No Runny Eggs

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.

Sorry about missing the Friday evening update; I decided to start switching my tracking spreadsheet to the certified results by county for the 60 counties, representing 2,329 reporting units and 801,991 votes, that have had their portions of the recount canvassed and certified by the Government Accountability Board as of Friday night. Between those counties and another 638 reporting units that have had their results reviewed but not yet certified (a total of 2,967, or 82.37%, of reporting units), 1,172,096, or just over 78%, of votes, have been recounted as of 6 pm Friday night. Combining that with the pre-recount canvassed results from the remainder of the reporting units, David Prosser’s unofficial lead over JoAnne Kloppenburg stands at 7,054 as of Friday evening, a drop of 262 from the pre-recount total.

The main reason why it took me the entirety of Saturday to do that integration is because 55 of those 2,329 reporting units that have been certified have changes from the running-total spreadsheet that was released by the GAB Friday evening. The net changes from that unofficial spreadsheet are Prosser -5, Kloppenburg +5 (or a net lead change of -10), and scattering -21.

In addition to the 60 counties where the recount has been certified, another 8 of the 72 counties have turned in recount results for all of their reporting units as of Friday evening. That leaves Dane, Milwaukee, Racine and Waukesha Counties as the last 4 counties left to complete their recounts. The GAB expects that Dane, Milwaukee and Racine Counties will be done by Monday, and they will be in a Dane County courtroom Monday morning to seek a court extension of the deadline for Waukesha County.

Speaking of Waukesha County, they finally finished the recount of the city of Brookfield a bit after 6 pm Saturday. I don’t have the recounted totals, but the number of challenges raised by the campaigns, mostly the Kloppenburg campaign, climbed to over 400.

Barring news reports from one of the four counties that were not done as of Friday evening, I don’t anticipate doing another update until Monday. Indeed, the GAB has not updated anything Saturday, and does not anticipate doing so Sunday.

Revisions/extensions (9:19 pm 5/7/2011) – I’ll be closing that poll on the left side of your screen at 7 am Monday.

R&E part 2 (5:11 pm 5/8/2011) – The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that Prosser added a net 2 votes to his lead in the city of Brookfield.

R&E part 3 (5:17 pm 5/8/2011) – WISC-TV reported that Dane County finished its portion of the recount late Saturday night, but they did not include what the changes versus the pre-recount canvass were.

R&E part 4 (6:35 pm 5/8/2011) – Charlie Sykes posted the ward-by-ward results from the city of Brookfield.

Hot Air commenter parke had this to say on the Green Room version of this post:

So, one way to look at this would be that an initial election result where, say one candidate won by 200 votes in this election, wouldn’t really amount to a hill of beans as far as being definitive. Thank you Joanne for establishing that point for us. It sure would make anyone who would claim complete victory by 200 votes look really foolish. And to think we wouldn’t have this insightful look if it weren’t for the efforts of Joanne.

Now isn’t that ironic.

There’s 4 days left in the statutory deadline, though the Government Accountability Board will file a request in a Dane County court on Monday for an extension on behalf of Dane and Waukesha Counties. Dane County has requested a one-day extension, and at least as of Thursday afternoon, Waukesha County had not given an estimated end date.

With 2,862 reporting units (79.46%) and 1,124,236 votes (just under 75%) recounted and reviewed as of 6 pm Thursday, David Prosser’s lead dropped by 220 votes from the pre-recount 7,316-vote lead to 7,096 votes. With a further 12 reporting units reporting results to the GAB but not having their numbers reviewed, 64 of Wisconsin’s 72 counties have now finished their portions of the recount.

Despite a continued hyper-challenge strategy employed by the Kloppenburg campaign, Waukesha County managed to finish recounting votes in 10 of the 24 wards in the city of Brookfield today (unfortunately, after the GAB released its 6 pm vote update), which brings that county’s completion total to just over 17% of the wards and close to 23% of the votes. The first of many challenges on the day began before the first bags of ballots were opened, as the overstuffed bags had begun to rip open from handling. The 6 plastic bags, from the first 3 wards and tied closed with a single red security tie, contained approximately 2,000 ballots. Lisa Sink at Brookfield Patch has an exhaustive multimediia report, including pictures of both the bags and several people dropping in to protect their votes, and video of the board of canvassers’ discussion and ultimate acceptance of the ballots.

