Brookfield's bursting bags-o-ballots bingo

She thinks we are all idiots. — MJS reader comment

Here they are, the famous votes of City of Brookfield, Waukesha County, Wisconsin, those 14,000 or so not included in the running Associated Press totals posted on election night, Tuesday, April 5.*

The results were four votes off compared to the final canvass, which included a total of 14,315 votes. Official canvass for Brookfield: Prosser, 10,859; Kloppenburg, 3,456. Numbers from the recount: Prosser, 10,862; Kloppenburg, 3,457.

These are the votes that Kloppenburg tried to prevent from being counted (which is puzzling as how else are you going to check the canvassed figures, or check the canvassed figures against the figures reported to the Associated Press to make sure if everybody's story squares up). Because it's a decount, obviously, and the only way Kloppenburg can hope to make up anywhere near 7,000 votes is to keep Prosser's votes from being counted, because there's not going to be any extra Kloppenburg votes. Not enough people voted for her.

So you have to decount and not recount, the inglorious approach.

The Kloppenburg objections, it has been reported, arose when it was discovered that so many Brookfieldians voted for Prosser, sacks stuffed with ballots were literally bursting at the seams. Brad Blog composed a 9K-word theorem and a D-Kos diarist had to be sedated.

Nevertheless the ballots were adjudged fit to be re- and not de-counted, and four additional ones were discovered among the 14,000-plus. Statistically notable is that 75% of them were Prosser's, which matches his score throughout the county: 74%. Not an exact match but close enough for government work, as the apt saying goes.

That is, a tiny sample but remarkably accurate, it turns out.

Lord only knows where the darkest of suspicions fomented or, more to the point, where those darkest suspicions persisted unabated by the considerably more parsimonious explanation of gross ineptitude on the part of the top ranking Waukesha County elections official.

When a tearful Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus appeared on a local Journal Communications, Inc. teevee outlet, we believed her d-Based tale of "human error" not out of heartfelt empathy but because she'd pulled likewise egregious stunts so many times before.

And when Kloppenburg's campaign manager Melissa Mulliken filed a complaint with the Government Accountability Board alleging — with nary a scintilla of evidence — a late night meeting between Justice Prosser and Governor Scott Walker and conspiracies involving "conservative bloggers," the jig was up, and only the most credulous of the foil-hatted imagined voting fraud instead of voting farce.

So next time eschew the Roundy's ballot bags for the brand name.**

* The individual City of Brookfield tally was reported by a different WaukCo. election official to a different, local internets reporter, so the bags-o-ballots always existed, and always had been cast. They weren't stuffed into or out of the bags days after the April 5 fact.

** Roundy's aluminum foil remains on the approved vendors list, and works as well as any other to repel the brain-controlling mindwaves.