Sen. Ron Johnson, WisGOP chair question Milwaukee's recounting of 30k absentee ballots

Republican Sen. Ron Johnson raised concerns about the 31,000 absentee ballots the City of Milwaukee said it began recounting Tuesday afternoon after election officials were made aware that doors covering on-off switches on some of the machines used to tally those votes had not been properly closed.

The city's top election official said earlier in the evening that the machines had not been tampered with and that the decision to recount the ballots was made out of an “abundance of caution" and in consultation with Democrats and Republicans.

Johnson labeled the vote-counting process in the state’s heavily Democratic city “grossly disorganized” during a visit to the downtown operation with Republican Party of Wisconsin Chairman Brian Schimming.

Johnson during the tour questioned Milwaukee Election Commission Executive Director Paulina Gutiérrez.

Schimming said they wanted to trust the process but said he thought it was "fair" to ask questions when an issue involving this many ballots comes up.

City officials said they would rerun about 31,000 absentee ballots “out an abundance of caution,” and one top state election official said “both political parties agree that nothing was wrong with the tabulation so far.”

Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson, in a visit after the Republicans had left, dismissed the senator's questions about whether the city was unprepared for the high-profile election.

And he said he did not think this error would become fodder for those looking to undercut the results of the more than 100,000 absentee ballots that had been returned to the city Election Commission.

"This was an issue that was caught, an issue that was addressed, and an issue that we've taken seriously," the mayor said. "We've worked to fix the issue and make sure that all the ballots were counted and counted correctly."

In the 2020 election, then-President Donald Trump and other Republicans zeroed in on Milwaukee's absentee ballots as he made unfounded claims of election fraud in his bid to overturn his loss to President Joe Biden in Wisconsin.

Trump's 2020 loss in the state was confirmed by recounts he paid for, court rulings, a nonpartisan state audit and a study by a prominent conservative group.

The senator, however, said he’d like officials to preserve video of the process and the count of the 30,000 ballots in question from both before and after they were rerun.

The Oshkosh Republican said the party wanted to know the results of the first tabulation of the ballots so they could compare them to the rerun.

“If we don’t have that, I get very suspicious," he told reporters shortly after 8 p.m. local time.

“We need to know what those counts are, not just the number of ballots, but how many votes for Kamala Harris, how many votes for Donald Trump,” the Republican senator said.

Schimming, who joined Johnson at central count, told the Journal Sentinel he wanted to talk to elections observers “and then we’ll decide how to go.”

“We’re not here because there’s no problem,” Schimming said. “Stuff was open on the back of the tabulators. They had one job.”

“It’s not like it’s illegitimate to ask questions about tabs open on tabulators in a state where we don’t have voting machines,” Schimming said.

Alison Dirr can be reached at [email protected]. Lawrence Andrea can be reached at [email protected].

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Sen. Ron Johnson questions Milwaukee's recount of 30k absentee ballots