WI-Supreme Court: Prosser Re-takes Lead By 40

Don’t get too comfortable with Tuesday’s results, because now they’ve changed thanks to another discrepancy between one county’s results and the AP’s. Of course, don’t get comfortable with the new numbers either, as more changes are likely as recanvassing occurs and the inevitable recounting and litigation begins!

A tally compiled by The Associated Press Wednesday and used by news organizations statewide, including the Journal Sentinel, indicated Kloppenburg was leading the race by 204 votes. Figures on Winnebago County’s website are now different from those collected by the AP.

Winnebago County’s numbers say Prosser received 20,701 votes to Kloppenburg’s 18,887. The AP has 19,991 for Prosser to Kloppenburg’s 18,421.

The new numbers would give Prosser 244 more votes, or a 40-vote lead statewide….

The latest numbers for Winnebago County are not official.

The news service is working to reach the Winnebago County clerk, but the clerk is participating in the canvass of the vote and has not returned a message.

UPDATE: High drama! More lead changes! In the last couple hours, Prosser added to his lead further with new numbers in Waukesha County. But now Talking Points Memo is reporting that Kloppenburg has added votes in a number of rural counties, enough to draw about even. Suffice it to say we have no idea who’s going to win this thing.

Late Update: Prosser has reportedly picked up another 200 votes from the correction of a clerical error in New Berlin, located in the Republican stronghold of Waukesha County in the Milwaukee suburbs….

Late Late Update: TPM has just confirmed with the local clerk’s offices that Kloppenburg has gained some net votes in some other counties: +113 in Grant County, +30 in Iowa County, and +91 in Portage County. She has also gained +24 in Vernon County.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Now there’s word of a much bigger discrepancy out there in Waukesha County that would favor Prosser. Nothing official yet, though:

Reports that Waukesha missed entire city (!) of Brookfield in counting Tuesday vote. Could be 7K vote gain for Prosser.

UPDATE #4: Waukesha is indeed adding about 14,000 votes, adding about 7,000 to Prosser’s margin.

Madison – In a political bombshell, the clerk in a Republican stronghold is set to release new vote totals giving 7,500 votes in the state Supreme Court race back toward Justice David Prosser, swinging the race significantly in his favor.

503 thoughts on “WI-Supreme Court: Prosser Re-takes Lead By 40”

  1. “An editor at the AP said the news service became aware of the discrepancy in the past hour.”

    Pathetic.  

  2. why we were declaring victory, when nobody had even called the election for either person, nor had a recount ended, let alone started.

    I knew the numbers would bounce up and down in the process. I was wondering why others didn’t.

    And Kloppenberg declaring victory doesn’t make it so. If that were the case, Steve Cooley would be California Attorney General right now.

    1. People keep saying wait for the Kloppenburg friendly counties. But why. I would think math errors can go either way. It’s a complete coin flip.

      Someone splash water on my face.

    1. If you count all swings to Prosser, he is ahead by 300 (not including Klopp’s gains in Vernon, Pepin, and Eau Claire).  With the latter counted, it’s a 240 vote lead for Prosser currently.

      1. If we end up losing, then this will be accurate; if we end up winning, then this will be a reminder not to be complacent.

  5. seeing Prosser up 21.  Counties will have small changes but the Winnebego county change seems to be way more than normal.

    1. The reason for Buena Vista being a common town name is the 1847 Battle of Buena Vista from the Mexican-American War, where future President Zachary Taylor led the American army to victory against those dastardly Mexicans despite being greatly outnumbered.

    2. I was vexed by the fact that nothing is pronounced the way it’s spelled here. BEW-na Vista, STAN-ton, AMerst County, TAZ-well… And I’m still not sure how Buchanan is pronounced. BUC-anan?

    1. I’m not exactly sure how Buchanan is pronounced by those from Buchanan but I expect it is BEW-can-an. Even being from the Shenandoah Valley, I can only extrapolate from those with sharp Appalachian accents in my home region to those in the very deepest, darkest Southwest Virginia.