A second early challenge, also dismissed by the canvassing board, involved the use of excess blank absentee ballots to compensate for the depletion of regular ballots on election day in Brookfield’s Ward 1. The funny thing is, up until today, I hadn’t heard, or at least I don’t remember hearing, of Brookfield running out of ballots, though I did hear of other, outstate locales running out.

In 71 of Wisconsin’s 72 counties, the recount is, or at least appears to be, on track for an on-time finish. With 2,717, or 75.43%, of the reporting units, and 1,044,530, or just under 70%, of the votes recounted and reviewed by Government Accountability Board staff as of 6 pm Wednesday, David Prosser has gained 271 votes from his pre-recount total, while JoAnne Kloppenburg has gained 481 from her pre-recount total. That represents a net loss of 210 votes for Prosser from his pre-recount lead of 7,316, bringing the unofficial full-state lead down to 7,106 votes.

Between those reporting units that have been recounted and reviewed and those which have been recounted but not reviewed, 61 of the 72 counties have completed their recount with just 5 days left in the statutory deadline. The GAB has created a page that contains individual county spreadsheets of the recount for those counties where results have been “certified” and, as they receive them, the minutes from the recount in those counties.

9 other counties appear to be on track, through either percentage of reporting units recounted or percentage of votes recounted, to be done by Monday. Milwaukee County, while it does not appear to be statistically possible to be done on time, is actually much further along than it appears; more than half the suburbs have been recounted, and the reason why the city of Milwaukee is currently reported as not reporting is the absentee ballots in every ward were counted at a central location on election day and thus must be counted separately from the ballots cast on election day.

That brings me to Waukesha County. As of Wednesday evening, only 10.31% of the reporting units, representing 17,549 votes, have been recounted and reviewed, with another 2,837 votes not reflected in the current GAB spreadsheet. Because the sum of those two numbers are barely 16% of the 125,070 votes canvassed by the county, and because of scrutiny not experienced by any other county including numerous challenges, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that Waukesha County has asked the GAB to extend the Monday statutory deadline. If the plan wins approval in a Dane County court, Waukesha County plans on moving to a larger room once May 9th passes and doubling the tabulation staff, which would allow it to recount multiple reporting units at the same time.

In the meantime, the city of Brookfield, whose forgotten-on-election-night results are widely regarded as the major reason for the statewide recount, will have its recount started in the Waukesha County Courthouse Thursday morning. Waukesha County is providing a live-stream of their recount process, for those of you who wish to watch. I’ve heard rumblings that the rate of challenges will increase once the ballot bags for the city of Brookfield are brought into the room, and that more than the “usual” number of observers will descend on the Waukesha County Courthouse, so things could get “interesting”.

Staying with Brookfield and Waukesha County, WITI-TV reported that the first version of the spreadsheet sent by the city clerk, Kris Schmidt, to the county on election night could not be imported into the county system because of extra columns added by the city to allow it to double-check the votes. A second version was sent four minutes after Waukesha County clerk Kathy Nickoulas informed Schmidt the first one was unacceptable. The remaining mystery is why that second version was not imported into the county system on election night.

As for the type of nitpicking the Kloppenburg campaign has been doing, they successfully challenged 18 of the 24 absentee ballots in the Sauk County town of Sumpter, most of them from a convent, because they broke heavily for Pross…er, lacked witness signatures on the application. 14 of the 18 that were in the drawdown (random removal) were for Prosser, while the pre-recount canvass for the town had Kloppenburg carrying the town 96-83. The Prosser campaign, in an e-mail received by WTMJ-AM’s Charlie Sykes, claimed that the GAB has not consistently enforced the witness signature requirement, and that even after the town clerk testified that the ballots that were delivered by her to the nuns were valid, the Sauk County board of canvassers rejected the 18 ballots a second time.

