Before a single vote is counted at Milwaukee’s central counting facility, Step 1 is for an election official to check every ballot tabulator to make sure the number of absentee ballots processed so far is zero. Hours later, and after several thousand ballots have been scanned, comes the climax: a late-night delivery of the voting results at the county’s election office. In between is a meticulous process to make sure thumb drives carrying vote totals in Wisconsin’s largest absentee ballot processing facility end up where they’re supposed to, aren’t tampered with and remain tracked through a full chain-of-custody process. All 26 steps are covered by a checklist that Milwaukee Election Commission Executive Director Claire Woodall developed after the same process went awry four years ago, landing her in the crosshairs of some who falsely accused her of rigging the 2020 election. Woodall devised the checklist in consultation with a Republican who was wary of the city’s lack of an official policy for extracting absentee ballot election results and sending them to the county. It was one of a handful of changes Woodall has implemented recently in reaction to criticism of her office’s handling of the 2020 election, when real and perceived missteps fed into false allegations. Do you have feedback on Milwaukee NNS's reporting? Take our survey to let us know how we're doing! The new policies, Woodall said, are about balancing two priorities: “We’re appeasing those folks,” she said of the critics and skeptics. “But we’re also protecting ourselves by giving as much transparency as humanly possible.” Woodall spoke to Votebeat during Tuesday’s primary election from her City Hall office, where she and other Milwaukee Election Commission staff spent most of the day troubleshooting minor issues, from political activists electioneering too close to a polling site to voting machines briefly jamming. Meanwhile, city residents cast just over 85,500 votes, including over 26,000 absentee ballots, at 181 polling sites. The 2020 presidential contest was Woodall’s first general election as Milwaukee’s top election official, and it still hovers over her work. That year, after officials finished tabulating absentee ballots at the city’s central counting facility in the wee hours after Election Day, Woodall left with a police escort to deliver the flash drives containing the vote totals to the Milwaukee County elections office. But she forgot one of the 12 flash drives at central count, a mistake some conservatives seized on as a flagrant oversight. Some went further and alleged that Woodall and other election officials tampered with the results, noting that the 3 a.m. slip-up happened right around the time Milwaukee officials updated the results with votes from 169,000 absentee ballots, which broke heavily for Joe Biden. There’s no evidence of any such tampering, and a recount confirmed the initial election results, but Woodall said her error prompted a Republican election worker, Sheila Stapleton, to suggest creating a new chain-of-custody policy to increase trust with the public. The suggestion came just before the November 2022 midterm election, around the time the Milwaukee election office was caught in the middle of another scandal, Woodall said. As city officials prepared to administer the election that year, then-Milwaukee Election Commission Deputy Director Kimberly Zapata told Woodall that she had requested three military absentee ballots under fake names to be sent to the home of a Republican state Assembly member. Zapata was quickly fired, but the news sullied the office’s reputation and shook up Milwaukee’s election operation. On short notice, Woodall had to take over for Zapata to manage the central count for that election and, in the aftermath of the firing, noticed an air of skepticism among the workers she was supposed to train. “That weekend, I was just in a mode of like, wow, we have abandoned all trust now after this has been the news story this week.” she said. “And so really just trying to be extra patient and listen to all of their concerns.” Stapleton’s concern, the issue she raised with Woodall in 2022, was that there weren’t official policies to make sure the USB drives inserted into tabulators had zero counted ballots before they started recording vote counts, or to ensure the secure transfer of city absentee voting results to the county level. Without those policies, Stapleton said, “How do we even know what’s going on once the data is taken off the machines?” Woodall and Stapleton then developed a version of what has now become a 26-point checklist.