The seals were discovered broken on multiple tabulator machines this afternoon at Milwaukee’s Central Count, resulting in Milwaukee having to zero out and recount tens of thousands of absentee ballots, Milwaukee GOP Chairman Hilario Deleon and GOP Election Observer Jefferson Davis told WRN.
“The seals are broken,” Deleon said. “It’s a huge red flag. It should not have happened.” We asked Deleon to explain what he meant specifically by the seals being “broken.” He told us the seals weren’t ripped or torn. But they were “hanging off” machines and were no longer sealing the doors. He said that he interprets that as broken seals. He provided the photos throughout this story.
Deleon said Paulina Gutierrez, Milwaukee Election Commission Executive Director resealed the machines with Deleon watching as an election observer.
“She looked like she was going to have a nervous breakdown,” Deleon said of Gutierrez, when she learned of the seal issue. “She was very transparent. She said, ‘We have to fix this right away.’”
Jeff Fleming a spokesman for the mayor, told WISN-TV that the doors were not closed properly.
“We are going to zero them all out again, 13 machines around, and then rerun the ballots that had already been processed,” he told the site. “It is going to extend the time that we will get the totals. We don’t know how much longer.” That affects approximately 30,000 ballots.
The Milwaukee Election Commission issued a statement saying leadership “was alerted to an issue with the tabulator doors being fully in place. Each machine has a door that should have been locked and sealed. It appears some doors were not fully secured by senior election officials. The city of Milwaukee has no doubt regarding the integrity of the election.”
The statement continued: “However, in order to eliminate any doubt to be fully transparent, the MEC has decided to start the tabulation process over for all ballots at Central Count. This decision was made in consultation with both Republican and Democratic officials. Approximately 31,000 ballots will be retabulated. As a result, the final count will be delayed. There is no estimate as to how long of a delay there will be. There is no higher priority than the accuracy of Milwaukee’s election results.”
Jefferson Davis, a GOP election observer at Milwaukee’s Central Count, told Wisconsin Right Now that he personally observed the seals. He said that 13 machines were affected.
Davis said he was told Milwaukee won’t have its absentee ballots counted now until 2 or 3 a.m. He told us that the “seals were broken or compromised. But some of them were clearly broken. Some of them, the door was open, which pushed the seal off the tabulators, but the seal was not cracked or ripped off.”
But he said some of the machines’ seals WERE cracked or ripped off, estimating that was about half of them. Davis said he personally saw them himself.
He said GOP election observers had watched in the morning as the election officials put the red bar-coded seals on the machines and “locked the doors.” Later in the day, “one of the observers came to me and said these doors are open,” he said, and they confirmed that. He said there were security cameras so they will be able to figure out what happened. He said officials zeroed the machines out and are now “starting from scratch.”
He said Gutierrez was “absolutely upset. She resealed them.” He isn’t worried this will affect the vote count because they are starting over.
Laurie O’Brien Wolf, a GOP Assembly candidate who is in close contact with election observers told WRN. “All tabulators are being zeroed out because of the seal issue. All counting will start over.”
She said she learned this from an election observer and added that, by afternoon, only 14,500 of the Milwaukee absentee ballots had been counted out of more than 100,000. “Some tabulators have been jamming and some don’t have wards to tabulate,” she added. “They should have been way farther ahead.”
We have calls/emails out to Gutierrez and Fleming, the spokesman for the city. The woman who answered the phone at the Milwaukee Election Commission, who gave her name as only Jane, told us, “There shouldn’t be a broken seal until the end.”
“The tabulation machines where the ballots are run through – on each side of the machine there are little glass doors with locks and seals with serial numbers. Those have to be closed at the end of the night,” Deleon explained. There weren’t flash drives in the machines yet, he said. However, the machine seals protect the hard drive ports where flash drives are inserted to get the count so it can be brought to the courthouse at the end of the day.
He said election observers in the morning watched as the machines were sealed, and it’s not clear what happened. But he doesn’t think the seal issue caused any issues with correct vote counts. Rather he said it’s slowed the process.
“The count here is unbelievably slow,” he said.
“Imagine a door being closed on the machine. So they have this red sticker with a bar code on it and a serial number. Half is over the glass door part, and the other part is on the machine. The doors were open and there were openings,” Deleon said.
“The sticker was still sticking on the glass door but was not attached to the machine. Some of the doors were wide open. Some were partly on the door and machine but there was a crack in the door. They weren’t cut. All the stickers were whole. They were just hanging onto the glass. I look at that as broken because they were just hanging off and they weren’t sealed. She (Milwaukee Election Commission Executive Director Paulina Gutierrez) had to put new seals on,” Deleon said.
Deleon said he doesn’t think they were bad seals because other seals were fine. “It’s not the seals.”