  8. that this may be one of those elections where we are never entirely satisfied that we know who won the most votes.

    But given that it isn’t clear that all counties have re-canvassed, I still think it’s more likely than not that Kloppenburg will be back in the lead when they’re done.

  10. but in a race where someone wins by 20 points, or even 5 points, why bother reporting a shift of 300 votes?  (Unless there’s only 1500 votes in the district)

  11. Add another 200 for Prosser from New Berlin in Waukesha County:

    David Prosser picked up 200 votes in New Berlin after a clerical error was discovered, according to Pat Karcher, a member of the board of canvassers in Waukesha County. Karcher spoke during a break in the canvassers meeting.

    http://www.jsonline.com/news/w…

  13. and other more populated areas or college towns. Those are more likely to have mistakes (due to higher vote volumes and less organization) and more likely to favor Kloppenburg.

        1. NOW GET BACK TO WORK!

          We’ve got recall elections to work on, and possibly in Michigan too!

          2. And this race coming down to the wire, at least before 14,000 votes from a suburb favoring Justice Prosser better than 2:1 were mysteriously discovered not to have been added to the total (wouldn’t it be great if a Dane County clerk suddenly had a brainwave that there were 20,000 votes in a 2:1 Kloppenburg area that he had somehow forgotten to report?)…maybe that will persuade people that if they care about who gets elected, they should vote.

          3. Or think of themselves that way. To them it feels like being a knee jerk automaton. Also, for partisanship to work, people would have to know what the parties stand for and how they would govern differently, and even that is beyond a lot of people.

            And it’s absolutely no helping in primaries or non partisan races.

          4. It’s doing the research before hand. You have to know what the powers of the office are, develop a concept of the skills and qualities that would suit someone to that position, and then research the candidates to find out who has those skills and qualities.

            The last part is the hardest. Most of the sources of information about candidates with any detail are from partisans of one side or another and they’re not necessarily credible. Even reading the news usually only gives you summaries of claims and counter-claims without enough context to tell you who’s telling the truth, and that’s for the races they cover. If it’s for something like County Clerk (to use a random example) you’re probably not going to read about it in the paper. The candidates running in those races are probably not going to be able to raise the money to get their names out there. And then there’s the fact that the issues at play are complex. Most people don’t know what “single payer” or “individual mandate” or “recission” mean. So then they have to figure that out.

            People are scared to vote the wrong way and not sure how to figure out what the right way is. And to top it off, for most people this stuff is work. Most people aren’t policy wonks or horse race nerds who come post on the internet about election returns in the Supreme Court race of states they don’t live in. We do this because it’s fun. It’s important too, but that’s not why we do it. The people who don’t vote also usually aren’t complaining about the government. If they had opinions about the government, they would have voted.  

          5. So I don’t see where the “waaay more than that” comes from.  Care to explain?

          10. going to go out on a limb and say we got the voters out. It was still close. I could be wrong but I’m pretty sure dem turnout was as good as it gets for an off year judicial election. However I think people underestimate the difficulty of beating a 15 year, technically non partisan, incumbent, even under these special circumstances.  

          11. once every 4 years.  And then some people know about that, and the midterm elections every 2 years.

            But other elections don’t get much mention from things like the TV news.  Except possibly an occasional “Joe Smith is the new mayor of our town”…AFTER the election.

            So, basically, if you’ve scheduled any elections other than for election day in November of an even-numbered year, WAY less turnout.

            Heck, I will admit that until about 2003 or 2004 ish, I didn’t even understand how primary elections worked.

            Seriously, when you tell people to vote, you have to be prepared to explain these things to them.  Many people will indeed be blindsided by the sheer existence of an election at an unexpected time.

            And many people really are.  The results suddenly get discussed on the news and they’re like, wait, what just happened?

