I’ll admit it — I’m shocked and saddened by what happened to poor Francesca Hong on Tuesday night, and I think there has to be accountability for the people who did it to her.
You heard about the tomfoolery and shenanigans surrounding Hong’s “defeat” at the hands of David Crowley, the Milwaukee County Executive who had dropped out of the Wisconsin Democrat gubernatorial primary for a month before shuffling back in, right?
If you haven’t, boy have I got a story for you. I’ll let Teri Christoph over at RedState give you the basics.
The final numbers aren’t in yet, but it looks like Crowley eked out a 39.8 percent to 39.4 percent win over Hong.
Hong losing despite all the polling that showed her the runaway favorite was one of the bigger stories of the night, but there was also the curious case of five USB sticks from Milwaukee that were found to be missing important voting data and delayed final results from being tallied.
Here’s what happened, according to the X thread of Wisconsin election observer Alexander Shur:
Five of the USB sticks were missing results from the election.
Election officials have to go back to the absentee facility to get the results again.
But election officials extracted “results” from some tabulators in 10 minutes and others in three. Election officials tell me it should take longer than three mins for results to download.
Milwaukee election chief Paulina Gutierrez confirmed to me that officials just clicked the wrong button on five of the tabulators. That’s why it went so quickly.
They downloaded audit logs but not results.
Even NBC News’ election guru Steve Kornacki couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
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