Waukesha County continued their haphazard recounting of Supreme Court votes today. Dkos's own Puddytat was there Monday. If you haven't read her account of that day's proceedings, please do.
The recount is winding up. Waukesha County, home of the 14,000-vote human error correction that gave David Prosser the lead two days after the election, is the last county still counting.
The Government Accountability Board's totals so far show Kloppenburg with a net gain of 342 votes. She would need a net gain of more than 7,316 to win the recount. Here is their latest update:
As of 11:45 a.m. on Tuesday, May 10, 2011, 3,455 Reporting Units have reported results, which have been reviewed by G.A.B. staff. That is approximately 96 percent of the of the 3,602 total Reporting Units.
So far, counties have recounted 1,412,729 votes, which is approximately 94 percent of the orginal votes cast in the State Supreme Court race.
The next update will be posted before noon on Wednesday, May 11, 2011.
Is challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg going to win the recount and overtake Prosser's lead? It's doubtful, but remember she requested the recount for more than one reason. Undoubtedly, one of the reasons she wanted the recount was to audit the highly unusual and secretive vote tallying methods employed by Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus.
While I can't say for certain that no fraud occurred in Waukesha County, I haven't read any logical scenarios that would explain a 14,000 vote swing other than sloppy record-keeping. There are enough verifiable facts to state conclusively that the votes from the city of Brookfield were not counted twice.
What I will never know is what Kathy Nickolaus did or planned to do between the time she reported the wrong totals to the Associated Press and when she finally discovered her omission of the city of Brookfield's votes from those totals. If we believe her timeline, there was a period of about 8 hours in the early morning of April 6th when she, like the rest of Wisconsin, believed Prosser had lost the election by just over 200 votes.
The fact is Nickolaus requested a second set of totals from Brookfield on election night, supposedly because their original totals were in the wrong format. The fact is Nickolaus did not report her error to anyone until shortly before a late-afternoon press conference two days after the election, and at least 28 hours after she noticed the error.
The fact is Brookfield's municipal clerk was the least credible of all the municipal clerks who were asked to explain unsealed ballot bags.
The fact is the retired Republican judge running the Waukesha recount stated that the first six Brookfield ballot bags were the "worst" they'd seen in terms of improper seals, then counted them anyway over the objections of Kloppenburg's representatives, claiming falsely that his board of canvassers did not have the authority to reject the ballots. From Kevin Kennedy, director and general counsel of the Government Accountability Board, in a letter posted on the Government Accountability Board's website:
“Wisconsin has the most decentralized election system in the United States,” Kennedy said. “The system has strong local control coupled with state oversight, resting on the partnership between the Government Accountability Board, the 72 county clerks, and the 1,850 municipal clerks. State law clearly gives each county’s Board of Canvassers the primary authority to conduct the recount, and to decide which ballots should and should not be counted...."
The fact is there are too many mislabeled and unsealed bags to rule out the possibility that someone tampered with ballots, voter poll lists, and inspection reports when they thought they needed only a few hundred votes to steal the election. That would take only two people - one municipal clerk and the person tallying the county-wide votes.
But, as I said , we'll probably never know if anything illegal happened, because at some point the need for those actions was shown to be unnecessary. If she planned or even executed any ballot-tampering, Nickolaus was given a solid alibi by her own incompetence.
Have we won anything? I think yes. The Kathy Nickolauses of Wisconsin and the Republican Party they support are very aware we will be watching closely during the upcoming July recall elections for the state Senate.
But of course, they have a counterattack. While we've been watching the recount in Waukesha, the Republicans in the Wisconsin legislature have quietly inserted some new language in their soon-to-be-passed,voter-suppressing "Voter ID" bill. With the modifications, the law would be in effect just in time for the recall elections, not in 2012 as originally proposed. From the Wisconsin State Journal:
Voters would be asked for a photo ID in the upcoming recall elections but would still be allowed to vote without one. They would then be informed that a photo ID would be mandatory beginning with the spring 2012 Primary.
...
"We were all wondering why there's such a rush on this bill — now we know," said state Rep. Jennifer Shilling, D-La Crosse. "It's about the recall elections. You feel the rules need to be changed right in the middle of the game."
Clearly, they can't train all the poll workers how to read and evaluate the validity of ID cards before July, but they can cause enough confusion before then to keep people away from the polls thinking they would be turned away without the proper papers.
I'm sorry, but Republicans suck. They didn't always suck, but they do now.