          12. Presidential elections and good midterms will see them show up, but any other time, the enthusiasm isn’t there. Many voters are just not that civic minded and those are many of the votes we rely on to win elections.

          13. Paradox of voting.

            Things like “having a voice in government” or “doing your civic duty” are lofty, symbolic concepts with no relevance to someone solely concerned with feeding their kids or playing XBox. Yes, their vote might provide the margin for a candidate who will give them more money for food or XBox games. But it’s usually less likely than winning the lottery, so why not play that insead?  

  23. but maybe he knows something:

    SykesCharlie Charles Sykes

    BREAKING: Waukesha County just announced 5:30 press conference to discuss officials canvas numbers. expect big numbers

    1 minute ago Favorite Retweet Reply  

      1. But there certainly should be something done to assure that “errors” like this don’t occur again.

      2. It’s worth exploring that this woman just made up the votes. They are on her personal computer. She’s an ex-GOP operative. She’s been reprimanded in the past for not following the proper procedures. There has to be recourse for voter fraud if proved.

    1.  In Roosevelt, NY. It was close too 100% white and a few African American families moved in. Most of the white people there immediately started selling their homes and sold it to only African Americans so the African Americans would not move to their neighborhoods.

      Also, there is redlining too.  

    1. That will change with the next generation, due to the economy making it much harder to busy houses, and apartments becoming more appealing.  

  33.  

    @JohnMercure

    John Mercure

    Numerous sources tell me Prosser will pick up 7000 votes in Waukesha Cty. 14,000 votes were apparently not entered into computer system

    1. This just doesn’t happen. 7,500 votes for the guy in second place just doesn’t happen two days after all precincts are through.

      Maybe I’m just in denial…

      1. but the Big Lie has long been considered better than fudging around the margins. It’s more believable. The general public isn’t likely to believe that someone would have the audacity to stretch the truth so much. Therefore, what they’re alleging must be true.

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B…

        Of course, I have no idea if that is what’s happening here. But I am skeptical.

  35. This is ridiculous. Is there any county that has finished canvassing process today without any of these big vote tally changes?

    (Though I understand this may happen all the time and just go unnoticed when a win is by several points).

    2. Yes. I think it’s more of a classifying of municipalites thing. It’s that politicial science question of “What’s the difference between a city and a village?”

      The big Brookfield (the one where the votes apparently forgot to be included) is a city, whereas the small Brookfield is just a village. They’re probably adjacent to each other, and just under different governments. One may have spun off from the other.

        1. …that it’s perfectly understandable why a certain critical percentage of swing voters wouldn’t buy it that Prosser deserves to be fired.

          The political case against him is a patchwork quilt, I can see how people wouldn’t bite on it.

          I would point to the Outgamie County results to make that point.  Prosser did well there and way outperformed the de facto Republican who lost to the de facto Democrat for county exec.  Same thing in Milwaukee County about whose turnout some here complain, where Prosser outperformed Stone by 4 points.

          The recalls are what matter, those are the prize, and this week was just a set-up, a trial run and a proxy for what matters.

      2. …the “error” puts Prosser outside of recount range, so we will probably never know… extremely convenient of the clerk to find just enough votes to do that!

      2. …they surely won’t care about electing a President, a U.S. Senator, a Governor, or anything else.

        Come on, no matter how important we all made this out to be, it’s perfectly understandable how some people would still say “I don’t buy it that this is about supporting or opposing Scott Walker.”

  37. … 14,000 votes were found in Dane County?

    If there was a legitimate mistake that goes against us let’s try and act like adults about it.

    1. Scalia may be from Jersey, but Sonia Sotomayor is from the Bronx and would knock the hell out of him if he did that. At least in my mind she would.

      Hey, so it appears that the Wauke$ha county clerk, Kathy Nickolaus, is a Republican, and elected to her office. Anyone want to start up a fund to recall her?  Because seriously, lady, just how incompetent do you and your staff have to be to miss an entire city when sending out results?