Revisions/extensions (7:09 am 5/5/2011) – I had the wrong link to the Waukesha County requests extension story. It’s fixed now. Sorry about that.

For the most part, things are moving along quite nicely in the recount as the halfway point came and went yesterday. According to the Government Accountability Board, over 69% of the reporting units, representing 64% of the votes cast, have completed the recount. With 2,511 “cleanly” reported/reviewed reporting units, (69.71%), one not “cleanly” reviewed, and 19 reported but not reviewed, out of 960,083 recounted votes, David Prosser lost 178 votes off his pre-recount 7,316-vote lead over JoAnne Kloppenburg, bringing the current unofficial lead to 7,138.

The reason why I say there is a reporting unit that was not “cleanly” reviewed is it appears the GAB fouled up the totals as listed on the spreadsheet from 6 pm last night for the town of Stone Lake, in Waushara Washburn County. The pre-recount county canvass had that town’s vote totals as 101 for Prosser, 82 for Kloppenburg and 1 “scattering”. However, the recount spreadsheet had the vote totals as 1 for Prosser, 101 for Kloppenburg, 84 “scattering”. Pending a “clarification” from the GAB, that is not included in the above vote totals.

As for the speed, WITI-TV reported that the GAB wants an estimate of finish time from each county clerk (or in the case of Milwaukee, the County Election Commission) by the end of business today, so they know whether they need to go to a court to get an extension of the Monday deadline. They further reported that it appears the city of Milwaukee will be done with the recount on Friday, the remainder of Milwaukee County will be done by Saturday, and Waukesha County will likely need an extension. With a note that the 19 municipalities and nearly-229,000 votes in Milwaukee County includes the city of Milwaukee, and the clarification that Sue Edman is the city of Milwaukee Election Commission executive director, here’s the report…

Kyle Maichle provided video of the Waukesha County board of canvassers dealing with one of the early issues there, the issue of the missing inspector’s report on a ballot bag in the Town of Delafield on Thursday…

Meanwhile, there were special elections in three Assembly districts (two in the Milwaukee area, one just north of La Crosse) yesterday to fill seats vacated by three Republicans who took jobs in Governor Scott Walker’s administration. WisPolitics reports the Republicans easily took the two Milwaukee-area seats, while Democrat Steve Doyle took the La Crosse-area seat. There are two items of note going forward:

• The fact that Doyle won in an Assembly district that is part of Sen. Dan Kapanke’s (R-La Crosse) Senate district does not bode well for his survival of his pending recall election. While former Assemblyman, and now Department of Administration secretary, Mike Huebsch held the seat from 1994 until he became the DOA secretary, the district had been trending more Democratic in the “top-line” races in recent years.
• The Assembly partisan split is now 58 Republicans, 40 Democrats, and 1 independent who, up until mid-summer last year, was essentially a DINO. Indeed, Bob Ziegelbauer (I-Manitowoc) voted for the budget repair bill that limited public union collective bargaining privileges. That is important because that means the Assembly Democrats still can’t follow the example of the Fleebag Fourteen Senate Democrats and run away to prevent action on fiscal matters.

Revisions/extensions (12:04 pm 5/4/2011) – Aaron Frailing of the GAB e-mailed me to say the information for Stone Lake was transposed when the staff entered it into the GAB worksheet. That correction would mean an additional reporting unit reported/reviewed and an additional 2 votes for Kloppenburg compared to the pre-recount totals. It also makes Prosser’s unofficial lead 7,136.

The learning curve continues.

R&E part 2 (1:09 pm 5/4/2011) – Normally I don’t do more than tweet the noon GAB update, but since there were multiple reasons (including my own typo; Stone Lake is in Washburn County, not Waushara), I’ll do a quick one summary here (my spreadsheet won’t reflect the changes until this evening and the 6 pm GAB update):

• 2,648 of 3,602 reporting units reported/reviewed (73.51%), with another 21 reported but not reviewed
• 1,009,143 votes recounted/reviewed (a gain from a pre-recount 1,008,273)
• Net change from the pre-recount numbers: Prosser -104
• Unofficial current Prosser lead: +7,212 (down the 114 from a pre-recount 7,316)

R&E part 3 (1:22 pm 5/4/2011) – I need to note that the towns of Larrabee and Royalton in Waupaca County were taken off the “recounted/reviewed” list as of noon. On Monday, they were reported as having a net 89-vote gain for Kloppenburg via recount.

