Since everybody rested on Sunday, there isn’t an update for Day 12. Today was supposed to be the end of the recount, but due to the multitude of stalling tactics by the JoAnne Kloppenburg campaign in Waukesha County, the deadline for that county was extended to May 26. The other 71 counties completed their portions of the recount by today, and the Government Accountability Board completed certification of the returns from 70 of them. With those 70 counties (containing 3,353 of the 3,602 reporting units), the 55 reporting units in Sauk County (the one county complete but not yet certified) and the 47 reporting units in Waukesha County recounted as of Saturday night, 95.92% of the reporting units have completed their recount of 1,411,609 votes (about 94% of the votes). That, along with the pre-recount totals in the 147 reporting units in Waukesha County not yet recounted, puts David Prosser’s lead over Kloppenburg at 6,977 votes.
Dane County’s minutes of the recount provide a rather interesting read. There were several torn ballot bags in the city of Madison, several instances of ballot bag seal numbers missing from the inspectors’ reports, ballots from two reporting units in two different municipalities that were initially missing from the recount room (both stacks of which favored Prosser in what were communities that were overwhelmingly carried by Kloppenburg, and which did not affect the pre-recount net margins once added), and an instance where an absentee ballot not cast at the municipal clerk’s office lacked a witness signature yet was counted both at the polls on election day and by the recount canvass board. I don’t need to tell you that there were no objections from the Kloppenburg campaign over any of this.
There was, however, an objection from the “non-partisan” Kloppenburg campaign on another ballot. In Madison’s Ward 59, the canvassers ruled a ballot that had a write-in for “Democratic one above” as a “scattering”; the Kloppenburg campaign wanted it counted for her.
WTMJ-AM’s Charlie Sykes got a hold of the latest Kloppenburg fundraising letter, sent out on Sunday. It strongly suggests she will avail herself of a judicial appeal of the results despite cutting less than 0.03 percentage points off of Prosser’s pre-recount 0.48-percentage-point lead. She would have 5 business days from the end of the recount to do so, which means that if Waukesha County takes until May 26, she could do so anytime before the end of the day June 3.
Updates will come a bit more slowly now that Waukesha County is the only one still counting. The GAB will issue an update of their unofficial tracking spreadsheet once daily, and while I may not necessarily do a full post daily, I will try to both summarize things on Twitter and keep my tracking spreadsheet up to date.
