Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion

7,305 vote advantage Prosser? Game over, even Milwaukee cannot overcome that margin.

Send in the clowns (lawyers).

Litigate this election till the cows come home. Meantime Judge Prosser remains in the comfortable leather chair, beaming.

That's not quite the question. It's "Can Milwaukee find enough votes to trigger a free recount so the rest of the Democratic counties can 'find' enough votes"

"Find" may not be the right word. I believe the correct term is "manufacture."

Never say never, Chuck. It's not over until Klopp concedes.

given her stubborn 'I won' interview, I don't think she's going to gracefully apologize to Prosser and the voters, or accept their votes without being forced to.

I guess even after it's over, and the election is certified, the effort to pretend this election was stolen will even ramp up, in order to keep the suckers screaming.

This twitter feed (http://twitter.com/WillHogoboom) indicates someone was able to scrape Milwaukee canvas numbers (the only ones still to be reported) from the Government Accountability Board earlier today. If true, they show the change in Milwaukee as +18 for Prosser and therefore he has won.

As a Milwaukee Native, I predict 7,306 manufactured votes in the final tally for Klopp.

I just don't think even the Democrats would be so brazen as to try and pull this one out.

Not with all the attention it's been given.

Not with the fact it's really not the big of a race in the grand scheme of things - like a U.S. Senate race or gubernatorial race.

Would they liked to have won it? Sure. But they've got bigger fish to fry (as do we).

They'll save their shenanigans for another race.

And they won't be caught flat-footed with the non-report error from a conservative county again.

In fact, I suspect the worst thing to come out of all this is the Democrats have been given another tool to shade the numbers ... or at least delay an accurate count on Election Night.

I think Hizzle has it nailed - the key in Milwaukee is not to win outright, but to trigger a free recount so that a few votes here and a few votes there, and pretty soon the Klopptomaniac wines.

If the Kloppenberg forces had even a tiny chance of flipping this election back to their picked candidate, they would have had to come up with the manufactured votes much sooner than now. Their narrow window of opportunity for "Fixing" this election is over, all you are seeing now is the fundraising, and setting the scene for the next election.

Jim at:

You're right. It would be tactically unwise for the unions to attempt to steal this election.

What they initially wanted was to scare Walker and Republicans into thinking the people hated the budget reforms. They already lost that. Stealing the election wouldn't help.

Now, what they want is to convince suckers the election was stolen. Stealing it back wouldn't help.

Prosser is in power until August anyway. The GOP could pass their budget reform whether Sumi's overturned or not. Stealing the election wouldn't help.

Add it all up, and even if you ignore the sheer difficulty of stealing to this degree at this point, it wouldn't make sense to the unions to try. They wanted a big push to change the political tide, like the Tea Party keeps doing, and they failed.

And... lol... "this is what democracy looks like".

so they will just try to play victim and hope to ride that to another attempt to change public sentiment.

Throughout Milwaukee, people are checking their car trunks, their closets, their computer printers... anywhere they might have accidentally forgotten bags of uncounted ballots.

1. Can Kloppenburg Find 7,305 Votes In Milwaukee Today? The rational answer is 'No', but...

2. My guess is that the Left's recount fundraising is being done with the intention of using the money for other purposes, whether or not the recount takes place or is state-funded. And I'm not accusing the Right of being pure as driven snow in this regard.

why not and steal the election, whats the worst that could happen, they lose? They already lost. No one will be prosecuted for trying if they win or lose. its the democratic way

Lord--and I thought WA state voting was suspect--clearly those folks in Wisconsin need to lay off the road kill for supper.

Yeah, I think that Georgfelis is right. The key here is that because they thought Kloppie had enough votes manufactured for the very narrow 240-vote win, they thought their work was done. If it went to a count, they could manufacture more by lawyering up more than the Prosser supporters would.

I say this, because as usual the late reporting precincts broke enough for Kloppie to record a very narrow win. As usual when it's a close thing. Apparently.

