(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) With flashbacks to Wisconsin’s notorious 2020 election graph undoubtedly returning to the minds of many skeptics and integrity watchdogs, the city of Milwaukee was one of the first out of the gate to encounter a significant “irregularity” on Tuesday.
The city, which played host earlier this year to the Republican National Convention, revealed that it wound need to recount about 30,000 absentee ballots after a Republican election observer flagged an improperly closed panel on an election tabulator.
BREAKING: The city of Milwaukee is going to recount about 30,000 absentee ballots that had already been counted.
There was an issue with one tabulator not being sealed. Out of precaution, the city will recount each ballot. A long night just got longer
— A.J. Bayatpour (@AJBayatpour) November 5, 2024
According to Alexander Shur of the nonprofit Votebeat, the compromised area included the tabulator’s on/off switch, as well as slots for USB drives to be stuck into the machine, potentially compromising about 30% of the city’s absentee ballot total.
The issue was not discovered until around 2 p.m., meaning workers had likely been using the machine for several hours. Around 4 p.m., officials began the absentee ballot recount, Votebeat reported.
City officials maintained that it was unlikely the machines had been compromised, but they were nonetheless undertaking the recount “out of an abundance of caution,” said Milwaukee spokesperson Jeff Fleming.
“We have no reason to believe that there was any compromise to any of the machines,” Fleming said. “But because they were not fully sealed—human error—… we are going to zero them all out again and rerun the ballots that had already been processed.”
Hilario Deleon, chair of the Milwaukee County GOP, said he was not concerned with the ballots having been compromised but was more alarmed by possibility that it could throw the vote-tallying into further disarray.
“I’m not worried about it, although it is a concerning thing when those things are supposed to be locked,” he said.
Deleon questioned the need to recount the affected ballots, noting it would push back the results and potentially open the door to additional irregularities by creating cover for Democrat election workers to continue into the wee hours of the night.
“So many more ballots still have to be counted,” said Deleon.
“Why are we adding more time onto this?” he continued. “It’s just going to be extra work for everyone, and any chance to get these numbers maybe by midnight or 1 a.m., that might have just been pushed back.”
A suspicious 3 a.m. ballot dump in some of the state’s blue-leaning counties in 2020, including Kenosha, allowed Democrat Joe Biden to make up a substantial Election Day deficit and gave him a narrow edge over then-President Donald Trump.
What’s amazing is how many don’t remember. Most people I talk to aren’t even aware that this graphic is representative of real charts (ie Michigan and Wisconsin)
The media did an unbelievable job at keeping people misinformed over the 2020 election theft pic.twitter.com/9ZsDfypu5t
— Albert Renshaw • e/acc (@Valuable) October 29, 2024
Skeptics noted that the entire batch appeared to break for Biden, with Trump’s trajectory not seeing any sort of equivalent bump as one might expect under normal circumstances.
Biden ultimately won the battleground state by a margin of just over 20,000 votes.
The Milwaukee incident follows another major irregularity flagged by eagle-eyed Republican watchdogs in Colorado, where it was revealed last week that radical leftist Secretary of State Jena Griswold had compromised hundreds of passwords to the state’s election machines by posting them online in a hidden tab of an Excel spreadsheet.
NEW: @GovofCO Polis (D) announces Colorado will deploy “human capital, air and ground assets, and other logistical support” to help SOS @JenaGriswold (D) change leaked voting system passwords statewide. #copolitics
— Kyle Clark (@KyleClark) October 31, 2024
The passwords had been posted and publicly accessible for months. After being alerted to the matter, Griswold’s office did not immediately come forward to altert the public for about a week, until after state Republicans announced it.
Libertarian and Republican officials in the state slammed the—presumably careless—error, calling for Griswold to resign immediately after failing to execute her one and only job.
Griswold refused but stated she was “regretful for this error,” the Rocky Mountain Voice reported.
Griswold was one of the ringleaders in an activist plot to force Trump off the ballot, although the ruling from the state’s leftist Supreme Court was ultimately overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Griswold also was outspoken in her condemnation of Tina Peters, a former Mesa County election official who received an eight-year sentence for allegedly compromising the county’s election equipment while trying to furnish pro-Trump watchdog groups with the voting logs to determine if the machines had been manipulated in the 2020 election.
Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/realbensellers.
