Scott Walker, Union Buster

[itsbeenfun2000]

And in Milwaukee County, Governor's hand picked successor for his former post as county executive has lost by a large margin to a political newcomer

[Ironwolf85]

it would be best if both parties argued, fought, made deals and alliances with each other (not third parties), and in the end come to the table with a deal that balances the budget and works.
that's the way the US system is supposed to work, and often does except when you get guys like walker, bulldozers...
guys who aren't out to better the country but line their own pockets....

[Callie Del Noire]

it would be best if both parties argued, fought, made deals and alliances with each other (not third parties), and in the end come to the table with a deal that balances the budget and works.
that's the way the US system is supposed to work, and often does except when you get guys like walker, bulldozers...
guys who aren't out to better the country but line their own pockets....

Actually that's not fair. Walker is perfectly wiling to negotiate. Watch..when he gets out of office he'll have a nice office somewhere working for the Koch Brothers..

I agree, sarcasm aside, that he's an aberration in the process. Sadly we've seen a LOT of them the last few elections. And he's highly placed.  North Carolina has had SEVERAL Governors who were clearly trying to line their pocket at the till.

[Valerian]

And the race still isn't decided.  Some precincts haven't yet reported in -- apparently in some cases, polling places had to stay open later than planned to allow everyone to get a chance to vote, since some areas were running out of ballots due to the unexpectedly high turnout and had to send for more.  This is the most current list I've found -- Prosser is officially in the lead, but by just 585 votes, so obviously it wouldn't take much to change that.  In any case, it looks like we'll be heading for a recount, unless something really unexpected happens.

I'm so nervous.   :P

[itsbeenfun2000]

At around noon today Klopengier took the lead. With 100% reporting now she won by 204 votes.  That is a .0015% margin of victory.

[Callie Del Noire]

The shame of it is that.. DESPITE how publicly discussed and debated this election was, the papers and websites are saying that statewide only a THIRD of all eligible voters showed up to vote.

That should be the sad part, no matter what side you're on.

[itsbeenfun2000]

Be fair Callie, some voters have chosen not to take sides in this dispute. Because of this they choose not to vote.

[Callie Del Noire]

Be fair Callie, some voters have chosen not to take sides in this dispute. Because of this they choose not to vote.

You're telling me that 2/3rds of the eligible voters were wiling to put their head in the sand?

No, I think you're putting too much to them. I'd say more of the typical voter apathy.

[itsbeenfun2000]

The November election had 2.2 million voters this one had 1.5 for what is normally and obscure election. You add to it that Prosser is actually a good man that got caught in the crossfire that left five choices

1. Vote for Prosser on his record.
2. Vote for his opponent, and unknown, because of his relationship with Walker even though before all this happened you would have voted for him if you voted to stop Walker from screwing over the working class public workers. (my category)
3. Vote for his opponent because you believed in her (most of us have never heard of her til the protests)
4. Don't vote because you felt guilty about the choice. (vote for Prosser you help Walker, vote for his opponent you are voting against someone you normally would support)
5. Don't bother to vote.

I am not saying the the majority fell into 4 that didn't vote. However, normally most of the elections in April are local with only one person running in Wisconsin. Most towns actually believe in the people who are in the position they hold. The turn out for local elections in April only gets large when there is a local issue. 1.5 million voters for a spring election is unheard of.

A footnote to all this. The election will go to a recount and that involves legal battles. If it gets to the state supreme court Prosser will  have to recuse himself from the case making the court split 3-3 if they vote on party lines. Just when you didn't think it would get any stranger it seems to.

[Will]

So you believe that any vote against Prosser can only be motivated by the desire to make an indirect slap at Walker?  The fact that Prosser would be willing to uphold what Walker has done would be enough to make me question his judgement, and vote him out on his own merits.

Not that I have a vote, of course.  Just saying.

[itsbeenfun2000]

I am saying that before Walker's anti union bill passed this race was a non issue. The incumbent had a huge lead and no one was paying attention to the race. Now you have 1.5 million people voting in a spring election and the incumbent losing by 204 votes. The only thing that changed was the anti union bill and this man sided with Walker in his political beliefs 95% of the time. This is going to flip the state supreme court from 4-3 conservative to 4-3 liberal. The republicans only have themselves to blame and yet they are now saying how awful this is that it may happen. I guess the people only speak when they win a majority of the vote in an election.

