Before I get to the meat of the matter in the recount of Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election, I do feel the need to restate the record going into today, with a bit of help from the Government Accountability Board (GAB), Wisconsin’s state election authority, which offers a plethora of links, including unofficial recount results reported to it updated twice daily:
- Justice David Prosser entered the recount with a county-canvassed 7,316-vote lead over challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg. As the margin was just under 0.5 percentage points (0.4881), Kloppenburg was entitled to ask for, and indeed did ask for, a statewide recount paid for by the state and the counties that do the actual recount.
- In Wisconsin, a typical recount consists of a machine recount of ballots cast on an optical-scan machine using the same type of machine used in the election programmed to count just the race being recounted, and a hand recount of ballots cast on a Direct Recording Electronic machine and paper ballots that were not cast on an optical-scan machine. Because the Sequoia Optech III-P Eagle optical-scan machine used by muncipalities in at least parts of 31 counties, by far the most-popular optical-scan machine used in Wisconsin, must have a blank memory cartridge to allow for the reprogramming, the memory cartridges used in the April 5 election must be preserved as-is under state law until after the recount process was completed, and there are no longer enough spare memory cartridges to allow for the preservation of the April 5 election data, both campaigns asked for and received a court order for the hand counting of ballots cast on the Eagle optical-scan machines.
- The recount, which was ordered to begin today at 9 am, is supposed to be done by 5 pm 5/9/2011 by state law. Once the recount is done, either candidate will have 5 business days to file a judicial appeal, which will first be heard by a reserve (retired/defeated for re-election) judge appointed by Supreme Court Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson, with any appeal going to the Madison-based 4th District Court of Appeals. If neither candidate appeals, the GAB, after a canvass of the results, will declare a winner.
With the background out of the way, on to the news of the day:
- The day didn’t begin in two counties – Chippewa (pre-recount totals had Kloppenburg leading 7,221-6,856) and Menominee (pre-recount totals had Kloppenburg leading 241-141). In Chippewa County, the canvassing board had just received spare memory cartridges so they could conduct machine recounts for their optically-scanned ballots, while in Menominee County, the canvassing board had not retrieved the election materials from the school board. Both are expected to begin tomorrow.
- As Ed Morrissey pointed out, Waukesha County, where a retired judge has replaced County Clerk Kathy Nickoulas on the canvassing board, had a few problems. The first ballot bag from the Town of Brookfield (not to be confused with the City of Brookfield, whose results were not reported by Nickoulas to the media on election night but were reported during the county canvass) had a mismatched number on a ballot bag seal, while a “remade” absentee ballot (one of five redone because the voter used pen instead of pencil and thus the ballot could not be read by the machine) and the “R’s” from an alphabetized collection of absentee ballots applications (three total) from the town were missing. While the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel story did not mention the fate of the missing “remade” ballot, they reported the missing applications were found at the town hall and brought to the recount site. Of note, neither campaign filed any objections today.
- Meanwhile, in Milwaukee County, the MacIver News Service had a video report of “anomalies” in the Milwaukee County recount:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VOdo4RRT20[/youtube] - At the end of the day, the GAB reported all of the issues raised by both campaigns were addressed by the various county canvassing boards and posted the results that they had received.
Since those results aren’t quite as user-friendly as one would hope, I took the liberty of creating a spreadsheet that helps one determine how many votes changed in each reporting unit. With 8.94% of the reporting units in Wisconsin reporting, Prosser’s lead dropped by 129 to 7,187.
Revisions/extensions (7:41 am 4/28/2011) – I cannot stress enough that the recounted numbers at this point are both incomplete and uncanvassed. Looking through my spreadsheet, there are several “anomalies” which, at this point, I ascribe to one of two factors – partial reporting of results from a particular reporting unit (outside of the city of Kenosha, this involves reporting units containing multiple wards) and likely transcription errors.
An extreme example of the last appears to be up in Bayfield County. The pre-recount canvassed numbers in the Town of Delta had the results from that town as Kloppenburg 61 votes, Prosser 49 votes; however, the reported (as of yesterday) recounted numbers had the results as Prosser 49 votes, Kloppenburg 11 votes.
If I wanted to fly off the handle like some of those on Wisconsin’s left did after Waukesha County discovered its clerk-induced error during the canvass, I could accuse Bayfield County’s clerk of intentionally holding back votes. After all, the pre-recount results had Kloppenburg more than doubling up on Prosser in that county. However, another reporting unit in that county, the city of Washburn Wards 1-4 (i.e. the entire city) had a gain of 60 votes for Kloppenburg compared to a 0-vote change for Prosser.
