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About
WEC Meeting on Monday
The Wisconsin Elections Commission meets Monday, August 31, 2026, at 10:00 a.m. by video teleconference only to consider formal action on Milwaukee’s August 11–12 central-count failure; the third high-profile tabulator problem at the city’s absentee operation in recent cycles.
(Click HERE for meeting details and to see how you can provide comment and watch the meeting).
What The Commission Is Being Asked To Do
Staff prepared a draft letter asking the Milwaukee Election Commission to release audit logs, spell out training changes before November, and show the public how results will be exported correctly next time. Commissioners can send the letter as written, expand it to demand more records, or decline to send it. That letter is the floor, not the ceiling. Voters should also tell the commission and the Legislature to end central count and send mail-in ballots back to the wards where those voters live.
The draft letter addresses the night staff downloaded audit logs instead of unofficial results from five of nine tabulators, delaying Milwaukee’s unofficial totals by about 90 minutes. WEC staff note they are unaware of compromised tallies, but say delays still undermine confidence. “Fair or unfair, the eyes of the nation are often on Milwaukee,” the draft states, “and providing transparency into the system, especially when a mistake occurs, is a critical service to the voters of our state.”
The letter asks Milwaukee to:
A second option is to amend the letter and demand additional primary-source records, including inspectors’ statements and reconciliation worksheets. Milwaukee has told at least one requester that producing related records could take “several weeks to months.”
Those steps treat symptoms. The structure is the disease: one warehouse, nine machines, one late-night USB run, and the whole city’s absentee vote, and sometimes a statewide race waiting on whether someone pressed the right button.
Krug: Hearing If Answers Don’t Come
Rep. Scott Krug, R-Rome, vice chair of the Assembly Committee on Campaigns and Elections, said on WISN 12’s UpFront that lawmakers will hold a hearing if Milwaukee cannot explain how staff exported audit logs five times instead of vote totals — and what will be different in November.
“The point is, I want to know that we’re ready for November. So if it takes more training, more input from stakeholders to say okay this is how we can do things better, that’s great. But I still need to see some accountability and less incompetence,” Krug said. “Who, what, where, when, why and how and what’s going to be better? If they’re not going to be more forthcoming directly with us, then yes, we should have a hearing.”
Krug, who has backed allowing clerks to begin processing absentees the day before Election Day, said Milwaukee’s repeated personnel and process problems make that case harder: a new timeline will not work “until we have the training down pat.”
Maxey’s 30-day Demand
Committee Chair Dave Maxey, R-New Berlin, sent Executive Director Paulina Gutiérrez an August 21 letter calling the night “a travesty” and listing three failures: a flash drive left behind in 2020, unlocked tabulator doors that forced a recount of about 31,000 ballots in 2024, and the 2026 export error. “Three strikes is not bad luck, but rather a pattern of mismanagement,” he wrote.
He asked for a timestamped account from the decision to leave the facility to discovery that five tabulators had not been exported; whether the post-2020 checklist was followed and who enforced it; a 10-year list of similar errors and why prior fixes failed; training and certification of the staff involved; which municipalities’ ballots go through central count and in what volume; whether smaller batches or isolating Milwaukee ballots would reduce risk; whether she supports an independent review including the WEC or, if warranted, the FBI; and what the state can provide in resources or statute. He demanded a written response within 30 days, an on-the-record committee briefing, and said that if she cannot fix the operation she should resign.
What Happened August 11–12
After roughly 15 hours of absentee processing, staff left Milwaukee’s central count facility around 11:10 p.m. without exporting unofficial results from five of nine tabulators. They had downloaded audit logs onto those flash drives instead. County staff found the error when they tried to upload results at the courthouse. City officials returned under police escort and re-exported the files. Officials say the results themselves remained intact on the machines; no ballots were lost, changed, or retabulated. Encrypted files could only be opened at the county courthouse, so staff could not inspect the drives before leaving. The city reported 27,268 absentee ballots returned of 33,276 issued.
That volume makes the length of the night harder to excuse. Milwaukee’s August primary absentee load, about 27,200 returned ballots, was roughly one-quarter of what the same central-count operation handled in the November 2024 general election, when the city tabulated about 108,300 absentees and still did not deliver USB drives to the county courthouse until about 3:15 a.m. It was about one-sixth of the roughly 169,000 absentee ballots Milwaukee received in November 2020.
In other words, a low-turnout partisan primary produced a 15-hour processing day plus a police-escorted return trip over a fraction of the ballots November will bring. If exporting results from nine machines cannot be finished correctly on a 27,000-ballot night, the question hanging over Monday’s WEC meeting is how the same office plans to finish a general election three to four times larger without another national delay.
