The vice chairman of the Wisconsin Elections Commission says there’s something not right in Milwaukee election administration, and it’s past time to get to the bottom of it.
Bob Spindell, a Republican appointee on the bipartisan commission, has called for an investigation into the latest late-night absentee ballot debacle in a blue city that has routinely been at the center of state — and national — election scandal for years.
The commission is expected to discuss the primary night “error,” and could take action, at a special meeting beginning at 9 a.m. Monday morning. It also plans to determine whether Green Bay’s incompetent former city clerk broke state election law after her office once again sent out duplicate absentee ballots.
‘We Need to Have an Investigation’
The Milwaukee Election Commission apparently has completed its in-house review of what happened during this month’s Wisconsin primary elections, when the final count of some 27,000 ballots stalled for about an hour. When the tally finally came in, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley was announced the winner of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin’s gubernatorial primary. Crowley squeezed out the narrow victory over state Rep. Francesca Hong, a Madison Marxist just slightly farther left than the Milwaukee County executive.
In a letter to WEC Administrator Meagan Wolfe (in which she incorrectly spells Wolfe’s first name), Milwaukee Election Commission executive director Paulina Gutierrez again claims that human error was the cause of the glitch. Election workers downloaded audit log files instead of election results on to five of nine data sticks.
While the “error” delayed the count, Gutierrez insists it did not “affect the security, tabulation, or accuracy of the election results, nor did the error prevent or impede any voter from casting a ballot,” according to the letter, obtained by Fox 6 News.
The letter notes “corrective actions” Milwaukee election officials will take before November’s general election. Gutierrez then seems to lament about the “broader environment in which election officials and election workers” perform their work.
“Mistakes can quickly become the basis for misinformation or unfounded allegations about election integrity,” she opines. “That reality makes transparency, accuracy and strong procedures even more important.”
It’s a curious comment to make for the embattled director of a Democrat-controlled election office that has frequently failed to deliver all of the above.
Bob Spindell, vice chairman of the Wisconsin Election Commission, has grown tired of the “errors” that have frequently plagued the state’s largest city’s election office. He immediately called for his commission to investigate the primary night mishap.
“There’s something that’s not right and we need to have an investigation to take a look and see if everything is all right,” Spindell said in a recent interview with The Federalist.
He wants to know exactly what Milwaukee election officials were doing in the hour that the ballot count stalled. The city reportedly had transported its absentee ballots on the USB flash drives to the Milwaukee County Courthouse, where the Milwaukee County Election Commission was operating, before announcing the “human error” to the public.
Oops. Somebody pushed the wrong button, Gutierrez told the press.
“All of the observers had gone home, all the poll workers had gone home,” Spindell said. “That’s another thing people have brought up to me is, ‘What happened during that hour?’”
‘All Sorts of Screwy Stuff’
Spindell, who is one of three Republicans on the six-member Elections Commission, served as a Milwaukee election commissioner for nearly 20 years. He says over the last two election cycles in particular “there’s been all sorts of screwy stuff,” and it begins with a lack of transparency.
In the 2024 presidential election, Milwaukee’s vote count was mired in tabulation machine security breaches and other election integrity issues, as The Federalist investigated. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., concluded that Milwaukee election administration was as “grossly incompetent” as he’s ever seen.
Said incompetence — “human error” — put the counting of some 108,000 absentee ballots well behind schedule on Election Day following the discovery that 13 ballot tabulators were not secured, apparently necessitating the recount of more than 30,000 absentee ballots.
Spindell said the election security fiasco was “unheard of” at the time. He noted the black curtain that Milwaukee elections officials used to shroud the central count ballot tabulation area. Observers could see absentee ballots arriving from drop boxes positioned around Milwaukee, but once inside the black curtain observation was impossible. Gutierrez and crew offered only vague explanations, that the curtain was necessary for “health and safety reasons,” the MacIver Institute reported.
When the smoke cleared, Milwaukee delivered the votes incumbent Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin, a far-left Democrat from Madison, needed to win a narrow statewide election.
In the 2025 state Supreme Court election, city election officials blocked windows to the “Secure Ballot Room.”
“Officials blocked one window with stacked mail bins; officials covered the other with a poster and sprayed it with frosted paint,” MacIver reported.
2024 was strangely reminiscent of the rigged 2020 presidential election, when Milwaukee came through late with enough votes for Joe Biden to claim victory over President Donald Trump in battleground Wisconsin.
Spindell says Milwaukee’s latest election administration screw-up was even worse than the incidents of duplicate ballots sent to hundreds of voters in Madison and Green Bay. Worse, the WEC official asserts, than the Madison City Clerk’s office failing to count nearly 200 absentee ballots in the 2024 general election.
Little Accountability
The Wisconsin Elections Commission also is expected to take up the latest election mess in leftist-led Green Bay.
City Clerk Celestine Jeffreys resigned earlier this month amid the WEC’s investigation into why Jeffreys’ office mailed out an unspecified number of absentee ballots to voters in several Green Bay wards — in advance of the August primary.
As The Federalist reported last month, the bungling clerk’s latest miscue occurred less than three months after the office issued duplicate absentee ballots “in at least 152 instances” before the city’s spring elections, according to a complaint filed by the Republican Party of Wisconsin and Brown County GOP board member Theresa Sipes. Jeffreys has a nearly six-year history of election law violations and election integrity abuses.
On Monday, the Elections Commission will decide whether Jeffreys again has violated the law and abused her discretion, according to a staff memo.
WEC has done little to hold election officials in the state’s Democrat-led cities accountable for their many “human errors” over the past several years.
