Milwaukee Election Officials Lost Results On Five USB Sticks but That Is No Problem If You Buy Their Excuse

Steve Kornacki's face froze live on NBC when Milwaukee's vote count just stopped moving.

Election officials suddenly admitted that five memory sticks came back with no results at all.

What they blamed for a stolen hour on primary night should make every voter worry.

Five of Nine USB Drives Came Back Empty On Primary Night

Wisconsin's Democratic gubernatorial primary hit a wall just after midnight on August 12.

Milwaukee's central count facility sent nine USB drives out to compile results from the city's absentee ballots.

Five of them came back carrying nothing but audit logs.

No vote totals. No usable data.

Roughly 15,000 of the 28,000 absentee ballots at stake vanished from the tally in an instant.

Election staff had to physically drive back to the absentee counting facility and pull the numbers a second time.

Milwaukee Election Commission Director Paulina Gutierrez had one explanation ready for reporters.

Gutierrez told reporters it came down to somebody pressing the wrong button on five tabulators.

Her staff meant to export finished results.

Instead they exported internal audit logs, the digital equivalent of grabbing the wrong file off a printer.

Votebeat reporter Alexander Shur caught something else worth noting.

Some of the working drives took ten minutes to extract results.

Others took three.

Shur said flatly that three minutes is too fast for a legitimate download, a detail Milwaukee has not explained.

A Democratic Socialist Lost the Wisconsin Primary While the Drives Were Still Missing

The timing could not have been worse for Francesca Hong.

The DSA-backed candidate trailed establishment favorite David Crowley by roughly 3,000 votes the moment officials discovered the missing drives.

Marquette's own polling had Hong up by 31 points just weeks earlier.

Crowley ended up edging her out by four tenths of a point, 39.8 percent to 39.4 percent.

A polling miss that size, sitting on top of a vote-count malfunction, is exactly the kind of night that makes voters stop trusting the number on their screen.

Milwaukee County Clerk George Christenson tried to wave it off, insisting the canvass and two voluntary post-election audits would catch any error.

Nobody asked Wisconsin voters if they wanted to spend election night trusting a promise instead of a number.

Computer scientist Ron Rivest put the real problem into words years before Milwaukee ever plugged in a USB stick.

"You never want to be in a position where you have to say I trust the election outcomes because I trust the computer," Rivest said.

Milwaukee put every voter in that exact position at one in the morning.

The 2020 Milwaukee Flash Drive Scandal Was a Warning Nobody Heeded

This is not Milwaukee's first blown handoff on election night.

In 2020, then-Election Commission Director Claire Woodall left one of twelve flash drives sitting at the counting facility instead of loading it for delivery.

That single missing drive delayed Milwaukee's overnight results and fed a firestorm of suspicion, even after a recount confirmed the totals.

Six years and a directorship change later, Milwaukee still cannot get every drive home with the right data on it.

Compare that to how other democracies do this.

France counts every ballot by hand right at the polling place and has a winner in one to two hours.

Colombia puts observers from every party at more than 100,000 counting tables and finishes the same night.

Argentina hand-counts paper ballots nationwide and calls the race in about three hours.

America's biggest swing states are running election night on flash drives that can silently swap a vote count for an audit log, and Milwaukee just proved it.

A Nine-Dollar USB Stick Is Deciding How America Counts Its Votes

Wisconsin decides presidential elections by a few thousand votes, and Milwaukee just showed the entire country it cannot reliably get results off its own hardware.

Officials keep telling voters the paper ballots are the backstop, and that is true right up until the night everyone is watching the drives instead of the paper.

Milwaukee's fix for 2020 was two more USB sticks and a promise, and that promise failed again on live television.

Every swing state watching this should be asking why a country that put a man on the moon still counts votes on the same kind of stick you buy for nine dollars at a gas station.

Sources:

• Teri Christoph, "Voter Data Was Missing From 5 Milwaukee USB Sticks — Then WI's Election Night Got Even Weirder," RedState, August 12, 2026.
• Kyle Becker, "Milwaukee's USB Debacle Is Exactly Why Americans Don't Trust Elections," RedState, August 12, 2026.
• FOX6 Milwaukee Staff, "Wisconsin election: Human error delays Milwaukee count," FOX6 Milwaukee, August 12, 2026.
• Matt Vespa, "Even This NBC News Election Analyst Couldn't Take the Wisconsin Primary Shenanigans," Townhall, August 12, 2026.
• Jim Hoft, "Milwaukee Election Officials Blame Human Error After 5 of 9 USB Drives Arrive Without Election Results," The Gateway Pundit, August 12, 2026.
• Jim Hoft, "Controversial Milwaukee Election Director Claire Woodall-Vogg Who Personally Attacked The Gateway Pundit Terminated from Position," The Gateway Pundit, May 2024.