Wisconsin Supreme Court Race Marred by Yet Another Voting Machine Malfunction

U.S. elections continue to be haunted by voting machine issues.

Another contentious election, another voting machine controversy.

A voting machine in Green Bay broke down and needed to be replaced during Tuesday's critical Wisconsin Supreme Court election, as reported by local Fox affiliate WLUK.

"City clerk Celestine Jeffreys said the machine at the Green Bay Botanical Garden wasn't working," WLUK reported. "Backup machines also did not work."

The city had to borrow a voting machine from Brown County.

"Those machines had been serviced, so we have to take a much more close look after this election as to whether or not we need to purchase new machines and exactly how we can ensure that that doesn't happen again," Jeffreys said. "It's the same problem we've been having at that ward for a couple of different election cycles."

Jeffreys said more than 7,000 absentee ballots had been returned to the city as of 4 p.m. About 30% of the city's ballots are cast absentee, she added.

According to Wisconsin Right Now, Brown County, where Green Bay is located, has ES&S ExpressVote voting machines. According to ES&S, "the paper-based ExpressVote Universal Voting System uses touch-screen technology that produces a paper record for tabulation."

ES&S, based in Omaha, Nebraska, controls around 50% of the country’s election system market. As reported by election watchdog Pro Publica in 2019, ES&S’ systems has been "plagued by mishaps at the local level."

Nonetheless, many experts and election officials say "the manufacturer remains dominant because there’s little government regulation and almost no oversight," according to the report.

"ES&S is owned by the McCarthy Group, a private equity firm, and thus its financial records — revenue, profits, salaries — are not public," ProPublica noted.

In an interesting twist, the City of Green Bay had actually sued the State of Wisconsin in federal court in 2020 an attempt to stop in-person voting on April 7, which was "a spring election date still supported by Gov. Tony Evers and the Republican leaders of the Legislature."

The lawsuit, argued that holding the election during the pandemic without changes “endangers not only the public health, but also the legitimacy of that same election process.”

“I don’t feel at all comfortable asking people to choose between either their health or their right to vote,” Green Bay Mayor Eric Genrich said in an interview. “…Having an in-person election on April 7 is not at all practical or possible, isn’t lawful or just.”

Now, with the Supreme Court essentially falling under Democratic control, the state's election integrity laws will likely suffer a major blow. This could mean an extension of the mass absentee ballots seen during the 2020 election, as well as the end of voter ID laws.

The contentious Wisconsin election broke records for outside money poured into the state, particularly $1 million donated by billionaire George Soros for the race.

But some state legislatures are fighting back. In Harris County, Texas, there were multiple reports of voting machine malfunctions in the critical election, which swung strongly in Democrat's favor in the tight race. Earlier this week, Republican members of the Texas state legislature would even allow the Texas Secretary of State to overturn results of elections based on conclusive evidence of fraud.

The Arizona governor's race in particular was egregiously marred by voting machine malfunctions that ended in extensive litigation and allegations of election malfeasance. On election day in Arizona, when most Republicans turn out to vote in elections, voting machine problems caused delays in at least 25 percent of the polls in Maricopa County.

The New York Times reported on the technical glitches that had struck Maricopa County, which had affected mostly red districts.

"Officials in Maricopa, one of the nation’s most populous counties and a focus of efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, said the problem affected ballot tabulation machines in about 60 of the county’s 223 voting centers," the report added. "In the afternoon, the county said it had isolated the problem: printers were not making dark enough markings on the ballots."

Former Secretary of State Katie Hobbs nonetheless certified her own election and became governor. And the Wisconsin Supreme Court will turn blue ahead of the critical 2024 presidential race.