Shortly after polls opened, officials discovered a tabulator that had not yet counted any ballots was missing a required security seal over a panel door. A few hours later, workers realized that two election workers had failed to write unique identifying numbers on the back of 242 ballots, a step required by state law in some municipalities to preserve ballot secrecy and enable tracking. As officials huddled to address that problem, two tabulators began rejecting large batches of ballots. Later that night, a tabulator produced error messages when officials tried to download its results.

Milwaukee election chief Paulina Gutiérrez acknowledged the mistakes but stressed that redundancies in the system prevented any ballots from going uncounted. The 242 ballots lacking identifying numbers, she said, were still processed because they belonged to eligible voters.

"It was a clerical error, and we have a way to track those ballots if we need to," Gutiérrez told reporters.

The errors are the latest in a series of high-profile incidents that have fueled distrust, particularly among Republicans who have long accused the heavily Democratic city of running a sloppy operation. In 2020, the city's top election official briefly left a thumb drive containing results at the central count facility. During this year's August primary, officials extracted the wrong files from several tabulators, delaying results by more than an hour.

"If there are repeated errors, investigation is necessary to determine the actual root cause," said Chris Piper, former top election official in Virginia and co-founder of the election administration consulting group Advance Elections.

But defenders of the city's operation argue that the mistakes have been blown out of proportion and that they reflect a system strained by inadequate resources rather than malice or incompetence. Ann Jacobs, a Democratic appointee on the Wisconsin Elections Commission, said the commission has seen no reason to investigate Milwaukee because the city has consistently identified and fixed its problems.

"Small errors are going to happen," Jacobs said. "If you've got 100 or 150 people who have been trained to process absentee ballots, and two people at one table mess up, your training's still really good."

Jacobs contrasted Milwaukee's transparent errors with mysteries in other municipalities, such as the 193 ballots that went missing in Madison in 2024 and were never counted, or Green Bay's repeated sending of duplicate absentee ballots to voters.

"We only do investigations when we don't know the answer to what happened," she said.

Kathy Boockvar, former Pennsylvania secretary of state, said the problems in Milwaukee are symptomatic of a broader funding crisis in election administration across the country.

"When we don't fund any program area with sufficient resources to carry them out well, you end up with a situation like I'm sure Milwaukee has — where election officials are underfunded and understaffed," Boockvar said. "Their equipment is outdated, their training is outdated, and they're working as hard as they possibly can to do a job that's actually a lot harder and a lot more complicated than it used to be."

Some of Milwaukee's most vocal critics were present at the central count facility on Election Day, including Janel Brandtjen, a former state legislator who chaired the Assembly elections committee after 2020 and endorsed former President Donald Trump's false claims that the election was stolen. Brandtjen cited a 2022 incident in which a Milwaukee deputy clerk ordered three military absentee ballots using fake names and sent them to Brandtjen's home — an act the clerk described as an attempt to expose flaws in the system. The clerk, Kimberly Zapata, was convicted and sentenced to probation.

"That should say everything you need to know, right?" Brandtjen said. "And what does that say about the system?"

Milwaukee spokesperson Caroline Reinwald called Zapata's actions "a serious violation of public trust" but said the misconduct of one individual four years ago should not be used to suggest broader, ongoing problems.

"That employee was investigated, terminated and ultimately convicted," Reinwald said.

By around 11 p.m., workers had finished tabulating the city's roughly 60,000 absentee ballots. The next step — downloading results onto thumb drives for delivery to the county — is the most scrutinized part of the process, and one that has broken down before. This year, as officials began that extraction, a tabulator displayed an error message. Gutiérrez decided to download the results onto a backup drive and segregate it, just in case. County officials said the manufacturer, Election Systems & Software, would investigate.

But by then, most of the Republican observers had left the building. It was clear that GOP gubernatorial candidate U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany had lost by a wide margin, and Milwaukee's absentee results would not determine the outcome. Bob Spindell, a Wisconsin Elections Commission appointee who had wanted to bet $100 that something would go wrong, was long gone. So were Brandtjen and others who had spent the day watching for irregularities.

"For some of those folks, it's representative of a bad faith effort on their part," Jacobs said of the early departures. "For others, they may just be following the lead of the people who are in charge, who've told them it doesn't matter anymore."

Milwaukee County Clerk George Christensen acknowledged that the lopsided statewide result eased pressure on his staff as they uploaded the city's absentee totals just before 1 a.m.

"It's somewhat nice that it doesn't have to all come down to the city of Milwaukee — waiting for those results," he said. "It takes a little pressure off my staff, which makes me happy."

The errors nonetheless renewed calls from some experts for additional oversight and resources. Piper noted that intense scrutiny itself can increase the likelihood of mistakes.

"This increased scrutiny certainly adds pressure to the individuals administering the elections and therefore increases the chances for errors when you have overworked election administrators," he said.

Boockvar said voters deserve a well-funded system.

"That has a much better chance of happening if we fund it sufficiently," she said.