Milwaukee officials started recounting every ballot from all city wards Thursday in response to allegations of voter fraud and incorrect vote tabulation in Tuesday's primary election.
The recount applies to the total number of votes cast, and will not affect the vote count for any individual candidates. The primary outcomes will stand, as it appears errors were made in the turnout totals.
In 198 of Milwaukee's 314 wards, voter turnout was higher than average, with some wards reporting turnouts higher than 100 percent.
"We're not suspecting any voter fraud at all right now," said Kyle Richmond, public information officer for the State Elections Board, who attributed the inaccuracies to confusion caused by multiple wards voting at the same polling place.
"Some reporting units in Milwaukee found that the number of ballots reported by the [vote-tallying] software [showed] a lot more ballots were cast than voters that went into the polling places," Richmond said.
The inconsistencies have left some doubting the idea of "one person, one vote."
"It certainly sets the table for fraud if [vote tabulators] can't even tell who's voting and how many people are voting," said Bob Delaporte, spokesperson for the Republican Party of Wisconsin. "I have no idea if someone right now is fraudulently canceling out my vote somewhere else."
But Michael Murphy, executive director of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, disagreed with Delaporte's evaluation.
"I've talked to the elections board — this was a mechanical glitch, and it didn't affect the vote, and it didn't affect any of the elections," Murphy said. "People need to not get caught up in claims by Republicans of phantom voter fraud."
To reconcile the number of ballots that went through the polling machine with the number of ballots that were reported by the polling software, the county must go back and recount the number of ballots inside each ballot bag, Richmond said. Ballot bags are not usually opened.
On top of possible tabulation errors were problems that poll workers experienced with the newly implemented AutoMARK machines for disabled voters, which are legally required to be at each polling place.
"We tested all the AutoMARKs before the [primary] elections, and a number of them weren't working," said Maribeth Witzel-Behl, Madison interim city clerk. "So we had them replaced, and they were all working when we delivered them to each polling place."
However, whether the machines were delivered to all polling places is suspect.
"We saw in Madison, anecdotally, that the equipment was not present in the morning at the polling place, or it wasn't set up," Richmond said.
He added that vendor response to machine breakdown was slow — a problem considering many of the machines malfunctioned on primary day.
In addition, Wisconsin voters have had to adjust to a number of voter-identification regulations.
In accordance with new state statutes, if a driver's license does not display the current address of the voter, he or she can opt to show a bank statement or utility bill to register at the polls. Clerks must then, by law, record an associated number with that statement, such as the voter's bank account number.
But unlike a driver's license number, social security number or date of birth, bank account numbers are not confidential under Wisconsin law. This means anyone who makes an open records request for someone's voter registration form could have access to that person's bank account number, leaving the voter vulnerable to identity theft.
"Until [the confidentiality of bank account numbers] has been decided by the [elections] board, we've decided to err on the side of caution and not give out that information," Richmond said.