Milwaukee Election Commission update on operations for election day

All right, good morning everyone. Just to give a couple of, do you want to, you just have them quiet down? Okay, yeah. All right. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for coming. Just want to do a couple of updates before we do questions. So polls opened at 7 a.m. Central count opened at 7 a.m. Of course, we do announcements and other things. So work probably started around 8 o'clock. We started tabulating ballots through our machines about an hour ago. So, as is every election, we got some reports of issues at polling locations. All of those issues have been resolved. The total numbers are in the back. We've been seeing a steady flow of absentee ballots being returned. So if you want to go on our website, you'll see the number of absentee ballots being returned on the regular. And then here, if you want to see the number of ballots that are being tabulated, that's the number that you see behind me here. So, any questions? Can you talk through the, there's an issue with 242 ballots that weren't numbered, is the legal department aware of it? What are you doing with the ballots? Yeah, so here at Central Count, whenever there are complicated issues, our standard protocol is that first, our workers go to the pod captain. If the pod captain can't answer, they go to a chief inspector. If the chief inspector can't answer, then the absentee board of counters, By state law, I'll get together to make that decision. You'll see that I am part of the absentee board of canvassers along with two of our full-time election commission staff. When there is an issue or a mistake, we review it to determine, you know, what are the next steps. Like any election, multiple people are monitoring and watching, and our tabulators actually found the issue where one of our tables mistakenly didn't put the voter number on the ballot. We reviewed that. We asked our pod captain to do an audit. Um, and we process those ballots because they are legitimate ballots. Those are eligible voters. It was a clerical error. Um, and we have a way to track those ballots if we need to. Um, so it's been handled with the issue. Yes. Thank you. How is it? Determine that no votes were impacted. Correct. So I spoke to the chief. She's an amazing chief, very talented, handled the situation like a professional. We called the election commissioner, too. He went and reported out there. We had our technicians out there. So when we have issues with the machines, there is an auxiliary bin that voters can put their ballot in there that is held until the machine is fixed, basically. Once the machine, which they had to, I think, turn it on and off, basically, Basically, the The chief inspector, along with someone else, so it's in constant view of others, will then feed those ballots into the machine from the auxiliary bin. Um, some, we, Voters have a right. Sometimes they'll wait. We say you can wait, or they will choose to say, you know what, I'll come back. And so I know that the chief had an engagement with all of the voters that while they were dealing with this issue, many of them chose to put it in the auxiliary bin, and then others came back. But the issue has been resolved. All those ballots are now in the machine and have been tabulated. Any other polling locations? Well every election we have something that happens right and so we have about 31 technicians out in the field. They start at four in the morning. They are especially trained to manage machines. We also have an additional senior level technicians that we then will escalate when we need to. So at this point all issues have been resolved thus far. Chiefs have a way to contact us over the phone. They have a chat room that they call. We have an emergency operations center. So we have been in communication since 545 this morning with our chiefs ensuring that they can get in and do the hard work that they do. It's my understanding that there was one other location that had a similar problem with Saveland. Do you know why you were having these problems and have you done anything to prevent it from happening at other locations? Yeah, so it looks like it looks like the machine was having a little trouble with accepting the ballot. We turned it on and off again and it seemed to have worked. So we had a few of those locations. I don't have that number now, but I can get back to you. What I do know is that other than Saveland Park, they were all basically resolved within the hour. And like I said, I talked to the chief at Saveland Park. She's doing great. And votes are happening. Those 242 ballots, are they one ward? It's one ward, yes. I think Ward 216. I'll have to double check for you. Sorry. DOJ is monitoring in Milwaukee, Madison. Have you heard from any of the chiefs about issues? Yeah, no, not at all. You know, it's totally normal for federal observers to come monitor elections. We met with them early in the week, last week. They agreed to follow state Wisconsin observer rules, which is great. They said that they would call us if they see anything. We asked if we could meet with them afterwards, and they accepted that. And so we're looking forward to see what their findings are. We also have congressional observers, which is also totally normal, specifically for a general election. Happy to say that the congressional observers that I've seen so far have been here before. And so, you know, they're very helpful and we walk them through the process. Congressional observers have more access than state observers, and so our staff is trained on that and they know what to do in those situations. And like I said, all of our chiefs, Are trained to call us. We have a hotline. There's a situation room with about six experts that are there to help them walk through the process. Every election we engage with our observers and our and our chiefs and we've been able 99.9% of the time we deescalate and the voting is not interfered with. Just to follow up on your question. Are there any concerns of ICE agents? No, we have not had any validated reports of that at this time. Do you know where DOJ is? What locations they're at? Did they tell you ahead of time? No, they typically don't. So even in any election, they typically will let us know that they're coming and they're auditing typically for voting rights, language access. So here in Milwaukee, we have Spanish and then additionally for ADA compliance. And so they'll go out and like I said, it's very great. I'm very grateful that they'll meet with me afterwards to find out what they found. Can you walk me through just briefly the training on polling? I assume they're told to write the notes. Yeah, so they're trained on that, and they have manuals. A couple more questions. We had a few photographers. Where they were told they could not be inside a polling location and report, which is not something we have experienced before. Is there a new rule that is prohibiting us from being inside? There is not, and you should call us immediately if that happens so that we can coach the chief. We obviously love having media. The only time we might have some issues is that if it's really busy, they're going to tell you, can you please go somewhere else or wait. We've trained a lot of new chiefs. It's a pretty busy, hectic day, so please do not hesitate to call us immediately if that happens because we do want you guys to have access. So I'm sorry about that. Thank you for having me. I appreciate that. I think for my office, there was another report about an issue . . . with the voting machine jamming or not taking the ballots. . . . Would there be any reason? . I mean, you know, I asked this kind of before, but there seems to be . . . like three of them already early in the day not accepting the ballots. . . . Yeah. So we have issues. . . We have issues every election like this. . . So, like I said, we have our technicians. . . They go out there. . They repair those. . So we have had multiple reports, but they're all resolved. . . When you have said a few times, you know, . . . there's multiple issues at elections. One is that... Normal. Well, you know, chiefs have to, they have one hour to get a polling location ready, right? So you can have the machine having to turn on and off. A lot of our chiefs, they get really nervous, right? So then, you know, you've got one hour, the password, many of the things is like getting that password spelled correctly. Our passwords change every election. So those are calls. So things like that. Maybe there's some access to a building. If you recall a couple elections ago, we had that. So things like machines too, you know, they're machines. And so we, that's why we have paper ballots. That's why we have voter numbers. That's why we have multiple levels of safety and security so that we're in a situation like that. A machine problem is not going to stop us from voting. And that's why we have all of our field staff out there and we expedite those issues as soon as possible. The workers involved in the numbering system, are they still working? Yes, we've coached them through that. We've got pod captains watching and I think they understand, you know, it was it was their first ward that they worked on. Thank you. Can you briefly say how you said you'll track the ballots if you need to? Are they segregated? Well, there's no voter number in the ballot. That's how we would do that. Okay, all right, thank you.