Liberal Strongholds Have an Election Process Problem

Software glitches. Human errors. Poor record-keeping.

Liberal strongholds have developed a habit of treating election administration failures as isolated technical problems instead of examining the process that allowed them to happen.

Something goes wrong. A technical explanation follows. Officials announce that the problem has been addressed and assure voters that the system worked.

Fixing the immediate error without examining the process behind it is a bandage, not a fix for the underlying problem.

That might be easier to accept if the mistakes would just stop happening. They haven’t. 

Milwaukee just gave voters the latest example. During last week’s Wisconsin primary, five of nine USB drives used to transfer Milwaukee’s absentee results had audit logs downloaded instead of election results. The error delayed the reporting of approximately 28,000 absentee ballots.

Milwaukee’s Election Commission Executive Director Paulina Gutierrez called it “human error.”  

Five of nine makes that explanation worth examining. 

Correcting the mistake after the drives reached the courthouse does not answer the more important process question: Why wasn’t the mistake caught before the drives left Central Count?

During the 2024 presidential election, an election observer noticed that panel doors on all 13 absentee ballot tabulators at Milwaukee’s Central Count facility had not been properly closed. More than 30,000 absentee ballots had already been fed through the machines. 

“There were seals on the door, but because the door was not properly closed, some of the seals got loose,” Gutierrez acknowledged at the time.

Different elections. Different mistakes. Same explanation: human error.

At what point does “human error” stop explaining an isolated mistake and start exposing a problem with the process designed to prevent it?

Milwaukee is not alone.

Last month, New Jersey blamed a “software glitch” after Gov. Mikie Sherrill admitted that approximately 6,600 noncitizens were registered to vote in the state.

Blaming software is convenient. It is also an admission that New Jersey’s election process lacked the safeguards necessary to catch the error before thousands of ineligible registrations made it onto the voter rolls.

Software does not absolve the officials responsible for the system using it. 

Yet even after that failure exposed serious questions regarding the state’s voter rolls, Gov. Sherrill resisted turning over the voter rolls to the Department of Justice. Back in February, DOJ sued New Jersey after the state refused to provide records of its voter rolls. 

California offers another example.

In response to a recent public records request, California’s Secretary of State said its statewide voter registration system “does not contain a voter status reason for cancellation due to non-citizenship.” In other words, it cannot readily identify how many registrations were cancelled specifically because the registrant was not a citizen. 

That leaves a basic accountability problem: If California does not track when registrations are cancelled for non-citizenship, how can the public determine if the safeguard is working?

Milwaukee, New Jersey, and California involve failures at different stages of election administration. A well-run election process is supposed to prevent predictable errors, detect others quickly, and leave an auditable record when errors occur. 

While these liberal strongholds explain failures after they happen, states like Florida and Texas have focused on building verification into the process itself. 

Florida learned the hard way that election failures should trigger reform, not excuses. After the 2000 presidential election exposed weaknesses in its election administration, lawmakers overhauled the state’s procedures. And 26 years later, Florida voters went to the polls Tuesday and knew the outcomes of the major primary races that same night.

The state allows mail ballots to be processed before Election Day and requires post-election audits to verify results. 

In the Lone Star State, Texas applies the same principle to its voter rolls. The Secretary of State updates the statewide voter registration database daily and provides counties with information on potentially ineligible registration for investigation. County officials are responsible for reviewing those records and removing voters determined to be ineligible.

Texas treats voter roll maintenance as an ongoing responsibility, not something to address only after a problem surfaces. Correcting a failure is the minimum. Fixing what allowed it to happen is the ultimate test.

The question voters should be asking is whether the process has changed enough to prevent the same kind of failure from happening again.

Election officials do not get to demand trust simply because they identified the problem. Public trust is earned through procedures that withstand scrutiny, not explanations offered after they fail.

Liberal strongholds have offered enough excuses. It is time to build safeguards that prevent failures instead of merely explaining them.

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