More than 30,000 votes in an overwhelmingly Democratic area in Wisconsin must be recounted on election night after an election observer noticed a panel on a vote tabulating machine wasn’t properly closed.
That flub, at a polling site in Milwaukee, means every absentee ballot that had already been counted at the site must be counted once again—a time-intensive process that local media says will “go very late” and may extend into Wednesday morning.
Alexander Shur, a journalist at Votebeat, reported that the panel in question protected the machine’s on-off switch and was supposed to be locked before the polling site opened. Shur’s report said the error was discovered around 2 p.m. local time.
ADVERTISEMENT
Wisconsin and its 10 electoral votes is one of seven swing states this election, with polls showing Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are neck-and-neck there. The midwestern state was won by Joe Biden four years by just 20,682 votes, meaning the delayed votes just might be what determines who carries the Badger State.
Republicans have seized on the situation in Wisconsin, with Lara Trump posting on X that GOP lawyers were making calls to tell vote tabulators and election officials to make the recount happen quick.
“This is an unacceptable example of incompetent election administration in a key swing state: voters deserve better and we are unambiguously calling on Milwaukee’s officials to DO THEIR JOBS and count ballots quickly and effectively,” Lara Trump wrote. “Anything less undermines voter confidence.”
The secretary of state of Nevada, another swing state, told The New York Times he fears over 13,000 ballots and counting will have to go through “signature curing” before being tabulated because ballot signatures do not match what the state has in its records.
That is much more than usual, Francisco Aguilar told the Times. He added that it’s overwhelmingly young people who are to blame.
“It’s mostly the fact that young people don’t have signatures these days,” Aguilar said, explaining the sudden uptick in bad signatures. “And when they did register to vote through the automatic voter registration process, they signed a digital pad at DMV and that became their license signature.”
Most of the problem ballots are in Clark County, home to Las Vegas, and in Washoe County, home to Reno. Biden carried Nevada four years ago with a winning margin of 33,596 votes. Should this election be just as close—or closer, as polls suggest it will be—it may come down the problem ballots to determine a winner.
“When you start to look at the data and you start to realize how high it is, it makes you nervous,” Aguilar said.
Elsewhere in the country, Iowa also reported having malfunctioning voting machines in “about a quarter of precincts” in Story County early Tuesday, reported The Washington Post. The technical issue will require vote tabulators to hand-count ballots after polls close—a process that’s sure to cause delays in a state that recent polling suggests may actually be in play for Harris.
In Pennsylvania, likely the election’s most important swing state, voters in deep-red Cambria County will get two extra hours to vote after it experienced widespread problems with voting machines that led to long lines. In Georgia, some polling sites extended their voting hours after hoax bomb threats were called in—a suspected voter suppression plot that was called in from Russia, local officials claimed.
Issues at polling sites are expected in an election of this scale, with a handful of issues reliably cropping up every four years.
While each instance is sure to lead to delays in releasing results, there have been no credible reports of voter fraud or destroyed ballots so far this Election Day.
The Daily Beast Podcast episodes are released every Thursday. Like and download on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or your favorite podcast app. And click here for email updates as each new episode drops.