Paulina Gutiérrez, executive director of the City of Milwaukee Election Commission, the official who runs the city’s elections office and its central-count operation, has called the delay human error. She said the wrong button was pressed and that accuracy was never at risk, only posting time. “Our teams are trained; they had written instructions with them; they had done it before, and unfortunately the mistakes still happened. I can’t get into someone’s head, but what I know is that we’re learning from this mistake and making enhancements so it doesn’t happen again.” She said the buck stops with her. Planned changes include screenshots on instruction sheets, pre-election team briefings, a public-testing demonstration, and “point-and-call” verbal verification of each step. She said she would welcome investigation. Mayor Cavalier Johnson has said no one will be fired and called it a training opportunity.
On UpFront, Gutiérrez, the Milwaukee Election Commission executive director appointed in 2024, also defended keeping central count. She argued that dismantling it would create security and resource problems and that tens of thousands of uncounted absentees would otherwise move around the city all day. That is an argument for convenience and staffing. It is not an argument that the current model has earned public trust. Three cycles, three tabulator-class failures, same facility.
Spindell put it on the agenda first
WEC Commissioner Bob Spindell was the first to call for a commission-level look. Shortly after midnight on August 12 he posted:
“Too many problems again with Milwaukee Central Count -2020, 2024 and now 2026. I call on the Wisconsin Election Commission Chair to place Milwaukee Central Count on the next Wisconsin Election Commission Agenda for possible investigation.”
He was interviewed that day by WISN and WTMJ and later appeared on Vicki McKenna’s program. That item is now before the commission.
Ban central count. Send mail ballots back to the wards.
Screenshots on a checklist will not fix a system that piles every absentee ballot in the state’s largest city into one room, runs them on a handful of machines, and then asks a small team, late at night, after 15 hours, to export the entire city on flash drives. That design turns ordinary human error into a citywide, then statewide, event.
Processing mail-in and other absentee ballots at the voter’s own ward does the opposite.
It shrinks the blast radius. On August 11, one wrong button on five of nine machines held up unofficial results for the whole city and left a gubernatorial primary hanging on national television. In a ward model, a mistake at one polling place is a mistake at one polling place. The other wards still report. There is no single USB run that can freeze 27,000 primary ballots, or 108,000, in a November general.
It replaces one exhausted night shift with parallel, smaller jobs. Wisconsin law already bars opening absentees before 7 a.m. Election Day. Central count then tries to do in one warehouse what hundreds of polling places already do for Election Day votes: inspect, process, tabulate, and close. Spreading returned mail ballots back to their wards means each site handles a few dozen or a few hundred envelopes, not tens of thousands. Fewer machines per site. Fewer memory devices. Fewer people who have to remember which on-screen option is “results” and which is “audit log” after midnight.
It matches how in-person votes already work — the process voters already understand. Election Day ballots are counted where they are cast, in front of inspectors from both parties and neighbors who can walk in and watch. Central count asks the public to trust a distant facility, a police-escorted van, and encrypted sticks that cannot even be checked before they leave the building. Returning absentees to the ward puts mail voters on the same visible path as precinct voters: same inspectors, same poll book logic, same posted results tape.
It makes observation real. A handful of party observers cannot meaningfully watch nine tabulators, thousands of envelopes, and a closing checklist in a warehouse the size of Milwaukee’s operation. They can watch a ward. Residents can watch their own polling place. When something goes wrong, the public can see which ward, which machine, and which inspectors, not a citywide fog labeled “human error.”
It ends the “ballot dump” that feeds suspicion even when the tally is honest. Officials are correct that a late Milwaukee dump does not by itself prove fraud. They are wrong if they think repeating it every cycle builds confidence. People see one city report last, after everyone else, after a scramble, after a prior flash-drive incident and a prior unlocked-door recount. Ward-level reporting posts results as each location finishes, the way the rest of the state already does. No single 90-minute hole for the country to stare into.
Milwaukee’s own numbers show why waiting for “more training” is not enough. This was not a presidential-year crush. It was a primary with about 27,200 returned absentees, a quarter of November 2024, a sixth of November 2020, and the close still broke. November will be larger. Training the same bottleneck harder does not make it smaller.
Gutiérrez, as Milwaukee’s top election official, is right about one thing: ending central count takes planning, staff, and statute. That is a reason to start now, not a reason to keep the model that has failed in 2020, 2024, and 2026. Ban central count. Require returned mail ballots to be sent to the voter’s ward for processing and tabulation. Put absentee votes where Election Day votes already are: in public, in pieces small enough that a wrong button cannot halt a city.
Call to Action
Submit commits to the Wisconsin Elections Commission requesting that they take strong and decisive action that will restore voter confidence. The long-term goal: abolish central count and return mail-in ballots to their wards.
Competence and transparency, not just an unchanged tally, are what rebuild trust. A fourth cycle of the same class of error will not be an accident, and another checklist at the same warehouse is not a solution.
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