The big news of the day is the catch of two errors committed by town clerks in a pair of Waupaca County towns, one of which should have been but wasn’t caught in the county canvass. The Government Accountability Board relayed the explanations from Waupaca County Clerk Mary Robbins (note; Robbins misstated the final vote total for JoAnne Kloppenburg in the town of Larrabee – it was 138 after the recount according to both press reports and the 6:07 pm 5/2 GAB spreadsheet; the latter link will not be to the 6:07 pm 5/2 GAB worksheet after noon on 5/3):

Town of Larrabee – discrepancy in count. I have attached our recount notes in regards to the Town of Larrabee. They use both the Edge machine and the Optech Eagle. The Town of Larrabee original tally sheet from the April 5, 2011 election showed a 0 vote count on the Eagle on their tally sheet. (minutes attached) Board of Canvass did not think they could open the ballot bag to count at their April 7th Board of Canvass, we should have done that. The clerk was called (Arlene Kratzke) and she said she just forgot to transfer the numbers onto the sheet. The Board of Canvass should have caught this mistake the tape was attached and I apologize, we must have just read the sheet and didn’t check the tapes, we normally always check the tapes. The call in sheet, also, only shows 70 for Kloppenburg, the tape shows 167 (sic), the actual hand count shows 168 (sic) for Kloppenburg.

Town of Royalton – discrepancy in count, Kloppenburg original count was 80, Recount final count was 95 votes for Kloppenburg. They use the Edge machine and paper ballots: Original Tally was 80 votes, the Edge machine tape showed 40 ballots, that total matched the tape, they counted the Edge tape 3 times. The hand counted paper ballots were 40 on the original tally sheet (I think they just put 40 in both columns by mistake) Tabulators, counted 3 times for Kloppenburg. The 15 ballots were paper ballots, the recount team counted these ballots 3 times. Clerk had no explanation other than the election officials forgot to count a stack of ballots cast for Kloppenburg when they reported and put all paper ballots into the bag or the person writing the tallies just copied the 40 twice. Since these were paper ballots a recount is the only way these would have been found.

Of note, David Prosser also gained a single vote in the Larrabee recount, while he lost 7 in the Royalton recount.

Overall, things shifted a bit further in Kloppenburg’s favor. With 2,128 reporting units (59.08%) and 806,888 votes (just under 54%) recounted and reviewed, Prosser lost 148 votes of his pre-recount 7,316-vote lead to bring the unofficial lead down to 7,168. A further 61 or 64 reporting units (depending on whether one believes the 64 listed in the summary on the GAB site or the 61 listed on the GAB spreadsheet) have reported, but have not been reviewed.

The GAB has also mentioned a couple of other tidbits in its summary of the day:

• 24 of the 72 counties have completed their recounts.
• Milwaukee County will appear to be a bit behind for a while yet because the absentee ballots in the city were counted at a central location on election night, and because of that, the separate count of those ballots were not yet completed.

I stopped at the recount location for Milwaukee County this afternoon and briefly talked with one of the election officials. He told me that they were “approaching halfway”, and that they hoped to be done by either next week Monday (which would be the day the recount is to be done by state law) or Tuesday.

Meanwhile, Lisa Sink over at Brookfield Patch reports things are continuing to go very slowly in Waukesha County. Only about 11,000 of the 125,000+ votes had been recounted as of midday.