[Callie Del Noire]

I am saying that before Walker's anti union bill passed this race was a non issue. The incumbent had a huge lead and no one was paying attention to the race. Now you have 1.5 million people voting in a spring election and the incumbent losing by 204 votes. The only thing that changed was the anti union bill and this man sided with Walker in his political beliefs 95% of the time. This is going to flip the state supreme court from 4-3 conservative to 4-3 liberal. The republicans only have themselves to blame and yet they are now saying how awful this is that it may happen. I guess the people only speak when they win a majority of the vote in an election.

Well when the public realized that Walker is doing everything he can to centralize power to his office and gut the opposition and kick them while they are down, enough went to bat to vote I guess.

[itsbeenfun2000]

Well when the public realized that Walker is doing everything he can to centralize power to his office and gut the opposition and kick them while they are down, enough went to bat to vote I guess.

Fortunately yes, however, where as Walker has been using the "the people have given me a mandate to do this when they voted in November" now the republicans in the house are saying "what a travesty this is and how much of a disaster it will be if the recount upholds the election results."

[Callie Del Noire]

Fortunately yes, however, Where as Walker has been using the "the people have given me a mandate to do this when they voted in November" now the republicans in the house are saying "what a travesty this is and how much of a disaster it will be if the recount upholds the election results."

Of course, they will always say that when the opposition takes the lead even by such a narrow margin.

And you got to admit.. the margin is close. We're talking about a margin as close as the one that originally had Al Franken losing his senate campaign. And that took MONTHS for it to settle.

[itsbeenfun2000]

Of course, they will always say that when the opposition takes the lead even by such a narrow margin.

And you got to admit.. the margin is close. We're talking about a margin as close as the one that originally had Al Franken losing his senate campaign. And that took MONTHS for it to settle.

And I am sure this will be the same I just hope it doesn't change

[Callie Del Noire]

And I am sure this will be the same I just hope it doesn't change

I expect dirty dealing charges being pointed towards both sides during the whole damn recount foolishness.

[Valerian]

Yeah, the recount process is supposed to begin next week, from what I've seen, and right now they're just trying to make sure all the ballots are safe and not tampered with.  It's going to be a zoo, and all I have to console myself with right now is that according to the Government Accountability Board, usually nothing changes because of a recount.

There are already charges of fraud starting up over the signatures the Democrats have filed for the recall of Randy Hopper, though.  His campaign manager is saying first, that some of the signatures are from people living outside Hopper's district (perhaps inspired by rumors that Hopper was living outside Hopper's district after moving in with his mistress).

The second charge -- get this -- is that the signatures were obtained under false pretenses, claiming that some of the people who signed were told that Hopper was actually one of the Democratic senators up for recall.

I can't decide if a facepalm or a headdesk is more appropriate for that one.  :P

http://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/article/20110407/GPG0101/110407057/0/GPG0206/State-Dems-We-enough-signatures-recall-2nd-GOP-senator?odyssey=nav

[Valerian]

It's only getting stranger, as usual.

The Waukesha County Clerk, Kathy Nickolaus, claimed a few hours ago to have found almost 15,000 uncounted votes floating in her computer system -- all the votes from the entire city of Brookfield -- amounting to 11,008 for Prosser and 3,426 for Kloppenburg.  (Waukesha is traditionally Republican leaning.)

I'm saying claimed, because she has her own system set up for collating and sending votes to the Government Accountability Board.  Seriously, her own system.  She has all the voting records on a couple of stand-alone PCs in her office that only she can access, for security reasons.  And she isn't letting anyone else check to make sure that this system is secure.  Now its probably too late to even tell if any changes were made, because she's got control of every single record.

When she first set this system up last year, the Waukesha County Board Chairman told her it was unacceptable and would have to be changed, but she ignored the order -- laughed at it, in fact, according to all the reports I've found.

She also used to work for the Republican caucus.  In 2002, she received immunity from prosecution when she was involved in a corruption scandal, detailed here.

On Tuesday, shockingly-large turnout suddenly emerged from Waukesha County, which did not comport with either the results of previous spring elections, or even internal estimates from city officials mid-day. In fact, a Waukesha City Deputy Clerk said at 1:18pm that turnout was very typical, predicting somewhere between 20 to 25 percent. As Tuesday night wore on, reporting in Waukesha County stopped altogether for hours, leaving observers to wonder what was going on. Then suddenly, results suggesting massive turnout started to pour in rapidly with Prosser adding dramatically to his total by a 73-27 percent margin.