Brookfield screwed all that up for them. D'oh!

Anyway, I've got some people crunching the numbers, not only regarding the counties that experienced the biggest swing from Walker in November to his ideological opponent Kloppenburg in April, which happens to mirror rather nicely the interstate highway system from Madison northwest to Minneapolis and Minnesota through La Crosse, south from Madison to Rockford, IL, east southeast into northeast Iowa, and south from Milwaukee into Kenosha toward Chicago.

Though, you know, I could be paranoid.

My prediction is that the Democrats will want to draw as little attention to this race as possible. They hyped up the race and made it about proving that Gov Walker and the WI Senate Republicans had lost their mandate. If they draw too much attention to this people may realize the nutty protesters didn't actually represent the will of the Wisconsin majority. On the other hand, they will instead concede the race and continue to refer to this as an example of Republican voter fraud for years to come.

The numbers above are extremely close to the numbers that I have been keeping from GAB.

I downloaded and kept a GAB worksheet from the other day, one that included "county-by-county" totals, as well as the statewide totals for all counties in the state, including the three (Crawford, Sauk & Milwaukee) that were being "worked on."

At that point, the statewide total showed that Prosser was up by 7,322 votes. She had to make up the difference somewhere in that mix of three counties being "worked on."

Some time yesterday, GAB stopped reporting the county-by-county totals, and only posted a running statewide total for all counties except the ones "being worked on."

Crawford County finally threw in the towel in the afternoon, by reporting the exact same numbers that they had reported all along.

Taylor County then replaced it as a county (one of three) that was being "worked on."

So now that Taylor and Sauk have "re-reported" their numbers into the statewide totals, it is a simple math problem to figure out what the difference is.

Including those new numbers reported by a combination of Sauk and Taylor, if Milwaukee makes no changes from the numbers that they had been reporting just two days ago, Prosser would win by 7,323 votes, which means that, according to my numbers, Prosser somehow picked up a net 1 vote from the combination of results re-reported for Sauk and Taylor counties!

ONE vote out of the two counties of Sauk & Taylor.

Since the Wisconsin Politics projection you linked above says that the difference is now 7,305 votes . . . we are only 18 votes apart. They may have picked up a different worksheet.

The prospect that somewhere in Milwaukee County she is somehow going to find 7,323 votes (or 7,305 votes), ones that Milwaukee county somehow missed in over a week spent counting and re-counting, is just plain ridiculous.

She is looking more and more foolish by the minute.

And if the difference when they report today is indeed over 7,300 votes, or even anywhere near that, she will have to concede!

After all, Kloppenburg is the one who kept insisting that a mere difference of 200 or so votes was enough for her to confidently and repeatedly claim victory!

Can't Milwaukee just borrow some of Madison's left over votes? I'm sure there are three or four cupboards full of them.

And Rockford, Illinois is in Winnebago County. Heh.

Living in Milwaukee, I think it would be exciting if the Milwaukee canvas gains Kloppenburg 7509 votes; thereby, restoring her win by 204 votes. How long do you think it would take for Republicans to scream fraud and demand answers?

Here was Kloppenburg confidently declaring victory, in spite of the fact that the margin at the time was only around 200 votes. (ht, AllahPundit, here at HotAir.)

Catch the reporter's questions. She ignores the obvious point he is making, and merely parrots that she is the victor, despite such a narrow margin.

But now, somehow she has refused to concede because she thinks she will make up over 7,300 votes in ONE county, and that following a full week of counting and adjustments, with all other counties having been posted at the GAB!

Judgment?

I agree with Dan Collins that they thought that they had done enough on election night to put it in the bag. Unfortunately the 10,000 wasn't enough and they are now mad as hell that they didn't just do 20,000 then and there.

@optionsgeek I didn't notice your post before . . . that +18 you note based on the GAB download that was linked in this tweet here by Will Hogoboom, I think matches up exactly with the numbers in my post above.