Revisions/extensions (7:28 am 5/3/2011) – It’s time to crush the dreams of some Kloppenburg supporters. Let’s take the most-generous interpretation of the vote shift I can give you, and look at just the net 169-vote shift away from Prosser and to Kloppenburg in the votes recounted and reviewed by the GAB between Sunday afternoon and Monday evening. That involved 129,058 votes, which means that net 169-vote shift represents a 0.131% net shift to Kloppenburg. Taking the rate of additional votes over the course of the just-over-24-hour period (0.185%) into account would mean there would be an estimated 692,508 votes left to count (691,230 pre-recount votes left, plus an estimated 1,278-as-yet-uncounted net vote gain). Multiplying the estimated remaining votes by the unrounded net gain Kloppenburg enjoyed between Sunday afternoon’s numbers and Monday evening’s numbers would get Kloppenburg a net 907-vote gain out of the remaining ballots, which would put her total recount gain at 1,055. However, since Prosser entered the recount with a 7,316-vote lead, he would leave it with a 6,261-vote post-recount win.

If one uses the net 0.184% net gain Kloppenburg has received and the 0.0945% total vote gain since the start of the recount, her final net gain would be far less. Out of the estimated 691,894 votes remaining, Kloppenburg would gain a net 128-vote gain, bringing her total recount vote gain to 276 and giving Prosser a 7,040-vote post-recount win.

The only news yesterday was the count itself. Shortly before the Government Accountability Board released updated numbers, the Associated Press (via WISC-TV) reported on the fact that, with just under 1/3rd of the 13 days allowed by state law to complete the recount, 1/3rd of the reporting units had results reported. The 4:15 pm release from the GAB upped that to 1,847 of 3,602 reporting units completed and reviewed, and with 677,830 votes as-recounted, David Prosser extended his pre-recount lead over JoAnne Kloppenburg by 21 to an unofficial 7,337 votes.

I do have to note the current (at least as of 4:15 pm yesterday) version of GAB’s spreadsheet has what appears to be an error in the bottom-line totals; they reported 693,592 votes as recounted, with similar “errors” in each individual vote total. As every number on their spreadsheet is hand-entered, that may well include numbers from reporting units that were not individually reported on said spreadsheet.

Again, both the GAB and I stress that those results are both unofficial and do not reflect all the reporting units that have completed recounts. For example, media reports had Eau Claire County as having completed its recount on Friday afternoon, yet the results released by the GAB yesterday afternoon did not have all of the results from Eau Claire County entered.

With that said, it is the “easy” half that is done. The canvassing board in, say, Milwaukee County can’t farm out some of their work to the canvassing board in, say, Green Lake County, even though the latter board already finished their work. Indeed, in terms of ballots recounted, Milwaukee and Waukesha Counties, out of those counties that have reported any results, are the only two which are significantly in danger of not completing the recount by next week Monday.

Even with just the partial results, some statistical analysis on the change of votes is possible. In just the reporting units that have been recounted and reported by the GAB:

• David Prosser saw an increase of 187 votes, from the pre-recount canvassed total of 358,268 votes to a recounted 358,455 votes. That is a 0.0522% gain.
• JoAnne Kloppenburg saw an increase of 166 votes, from the pre-recount canvassed total of 318,527 votes to a recounted 318,693 votes. That is a 0.0521% gain.

Just as a reminder, Prosser’s pre-recount lead over Kloppenburg was 0.4881 percentage points.

Revisions/extensions (12:01 pm 5/2/2011) – Kyle Maichle reports there is a poll list (called “poll book” in his Twitter stream) “issue” in Brown Deer’s Wards 1-3 (yes, it is a single reporting unit despite containing multiple wards, and it is in Milwaukee County). That reporting unit went for Kloppenburg by a pre-recount 925-704 margin.

Despite an earlier declaration from the Government Accountability Board that there would be no result updates today, they are now planning on the usual noon and 6 pm schedule. In fact, the noon update came out just before I finished updating my tracking spreadsheet in preparation for this update, so I added those numbers in. With 1,310 of the 3,602 reporting units, or 36.37%, reporting and (informally) reviewed by the GAB as of 7:04 pm last night, David Prosser gained a net 35 votes on his pre-recount 7,316-vote lead. That is on 441,178 votes recounted, or a bit over 29% of the votes cast.

