Wisconsin’s nail-biter gubernatorial primary election Tuesday night surprised most people and delivered its own drama, as a sudden glitch with missing tallies of absentee ballots in Milwaukee delayed reporting of the result. For journalist Susan Crabtree, covering all the primaries that evening, it was a late night as well. I was thinking it was going to wrap up early, Crabtree says on the most recent On Background podcast. Francesca Hong, the Democratic socialist candidate, was ahead (in pre-election polls) by some 18 points, but it was a nail-biter with lots of twists and turns that night. In an upset, Wisconsin Democratic voters chose Milwaukee county executive David Crowley over the socialist Hong by a margin of 3,000 votes. I stayed up and watched Crowley’s lead go from 500 votes up to a couple thousand, agrees co-host Eric Eggers. The delay in Wisconsin election’s results were caused by a glitch affecting roughly 20,000 Democratic absentee ballots in Milwaukee County. Five of nine flash-drive memory sticks holding absentee ballot results had the required audit information, but not the actual results. Election results were delayed an hour while the thumb drives went back to the courthouse to have the results properly downloaded into them. Election officials attributed the glitch to human error and said a wrong button was pushed. Crowley eventually defeated Hong by less than 4,000 votes or 0.5 percent of the vote. There is no automatic recount law in Wisconsin, but any candidate can petition for a recount and pay a fee to do so. If the margin is less than 0.25 percent of total votes cast, the fee is waived. It just goes to show you why there is distrust in the election process, Crabtree says. You would think there would be checks and balances so something like that wouldn’t occur. I’m not saying that there should be distrust in the results, but anything like that causes concern, she adds. Why didn’t [they] have someone else making sure those results were downloaded correctly? It isn’t the first time election results in Milwaukee have been questioned. In his 2018 book Fraud: How the Left Plans to Steal the Next Election, Eggers wrote that in Milwaukee during the 2004 presidential election, police discovered that 4,000 more votes had been cast than there were registered voters. At least this time they remembered all nine of them, Eggers quips. Back in 2020, they left one of the [thumb drives] back in in the polling place. In 2024, they had to manually recount 31,000 absentee ballots because they realized someone had left something unlocked. So, it became a chain-of-custody and security issue. The Wisconsin gubernatorial primary pitted a progressive black county executive against a socialist state legislator. Meanwhile in California, Crabtree says, a similar battle is shaping up over the congressional seat held by retiring Democrat Nancy Pelosi. The former House Speaker announced her retirement last November but was reportedly deeply annoyed that state senator Scott Weiner had begun his own candidacy for the seat a month earlier. Weiner basically jumped out ahead of Nancy Pelosi’s machine in San Francisco, and he’s not really kissing her ring, Crabtree says. He’s a very radical, far left candidate. He’s most known across the state for this law that allows anyone who is within ten years of age to date a minor. So, people are saying this is a pro-pedophile law. Weiner is also responsible for legalizing prostitution in California. Journalist Christopher Rufo and the New York Times have both done stories on how that has led to child trafficking, with criminal gangs are putting their tattoos on their prostitutes, she describes. A lot of them are underage girls in Los Angeles. And so, [Weiner] is a very controversial figure, but beloved in San Francisco by the LGBTQ+ community. But Nancy Pelosi wanted her daughter (Christina Pelosi) to run for that seat. Instead, she is running for Scott Wiener’s Senate seat, because she didn’t think she could win against him, Crabtree tells Eggers. So, Nancy Pelosi is now supporting [San Francisco supervisor] Connie Chan, who represents another big constituency in San Francisco, the Asian community. And she is she’s a far-left candidate too, but not as radical as Scott Wiener. That race has been marred by a chatbot controversy, a stunt by the Weiner campaign, which created an AI-powered chatbot to generate answers posing as Chan. While it was designed to criticize her policy record, Wiener had to take it and billboards promoting it down last week after Pelosi and other prominent Democratic leaders denounced it as a misuse of AI, according to reports by Axios. The chatbot demeaned Chan, a Chinese immigrant from Hong Kong, and invoked stereotypes about her accent and citizenship, according to reports. Crabtree, a California native and co-author of Fool’s Gold about the state’s corrupt politics, notes that Nancy Pelosi’s real power in California politics is her ability to raise money from wealthy Silicon Valley donors. She’s a rainmaker in terms of money, Crabtree says. The hosts close the show discussing the state’s upcoming gubernatorial election, in which Republican and former Fox News host Steve Hilton faces former HHS secretary Xavier Becerra. Hilton is trailing but running more strongly than Republicans usually do in blue California. Last week, current HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. visited the state as part of the Trump administration’s war on welfare fraud and noted that while Becerra ran the department under the administration of President Joe Biden, he eliminated jobs at the agency that were specifically for fighting fraud in welfare programs. So, Becerra basically let this run rampant, Crabtree says. And that’s why we’re seeing so much fraud in the Medicare and Medicaid system, in Minnesota and in California, especially with in-home care workers, as well as the uncovered hospice scams in the state. The fraud is helping Democrats get their agenda passed and get reelected in California, she says.
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