She had 7,323 votes to make up in Milwaukee, once Sauk and Taylor results were reported earlier.

Wait! Did they count all the dead Democrats that crossed the border into Illinois with the Fleabaggers?

Now . . . I don't know how things work in Wisconsin, but here in New Jersey the prospect of a state government board working past 5pm is nearly unthinkable.

As of 6:00 pm (Central) the website of the Wisconsin Governmental Accountability Board says the following:

"Spring 2011 Election

The Spring 2011 Election was held April 5, 2011. Official results are not yet available."
. . . .

And the County canvasses for all counties (except for Milwaukee County), are currently available on that site. That page still says: "Milwaukee county is still being worked on, and will be posted as soon as possible."

Just take a look here and scroll down to see what Milwaukee had reported to them, (at line 2236, which included corrections made over the course of the week.

Now, the GAB does have until some time in May to certify the results. But they can't do that until Milwaukee reports -- any day now!

So, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that Milwaukee County, under the control of a Democrat clerk, is not going to sign off today on the "updated result numbers" for that election -- whatever they eventually may be -- for the judicial election that took place a week and a day ago.

Perhaps for political reasons they will be deferring to Joanne Kloppenburg, in order to allow her the opportunity to put out a statement of "concession" so that she can save face after having so prematurely declared victory last week.

Or, perhaps the ink is not dry on some document(s) or other.

Whatever.

Suffice it to say that if at this point the "new numbers" somehow showed her ahead, even ever so slightly, I'd guess we would have heard trumpets blaring and drums beating by this time!

It might not be very classy but I admit I would pay money to hear a Judge Prosser victory speech in which he simply repeats the bulk of Kloppy's speech (changing "him" to "her" and so on as needed, and dropping the 30 years of service bit).

Propaganda: Even if the Dems cannot win a recount, they can advance their cause by doing what they always do: Embarking on a massive smear campaign to create a myth that the election was "stolen" by the Republicans. The actual facts will get ignored, twisted, denied, and finally buried under a mountain of lies. They've been getting away with it for many years, because academia and the news media collude in spreading their lies.

Perhaps, but don't you think it would be more valid if Bush had lost in 2004 and Walker run out of town by now, pst314? More of the same, when the same isn't working anymore is, what?

@The Grand Inquisitor

Apparently we both came to the same conclusion here. Will be interesting to see if thats how it plays out.

@JimMtnViewCa . . . Heh! Nice to dream, no? But you can tell from his presser the other day that Justice Prosser really is a class guy.

Hey, it won't happen, but I'd also love to hear him simply quote the ever-laconic Silent Cal (Calvin Coolidge) when he was once addressed by a young woman he had been seated next to at a dinner party. According to the story, told by Coolidge's wife, Grace, the young woman was trying to goad him into a conversation at the dinner, and she told the President that she had bet friends she could get him to say more than two words to her at the dinner.

He simply replied, "You lose."

ps: I admit I was wrong in my prior prediction that Kloppenburg would likely concede on Wednesday, based on the presumption that the Democrats in Milwaukee county would be unable to manufacture more than 7,323 votes in order to give her the victory.

Milwaukee County is still the inexplicable holdout, as reflected on the website of the GAB, where, as of 10:30 am Central Time, 04/14/2011, now a week and two days following the election, it says:

"Milwaukee county is still being worked on, and will be posted as soon as possible."

Any day now . . .

Here is a development.

Missed this sleeper story on JSOnline . . . "Milwaukee County to complete canvass Thursday."

And, within the story is what may be an extremely important telegraphing of where this is all headed:

. . .
Milwaukee County Election Administrator Lisa Weiner said Wednesday that commission workers were proofing and double-checking their work related to the April 5 vote.

Weiner and Deputy Election Administrator Suzette Emmer said no significant discrepancies have been found during the canvass.
. . . .
(my emphasis added)

Don't worry, I'm sure there's a democrat car with 10,000 votes for kloppenbeg, that will mysteriously appear by Friday.Keep hope alive.