There has been shockingly little news in the media this weekend on the recount. Other than the multiple reports on the numbers as released by the GAB just after noon on Friday, two Madison media outlets reporting on the Verona lost-and-found ballots, and some outstate sources reporting their local counties are either done or almost done with the recount with very little to no drama, there wasn’t anything I could find in my sweep of media outlets.

WISC-TV in Madison did a story on those lost-and-found ballots, and there is a “slight” difference with the CapTimes story I relayed yesterday regarding the condition in which the lost-and-found ballots were. WISC-TV reported that, instead of the ballots, all of which were “write-in” ballots according to WISC-TV, being merely rubber-banded, they were in a sealed ballot bag. WISC-TV also reported that neither campaign objected to the inclusion of the ballots in the recount.

I’ll start this overdue update with the unofficial recounted numbers released at 6 pm last night from the Government Accountability Board. There are a pair of one-vote discrepancies in the current GAB spreadsheet where the hand-entered total number of votes is one higher than both the sum of the votes cast for the candidates and “scattering” (i.e. write-in) and the number of ballots reported as cast, likely entry errors because every number is hand-entered on the GAB spreadsheet, so I did not include those two reporting units in my tracking spreadsheet. Not including those two reporting units, David Prosser’s lead over JoAnne Kloppenburg in the 523 “cleanly” reported units (14.52% of all reporting units, representing 176,646 votes) increased by 32, to an unofficial 7,348-vote lead.

A quick housekeeping note on my tracking spreadsheet; except for Wednesday’s scrapped numbers, it will include the archived daily totals from the GAB on individual worksheets (date/time-stamp based on when the GAB uploaded their source spreadsheet both in the header and in the worksheet tab), and the most-current worksheet will be on the tab furthest to the left (it should also be the one that opens when one opens the spreadsheet).

The GAB also reported yesterday that 20 of the 72 counties have completed the recount as of 8:19 pm. They (and I) stress that not all of those counties have been entered in the running-total spreadsheet yet. Indeed, WEAU-TV reported that Eau Claire County completed its recount, with a net change of 9 additional votes for Prosser and 14 additional votes for Kloppenburg. The pre-recount margin in Eau Claire County was 15,919 for Kloppenburg and 11,416 for Prosser. Notably, Eau Claire County was forced to recount every vote by hand because the optical machines used by every municipality was the Optech Eagle.

The Prosser campaign launched a website that, among other things, is tracking results that combine what the GAB is reporting and what representatives of their recount team have observed. I cannot stress enough that these are both unofficial numbers and from a source that has a vested interest in what is reported, namely one of the campaigns. As of early this morning, according to the Prosser campaign, with 31.75% of the wards and 398,395 votes (26.61%) recounted, Prosser’s lead has grown by 52 votes from the pre-recount 7,316-vote lead.

Meanwhile, the big story of yesterday (or, at least what would have been the big story had it happened in Waukesha County instead of Dane County) was the separation of 97 ballots from a ballot bag in the city of Verona. Summarizing The CapTimes’ story, the discrepancy came about when the Dane County canvassing board discovered, while recounting ballots cast in the city of Verona, there were over 90 fewer ballots present than the number that had been run through the voting machines on Election Day. A search ensued, and the ballots, rubber-banded together, turned up in the office of the Verona city clerk. Despite the loss of the chain of custody on the ballots, precinct stamps and initials established their legitimacy and they were recounted. The once-missing ballots favored Prosser by 30 votes, even though Kloppenburg carried the city of Verona by a pre-recount 2,380-1,204 margin. That irregularity also, according to the CapTimes did not change that pre-recount margin.

The weekend will be at least a one-day period of work for most of the canvassing boards that have not completed the recount process. While state statutes state that, while recounting, canvassing boards cannot take more than one consecutive day off, the GAB will allow those boards who are “confident” they will complete their work by Friday, May 6 (three days before the statutory deadline) to take the entire weekend off. As for the GAB, they will post at least one updated set of vote totals today, but they will not post any tomorrow.

