E423: The Comeback

Who's dropping out first? So Tuesday night, we end up with another late night and another one of these situations where we're waiting on Milwaukee to come, you know, tell us what you got in your absentee ballots.

What does Central Count have to say? Because we have another razor-thin race in Wisconsin.

And once again... oops, there's something wrong.

And in this case, it was the downloading of data to hard drives.

They then go back and they re-download them, correct it, and get all the results.

But it's a delay of a couple of hours.

Even national commentators are throwing up their hands going, Milwaukee again? What's going on? Gentlemen, what is your take on this? What is the meaning of it? Does it affect the confidence voters have Is it just all much ado about nothing? What do you think?

Well, as the Milwaukee man between Bill and I, I'll go first here.

And sorry, Steve Kornacki, but this is what we do.

You can throw up your hands all you want.

But the reason we do it this way for the last several legislative sessions is because of Republicans.

Wisconsin needs to pass a law to allow central count communities, which is not just Milwaukee, it's five or six bigger urban areas, to start the processing of absentee ballots before the polls close.

This is done in other states.

It would speed things along.

There's no reason not to do it.

But, you know, my interpretation is that Republicans in the state legislature have said no, because they think they benefit from the chaos.

Bill can respond to that if he chooses.

The second thing I will say is I hope that this process actually instills some confidence, because we all learned that what happens is The counts at each of these different municipalities are individually loaded onto their own flash drives.

There is no transmission over the internet of this information that can be corrupted.

It is literally physically taken from the villages or towns in Milwaukee County into central count.

The other thing that we learned is they test this stuff because the other data set was a test of the system that they run beforehand in hopes they get it right as quickly and efficiently as possible.

So it is not like the data that they initially downloaded, you know, how did it get there? Ooh, there's some spooky conspiracy.

No, this was the test data.

And because there are checks in place, it was immediately identified as such.

And rather than take a shortcut and ask people, oh, just email it in, or, oh, just upload it over the internet.

Who's dropping out first? So Tuesday night, we end up with another late night and another one of these situations where we're waiting on Milwaukee to come, you know, tell us what you got in your absentee ballots.

What does Central Count have to say? Because we have another razor-thin race in Wisconsin.

And once again... oops, there's something wrong.

And in this case, it was the downloading of data to hard drives.

They then go back and they re-download them, correct it, and get all the results.

But it's a delay of a couple of hours.

Even national commentators are throwing up their hands going, Milwaukee again? What's going on? Gentlemen, what is your take on this? What is the meaning of it? Does it affect the confidence voters have Is it just all much ado about nothing? What do you think?

Well, as the Milwaukee man between Bill and I, I'll go first here.

And sorry, Steve Kornacki, but this is what we do.

You can throw up your hands all you want.

But the reason we do it this way for the last several legislative sessions is because of Republicans.

Wisconsin needs to pass a law to allow central count communities, which is not just Milwaukee, it's five or six bigger urban areas, to start the processing of absentee ballots before the polls close.

This is done in other states.

It would speed things along.

There's no reason not to do it.

But, you know, my interpretation is that Republicans in the state legislature have said no, because they think they benefit from the chaos.

Bill can respond to that if he chooses.

The second thing I will say is I hope that this process actually instills some confidence, because we all learned that what happens is The counts at each of these different municipalities are individually loaded onto their own flash drives.

There is no transmission over the internet of this information that can be corrupted.

It is literally physically taken from the villages or towns in Milwaukee County into central count.

The other thing that we learned is they test this stuff because the other data set was a test of the system that they run beforehand in hopes they get it right as quickly and efficiently as possible.

So it is not like the data that they initially downloaded, you know, how did it get there? Ooh, there's some spooky conspiracy.

No, this was the test data.

And because there are checks in place, it was immediately identified as such.

And rather than take a shortcut and ask people, oh, just email it in, or, oh, just upload it over the internet.