Milwaukee Election Commission Executive Director Paulina Gutiérrez addressed a “human error” that delayed reporting of the city’s absentee ballot results on primary election night but offered no actual explanation for it during an appearance on WISN-TV’s “UpFront” on Sunday.
In her first televised interview since the Aug. 11 incident, Gutiérrez emphasized that the mistake did not affect the accuracy or integrity of the vote totals; only the timing of when results were publicly reported.
“The most important thing that I want voters to understand is that this had absolutely no impact on the accuracy of the election results,” she said. “It had an impact on when those results were posted.”
The error occurred after staff members at the city’s central count facility finished processing absentee ballots. Officials are responsible for downloading results from nine tabulator machines onto secure flash drives, which are then transported to the Milwaukee County Election Commission at the county courthouse for uploading and reporting.
On election night, a staff member mistakenly downloaded audit logs instead of the actual vote tallies from five of the nine machines. Once the problem was identified at the courthouse, city officials returned to the central count location under police escort to retrieve the correct data, causing a delay of roughly one to 90 minutes and pushing final results into the early morning hours of August 12.
“I can’t get into someone’s head, but what I know is that we’re learning from this mistake and making enhancements so that it doesn’t happen again,” Gutiérrez said, adding that the commission plans several improvements to the tabulation process.
“At the end of the day, the buck stops with me as the executive director, and so my job is to make sure that people are ready,” Gutiérrez said.
She notably declined to discuss why the employee responsible for the mistake is not being punished or disciplined in any way. She also indicated that the Milwaukee Election Commission would cooperate with any investigations by local or state lawmakers.
On Friday, Wisconsin Assembly Campaigns and Elections Committee Chair Dave Maxey demanded answers from Gutiérrez, giving her 30 days to respond to detailed questions about the incident, which was the third major failure at Milwaukee’s central count facility in the past six years.
In 2020, former Milwaukee Election Commission director Claire Woodall forgot a flash drive containing thousands of votes and had to send Milwaukee Police officers back to the central count facility to retrieve it. During the 2024 presidential election, observers at central count noticed several tabulators left unlocked and open when the facility opened the morning of election day. More than 30,000 votes had to be recounted.
