Paulina Gutierrez, the executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission, says she welcomes any investigation from state or local lawmakers after “human error” led to delayed results from the city’s central count location during the August primary.

“The most important thing that I want voters to understand is that this had absolutely no impact on the accuracy of the election results,” Gutierrez said on WISN 12’s “UpFront,” which is produced in partnership with WisPolitics. “It had an impact on when those results were posted. Our teams are trained; they had written instructions with them; they had done it before, and unfortunately the mistakes still happened. I can’t get into someone’s head, but what I know is that we’re learning from this mistake and making enhancements so it doesn’t happen again.”

On primary election night, Gutierrez said the audit logs were initially uploaded to five flash drives instead of the absentee ballot results, which forced city election officials to return to Milwaukee’s central count location and re-upload the results.

“Until that point, the election was running smoothly,” Gutierrez said. “I was very pleased with the team, and I can understand the frustration and disappointment. I, too, am frustrated and disappointed by the process, but with every step that we take, we get better. And the training was there, and at no point was the accuracy of the results threatened. It was just about when those results were posted.”

Gutierrez said the city will implement a number of changes ahead of the November election. It has had written procedures in place since 2024, and Gutierrez said her office is working to enhance those procedures. There will also be a public demonstration of the process at a public testing “so that everyone can see how it works.”

Last week, Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson said no one would be fired over the mistake and called it “an opportunity for training.”

“At the end of the day, the buck stops with me as the executive director,” Gutierrez said. “And so my job is to make sure that people are ready. I’m not going to discuss personnel matters, but what matters is that we get better and we learn from this issue.”

GOP state Rep. Scott Krug, the assistant majority leader and vice chair of the Assembly elections committee, says if lawmakers don’t receive adequate answers from Milwaukee election officials, legislative hearings should be called.

“Who, what, where, when, why and how, and what’s going to be better?” Krug told “UpFront.” “If they’re not going to be more forthcoming directly with us, then yes, we should have a hearing and let people know that you’re not going to have to wonder what’s going to happen in November.”

Rep. Dave Maxey, chair of the Assembly elections committee, sent Milwaukee election officials a letter Friday with a series of questions and requesting a response within 30 days.

Krug said the key is to be ready for November, and if that takes more training and input from stakeholders to improve the process, that’s understandable.

“But I still need to see some accountability and less incompetence when it comes to trying to expand options for, say, Monday processing and other things like it,” Krug said. “We just cannot do that if we’re not training people appropriately.”

Krug, who has pushed to pass legislation allowing central count municipalities to start processing absentee ballots the day before, said Milwaukee’s mistakes make that possibility more difficult.

“So if you don’t have the right people, the right personnel, you could screw up on Monday, you could screw up on Tuesday, sometimes they’re screwing up on Wednesday,” Krug said.

Marquette University Law School Poll Director Charles Franklin says the new statewide poll released Wednesday will ask about the matchup between David Crowley and Tom Tiffany in the race for governor alongside a number of key issues facing the state.

“This will be the first chance that we’ve done a Tiffany versus Crowley question,” Franklin told “UpFront.” “So we’ll see how voters line up. We’ll also be looking at, and this is worth doing, is are the partisans unified behind Tiffany and united behind Crowley. Has that already taken place, or is there still work to do?”

Franklin said the poll will also ask about schools, property taxes, data centers and other issues.

Franklin also weighed in on Median Strategies, the group that announced that it posted fake polls in the L.A. mayor’s race and Wisconsin’s Democratic primary for governor.

The group said in a statement it “was created as a short-term social experiment examining how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification.”

“This is apparently just, simply, a fraud,” Franklin said. 

He said the poll did not cross his radar and that no reputable polling aggregators like Real Clear Politics, The New York Times or FiftyPlusOne included the fake poll in their aggregations.

See more from the show.