Wisconsin election officials reject 'fraud' claims over technology issue

"Don't let Milwaukee Electron [sic] Officials tell you the 5 missing thumb drives data is simply 'human error,'" says an August 13 post on X from "Wall Street Apes," an account AFP has repeatedly fact-checked for spreading misinformation. "It's not human error, it's more election fraud."

Similar posts circulated on Facebook and Instagram.

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Screenshot of an X post captured on August 13, 2026. Red X added by AFP.

The fraud allegations appeared after Milwaukee election staff made an error while downloading the tallies from absentee ballot tabulator machines, briefly delaying the release of results in Wisconsin's Democratic primary for governor. Ultimately, moderate candidate David Crowley narrowly defeated democratic socialist Francesca Hong.

But the city of Milwaukee's Election Commission said the accuracy of the election was not in question.

"The issue delayed the reporting of Milwaukee's results, but it did not affect the results," the body said in an August 12 press release (archived here).

"The election results remained intact and unchanged on the tabulators. No ballots were lost or changed, or needed to be recounted or retabulated."

According to the press release, election staff counting absentee ballots are supposed to download results from nine tabulator machines onto secure flash drives and transport those drives to the county courthouse, where results are reported.

But when the county accessed the drives, they realized that the staff had accidentally downloaded audit logs -- records that document tabulator machines' activity -- onto five of them, rather than the results.

Milwaukee County Clerk George Christenson said at a press conference announcing the issue late August 11 that those five sticks would have contained the results from approximately 15,000 ballots (archived here and here).

Election staff then returned to the absentee ballot counting location with members of the Board of Election Commissioners and the Milwaukee Police Department, according to the press release. There, they retrieved the missing results and returned them to the county courthouse.

About one hour later, results were posted.

'Multiple levels of security'

Speaking to reporters August 12 outside the absentee ballot counting site, Paulina Gutiérrez, executive director for the city of Milwaukee's Election Commission, said printed precinct reports documenting the number of ballots from each ward helped confirm the total count of votes was not altered (archived here).

"We have multiple levels of security," Gutiérrez said. "We've got paper copies here. You can see exactly that nothing has changed from when we first printed to what we're doing now."

Wisconsin state election officials also told AFP strong safety measures are in place to prevent vote tampering.

Emilee Miklas, a spokeswoman for the Wisconsin Elections Commission, told AFP in an August 12 email that there is no plausible way that a bad actor could overcome the many security measures at the municipal, county and state level (archived here). The safeguards include the canvassing process in which a board reviews vote totals and either certifies them or administers a recount (archived here).

Miklas said Wisconsin requires the submission of paper ballots and stores them in multiple locations across the state, making any technological attempts at vote tampering unlikely and ineffective.

"Each and every ballot cast in Wisconsin is backed by a voter verifiable paper record," she said. "Even if it were possible to alter voting machine data, the bad actor would also have to alter the paper record for every single ballot they wished to change."

Milwaukee County Clerk Christenson said at a press conference that the county will perform two additional audits to ensure election integrity (archived here).

Neither candidate made any allegations of fraud, with Hong conceding the race and congratulating Crowley on his victory in an August 12 post on X.

According to data collected by the Heritage Foundation, only eight people have been convicted for crimes relating to altering vote counts from 2013 to 2025 (archived here). 

Recent investigations found security flaws in Dominion Voting Systems machines, which Wisconsin used to count votes in previous elections. However, there is no evidence that these flaw were exploited to change election results (archived here and here). The Wisconsin Elections Commission website says officials perform an audit of machines for state elections.

Read more of AFP's reporting on election misinformation here.