BREAKING: A “Human Error” in Milwaukee After Midnight Caused…

Election night chaos returned to Milwaukee this week after officials admitted that five of the nine USB drives used to transfer critical absentee ballot results were missing the actual vote data, delaying final results in Wisconsin’s Democratic primary for governor and once again raising uncomfortable questions about the reliability of election administration in America’s most scrutinized swing state.

The blunder unfolded shortly before midnight as Milwaukee election workers attempted to deliver absentee ballot totals from the city’s central counting facility to the Milwaukee County Election Commission. Instead of vote results, five of the nine flash drives contained nothing but audit logs, essentially useless data that provided no insight into how the ballots had actually been cast.

Milwaukee Election Commission Executive Director Paulina Gutierrez was left to explain the mess to a room full of reporters and a national television audience already on edge watching the tight Democratic primary for governor between Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley and progressive state Representative Francesca Hong.

“As part of the download process, there are two things: there’s the audit log and the results,” Gutierrez told reporters. “What we uncovered was that five of the sticks had the audit log downloaded and not the results. It’s a human error. These things can happen.”

Gutierrez went on to explain that officials would need to return to the operations center and redo the download process for the five affected tabulators, comparing the newly extracted results against previously printed reports to verify accuracy before the numbers could be trusted and released to the public.

The explanation, while technically plausible, did little to reassure an already skeptical public. Wisconsin election observer Alexander Shur reported that officials managed to extract results from some of the tabulators in as little as three minutes, a timeframe that election experts say should not be possible given the normal complexity of the download process. That detail alone has fueled further questions about exactly what went wrong and whether the explanation offered by officials tells the full story.

The delay proved consequential well beyond mere inconvenience. NBC News cut away from its live election night coverage as anchor Steve Kornacki, visibly caught off guard, was forced to end the network’s tracking of the race because Milwaukee’s numbers simply were not available. Reporters described Kornacki as speechless when informed that a major American city could not produce accurate results at the most basic level of data transfer.

Making matters worse for Democrats, the missing data emerged from precincts on Milwaukee’s Riverwest and East Side, areas that were not directly impacted by the USB issue but which had heavily favored Hong, the more progressive candidate in the race. Hong had led Crowley by more than 20 points in pre election polling, yet by the time full results were finally tabulated, Crowley had narrowly pulled ahead and won the primary.

That sudden and dramatic overnight shift, combined with the unexplained data disappearance, immediately sparked speculation online about whether the glitch was truly an innocent mistake or something more deliberate. While no evidence has emerged to substantiate claims of intentional manipulation, the optics could hardly be worse for an election commission already carrying significant baggage from past controversies.

This is far from the first time Milwaukee’s handling of USB drives and election night procedures has drawn scrutiny. During the 2020 presidential election, then Milwaukee Election Commission Executive Director Claire Woodall-Vogg misplaced a flash drive containing critical absentee ballot results in the middle of the night, precisely as the city was reporting a massive wave of ballots that ultimately helped deliver Wisconsin to Joe Biden. Officials at the time insisted the drive had never actually been lost, but the episode left a lasting mark on public trust in the city’s election operations.

More recently, in 2024, Milwaukee election workers left tabulator doors unlocked and unsealed for hours while processing tens of thousands of absentee ballots. City officials again chalked the failure up to human error and, out of what they described as an abundance of caution, zeroed out the affected machines and reran more than 30,000 ballots from scratch, pushing final results deep into the early morning hours.

Different election, different personnel, different specific procedural failure. Yet the pattern remains strikingly consistent. Same city, same late-night uncertainty, and the same reassurances from officials that nothing was seriously wrong.

A local alderman, attempting to calm public concern, insisted that the Milwaukee Election Commission has been and will continue to be transparent about its processes. He added that the incident should serve as a reminder for the state legislature to revisit rules around when absentee ballots can begin being processed, an implicit acknowledgment that current procedures leave far too much room for error on election night itself.

Election security advocates were less charitable in their assessment. Critics point out that repeated failures, even if each one is individually explainable as human error, add up to a systemic problem. When a city cannot reliably transfer already tabulated results from a machine to a USB drive without major mishaps on a near-annual basis, voters are right to ask whether more fundamental changes to procedure, training, or oversight are needed.

Conservative commentators were quick to draw a contrast with countries like Argentina, where single paper ballots are hand counted and full results are typically reported within three hours of polls closing. The suggestion is not necessarily that America should adopt an identical system, but that there is no excuse for a modern American city with access to sophisticated tabulation equipment to repeatedly bungle something as basic as transferring a results file onto a flash drive.

Milwaukee County uses ES&S voting systems for its operations, relying on models including the DS950, DS450, and DS850 for processing mail and absentee ballots, according to data compiled by VerifiedVoting.org. These are widely used systems across the country, which raises the question of whether the failure was specific to Milwaukee’s training and procedures or reflects a broader vulnerability in how these machines are operated on election night.

For now, officials maintain that no ballots were lost and that the underlying vote totals were always recoverable, simply delayed by the mix up over which files had been copied onto the drives. Gutierrez emphasized that there were no machine malfunctions, only a mistake in which button was pressed during the export process.