A version of this will be went up at Hot Air’s Green Room about 9 pm.
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Re – the spreadsheet – it would be nifty to add a second page that shows only ‘reports that have changed due to recount’, and repeats the line for that reporting entity, in order from ‘most change’ to ‘least change’.
I know this can be done by linking to the first worksheet and doing a compare, using your columns with something like
=IF((ABS(L14)+ABS(M14)+ABS(N14))>0,0,1)
where the True answer would show the line, ‘False’ would not show a line
Just an idea. Great SS, I look forward to following it daily !
Thanks.
I thought about doing that, but given I plan on creating new worksheets to reflect the daily GAB runs, and the fact that some counties are feeding GAB partial results from a particular reporting unit, it isn’t feasable at this point for me to include that particular feature. Also, I just learned that at least one of the spreadsheets GAB created yesterday had signicant errors.
Yeh, I saw GAB’s blog entry about that.
If you happen to start a little email notification list ‘new SS is up’, pls add me to it :-)
I’ll have new posts both here and in the Hot Air Green Room each time I update the spreadsheet (most-likely daily).
In fact, assuming I can ignore a splitting headache after standing near a couple of unionistas at a Paul Ryan town hall, the Day 2 post should be up here within the hour and at HA shortly thereafter. I’m just scanning some outstate sources to see if there’s any significant news out there.
Cool. HotAir promoted your link from Green Room to main page, which is where I first found it. What did all this do to your web stats ? Just curious …. I have a few sites.
I wonder if the SC is going to wait for all this to be over before addressing the Sumi case and related filings ? I know Walker filed with them directly in addition to the Sumi appeal that the Appellate level cert’d up to SC.
If so – by law Kloppy can take the recount to court, drag that out, then appeal it, drag that out, then appeal THAT ( to SC, where Prosser would have to recuse ) – a total of 4 more bites at the apple.
Then if she loses, and Sumi loses, the unions have had 4 more months to sneak in contracts – what happens to them ? WHo knows ?
Some of my ‘Wisconsin’ links for you – you probably have them already
http://volokh.com/ – Jonathan Adler blogs on major Prosser v Kloppy events, quite a few Wisconsin threads already
http://www.channel3000.com/politics/index.html
http://www.jsonline.com/
http://www.wisbar.org/
http://www.wispolitics.com/
http://budget.wispolitics.com/
http://www.1-888-no-union.com/aboutunions/tenfactsaboutunions.html
https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/statutes/statutes/35/I/095/1
The swearing in of the new Supreme Court Justice is not until August so it is extremely unlikely that Kloppenberg can drag on the recount process in the courts for 3 1/2 months. Prosser is currently a Supreme Court Justice so the case would have to be delayed from being in the Supreme Court until after early August, also extremely unlikely.
Since the case would involve Prosser, even if it reached the Supreme Court before August 1, he would need to recuse himself.
Moreover, the Court typically does not have a July session, though that would affect the budget repair bill more so than this. This case would almost certainly be heard on an “emergency” basis because of the August 1 start date of the new term, but would result in a 3-3 deadlock.
RE: … both campaigns asked for and received a court order for the hand…
A more accurate reporting would be:
Both campaigns objected to the GAB plan to destroy the April 5, 2011 election data, set the election results in memory to zero, and replace the April 5, election programming with programming specific to the recount. The Judge agreed with the objection and denied the GAB motion to destroy the April 5, 2011 data residing on the optech Eagle memory cards. The 4 parties (Judge Reiss, the GAB, the Prosser campaign, and the Kloppenburg campaign) then agreed to hand counting jurisdictions which used Optech Eagles; 31 counties in whole or in part.
The GAB is not getting enough flack for their near-obsessive desire to destroy electronic election records. The SC recount is just latest manifestation of the GAB need to erase.
I believe I covered that at the time. Now, if the municipalities weren’t so dependent on an obselete machine (or Sequoia/Dominion and the Election Assistance Commission weren’t so slow in approving an updated software package that would allow simultaneous storage of the results from an election and its recount), it wouldn’t have been an issue.
While you’re here, how about some commentary on the “anomalies” (some of which are closer to “irregularities”) of election-night procedures being uncovered by the recount.