MADISON – All votes cast in Wisconsin during the 2024 presidential election were counted accurately, a new audit concludes.
Ballots were not altered, missed or counted for the wrong candidate by voting machines across the state when President Donald Trump defeated then-Vice President Kamala Harris in this battleground state.
The audit, required to be conducted by state and local election officials after each general election, covered more than 327,000 ballots and was conducted in the weeks following the November election, according to Wisconsin Elections Commission administrator Meagan Wolfe.
WEC Administrator Meagan Wolfe speaks at a Keep Our Republic voting education event in La Crosse on Wednesday, Oct. 25, 2023.
Local clerks and their staff audited the ballots by hand to confirm the voting equipment used throughout the state accurately tabulated votes and remained secure throughout the election, Wolfe said in a memo to commissioners.
“There was no evidence of programming errors, unauthorized alterations or ‘hacking’ of voting equipment software or hardware, or any equipment malfunctions that changed the outcome of any contests on the ballot,” Wolfe wrote.
Any errors were determined to be committed by humans and not machines, Wolfe noted. The audit was the largest of its kind, Wolfe said. It comes after years of intense scrutiny of Wisconsin elections and the commission following the 2020 election after which President Donald Trump launched a campaign based on false claims arguing he had actually won Wisconsin’s presidential contest that year and was not defeated by former President Joe Biden in the Badger State.
Wrapped into the baseless argument were allegations of voting machines changing votes.
In reality, Biden defeated Trump in 2020 by about 21,000 votes — a margin that was upheld by audits, judges and Republican-overseen election reviews and studies. In 2024, Trump defeated Harris by about 29,000 votes in Wisconsin.
“My hope is that this reassures persons on all sides of the political aisle that voting tabulators are doing their jobs accurately,” Democratic commission chairwoman Ann Jacobs, who also was chair during the 2020 election, said said in a post on the social media platform X. “We all lament when our candidate loses, but in WI, it wasn’t because someone hacked the machines. The other guy just got more votes,” said Jacobs, a Democratic appointee to the commission.
Molly Beck can be reached at [email protected].
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Wisconsin audit finds all votes accurately counted in 2024 election
