The tabulator told them exactly what they were doing. Nobody read it.
Video obtained by CBS 58’s A.J. Bayatpour, published Thursday, captured the moment Milwaukee elections staff botched the city’s primary night count. The screen is not ambiguous. Across the top: “Export Audit Log.” In the dialog box below: “Exporting Audit Log.” Timestamped 10:16 p.m., Aug. 11. A worker had to press “confirm” to proceed.
That same situation happened on five of the city’s nine high-speed tabulators during Tuesday night’s election count.
The footage undercuts the Milwaukee Election Commission’s central defense. In a written Q&A this week, the commission said the error could not have been caught sooner because everything downloaded from the tabulators is encrypted and readable only at the county courthouse. “There is no opportunity for MEC staff to double-check or verify the contents of the flash drives,” it wrote. True of the drives. Not true of the screen announcing what was being written to them.
The screen itself announced exactly what was being written to the drives. The commission’s own public explainer even draws the distinction staff somehow missed: an audit log “documents activity and events that occur on the machine. It is not the file containing election results.”
The result was roughly 15,000 absentee ballots’ worth of results stranded at Central Count while officials arrived at the courthouse with the wrong files. A police-escorted return trip was required to retrieve the correct files. The delay pushed the reporting of Milwaukee’s decisive absentee count past 1 a.m. in a Democratic governor’s primary ultimately decided by roughly 3,000 votes.
This is not a minor clerical mix-up. It is a basic failure of process in the state’s largest and most Democratic jurisdiction — the same jurisdiction whose late-night results repeatedly shape statewide outcomes. When the machines literally tell operators they are exporting the wrong file and operators confirm it anyway, claims of sophisticated encryption protocols ring hollow.
Wisconsin voters have watched Milwaukee election administration face scrutiny for years. Clear on-screen instructions ignored on more than half the high-speed tabulators only deepens the credibility problem. In a state where margins are routinely measured in the low thousands, basic competence at Central Count is not optional.
The primary is over. The questions about how Milwaukee counts its votes are not.