      1. …but it was the page on the Metroid series’s space pirates, and all I did was change “a fictional, highly sentient species” to “a highly fictional, highly sentient species”.

        This was back when they actually had a page for the space pirates.

    2. A full audit wouldn’t hurt, I guess, but I doubt this lady would be so stupid as to just create 14K fake ballots on her computer and expect nobody to notice.

  40. Explain to me why the counties surrounding major cities tend to be extremely Republican, while the county that the city is in tend to be heavily Democratic?  

  42. (a local news station for Milwaukee) reported that it’s 7,000 votes missing, not a net gain for Prosser. Either way it doesn’t look promising  

  47. No way that something this major comes up in Dane or etc. The thing about other Wisconsin counties is that they list the results by precinct and it’s pretty obvious that nothing major’s missing.

  51. I did the math, and my preliminary conclusion was that 21,091 votes were case in the City of Brookfield for the 2010 gubernatorial election.

    If that’s useful in any way whatsoever.

    1. but the missing ballots that magically appeared, the endless challenges that mostly got thrown out anyway, the Lizard People. It’s as much Norm Coleman’s fault as it is the system’s, but having one senator for half a year is kind of ridic.

  52. Fucking hell. I come back to learn that 7,000 GOP votes mysteriously appeared. Just make sure they were real. We’ll move on and ideally turn out those State Senators who voted with Walker’s craziness.

  55. Every county will have to be on the ball, everything will be in order and no potential for large scale errors like this.

    2. last summer, two ballot props that were pushed by PG&E and Mercury Insurance both failed.  That was something.

      Yes, we can compete.  I actually think that if the candidate against Prosser was not initially a sacrificial lamb and was in it to win it from the get-go, we would have won.

    3. These big donors can put as much money into campaigns as they like, but turnout can counteract that. Milwaukee County didn’t help turnout enough and the very few voters Democrats have in those heavy GOP suburban counties didn’t show up either.

    4. It’s very, very difficult to beat an incumbent judge, no matter the political climate.

      Don’t think that the Koch Brothers are unstoppable. The fact that we came super-close to beating an incumbent justice doesn’t mean the system is broken.

      By the way, third-party groups coming in to help their candidates? That happened before Citizens United. You can’t blame it for this.

  56. Just wow. Talk about snatching victory from the jaws of defeat from Prosser. But anyone who’s allowed to keep election data on their own computer should be fired.

    1. It’s worth it politically to put them on defense, point to this any time those Rethugs bring up “fraud!”

      I’m increasingly tired of bothering to take the high road.  It’s worth it only if we get something to show for it from voters.  But we don’t.  So just make war.

    2. It is insane that Election Day is not a federal holiday in the United States. I have never understood that. And it obviously benefits Republicans, because people working low-end jobs are likelier to break Democratic and less likely to be willing to skip work to vote.

  62. A wise idea, especially considering WI has a paper trail.

    “Wisconsin voters as well as the Kloppenburg for Justice Campaign deserve a full explanation of how and why these 14,000 votes from an entire City were missed. To that end, we will be filing open records requests for all relevant documentation related to the reporting of election results in Waukesha County, as well as to the discovery and reporting of the errors announced by the County. We are confident that election officials in Waukesha County will fulfill these requests as quickly as possible so that both our campaign and the people of Wisconsin can fully understand what happened and why. Just as Assistant Attorney General Kloppenburg has run to restore confidence in the court, Wisconsin residents also deserve to have full confidence in election results.”

    1. and she’s about to lose so go for the gusto, I say.  Although I doubt she will; Democrats respect government and have a much harder time making shit up about fraud because no, we understand the governmental process and we don’t expect everything to be perfect, we just expect it to work itself out in the end and it probably did.

      I really do believe the difference between the GOP and Dems and their position on government “working” is a macro level that works itself into many, many micro facets of the difference between the GOP and Dems.

