There’s something deeply amiss in Milwaukee’s election administration, and a prominent Wisconsin official is finally demanding real answers. Bob Spindell, a Republican appointee and vice chairman of the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC), has unequivocally called for an urgent investigation into the city's latest election night fiasco.

For years, this blue bastion has been a magnet for election controversy, not just in Wisconsin but across the nation, routinely finding itself at the center of late-night absentee ballot debacles and questions of integrity.

The WEC is poised to tackle the primary night “error” — and potentially take action — during a special meeting scheduled for Monday morning. The commission also plans to scrutinize whether Green Bay's notoriously incompetent former city clerk violated state election law after yet another instance of duplicate absentee ballots being mailed out.

'We Need to Have an Investigation'

The Milwaukee Election Commission, in its infinite wisdom, claims to have completed its "in-house review" of what transpired during this month’s Wisconsin primary elections. The incident in question: a mysterious, hour-long stall in the final tally of some 27,000 ballots. When the numbers finally emerged, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley was declared the winner of the Democratic Party’s gubernatorial primary, narrowly edging out State Rep. Francesca Hong, a Madison Marxist whose policies are barely distinguishable from Crowley's own.

In a letter to WEC Administrator Meagan Wolfe (whose name was misspelled, no less), Milwaukee Election Commission executive director Paulina Gutierrez once again attributed the “glitch” to "human error." Election workers, she claimed, simply downloaded audit log files instead of actual election results onto five of nine data sticks. Such an oversight, in a critical election, beggars belief.

While the "error" certainly delayed the count, Gutierrez insisted it did not "affect the security, tabulation, or accuracy of the election results, nor did the error prevent or impede any voter from casting a ballot." Such assurances ring hollow for an office with a documented history of transparency issues.

The letter vaguely mentions "corrective actions" Milwaukee officials will take before November’s general election, followed by Gutierrez’s curious lament about the "broader environment in which election officials and election workers" perform their duties. She then opined that "Mistakes can quickly become the basis for misinformation or unfounded allegations about election integrity. That reality makes transparency, accuracy and strong procedures even more important."

Coming from the embattled director of a Democrat-controlled election office that has consistently failed to deliver on those very promises, her comments are a masterclass in projection and absurdity. And somehow, they still expect Americans not to notice.

Bob Spindell, the WEC vice chairman, has quite rightly grown weary of the parade of “errors” that have chronically afflicted Milwaukee’s election operations. He immediately called for his commission to launch a full investigation into the primary night mishap.

“There’s something that’s not right and we need to have an investigation to take a look and see if everything is all right,” Spindell declared in a recent interview. He wants to know precisely what Milwaukee election officials were doing during that crucial hour when the ballot count stalled. The city had reportedly transported absentee ballots on USB flash drives to the Milwaukee County Courthouse before publicly announcing the convenient "human error."

“Oops. Somebody pushed the wrong button,” Gutierrez told the press. Spindell highlighted a critical detail: “All of the observers had gone home, all the poll workers had gone home. That’s another thing people have brought up to me is, ‘What happened during that hour?’” That part should not be complicated.

'All Sorts of Screwy Stuff'

Spindell, one of three Republicans on the six-member Elections Commission, served as a Milwaukee election commissioner for nearly two decades. He states plainly that over the past two election cycles, in particular, "there’s been all sorts of screwy stuff," all stemming from a profound lack of transparency.

The 2024 presidential election saw Milwaukee’s vote count mired in tabulation machine security breaches and other glaring election integrity issues. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., accurately described Milwaukee's election administration as "grossly incompetent"—the worst he had ever witnessed.

This "incompetence"—conveniently labeled "human error"—led to the counting of some 108,000 absentee ballots falling far behind schedule on Election Day. The reason? A shocking discovery that 13 ballot tabulators were unsecured, reportedly necessitating the recount of more than 30,000 absentee ballots. Spindell called this security fiasco "unheard of." He also pointed to the infamous black curtain Milwaukee election officials deployed to shroud the central count ballot tabulation area. Observers could see ballots arrive, but once inside the curtain, observation was mysteriously impossible. Gutierrez and her team offered only vague explanations about "health and safety reasons."

When the smoke cleared, Milwaukee somehow delivered the exact votes that incumbent Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin, a far-left Democrat, needed to secure a narrow statewide victory. Funny how that always seems to happen in one direction.

In the 2025 state Supreme Court election, city election officials went even further, brazenly blocked windows to the "Secure Ballot Room." One window was obstructed with stacked mail bins, the other covered with a poster and frosted paint. The message was clear: no transparency allowed.

The repeated irregularities of 2024 and 2025 felt eerily reminiscent of the rigged 2020 presidential election, when Milwaukee once again arrived late with just enough votes for Joe Biden to claim a dubious victory over President Donald Trump in battleground Wisconsin, an outcome many still consider to have been rigged.

Spindell contends that Milwaukee’s most recent election administration screw-up was even worse than the incidents of duplicate ballots sent to hundreds of voters in Madison and Green Bay. It was, he asserts, worse than the Madison City Clerk’s office failing to count nearly 200 absentee ballots in the 2024 general election. The pattern is undeniable.

Little Accountability

The Wisconsin Elections Commission is also expected to address the latest election mess in leftist-led Green Bay. Former City Clerk Celestine Jeffreys abruptly resigned earlier this month amidst a WEC investigation into why her office mailed out an unspecified number of absentee ballots to voters in several Green Bay wards—before the August primary.

This bungling was no isolated incident. As previously reported, Jeffreys’ latest miscue occurred less than three months after her office issued duplicate absentee ballots "in at least 152 instances" before the city’s spring elections. This is a clerk with a nearly six-year history of election law violations and abuses of election integrity.

On Monday, the WEC will decide whether Jeffreys has, yet again, violated the law and abused her discretion. Yet, despite this litany of failures, the WEC has demonstrated a baffling reluctance to hold election officials in the state’s Democrat-led cities accountable for their multitude of “human errors” over the past several years.

The relentless drumbeat of "errors," "glitches," and transparency failures from Milwaukee and other Democrat-run cities in Wisconsin is not merely an administrative inconvenience. It is a direct assault on the public’s trust in the democratic process and a grave threat to the integrity of our elections. True accountability is not just a request—it is a non-negotiable demand for any state that claims to uphold the principles of free and fair elections, and it is vital for the America First movement to secure our republic.