No. News media errors in reporting Wisconsin’s unofficial results did not affect the outcome of the election.
Several people contacted the WEC about discrepancies they may have seen in unofficial results on media websites or TV broadcasts on Election Night. They believe that these reporting errors are evidence that vote totals were somehow changed or flipped, but nothing could be farther from the truth.
Wisconsin does not have a statewide system for reporting unofficial results on Election Night, and there is no central official website or feed where results are reported. State law requires that counties post the unofficial election night numbers for each polling place. The unofficial statewide and county results numbers that the public sees on Election Night and the days thereafter come from the news media, including the Associated Press, which collects them from the 72 county clerks’ websites.
One false rumor that circulated after the election was that results were flipped in Rock County on Election Night, based on screenshots from FOXNews.com. According to the Associated Press, there was an error that occurred in the way they gathered results from Rock County’s website which caused AP to transpose results for Joe Biden and Donald Trump. An AP correspondent noticed the error within a few minutes and corrected it, according to a statement from the newswire:
Patrick Maks, media relations manager for The Associated Press said, “There was a brief technical error in AP’s collection of the vote count in Rock County, Wisconsin, that was quickly corrected. AP has myriad checks and redundancies in place to ensure the integrity of the vote count reporting. We are confident in what we have delivered to customers.”
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/nov/10/eric-trump/no-rock-county-did-not-have-glitch-stole-votes-tru/
The AP’s error in no way reflects any problem with how Rock County counted or posted unofficial results. The WEC has confirmed with Rock County that their unofficial results reporting was always accurate.
There have been similar false claims about numbers on a CNN broadcast around 4 a.m. Wednesday when the city of Milwaukee’s absentee ballot results were added to ballots cast at the polls on Election Day.
Voters should be extremely cautious about drawing any conclusions based on changes in numbers during Election Night reporting. News organizations do their best to report accurate results, but sometimes they make minor mistakes. These errors have nothing to do with Wisconsin’s official results, which are triple checked at the municipal, county and state levels before they are certified.