      1. Although, an intersting question – does it actually help our cause to yell fraud in terms of motivating voters? Make them more angry? Or does it cause them to not believe it does any good to vote in elections?

      2. Pulling within a percent of winning in a race where

        * we were totally outspent

        * we had a sacrificial lamb as a candidate

        ** who was totally unknown until a couple months ago

        * we had no spoiler candidate helping us

        * the race is officially non-partisan

        * many people don’t like the idea of electing/rejecting judges based on politics

        * the election day occurred in an off-year

        * the election day was not a typical November election day

        * the election day had few, if any, other turnout drivers

        Yeah, I’d say this is an accomplishment.

        But this is just the beginning.

      3. …and the incompetence may be leading to double vote counting.  She talked about using macros to manipulate data in her press conference and that should have sent alarm bells ringing.  The fact that she has a history of corruption and scandal does not help her case.

        Regardless, it should be fully investigated… the whole thing reeks of scandal.

      4. But Nate’s argument is pretty insubstantial for a rationale.  He gave instances of 3 elections that had completely different backgrounds to them and expected somehow to fit that data with respect to a special off year election?  

        The fact of the matter is that Dane County and Milwaukee had something like 50% turnout whereas the state total was something like 37%.  That alone makes it not “suspicious” to say the least, that Waukesha had turnout around the average since we have two heavily populated counties turning out in massive numbers.  This would similarly also lead to a lower proportion of the vote as a whole, which means that a .3% shift from 2008 is wholly credible.  

        The history of this woman also brings a lot of doubts that I would very much like an investigation to clear up.  She was working for the Republican Caucus during a scandal that landed the Speaker in jail and had to be granted specific immunity, has screwed up numbers in 2006 before too, and has openly defied the elections committee over the “wisdom” of keeping elections data on her personal computer, which has led to more than one news report on that issue.  

        Personally I find it hard to believe that she could miss the largest city in the county and not notice that in the returns, but people can be incompetent and she sure has enough of an alibi to support that.  This does, at least, give Kloppenburg a reason to investigate without charges that she’s trying to “steal” the election from Prosser.  

        Honestly, though, even if this were election fraud, chances are it would’ve been thought up well ahead to, you know, not get caught.  You don’t do something this brazen without considering the ramifications, which gives more credibility to incompetence.  On the other hand, the biggest lie is the most believable and allegations of a double count are completely possible.

  63. Let’s just presume there is no foul play here… The fact is, Prosser’s campaign had him down by high single digits last week.  then the Koch brothers come in, spend $2 million dollars, and boom… election bought.

    I’m beginning to wonder if we will ever be able to compete in the post-Citizens United era.

    And to think I was so relaxed today, thinking that the political gods had finally favored us for once… only to see us smacked down once again on the precipice of victory.  What have we done to offend them?  Can we make some sort of ritual sacrifice?

  64. I have never, ever seen this kind of thing happen before.

    And Republicans bitched and moaned when an election worker found a box of uncounted ballots in his trunk in Minnesota during the 2008 recount. 7,500 votes for Justice Prosser just suddenly turning up after all precincts were reported to be counted?

    Pardon my French: but what the fuck?

  65. I think all this really shows that voting for judges is a terrible system. Political disputes should be settled through the political branches of government, not through the judiciary.

    Go ahead with the legislative recalls. Win the next general election. But whether or not the legislature violated the state’s open meetings laws should not depend on a judge’s political affiliation. If either of these candidates would decide the case on such a basis, then the whole concept of rule of law can be kissed goodbye.

    I’d hope that neither of them would do so. But subjecting them to the will of voters to keep their jobs doesn’t help.

  66. …keeping tab on all the changes in the vote tallies today. Apparently, as of right now, they are only including counties where the final recanvassing has been complete, which adds up to only a dozen of Wisconsin’s total counties.

    We began the day with a Kloppenburg lead of 204, and we end the day with a 7014 Prosser lead, if my math is correct.

    http://elections.wispolitics.c…

    We’ll see where it goes from here.  

