Milwaukee County, the most populous county in the state, completed their recount last Friday, ahead of the Monday deadline. Waukesha, on the other hand, requested an extension and was given until May 26 to complete theirs.

Waukesha is the county directly west of Milwaukee and is one of the most red districts in the state. It was the place where, 2 days after the election on April 5, County Clerk Kathy Nichlaus (R) "discovered" that she "forgot" to report the results of the largest city in the county which overturned a 200 vote lead (with 100% of the vote in) for Joanne Kloppenburg into a 7,500 "victory" for RW Justice David Prossers re-election. While it was not the first "human error" in Kathy Nichlaus's notorious history running elections in that county, she continues to be re-elected to the same public office in charge of Waukeshas elections. What happened was tantamount to Wisconsin reporting 100% of the results in a presidential election and 2 days later saying they "forgot" to include the votes from Milwaukee, the largest city in the state.

Problems with the Waukesha recount began with the first ballot bags opened. The ID tags on those bags didn't match the number of the tags that the bags were supposed to have leading to chain of custody concerns (i.e. did someone open those bags, manipulate the ballots, then close the bags with another undocumented tag?).

Their recount has been proceeding slowly. Officials say that the slow recount is due to the high level of scrutiny and media attention. That might be a factor, however, there are other factors which are responsible:

They were using fewer recount staff

They have now increased the number of ballot counters (they call them "tabulators") and moved to a larger room.

They are recounting fewer hours

Milwaukee County schedule their recount to begin at 8 AM and run through 6 PM every day. Waukesha appears to run a 10:30 AM - 4:30 PM schedule.

The process is inefficient

Where Milwaukee County recounters handled an entire ward at a time, from verifying the number of voters to verifying the tag number and opening the ballot bags to counting the ballots to verifying the vote count to ensuring that the number of voters and number of ballots matched to closing and retagging the ballot bags and then moving on to the next ward, the Waukesha process seems fragmented. Yesterday, I saw ballots sorted and counted, but had no idea of the number of voters or whether the ballot count matched the voter count or if the number of voters had been verified earlier that day (I came in the afternoon).

On top of that, every single action must be directed by an election supervisor. For example, the supervisor directed first that ballots be sorted into 2 piles of abscentee votes and "regular" votes. After that was done they waited for the next direction which was to resort the "regular" votes into 3 piles with questionable votes and no votes in the Supreme Court election placed in separate piles. After doing that, the tabulators waited for the next direction which was to count the "normal" ballot into stacks of 25 ballots each. More waiting. The next direction was to sort the stacks of 25 into stacks of 100 ballots. Later the total number of regular ballots, abscentee ballots, no votes, and questionable ballots were determined. After that, all of the counts from the 4 tabulators who had about 100 ballots each were combined into a total.

Following that, an empty bin was provided to move the sorted ballots to an optical scanner to be counted. It was only then that I discovered that another table of 4 tabulators were doing the same thing with the rest of the ballots from that polling place. Those ballots were then combined for a grand total.

This means that 8 people were doing a job that 2 people would have done in Milwaukee County and there the same election workers and observers would do it from beginning to end for each polling place.

Then, more waiting until they were called by an election supervisor to one of two optical scanners for the actual vote count. As it was done in Milwaukee County, observers would count the ballots going into the scanner for "their" candidate in order to validate the count from the optical scanner when the recount was tabulated after the ballots were scanned.

More fragmentation

Ballots identified by the tabulators as no votes or "questionable" were removed from the machine count by an election supervisor. This concerned me since ballots should be kept together to ensure that they aren't mislabelled or misbagged. After raising objections to this separation, I was told that those ballots were taken to the Board of Canvassers for review. In Milwaukee, those votes were examined by an observer from each candidate and only those that could not be agreed upon would be taken for review by the board (in most cases there was agreement).

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The result of all of this is great inefficiency. If these 1000 ballots were recounted in Milwaukee County, it would have taken 2 poll workers with 2 observers a couple of hours from verifying voters through the final count and comparison. In Waukesha, it took a supervisor and 8 tabulators the entire afternoon to get a only a ballot and vote count and I don't know how many voters to compare it to. Small wonder it's taking this long.

To be completely fair, I was only in Waukesha County for one afternoon while I spent much more time in Milwaukee County for the recount there. However, I was told that this was a normal day for the Waukesha recount.

On a personal level, we were allowed to use the indoor facilities in Waukesha (as opposed to using the cold outside Port-A-Potty in Milwaukee), but observers were required to stand the entire time (not good for my back and knees) rather than sit across the table from the recount staff. While invited back, I just can't today as my knees and back need rest from hours of standing. I will consider going tomorrow if my joints allow and hope to find things more organized and efficient. As things are, I'm not surprised that Waukesha is far behind in their recount.

Thanks for your continued interest.