Milwaukee’s vote counting will be delayed by about an hour as they are forced to recount more than 30,000 absentee and early votes.

Issues with tabulator machine in Milwaukee

Polling officials in Milwaukee noticed that 13 vote tabulator machines were not properly locked, and although they do not suspect any tampering occurred, they will take extra caution and recount more than 30,000 votes.

“It appears some doors were not fully secured by election officials,” the Wisconsin Elections Commission said in a statement. “The City of Milwaukee has no doubt regarding the integrity of the election. However, in order to eliminate any doubt to be fully transparent, the MEC has decided to start the tabulation process over for all ballots at Central Count. This decision was made in consultation with both Republican and Democratic officials. Approximately 31,000 ballots will be re-tabulated.”

Before the recount, more than 100,000 absentee and early ballots were expected to be counted by midnight tonight, but now this could delay the counting until Wednesday morning.

“Those ballots have already been flattened, they’ve already been successfully through the machine,” said Ann Jacobs, chair of the Wisconsin Elections Commission. “So my hope is that they can just get them through and they’ll go through and it shouldn’t take too much extra time.”

Despite criticism from the Republican National Committee, who called the error “an unacceptable example of incompetent election administration in a key swing state“, Jacobs commended Milwaukee officials for the decision.

“You can’t wait to see who wins to then decide if you’re going to re-run the ballots,” said Jacobs. “This had to be made today, it had to be made now, and they made the right decision.”