One Wisconsin Now estimates put overall turnout near 38 percent, a wild outlier to historical data and the earlier mid-day estimation of Waukesha’s own officials.

http://www.onewisconsinnow.org/press/election-returns-what-went-on-in-waukesha.html
http://keepamericaatwork.com/?p=106162
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x838721

Other reports (#whatkathyfound) indicate that Nickolaus' computer also contains Saddam's WMDs, a perpetual motion machine, and that sock you lost last week.

I just want to know who to throw things at.  :P

Edit: Also, the number of "found" votes is extremely significant.

In WI, an automatic recount at state-expense is triggered if an election is within .5%, and we have a fully verifiable paper trail to audit election results. That means in this election with approximately 740k for Kloppenburg and 739k for Prosser, the vote gets recounted at state-expense if the election is within ~7400 votes.

So the last 2 days the WI-GOP has been scrambling trying to figure out how they can still get Prosser into office. What was the result of their brain-storming? Add a few extra votes in a friendly area (Waukesha), and call it a clerical error. But in order to steal the election, they NEED to be able to keep a recount from occurring, because a recount would expose their attempted fraud to the light of day.

So they couldn't just give Prosser a couple hundred to put him barely in the lead by 40. They had to give him more than 7500 in order to get above the threshold for automatic recount, so that the only way for a recount to happen would be if Kloppenburg ponies up the money for a state-wide recount, which could be expensive.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/04/07/964575/-Why-Prosser-needed-EXACTLY-+7500-votes?showAll=yes

[Callie Del Noire]

While the State GOP can keep the STATE authorities from looking into the case, if there is sufficient cause for a fraud investigation the feds can be called in. Particularly if there is an out of state connection added in.

[Vekseid]

And apparently the Waukesha County votes don't have a paper trail.

It's my personal opinion that no paper trail is tantamount to election fraud, and the results from such an election should be tossed out and the people in the county can have proper voting machines brought in and the vote run again.

But that may just be me.

[itsbeenfun2000]

As much as I would like this to be election fraud the chances of that are either 0% or 100%. To vote in Wisconsin there are checks and balances at each polling place. Each polling place has a large book in alphabetical order of registered voters. You go up to the election judges and give your name and address. There are two of them there and they confirm who you are and initial in the book that you checked in. They then give you a numbered ticket, also initialed, where  you go to another judge where you trade your ticket for a ballot. You may register to vote the day of an election in Wisconsin but the paperwork is kept as well. The number of tickets given out has to equal the number of people signed out in the book plus newly registered voters.

This would mean they would have to have over 10000 registered voters and/or newly registered voters signed in as ghost voters who are going to be called if an investigation is started. That would mean you would need to have over 10000 people willing to commit purgery to pull this off. That would be one hell of a conspiracy and impossible to pull off. So if they did something out of the ordinary here very easy to prove, to do it would be very stupid.

[Vekseid]

She can also doctor the results on her own machine, which is the problem. Although it would be possible to do forensic and statistical analysis of the votes on her machine, her machine would need to be seized and analyzed.

[Valerian]

I'm thinking the chances are 100%.

She deliberately set up a system with no oversight but her own, then refused to change that system to comply with accepted guidelines.

No one has yet offered a non-fraud-based explanation for that several hours-long blackout on voting results from the county.

She used to work for Prosser, technically -- he was Minority Leader in the state assembly when she worked for the Republican assembly caucus in the nineties.

She was a computer tech and programmer, so presumably knows how to put together a decent fake on a computer.  And because there's no oversight, she doesn't need to create thousands of fake voters.  As far as I can tell, literally all she has are numbers on a spreadsheet, with none of the usual cross-checks, numbers, and tickets to back them up.

Most damning of all, this "error" gives Prosser exactly the number of votes needed to prevent the automatic, free recount that would otherwise have happened.  Finding 7,400 votes wouldn't have been enough.  Finding 7,500 puts them exactly over the top.

Now, if Kloppenburg wants to call for a recount, she'll have to pay for it.  Estimates put that cost at about $1 million.  She'll be under intense pressure not to "waste all that money and time", because look! Prosser's ahead by a virtual landslide (pun intended) and she's just being a sore loser.

I retract my earlier statement about wanting to know who to throw things at.  Now all I want to know is how to get the feds looking at this as quickly as possible.

[Ironwolf85]

!!!!!
that's just obscene, someone has to know about this and get the feds looking at it!

[Zakharra]

 That woman is stupid. This should be and very likely will be looked at. Especially if they can prove she isn't folowing the election law guidelines.  Seriously.. what the fuck are theser politicians thinking?  They can't get away witrh this sort of crap anymore. Why the hell are they doing this when they know they will be caught?