The seals were discovered broken on multiple tabulator machines this afternoon at Milwaukee’s Central Count, Milwaukee GOP Chairman Hilario Deleon told WRN.
“The seals are broken,” Deleon said. “It’s a huge red flag. It should not have happened.”
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Hilario Deleon[/caption]
He said Paulina Gutierrez, Milwaukee Election Commission Executive Director resealed the machines with Deleon watching as an election observer.
“She looked like she was going to have a nervous breakdown,” Deleon said of Gutierrez, when she learned of the seal issue. “She was very transparent. She said, ‘We have to fix this right away.’”
Jefferson Davis, a #GOP election observer at #Milwaukee Central Count, told #Wisconsin Right Now that he personally observed the seals. He said that 13 machines were affected.
Davis said he was told Milwaukee won’t have its absentee ballots counted now until 2 or 3 a.m. He told us that the “seals were broken or compromised. But some of them were clearly broken. "Some of them, the door was open, which pushed the seal off the tabulators, but the seal was not cracked or ripped off.”
But he said some of the machines’ seals WERE cracked or ripped off, estimating that was about half of them. He said GOP election observers had watched in the morning as the election officials put the red bar bar-coded seals on the machines and “locked the doors.” Later in the day, “one of the observers came to me and said these doors are open,” he said, and they confirmed that. He said there were security cameras so they will be able to figure out what happened. He said officials zeroed the machines out and are now “starting from scratch.”
He said Gutierrez was “absolutely upset. She resealed them.” He isn't worried this will affect the vote count because they are starting over.
Laurie O'Brien Wolf, a GOP Assembly candidate who is in close contact with election observers told WRN what's happening at Central Count in #Milwaukee, "All tabulators are being zeroed out because of the seal issue. All counting will start over."
She said she learned this from an election observer and added that, around 2 p.m., only 14,500 of the Milwaukee absentee ballots had been counted out of more than 100,000. "Some tabulators have been jamming and some don't have wards to tabulate," she added. "They should have been way farther ahead."
We have calls out to Gutierrez and to Jeff Fleming, a spokesman for the city. The woman who answered the phone at the Milwaukee Election Commission, who gave her name as only Jane, told us,
"There shouldn’t be a broken seal until the end," she said.
“The tabulation machines where the ballots are ran through - on each side of the machine there are little glass doors with locks and seals with serial numbers. Those have to be closed at the end of the night,” Deleon explained. There weren’t flash drives in the machines yet he said. However the machine seals protect the hard drive ports where flash drives are inserted to get the count so it can be brought to the courthouse at the end of the day.
He said election observers in the morning watched as the machines were sealed and they broken by 2 pm and it’s not clear how they were broken. But he doesn’t think the broken seals caused any issues with correct vote counts. Rather he said it’s slowed the process.
“The count here is unbelievably slow,” he said.
We asked Deleon to explain what he meant specifically by the seals being “broken.”He told us the seals weren’t ripped. But they were “hanging off” machines and were no longer sealing the doors.
“Imagine a door being closed on the machine. So they have this red sticker with a bar code on it and a serial number. Half is over the glass door part, and the other part is on the machine. The doors were open and there were openings," he said.
"The sticker was still sticking on the glass door but was not attached to the machine. Some of the doors were wide open. Some were partly on the door and machine but there was a crack in the door. They weren’t cut. All the stickers were whole. They were just hanging onto the glass. I look at that as broken because they were just hanging off and they weren’t sealed. She (Milwaukee Election Commission Executive Director Paulina Gutierrez) had to put new seals on.”
Deleon said he doesn’t think they were bad seals because other seals were fine. “It’s not the seals.”
https://www.wisconsinrightnow.com/milwaukee-seals-broken-tabulators-central-count/?feed_id=23899&_unique_id=672aa58b60ad8
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