WisPolitics reports that Dane County judge John Markson has approved a plan put forth by the Government Accountability Board that will allow it to schedule recall elections for the first eight state Senators (Republicans Dan Kapanke, Randy Hopper, Luther Olsen, Shelia Harsdorf and Alberta Darling, and Democrats Dave Hansen, Jim Holperin and Robert Wirch) on what is anticipated to be July 12 by allowing an extension of the 31-day deadlines for the GAB to issue a certificate of sufficiency (or insufficiency) on the various recalls to a date, between May 31 and June 3, that would potentially allow the GAB to schedule the elections on a single day. I do have to note that if the GAB delayed the issuance of a certificate of sufficiency beyond May 31, that election date would be pushed to July 19.

Further, while the recall effort against Republican Senator Robert Cowles was not part of the court petition, the by-the-statutes timeline would also put his recall election on July 12. However, GAB director Kevin Kennedy said that the GAB would likely also seek an extension of the timeline for that case.

Had the judge not approved the GAB plan, the recall elections would have been scattered across the calendar. Kapanke’s election would have been on June 14, Hopper’s on June 21, Darling’s, Hansen’s, Harsdorf’s, Holperin’s, Olsen’s and Wirch’s on July 5, and Cowles’ on July 12. That would have allowed the Democrats to concentrate all their resources on single districts three different times, while it would also have put the bulk of the elections, and all of the elections against the Democrats, on a holiday week, specifically the day after Independence Day.

So much for the DPW “rolling recall” plan.

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.

The Republican Party of Wisconsin brought forth evidence of the Democrat Party of Wisconsin (or people representing them) usurping the good name of Green Bay’s Aurora BayCare Medical Center to phone in intimidation attempts to those who signed recall petitions against Democrat state senator Dave Hansen. Quoting from RPW Executive Director Mark Jefferson:

It’s disgusting that the Dems would use a fake call from a hospital to trick people into answering their phones – only so they could harass and intimidate them into saying they did not sign a recall petition. People who received that call may have feared the worst – an unexpected call from a hospital can bring terrible news about a loved one. The Democrats’ intent was obviously to confuse and upset people, hoping they would be disoriented and easily tricked into saying they had not signed a recall petition. Dave Hansen’s political career may be coming to an end because he fled to Illinois, but that doesn’t excuse this cruel, desperate tactic.

Once again, the DPW proves itself unworthy of any future majority.

Revisions/extensions (4:40 pm 4/26/2011) – WTAQ reports (H/T – Michelle Malkin) that the DPW claims that the falsified Caller ID was an error, but that they will continue to harass Recall Dave Hansen supporters.

R&E part 2 (5:29 pm 4/26/2011) – I would be remiss if I didn’t thank Michelle and Jeff Dunetz for linking here. The funny thing is, while I did tip Michelle, I sent her the link to the RPW release, not to this post.

R&E part 3 (6:20 pm 4/26/2011) – And Hot Air links. Thanks AP.

RE part 4 (6:32 pm 4/26/2011) – And Memeorandum…

R&E part 5 (6:43 pm 4/26/2011) – Flashback (H/T – Jim Hoft, who is also all over this) – Recall Hansen offices broken into hours after the group announced it had enough signatures to force a recall election. Among those items taken was a computer, as well as petitions with an estimated 150 signatures (not enough to stop the group from turning in the petitions last week).

Given those petitions, while now a public record, don’t contain phone numbers, I wouldn’t be surprised if the DPW got the phone numbers off that stolen computer.

R&E part 6 (7:28 pm 4/26/2011) – I highly recommend reading Kevin Binversie’s take. He remembered a slimy robocall campaign DPW chair Mike Tate ran in 2006 when he was with a group trying to keep the door to gay marriage open in Wisconsin.

R&E part 7 (8:54 pm 4/26/2011) – More linkage from The PJ Tattler.

In an editorial that has more of a RDW feel, The Racine Journal Times editorial board skewered the decision by JoAnne Kloppenburg to seek a recount. The open which I’ll tease you with is worth it on its own, but it’s hardly the only broadside they launched:

By this time we would have known if election clerks had somehow missed counting the votes from Kloppenburgville (pop. 7,317) somewhere in western Dane County.

