Hi, folks,

I spent Election Day driving between polling locations, talking to clerks and voters, and bringing readers along for the ride. My editors and I stayed up past midnight to watch your ballots get counted. We do it for the love of the game but we can’t keep it up without your support. Chip in to help Votebeat raise $8,000 by Dec. 31. Donate any amount to become a member for the entire year, and get access to exclusive members-only events.

Now, on to the newsletter.

You may recall that at the end of the night in the August election, Milwaukee election officials mistakenly downloaded the wrong files from five of the nine tabulators at the city’s facility for counting all absentee ballots. They meant to download election results, but instead downloaded audit logs.

Officials didn’t catch the mistake until they got to the county courthouse, so they had to turn back to the city facility under police escort, and then go back to the county clerk’s office with the right files. The city received extensive scrutiny for the mistake, which delayed the city’s unofficial results by about 90 minutes in a close Democratic gubernatorial primary race. 

This Tuesday, I spent the entire day and night at the city’s central counting facility at the Italian Community Center (except for, uh, when I ate some, uh, sushi in the, you know, uh, well, on the ground of a parking garage). I saw firsthand how city officials addressed the August error to ensure it never happens again.

It begins with — wait for it, this is exciting — a laminated packet of instructions guiding officials through each step of the process to download results. That packet is passed out to observers so they can see which buttons officials are supposed to click. If things go awry, observers can tell officials they’re clicking the wrong buttons.

Officials now announce the buttons they click, too, so if you can’t view the tabulator screen, you can at least hear what they’re clicking and follow along.

Not the most riveting stuff, but this is how elections are run and how problems are solved. It’s a lot of checklists, plenty of tedium — and certainly none of the backroom CIA-style plotting that conspiracy theorists like to imagine.

The city downloading process wasn’t as smooth as officials would have liked it to be on Tuesday One tabulator was coughing up error messages after officials tried to download results. But it turned out to be a non-issue, and the mistakes that happened in the past weren’t repeated.

On the whole, it looked like it was a smooth Election Day in Wisconsin. Some polling places had long lines, others had issues with tabulators. These are the issues officials are used to confronting on Election Day. And I’ve heard of nothing too far out of the ordinary yet.

Enjoy your rest. Sorry to remind you, but we have a statewide election in five months.

Let me know what questions you have about elections in Wisconsin. You can reach me at [email protected] or by replying to this email. 

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