Day 8 of Wisconsin’s recount of the April 5th election for Supreme Court was relatively quiet. More counties are completing their recounts and submitting final numbers to the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board (GAB).
Two counties in northern Wisconsin that went for Kloppenburg in the original canvass finished early with very little change in results. Their county clerks were a little cranky about having to perform the recounts. Oddly, one of them expressed the opinion that recounts reduce public confidence in the system.
"It calls into question the election and lessens people's confidence in the process," he said.
By that logic, dispensing with counting votes altogether should really boost the confidence of the citizens, right Benton Harbor?
The GAB has released their nightly unofficial spreadsheet for Wednesday, May 4th, and it shows a net gain of 210 votes for JoAnne Kloppenburg, in the precincts reported and reviewed. They have also added a new county-by-county breakdown. The GAB summarizes the days work as follows:
As of 6:00 pm on Wednesday, May 4, 2011, 2,717 Reporting Units have reported results, which have been reviewed by G.A.B. staff. That is approximately 75 percent of the of the 3,602 total Reporting Units.
So far, counties have recounted 1,044,530 votes, which is approximately 70 percent of the orginal votes cast in the State Supreme Court race.
Waukesha County, the land of a thousand excuses, has actually learned a couple lessons. One thing they’ve realized is that
livestreaming means everything they do and say is available for viewing to the entire world. They now go offline during breaks. That’s too bad for long-distance eavesdroppers like me, because some of their best conversations have happened “off the record.”
They have also learned that bags that are not sealed properly should be opened from the bottom. This preserves the condition of the seal (or lack of a proper seal) at the top of the bag. Previously they would cut off the top of the bags. There were some more bags this morning with gaps that should have been gathered and closed before sealing. Those bags, with the condition of the seals preserved, were marked as exhibits and noted in the record.
Speaking of bag problems in Waukesha County, here is an interesting clarification on the very first Waukesha County “chain of custody” issue reported.
Just when they were starting to pick up steam, Waukesha County began “machine counting” some precincts this afternoon. Back to level 1 on the learning curve.
Up until now, they have been hand-counting precincts where older ballot scanners are used. New memory cards for those machines are not available, so a recount on them would mean re-using the same memory cards used on April 5th, which would wipe out the original results. The GAB received permission from the courts to hand-count those precincts.
This affects a number of counties in Wisconsin. It is not unique to Waukesha County. The machine counted ballots will still be individually inspected for irregularities before being counted and can be challenged by official campaign observers. The only change is that the actual counting will be done by the same type of machine used at the polls rather than by human tabulators.
Shockingly, the canvass board in Waukesha predicts they will not finish counting before the deadline of May 9th and will need to get a court-ordered extension. It took them 7 days to count 12% of the vote, so I calculate they will finish at the end of June.
The switch to machine counting probably will not speed up the process in Waukesha County, since the ballots have to be fed into the machines one at a time. If anything, it might be a little slower. Imagine you're really thirsty and the only source of liquid is a Koch machine - oops, I mean Coke machine - that charges 825 dollars for a bottle of cola. Fortunately, you earned 825 dollars in singles at your second job this month. Now imagine feeding those dollars in to the pop machine, one at a time. That's approximately what we're looking at when machine-counting an average Waukesha County precinct.