Free Republic

With election officials insisting there was nothing really seriously wrong, results in Tuesday’s primaries in Milwaukee were delayed by what was labeled “human error.” Milwaukee Election Commissioner Paulina Gutierrez said that when she arrived at the Milwaukee County Courthouse to hand off about 28,000 absentee ballots, five of nine USB drives she brought with her contained the wrong data. Election audit logs, not ballot results, were on the drives, she said, according to Urban Milwaukee.

While votes streamed in during last week’s Wisconsin Supreme Court race, workers in Milwaukee handled ballots in secret back rooms forbidden to observers, according to multiple sources. One of these rooms also allegedly stored vast numbers of blank ballots. Wisconsin state Rep. Dave Maxey, a Republican, told The Federalist that Milwaukee elections director Paulina Gutierrez blocked observers from seeing multiple rooms in the city’s Central Count, where workers were processing ballots on Election Day. According to Maxey, one of these was the “secure ballot room,” which housed pre-printed blank ballots. “The reason I wanted to get into those rooms is,...

The top elections official in Milwaukee County was removed from her post Monday in an unexpected shakeup in the most populous county in battleground Wisconsin six months before Election Day. A spokesperson for Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson said Monday that Milwaukee Election Commission Executive Director Claire Woodall would be replaced by her deputy, Paulina Gutierrez, citing “internal” issues within the commission. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel first reported the news of Woodall’s ouster. In a statement, Johnson spokesperson Jeff Fleming said that the move was not related to how Woodall or her office oversaw elections but that it was a result...