Milwaukee removes elections chief in unexpected battleground-state shakeup
Milwaukee removes elections chief in unexpected battleground-state shakeup
The top elections official in Milwaukee County was removed from her post Monday, an unexpected shakeup in the most populous county in battleground Wisconsin six months before Election Day.
A spokesperson for Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson said Monday that Milwaukee Election Commission Executive Director Claire Woodall would be replaced by her deputy, Paulina Gutierrez, citing “internal” issues within the commission. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel first reported the news of Woodall’s ouster.
In a statement, Johnson spokesperson Jeff Fleming said the move was not related to how Woodall or her office oversaw elections but was a result of “other issues internal to the election commission office and to city government that raised concern.” Fleming did not elaborate on the nature of those issues when asked by NBC News. Gutierrez’s appointment is subject to approval by the Milwaukee Common Council.
The unexpected move comes just under six months away from a 2024 presidential race likely to be decided by a small handful of states, including Wisconsin.
Wisconsin’s past two presidential elections were both decided by fewer than 23,000 votes each. And Milwaukee — a Democratic stronghold where Trump allies falsely portrayed slow counting of mail ballots as a sign of fraud in 2020 — was at the center of the drama in each of those elections.
Wisconsin has already lagged behind other swing states in shoring up election policies following 2020 chaos. Election workers and watchdogs in the state have expressed concerns that the same loopholes exploited by Trump allies to try to overturn the election results that year still exist in Wisconsin.
Woodall’s departure comes just two months after her former deputy, Kimberly Zapata, was found guilty by a grand jury of official misconduct and election fraud charges related to her having obtained fake absentee ballots.
Zapata had claimed she had been trying to expose vulnerabilities in Wisconsin’s elections. She was sentenced last week to probation and a $3,000 fine.
Woodall’s termination also highlights the widespread issue of election worker turnover, which reached a historic high level this year ahead of the 2024 election, according to data obtained by NBC News last month.
That data found that turnover in local election offices has been increasing for years, suggesting the issue goes beyond post-2020 threats.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com