For once, ‘Democratic Socialists’ and Republicans are asking the same question.

Did Democrats just rig their own Primary election?

The Primary for Wisconsin’s Democratic nominee for Governor ended with another sketchy tabulation error, and a shocking upset — at least when compared to recent polling.

Avowed socialist Francesca Hong was tracking as much as 20 points ahead of her main Democratic rival in the polls.

But then came that 1 a.m. ballot shift that Democrats have become infamous for.

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Along with all the equally infamous excuses.

Republican Congressman Derrick Van Orden (MN Rep) isn’t beating around the bush, and is making the accusation point blank:

It all went sideways when the Milwaukee County Clerk and the head of state Election Commission came to the mic just before midnight.

I feel like I’ve heard the start of that story somewhere before…?

Everyone was expecting a sudden tabulation of thousands of votes as the data was delivered to the central operations center.

Instead, Democrat election officials started explaining why the count would be taking even longer than expected, as reported early this morning by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

Milwaukee County Clerk George Christenson announced shortly before midnight that issues had arisen during the downloading of absentee ballots at the City of Milwaukee’s Central Count, further delaying the closely watched results of Wisconsin’s Democratic primary for governor.

Paulina Gutiérrez, executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission, identified the issue as “human error.” Gutiérrez later clarified that the “wrong button was pressed.”

“Elections are a bedrock of democracy. The City of Milwaukee’s highest priority during an election is the accuracy of our vote count,” Nick DeSiato, chief of staff for Mayor Cavalier Johnson, said in a text message to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel shortly after the issues were reported.

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“The Milwaukee Election Commission has been and will continue to be transparent with its processes. This also serves as a timely reminder that our state Legislature needs to revisit the ability to early process absentee votes.”

“There are also many layers to election security and accountability to ensure that the vote count is accurate,” he added. (Emphasis added.)

I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a lot of grandiose doublespeak meant to buy time while they fudge the numbers.

Even NBC News was hard pressed to pretend this wasn’t sketchy!

Watch this clip while the NBC News live election coverage comes to a SCREECHING HALT while “indefinitely waiting for them to get their act together”:

That has to be one of the most revealing and PAINFUL TO WATCH news clips in history.

And you heard the NBC News election anchor mentioned “the sticks” — a reference to the memory stick flash drives at the heart of this incident.

More than half of those ‘sticks’ were completely missing any ballot info, according to this ABC News affiliate out of Milwaukee:

The city of Milwaukee Election Commission Executive Director Paulina Gutierrez said they discovered five of the nine flash drives brought to central count had the audit log downloaded and not the results.

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“It’s a human error,” Gutierrez said.

They had to go back to the operations center at central count to redownload the results from five machines. The results will then be sent back to the Milwaukee County Courthouse to be reuploaded.

When asked by WISN 12 News’ Hannah Hilyard if this was all as simple as somebody pressing the wrong button, Gutierrez said, “correct.”

Around 1:05 a.m., Milwaukee County Clerk George Christenson announced the results for Milwaukee. David Crowley finished with 65,131 votes (43.04 %). Francesca Hong finished with 62,739 votes (41.46%). Therefore, Crowley finished with 2,392 more votes than Hong. (Emphasis added.)

So, the ‘Democratic Socialist’ candidate who had been polling upwards of 20% above the establishment Democrat suddenly lost by half a percentage point; by 2,392 votes.

Sketchy, indeed.

Here’s a clip from that middle-of-the-night briefing…

Just in case you want to hear the excuses for yourself:

I can’t help but note that Election Commission Director Gutierrez went completely out of her way to emphasis that it wasn’t a machine error, but a “human error”; still defending those machines!

So the Democrat establishment candidate now goes forward to November’s general election.

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And the Democratic Socialist — who polls showed would likely lose to Republican candidate Rep. Tom Tiffany — just got sidelined in a shocking overnight tabulation.

Meanwhile, Wisconsin’s Van Orden continued to drop social media bombs on X today following last night’s sketchy ballot shenanigans:

He also prophesied a REPEAT of last night’s fiasco, come November:

Of course, the Democrats in charge of Wisconsin’s ballot recount… after recount… after recount… after recount… are promising to ‘alleviate’ the concerns about election integrity.

How?

More recounts, of course, according to this report from the Fox News affiliate in Milwaukee:

“At the end of the day, we will start the canvass tomorrow or the next day, which essentially is an audit. And we also do two extra voluntary audits. So there are plenty of checks and balances in the system to alleviate any of those concerns,” Christenson said.

As a result of these issues, officials had to recount roughly 30,000 ballots.

One popular X account captured my thoughts perfectly:

Do we need any more reasons to take steps to ensure more secure elections in this country?

I hate to say it, but not even the SAVE America ACT would change the security surrounding the actual ballot tabulation process.  (I checked.)

I’m left with this thought — we have more work to do, folks.

And the window in which to get it done is closing fast.

This is a Guest Post from our friends over at WLTReport. View the original article here.

 

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