Milwaukee will rerun 31K absentee ballots, delaying count
Milwaukee will have to retabulate approximately 31,000 absentee ballots after a human error at the city's central ballot processing location, likely delaying the city's final results by hours.
A door to several tabulators was not properly sealed, according to Jeff Fleming of the Milwaukee mayor's office.
"The people operating the machines along both walls -- the 13 machines -- are being reset to zero," Fleming said. "They will rerun all the ballots that they previously ran after it has been reset."
Milwaukee received a total of 106,000 absentee ballots, which are processed at the city's Baird Convention Center. The city cannot report the results of the absentee ballots until every ballot is counted, per Wisconsin law.
"We're guessing, you know, one hour, two hours, three hours, four. We just don't know at this stage," Fleming said about the delay.
Fleming said the issue was "human error" that he blamed on "senior election staff."
"We want to make sure everybody understands that our goal here in this room is to be absolutely accurate beyond any question, and to do that, we're going to rerun the balance," Fleming said.
The Milwaukee Election Commission said that the doors to the tabulators were not “fully in place,” forcing a restart of the process.
“The City of Milwaukee has no doubt regarding the integrity of the election," the commission said in a statement. "However, in order to eliminate any doubt to be fully transparent, the MEC has decided to start the tabulation process over for all ballots at Central Count."
Milwaukee will rerun 30,000 absentee ballots
-ABC News' Peter Charalambous