So says the WSJ’s Douglas Belkin today:
The Wisconsin Supreme Court election that could affect a contentious union-rights law just got even messier.
On Monday, the 80-year-old Democratic election observer who vouched for the conduct of the Waukesha County Clerk in the April 5 state Supreme Court race said she was kept in the dark and now isn’t sure what happened.
Last week, observer Ramona Kitzinger told reporters that the numbers Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus reported “jived” with what she witnessed.
On Monday, the Waukesha Democratic Party released a statement ascribed to Ms. Kitzinger saying she’s “very, very confused about why the canvass was finalized.”
“I am 80 years old and I don’t understand anything about computers,” the statement quoted Ms. Kitzinger as saying. “It wasn’t even until the press conference was happening that I learned it was this enormous mistake that could swing the whole election.”
Ms. Nickolaus has apologized for losing nearly 15,000 election ballots and chalked it up to human error.
Ms. Kitzinger’s statement comes as Democrats are seeking an investigation into the mistake. Up until Ms. Nickolaus found the votes, Democratic-backed candidate JoAnne Kloppenburg was beating Republican-backed incumbent David Prosser by 200 votes out of nearly 1.5 million cast.
This is false. Or rather, it is unnecessarily misleading. To wit, the votes were always there. The fact that they hadn’t yet been recorded in the Waukesha tally is what was “found,” and even then, at least one Brookfield reporter was able to get the numbers the night of the election from the City of Brookfield’s clerks office — and the numbers they handed her, which she posted, match the (later) numbers that Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus subsequently claimed she failed to save when sending tallies off to the AP.
So Kloppenburg was “beating” Prosser only because AP reporters were relying on unofficial vote counts — and their numbers were off because the entirety of Brookfield’s vote count was missing from the calculus.
After Ms. Nickolaus found ballots from the politically conservative city of Brookfield, Mr. Prosser led by about 7,500 votes. The state is expected to verify the totals by Friday. The loser will have three days to file for a recount.
Again, the ballots weren’t “found,” as reporting from election night clearly shows. They simply weren’t included in Ms. Nickolaus’s count because she erred.
Fortunately, the City of Brookfield released the data to reporters, and the date it released on election night jibes with Nickolaus’s revised tally. As one agitated commenter addressing the conspiracy theorists aptly notes on the Brookfield Patch’s website today:
How can you just keep ignoring the FACT that the vote totals were reported by THIS WEBSITE on the NIGHT OF ELECTION, and they are the same numbers ultimately/finally reported by the Clerk? Is the reporter part of your conspiracy? The Patch owned by the Koch Brothers? (nope – a Huffington entity) Ignoring what doesn’t fit your conspiracy theory doesn’t make you right – or smart – just an ideologue.
Or a leftist. Truth doesn’t much matter, because truth is only that which you can get people to believe. And that involves a complex calculus of pandering, persuasion, and power.
And the latter we can see at play here, as Ms. Kitzinger is now backing off her original story, claiming incompetence and some senility rather than cross the union thugs who no doubt have taken a go at revising her press conference position.
(h/t Terry H and geoff b. See also here and here)
When did the AP become the official judge of Wisconsin elections?
Can you imagine the amount of “persuasion” that’s been brought to bear on this old woman by her “fellow travelers” since that fateful press conference? Enough that she’s willing to go in front of the press and use the, “but what do I know, I’m a batty old lady”, card to, er, refine her statement…
I hate to pee in the unionistas cornflakes, but the AP-Obama result is not the final measure of electoral victory. That would be the certified results.
Thank God that the local paper noticed the error on the very night of the election.
You almost feel bad for that lady watching her walk back her prior honest assessment.
There will be further ‘investigations’, deemed necessary by LeftLibProggs who won’t stop until this election is theirs. I’ll bet they terrorized Ms. Kitzinger. I wonder if she woke up with a cat’s head in her bed?
Noted Right Winger Nate Silver of the 538 blog posts the following: Vote-Counting Error In Wisconsin Points to Incompetence, Not Conspiracy
Oops, did I say Nate Silver is a Right Winger? I meant to say, noted lefty blogger, Nate Silver
Sure, Blake. But Dailykos says differently. I know, because it was linked as PROOF of malfeasance in the comments at that Brookfield Patch article. Which itself was written in time-traveling ink.
Plus, Microsoft whatever has, like, an autosave, so how can it not be saved?
ANSWER THE QUESTION!
“Do not ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.”
Me, I blame the Patriarchy. Or possibly the Rosicrucians.
Well, Jeff, here’s what happened..According to what I read, Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus received the data in an Excel spreadsheet and saved the data.
Then, whoever sent the data to Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus realized it was incorrectly formatted in the Excel spreadsheet and changed the number of columns in the spreadsheet. So, the spreadsheet was reformatted with the correct number of columns and resent to Ms. Nickolaus.
Well, if you change the number of columns in a spreadsheet, it’s going to change the where the data is saved in an Access database.
Easy mistake to make, even for people experienced in the use of Excel and Access.
My take, anyway. I don’t remember where I read about Excel formatting of election results. However, if the county election officials are using Excel, this is a very easy mistake to make.
I think that Wisconsin needed those cadres of international election observers that Jimmy Carter was advocating years ago.
I think the real reason lefties are upset is because they know they can’t manufacture enough votes to overcome a 7,500 vote lead.
Oh, and yes, I slept and a Holiday Inn the other night.
*at a
sigh.
“Jived”? “Jived“?!?
Do I even need to formally say it?
I’ll bet she has a dog named “boy” too.
All of this is moot, of course. The votes are there, no matter how they spin this.
Blake’s point is right – the dems can’t find 7000 votes to overcome this, so whining is the order of the day.
I’ll bet this was why she is a Democratic election observer. Ignorance is a resume enhancer to Democrats.
So, the democrats are using ‘unhelpful and mean’ stereotypes to enforce their new narrative. Ageists!
The new construction would be highly amusing if Kitzinger was black.
Intimidating old ladies now are they? Where’s a union thug, when you need to beat someone’s ass, when you need one? Scum of the earth.
The good woman missed out on an excellent bit part.
Minor pedantic point. Truth, or perhaps TRUTH!!!!!, is all that matters to them. It is facts that don’t matter and must be ignored, lied about or thrown down the memory hole. As long as the argument is about truth, or perhaps TRUTH!!!!!, we can’t win because every argument ultimately boild down to a variant of, “I don’t care, Obama is awesome.”
The only problem with that formulation is, truth is the sum of all facts, known and unknown.
What they do is cherry-pick the known ones and make up unknown ones, which means what they are about is not TRVTH!!!! but NARRATIVE!!!!!
Unless they get all of the Brookfield votes thrown out. Don’t believe they won’t try.
I heard from a friend in WI that the plan is to invalidate all the Waukesha County votes based on a “fraudulent canvass” or some such nonsense.
The individual ward and precinct tallies were witnessed by election workers and observers of both parties, and the election night spreadsheeet/database calculations were not official results. (The canvass is the first official vote tabulation reported to the state, and there is absolutely no evidence that any fraud has been committed in performing that canvass.) To disenfranchise an entire county’s votes based on an unofficial report erroneously made by a county clerk would be to establish a horrible precedent that is virtually guaranteed to cost a Democrat an election the next time it’s used.
I would say it is inconceivable that the Democrats are so stupid as to persue this argument, that it is further inconceivable that the Wisconsin courts would rule accordingly, and even more inconceivable that SCOTUS would fail to strike down the arbitrary disenfranchisement of an entire county… but then Inigo Montoya would admonish me: