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Breaking down how and why the city of Milwaukee reports election results from absentee ballots all at once on election night, and how bipartisan efforts to reform the process stalled.
At Civic Media, we put together a special broadcast called “Making Your Vote Count 2024” and as part of that show, we worked with election officials and leaders from both parties to talk about top issues, address misinformation about voting, and much more.
That broadcast airs live at 6 p.m., Tuesday, Oct. 22, across the Civic Media network. It will be available as a video and podcast online after it airs. Find more information about the show here.
Here at The Recombobulation Area, we’re bringing you BONUS CONTENT from this broadcast to address one of the biggest sources of election misinformation in recent years in Wisconsin — the late night “ballot dump” coming from the city of Milwaukee.
Listen here to our 10-minute audio segment breaking down what’s happening when Milwaukee reports results late into the night, the state legislature’s bipartisan efforts to address the perception problem surrounding this reporting, and what to expect on election night on Nov. 5 (and possibly into Nov. 6).
This segment features interviews with Republican State Rep. Scott Krug, who serves as the Chair of the Assembly’s Committee on Campaigns and Elections, and with Paulina Gutierrez, the newly appointed director of the Milwaukee Elections Commission, and is narrated by yours truly.
Listen to the segment as a podcast here. You can also see a full transcript of this segment below.
One of the most pervasive conspiracy theories surrounding Wisconsin’s elections in recent years has involved what’s often been referred to as a late night “ballot dump.”
What this has mostly referred to is the reporting of election results from the city of Milwaukee. More specifically, this is about the reporting of election results from absentee ballots in the city of Milwaukee.
Confusion and accusations of fraudulent behavior over this “ballot dump” or “ballot drop” has been around for a while, but reached new heights after the 2020 presidential election. Conspiracy theories about this have raged on in the years since, often in false or misleading ways on social media. Visually, people can see red and blue lines going up concurrently along an arc as votes are tabulated, and then there’s a point where the blue line indicating votes for Joe Biden goes vertical and overtakes the red line for Donald Trump. This is the “ballot dump.”
What’s happening here is actually quite simple. It’s the city of Milwaukee reporting the results of all of its absentee ballots, all at once, in accordance with state law. In the 2020 election, because of the larger number of absentee ballots that were used during the covid-19 pandemic, these results were not counted and reported until after 3 a.m. local time.
Milwaukee is the most populous city in Wisconsin by a significant margin, with more than 550,000 residents. It has nearly twice the population of Madison, the second largest city, and therefore, there are a whole lot of votes to count there. Milwaukee uses a process called “Central Count” where all of the ballots are tabulated and counted all in one location. But because of decisions made by lawmakers at the state capitol in Madison, election workers at Central Count in Milwaukee are not allowed to begin counting those absentee ballots until the morning of Election Day. This is not how things work in most states.
Here’s how Paulina Gutierrez, the new executive director of the Milwaukee Elections Commission, describes the process:
“So basically what happens is all of those absentee ballots — the ones that go by mail, the ones that go to the long term facility, the ones that are used to vote at our early voting centers – all get collected into our operation center, where they are stored in our secure ballot room. And in that room we have specially trained staff who make sure that the ballot is legitimate, make sure that it's eligible. And then we start to sort them by ward and by last name, alphabetized by last name. We get them all organized as much as we can. We are one of only two states in the country that are not allowed to pre-process or open or touch the ballot until 7 a.m. on election day. So when we walk into our central count, we have all of the absentee ballots that have been coming to us since mid-September. And so for the presidential, it's tens of thousands of ballots, and we cannot touch them until Election Day.”
So, because of its sheer size, Milwaukee will almost certainly be the last jurisdiction to report its results on election night in Wisconsin. The city of Green Bay also uses central count, as do a few dozen other municipalities across the state and the results from absentee ballots in those communities are also reported all at once.
And if you’re wondering, the other state where election workers are not allowed to pre-process those absentee ballots that Gutierrez was referring to is Pennsylvania. Of course, another closely contested swing state. That’s another factor to be aware of on election night as results are reported.
Other states don’t have that problem. Florida is one such state. Following reforms put in place after the 2000 election, Florida is one of the fastest states in the nation to report its results. And in an effort to address the issue of these late night ballot dumps, one Republican member of the State Assembly — Scott Krug — spent some time in Florida with the people who run their elections to learn about how the process works there. Here’s what he told me.