But that’s not happened, and we don’t expect it to.

I’m actually more-or-less ambivalent toward the news that there will be a hand recount of optical-scan ballots in at least portions of 31 counties, jointly agreed to by the Prosser and Kloppenburg campaigns, but only because I am confident that not even a hand recount in those 31 counties (list of counties, though not municipalities other than the city of Milwaukee, courtesy WISC-TV’s Jessica Arp) will result in a net change-of-margin of over 500 votes.

For those of you wondering, in a typical recount, optical-scan ballots would be fed right back through the machine, while both paper ballots that were not optically-scanned and ballots cast on direct recording electronic machines are both hand-counted (DRE hand recounts are from the permanent paper record generated by the machine). However, the Government Accountability Board found an otherwise-irreconcilable problem with the Optech Eagle optical-scan machines used in at least parts of 31 counties and filed a suit to allow a court to reconcile it.

The Optech Eagle, which is no longer made, requires removable memory cartridges, which also are no longer made, to record the vote totals. In order to perform a machine recount, each memory cartridge used in each machine must be clear of all prior data and reprogrammed to perform the recording of the count. There is a claimed insufficient number of spare memory cartridges available nationwide to allow for a recount without erasing at least some of the memory cartridges used on April 5. However, since there is a recount pending, the memory cartridges cannot be erased under state law.

The GAB, through the Department of Justice, had asked for a declaratory judgement to allow a sufficient number of memory cartridges used on April 5 to be erased and used in the recount, while acknowledging that either or both campaigns may request a hand recount.

It’s actually a compilation of three items, with at least one of them a complete surprise out of left field. First up, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editorial board member Ernst-Ulrich Franzen:

But we still think Kloppenburg’s request is a mistake. What happened in Waukesha County was a serious error, but it appears to have been just an error, and one that has now been rectified. The recount is costly and will only serve to further exacerbate Wisconsin’s political divisions. It will leave a bad taste; that’s a sad legacy for Kloppenburg. The difference in the balloting is 7,316 votes. Although that’s less than 0.5% of the 1.5 million votes cast, it’s still a big margin to overcome. Odds are that a recount won’t change a thing. Kloppenburg should take the high road in this case and concede the election.

That was followed by the full editorial board (or at least a majority therof) dumping on the idea of a statewide recount:

We understand the motivation. The final county-by-county canvassing of the state Supreme Court election revealed that Justice David Prosser won a narrow victory, a reflection of how polarizing the new governor and his policies have become. The heat generated by the controversy over those policies most likely spurred the significant turnout for a spring nonpartisan election and a 7,316-vote win for Prosser – less than 0.5% of the 1.5 million votes cast.

That’s slim, but it’s not likely that a statewide recount will change the outcome. Were it a margin in the hundreds of votes, perhaps, but Kloppenburg has to recognize that it’s not.

Finally, Jay Bullock had a moment of clarity:

I supported JoAnne Kloppenburg’s campaign. I do not support the recount, mostly because I do not believe the votes are there and it’s going to be a waste of time and money–taxpayers’ and donors’.

Kevin Binversie found, and Charlie Sykes publicized a chart put together by Politico of statewide recounts over the last 31 years. Some of the races were a bear to track down, but there are two important items to note:

• In terms of percentage, the largest margin of change was 0.1522 percentage points (313 votes) in the 1980 Vermont Senate election. That election involved just under 206,000 votes, less than 14% of the votes at stake in Wisconsin now, and did not change the result.
• In elections that were of similar size to the Wisconsin Supreme Court election or larger, the largest percentage margin of change was 0.0730 percentage points (1,121 votes) in the 2000 Colorado Board of Education election. That election, which involved just over 1.5 million votes (compared to just under 1.5 million votes in Wisconsin now), was also just barely the second-largest vote change, with the 2000 Florida Presidential election seeing a 1,247-vote change on just under 6 million votes cast.

In short, the numbers aren’t there.