    1. Not to mention that if voting were mandatory, and it were the Democrats that did it, the onslaught of new lower information voters would turn out and simply vote against the Democratic party as punishment for making them vote in the first place.

  68. The most Republican county in the state happened to “find” a whole treasure trove of votes.

    Saving the de facto Republican candidate, who, by the way, underperformed a losing baseline (Bush ’04) in pretty much every kind of county (both rural and urban, both red and blue) in the state.  

    1. This womans only job is to take care of elections in her county. She “forgot” to send in one of the largest cities votes in her county. If it isn’t fraud it’s extreme stupidity.

      1. also, while I’m sure there’s a handful out there, the idea of a significant number of people who are eligible to vote who is solely concerned with playing XBox…is scary.

  69. As my name implies, I live in Brookfield. I vote in Ward 9, so my vote is one of those supposedly not counted by Ms Nickolaus in Tues night’s tally.

    I voted at 4pm; I was given ballot #420 in what seemed to be a very well-run election operation. There are 1113 registered voters in my ward, so I figured the turnout would be good. According to the CC’s numbers, it turned out to be 52.22% (14,315 out of 27,412 registered voters.) That IS high, but believable for this town, which is home to several right-wing schools, including The Brookfield Academy (started by Harry Bradley, founder of the John Birch Society.) Those folks are VERY politically active; they are anxious to see Walker’s private school vouchers become a reality, and for unions to ‘go away.’

    But what does trouble me is that her numbers indicate an overall turnout for Waukesha County of 47.24% (125,102 out of 265,813 voters), which is whopping.

    Voters in Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington Counties were heavily lobbied with various GOTV activities (robo-calls to residences, emails to business execs/owners.) They knew that Scott Walker and the Tea Party’s ideologically-driven agenda depended on them delivering a Prosser win. So the turnout is possible.

    But my area specifically (Brookfield) is also home to known political operatives, who have lied and cheated before (email me for names.) The guy who made the FOIA request for Prof. William Cronon’s emails (the UW prof who exposed ALEC) lives a few miles down the road (in Pewaukee.) So, while this could be a case of a fantastic turnout and clerical incompetence on election night, it could certainly be something more sinister, given the parties involved and the stakes. Either way, it bears further investigation and close scrutiny.  

     

  70. Not necessarily because I believe anything fraudulent happened (I literally couldn’t sleep if I believed that, so I choose not to), but because I like to think these things through like a criminal might.

    Clearly, she didn’t just create 14,000 votes out of thin air (i.e. to add to the real totals from election day). I assume Wisconsin, like all states, makes available voter files with flags for each election if that voter showed up. To create votes, you also have to assign them to real voters, and at that volume it would be an easy matter to check a few to see if they really voted.

    No, the nefarious scenario that actually fits the facts is something else. The clerk reports real totals on E-day, but keeps them on her personal computer, and only there. After the fact, when her candidate is losing, she simply changes the mix, giving her guy a greater share of the total. In other words, she changes votes, she doesn’t add them. Perhaps she adds a few as well, but not too many so it’s hard to conclude anything from the voter file.

    Sounds pretty far fetched. But that’s I think the only scenario that works.

  71. You have got to be fucking kidding me. According to MSNBC:

    Nickolaus was given immunity from prosecution in a 2002 criminal investigation into illegal activity by members of the assembly Republican Caucus. She worked for 13 years as a data analyst and computer specialist for the caucus. Prosser, who as speaker of the Assembly in 1995 and 1996 controlled the same caucus, was not part of the investigation. Nickolaus resigned from her state job in 2002 just before launching her county clerk campaign.

    If you’ve spent more than a decade as a data analyst and computer specialist, you know that you should never just, you know, take all of the election data off the county servers and lock it into your home computer and then just announce that you accidentally forgot to save the totals for a relatively large city before you sent in the data, and oopsies, looks like the Republican won the election instead. Plus, she has a long, sordid history of fishy behavior, from that initial scandal to recent smackdowns from the conservative county board for doing stuff like this.

