at one table mess up, your training’s still really good.”
Kathy Boockvar, a former Pennsylvania secretary of state, said issues like the ones in Milwaukee often result from election offices not having enough resources.
“When we don’t fund any program area with sufficient resources to carry them out well, you end up with a situation like I’m sure Milwaukee has — like probably most jurisdictions in this country — where election officials are underfunded and understaffed,” she said. “Their equipment is outdated, their training is outdated, and they’re working as hard as they possibly can to do a job that’s actually a lot harder and a lot more complicated than it used to be.”
“The voters deserve an effective, efficient system of voting operations,” she continued. “That has a much better chance of happening if we fund it sufficiently.”
In Pennsylvania, she said, the secretary of state’s office would review errors as a matter of course, working with local election officials to improve operations.
Boockvar declined to speculate on the cause or severity of the errors in Milwaukee, noting she is not familiar enough with Wisconsin’s laws or the details of Tuesday’s incidents, but she said if a Pennsylvania jurisdiction had repeat issues, she would have reviewed them with local officials to make sure they don’t happen again.
In Wisconsin, WEC has the authority to investigate municipalities’ election operations if it has concerns. But Jacobs said WEC has had no reason to investigate Milwaukee so far because the city has addressed its errors.
“You can’t fix what you don’t know is a problem, and when something is shown to be a problem, you create a fix,” she said. “And in Milwaukee, they’ve done a good job of isolating and identifying the problem and fixing it.”
Unlike other municipalities WEC has investigated, she added, the errors in Milwaukee haven’t been shrouded in mystery. The commission investigated Madison to uncover how 193 ballots went missing in 2024, never to be counted, and how Green Bay sent duplicate absentee ballots to voters two elections in a row.
“We only do investigations when we don’t know the answer to what happened,” Jacobs said.
Problems beget criticism, and critics beget problems
Milwaukee’s history of errors — combined with its status as a racially diverse source of Democratic votes in an otherwise white, rural state — has made the city a target for Republicans who suspect its elections are not totally above board. But the expectation for election officials to be perfect actually makes their lives harder, experts said.
“This increased scrutiny certainly adds pressure to the individuals administering the elections, and therefore increases the chances for errors when you have overworked election administrators,” Piper said.
Some of Milwaukee’s critics were at its central counting facility on Tuesday. One was Janel Brandtjen, a former state legislator who was chair of the Assembly Election Committee following the 2020 election, when she endorsed Trump’s false contention that the election was stolen and tried to decertify Wisconsin’s results.
Brandtjen has an unusual reason to be skeptical about Milwaukee. In 2022, a Milwaukee deputy clerk who no longer works at the city ordered three military absentee ballots using fake names and sent the ballots to Brandtjen’s house, an effort that the former deputy described as an attempt to expose flaws in the election system. The deputy clerk, Kimberly Zapata, was sentenced to probation.
“The deputy clerk made up ballot names and sent them to my house,” Brandtjen said Tuesday of her trust in Milwaukee elections. “I mean, that should say everything you need to know, right? That alone. And what does that say about the system?”
Milwaukee spokesperson Caroline Reinwald said Zapata’s actions constituted “a serious violation of public trust.”
“That employee was investigated, terminated and ultimately convicted,” she said. “However, one individual’s misconduct four years ago should not be used to suggest broader or ongoing problems with Milwaukee’s elections without evidence to support that claim.”
Amid blowout loss, skeptics left before officials conducted most scrutinized process
Around 11 p.m. on election night, poll workers at Milwaukee’s central count operation finished tabulating the city’s 60,000 absentee ballots. The next step was to download the results from the tabulators onto thumb drives to deliver them to the county.
This is the most scrutinized election process in Milwaukee — and one that has often broken down. In 2020, the chief official briefly forgot one thumb drive at central count after leaving for the county clerk’s office. In this year’s August primary, officials extracted the wrong files from several tabulators but didn’t realize it until they got to the county clerk’s office, a mistake that ended up delaying results by well over an hour.
Both incidents led to an explosion of conspiracy theories. Now, during that extraction process, GOP observers frequently follow Milwaukee election officials from tabulator to tabulator, watching for anything suspicious.
By the time officials began that process on Tuesday, though, those Republicans had left the facility. At that point, it was clear that Republicans were falling far short in critical statewide races. It was also abundantly clear that Milwaukee’s absentee results wouldn’t determine the outcome of the election, barring something extraordinary.
Spindell, who wanted to bet on a Milwaukee mishap, was long gone, as were Brandtjen and a man who heckled Gutiérrez, telling her around 7 p.m. that she wasn’t properly deleting files off the hard drives that would be used to download election results. Other GOP observers, like attorney Dan Eastman, who represented plaintiffs trying to overturn the 2020 election in Wisconsin, and Jefferson Davis, a former Menomonee Falls village president and conservative election activist who has promoted conspiracy theories, had left the building.
Had they been there, they would have witnessed yet another innocuous error that could have been twisted into a conspiracy theory.
One of the city’s 10 absentee-ballot tabulators showed an error message right after officials downloaded results onto the thumb drive. Unsure whether that drive contained the results, Gutiérrez decided to download the results onto an extra thumb drive and segregate it from the others, in case the original didn’t work. County officials said that Election Systems & Software, the company that manufactured the tabulator, would be looking into the issue.
Asked about conspiracy theorists leaving early, Jacobs, the Wisconsin Elections Commission member, wasn’t surprised.
“For some of those folks, it’s representative of a bad faith effort on their part,” she said. “For others, they may just be following the lead of the people who are in charge, who’ve told them it doesn’t matter anymore.”
As Milwaukee County officials uploaded election results just before 1 a.m., with just under 60,000 absentee votes from the city that swung heavily Democratic, County Clerk George Christensen acknowledged that the pressure was off, since Republican gubernatorial candidate U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany had admitted defeat hours before.
“It’s somewhat nice that it doesn’t have to all come down to the city of Milwaukee — waiting for those results,” he said. “Of course, those ballots and votes are important, but it was kind of a little bit less pressure for us here. It takes a little pressure off my staff, which makes me happy.”
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.
