April 9, 2011

Why not a Wis. S. Ct. recount anyway?

No skin off the petitioner:
If the difference between the votes cast for the leading candidate and those cast for the petitioner is not more than 0.5% of the total votes cast for the office, the petitioner is not required to pay a fee. — Wis. Stat. § 9.01(1)(ag)1.
I may have a bad number in there somewheres,* but my SS says D. Prosser, 50.24%, J. Kloppenburg 49.76%. Strict construction for ya.

"We're broke." — Scott Walker, seriatim
"Access is like Jesus – it saves." — Fergus

* And, a handful (six) of counties' results are still unofficial.

eta 01: Make that three counties whose results are still unofficial: Milwaukee, Outagamie, and Sauk. No change to the above percentages in the meantime, however. h/t WisPolitics Election Blog.

eta 02: Outagamie Inagamie, MKE and Sauk to go.

eta 03: WisPolitics sez its Sauk figures are official, they're just not posted to Sauk Co. or Government Accountability Board websites yet.

6 comments:

Ian said...

Don't worry, if that's the case, a few more votes will show up somewhere in Waukesha.

Display Name said...

I'd need to review Nickolaus's press conference again, but I heard two excuses. One, the "I forgot to hit 'save' ". Two, the subordinates adding columns to Excel templates, adding numbers in places that subsequent Access import macros didn't expect. Both excuses could be true, but they could be unrelated. She had some smaller errors for townships as well as the bigger error for Brookfield. While Access auto-saves, for Excel she'd need to click "no" for "Do you want to save the changes you made?". Until someone has her code and spreadsheets in hand and performs an independent analysis, I don't think we can conclude we know what actually went wrong.

Free Lunch said...

Based on her history, the fact that Waukesha County voters are willing to vote for a manifestly unqualified person is what went wrong. This is not Nickolaus's first screw-up and her obsessive secrecy and unwillingness to follow good IT procedures makes all of her screw-ups look like they are intentional actions rather than out-of-her-depth incompetence.

gnarlytrombone said...

I have a much more basic question: Who closes up shop on election night without verifying that no precinct is reading null, much less major municipalities?

If I lived in Waukesha, I'd be verifying whether my marriage licence was valid.

Display Name said...

Closes up shop? This error should've been spotted right away and should've never saw the light of day. She didn't have enough eyeballs looking at the problem. She didn't think it was important to give the public the town-by-town totals.

Anonymous said...

You are right John Foust. And yet they have declared Prosser the winner. And to date, to my knowledge, no IT professional as looked at her computer to see what really happened. That is as scary to me as Benton Harbor MI and ALEC are... They are coming for you next Milwaukee!!