    That is BEYOND fucking fishy. I’m sorry. I was in the oh-well-win-some-lose-some-fuck-it camp before. But NO WAY would anyone who knows anything about computers think that was okay. She’s either lying and committing voter fraud and using basic math to cover her tracks and fool Nate Silver, or she is literally the dumbest computer specialist in the history of computer specialists. Fellow nerds, back me up on this. This is like computer science 101 here.

  73. a lot of people want to believe it’s just a human error by a stupid human, but I would already start to keep a close eye on Wisconsin’s electoral voting in 2012. The republicans plan their human errors carefully.

    1. Liberal Dane County was more engaged in the 2010 gubertorial race, with a Scott Walker victory likely, than it was engaged in the Obama-electing 2009 Presidential race?

  74. http://suggest.wi.gov/docview….

    (excerpt)

    Final results later showed Lufter losing to fellow Republican Bill Kramer by a significant margin.

    County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus said some returns from the City of Waukesha inexplicably had data recorded in the wrong column, which momentarily skewed results.

  75. the local paper reported on the count; it just wasn’t added to the state totals due to what looks to be human incompetence.

    As expected, Brookfield city voters ran up a good turnout in the state Supreme Court race and gave incumbent Justice David Prosser nearly 11,000 votes.

    Unofficial, unaudited results showed 76 percent of city residents who voted picked Prosser, with 24 percent voting for challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg.

    That translated to a city voting turnout of about 53 percent, the city’s second-highest for a spring election since 2001, but nowhere near the 79 percent turnout for the gubernatorial race last November.

    This place was known to reach sky-high levels of turnout.  I mean, 79% showed up for a gubernatorial race in a non-presidential year??  Yikes.

  76. … if the union backed candidate “winning” by 200-300 votes was an historic upset, the sign the GOP was done, and evidence any state in the Rust Belt was off the table in 2012, does that mean that the conservative’s 7500 vote lead now means the exact opposite and that unions are dead and Republicans on the rise–only on a scale 23 times greater?

  78. That is, the logic found in this tweet:

    http://twitter.com/fivethirtye…

    I’m not sure how you can find significance in a county’s percentage of the statewide vote is past elections. The numbers seem to shift randomly when one consider any county. Take for example the same figure’s for liberal Dane County.

    Percentage of statewide vote of Dane County

    In 2008-Pres: 9.5%

    In 2010-Gov : 10.2%

    In Feb 15-Supreme Court primary: 15.6%

  79. The election result (regardless of the final tally) shows that we’re motivated, and that Walker’s overreach moved WI back to a lean Blue state. However, it also shows that there has been no real movement on the Red side of the Bush/Kerry divide. (My suspicion is that current polling practices still do not adequately discount intensity, but that’s another subject.)

    That means there should be a laser like focus of resources on the seats we have a good chance at.  

  81. As someone who has lived in Waukesha County for 40 years I can attest to the Republicans that dominate this county.  Because you can’t get elected to any political office here unless you are a Republican you don’t pay much attention to elections for Congressman (Sensenbrenner), state senate or state assembly, or any of the county offices.  That’s how a political hack can end up as our County Clerk.  It’s ludicrious that she personally controls the reporting of election results.  Anybody with an accounting background would have a separation of duties and control procedures in place.

    On election night and even on the next day the only thing she posted to the public were the totals in the aggregate.  There were no totals by municipality.  I believe her predecessor would post results not only by municipality but down to the precinct or ward level.

    On election night when they were interviewing Proesser’s campaign staff which was having their after election party in Waukesha County they knew that the results she was putting out was missing votes.  That’s because they had the results directly from the municipalities bypassing her.

    On another note because I live in Waukesha County I received at least 5 phone calls a day in the week before the election from conservative groups urging me to vote.

       

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