“So when an absentee ballot comes in in the state of Florida, it is opened, it's processed, it's prepared, it's stored in the machine. The voter gets a ballot number. So basically, by the time you hit 10 o'clock or 11 o'clock, eastern standard time in Florida, you've got all the early votes processed and tallied and ready to be released for results. And the in person vote is not very far behind it. So a state that's got three or four times the voting population that Wisconsin does, it's in the books, the elections in bed by midnight, right? I mean, it just kind of seemed like a gold standard after what we saw in 2020 come out of Milwaukee. You know, obviously, it was the covid election — tons and tons of absentee ballots slowed down the process till about three o'clock in the morning. A lot of people had gone to bed, you know, 11, 12, one o'clock with one guy leading. We wake up the next morning, the other guy took the lead, and an explosion occurs in conspiracy theories.”
Krug took over as Chair of the Assembly Committee on Campaigns and Elections in 2023, and sought to address this in a bipartisan way, working with the ranking Democrat on the Committee, and with members of both parties in the Assembly and Senate. Krug said 90% of the problems we face in elections in Wisconsin are from this perception surrounding these late night ballot dumps and he made addressing this perception problem a top priority. So, the bill that was introduced in 2023, Assembly Bill 567, would have allowed clerks to process absentee ballots the Monday before Election Day.
That bill eventually passed unanimously out of committee and passed in the Assembly on a voice vote in late November of 2023. The governor signaled that he would sign it if that was the bill that reached his desk. But it never got there. Even though it was crafted in a bipartisan manner, passed overwhelmingly in the Assembly with bipartisan votes, and became the rare bill that had the support of Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and Democratic Governor Tony Evers, the bill stalled in the State Senate. The Senate’s elections committee, chaired by Republican Dan Knodl, never allowed a vote on the bill. Krug said there were some political reasons that the bill might not have passed, but that’s a story for another time (and you can listen to our full conversation as a separate podcast). But here’s what Krug said about where this bill ended for this session when it finished this past spring.
“So this is a very long process, and in the end, unfortunately, didn't get through the State Senate. But I think we kind of laid the groundwork really well for what an early processing ballot could be. And I think, you know, in the future, it's probably going to be a little bit more than a Monday process that we can get to the point where, maybe closer to what Florida and 40 some other states do, where they process them a little bit earlier even than Monday. Whereas if an absentee ballot comes in, we open it, secure it, store it in the machine, everybody knows it's safe and secure. I think the only thing that's going to get us to that point, though, is an election that is non controversial. So we're hoping, whichever way this one goes, it'll be a one or 2% difference to 10,000 vote difference. So that'll help build some trust in that process, too.”
Meanwhile in Milwaukee, because the Wisconsin State Legislature did not make this change in the last four years, Gutierrez and the Milwaukee Elections Commission are planning for another late night. She said they have scaled up their staff from between 70 and 90 people for a typical election to about 300 people for this year, and they will have 13 high speed tabulator machines put to use. But she still thinks that it will again be after midnight when these results are ultimately reported. I asked her what her expectations are for the number of absentee ballots cast in Milwaukee this year, and what time they might be reported on election night. Here's what she said.
“It's hard to say. I am a risk averse person, so it's hard for me to estimate, especially being newly appointed. However, what I can tell you is that prior to 2020, absentee voting was there, it's been trending upward, right? And then we had the giant blip, and during the pandemic, and the numbers have come down, but there's, there's still trending upward. And so based upon what we're seeing now, we're making a high estimate of about 80,000 ballots for this election. So you know that the governor's race was about 66,000 and the pandemic presidential was about 176,000 we're kind of doing it in the middle.”
So on Nov. 5, or into the wee hours on Nov. 6, you should know two things. First, you should know that the results from tens of thousands of absentee ballots from Milwaukee will be reported all at once. This is the process that state lawmakers have allowed for, election workers will begin counting the ballots at 7 a.m. on Election Day, and the results will be reported once all the votes are counted. Second, you should know that the Wisconsin State Legislature had every opportunity to reform this process over the last four years and even passed a bipartisan bill through the Assembly to do so about a year ago, but it did not pass and become law because of a few Republicans in the State Senate.
So now, we’re back to the same process we had four years ago. Hopefully, for this year, there will be a better understanding of how this all works and there won’t be as many conspiracy-laden accusations leveled at the city of Milwaukee and on election workers who are just doing their job in accordance with state law. And for future years, let’s hope we can build on the level of bipartisan cooperation established, and get something done to improve this process. But for now, we can expect another late night of reporting election results from absentee ballots in the city of Milwaukee.
