Unanimous state Supreme Court blocks attempt to re-examine ballots in narrowly decided Racine school

[brooklynite]

Source: Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

MADISON – A unanimous state Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled those challenging a narrowly decided 2020 school referendum in Racine did not have a right to have ballots re-examined in court after they had already been reviewed during a recount.

The decision lets stand a referendum that passed by five votes and is expected to cost Racine taxpayers $1 billion over 30 years.

The ruling has implications for future recounts in a perennially purple state. Wisconsin has had a long run of tight elections, resulting in a statewide recount in 2016 and limited ones in 2020.

At issue in the case decided Tuesday was whether those challenging election results can force courts to reexamine ballots after they have already been recounted. The justices sided with lower courts that determined they could not.

Read more: https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/2022/04/12/wisconsin-supreme-court-lets-stand-racine-school-referendum-result/7287450001/?utm_campaign=snd-autopilot&cid=twitter_js_politics

[sybylla]

1. BOOM!

Anyone who has attended (because they are public) or assisted in a recount knows that Wisconsin has a strong recount process. It's the height of ridiculousness and a waste of money to boot to ask a court to do any better or different.

[questionseverything]

2. Do they hand count the ballots or run them through a scanner?

N/t

[sybylla]

3. That depends on the type of ballot.

My background here is as an election observer, a recount observer representing a candidate, a poll worker for 10 years, and as a recount worker for local and statewide recounts.

State law says that if a tabulator was used on election day, a tabulator has to be used on recount day bearing the same programming. But, that does not stop observers (or recount workers) from watching each ballot go into the machines and counting the votes as they go. I did this during the statewide recount in 2011 as an official observer for the supreme court candidate and many times since.

If a ballot is printed by a an older electronic voting machine, many cannot be counted again by that machine. Those ballots are manually counted. This is evolving as municipalities replace old accessible electronic voting machines with new accessible machines for electronically printing ballots that go into tabulators. Again, all of this is easily observed by official candidate representatives (which are the only members of the public allowed to be in and around the recount workers.)

Recounts take place after machines have been audited. State election law requires random audits in which several precincts in every county are drawn post election day and the votes cast in that precinct are manually matched to the tabulator counts. This, like everything about Wisconsin elections, happens publicly and is observable if anyone wishes to see.

The changing numbers that happen after recounts generally are due to errors made by poll workers on election day, such as not counting absentee ballots that should have been counted, counting absentee ballots that shouldn't have been counted, provisional ballots that have been cured but not counted originally, improper challenges to voters, or ballots that could not be counted by tabulators due to poor markings or stray marks that are misread as overvotes.

[questionseverything]

4. Brad blog did several articles about Wisconsin and there "recounts "

Basically the machines are trusted to audit themselves

Observing and doing a “side count” has no meaning

Heck in Wisconsin you can think you’re elected and three days later a clerk who kept results on their laptop will discover they “found” an entire towns votes and the winner changes

If the average citizen can’t oversee the election results without special expertise the election isn’t valid

Hand counted paper ballots are the only way for citizens to oversee their elections

[sybylla]

5. I am quite familiar with the whole black box voting assertions.

I was here in the early 2000s advocating for hand count of paper ballots. If you'd like to share a link to the specific Brad Blog post you are citing, I will take a look at it and address it point by point.

Doing a side count has meaning if you can confirm the tabulator matches your manual ballot tally. Even in Waukesha in 2011, this was true. Had there been evidence to the contrary across the state, the supreme court candidate would have gone to court. Her observers statewide manually matched, through observation and counting ballots, to the tabulators to the point that she saw no reason to seek a legal challenge.

The machines do not audit themselves.

One shady clerk back in 2011 does not a shitty process make. Election law, the election day process, and the machinery evolve.

The average voter CAN oversee the process and the results without needing special expertise. That was me in 2011.

OTOH, the Dem party is really good at training observers in their legal rights, so they can advocate, challenge, and ask questions during recounts.

Each party has a right to designate poll workers in every municipality, which is how I got my job. Each party's poll workers are also invited to work the recounts, so there are people from both sides and no particular side (if they don't claim one) working elections and recounts.

Can the process be improved? Always. Can it be undermined by misinformation? Always. Will those acting outside the rules and law which define the conduct of our elections go unpunished (like the Waukesha clerk in 2011)? Depends.

Those of us involved here in Wisconsin know that the process is pretty good with checks and balances far better than most states.

[questionseverything]

6. If the side count doesn't match there is no recourse so it's window dressing

Kloppenberg wrote a long explanation of the many problems with Wisconsin vote counting, she was an independent so really didn’t have a team in place to either gather info or to go to court,

Less than 17,000 ballots, one question, could easily be counted in an afternoon by 4th graders

Paper ballots no human being gets to inspect qualify as a “trust me” system

[sybylla]

7. She absolutely did have a team in place

I was on that team. She had people in every county observing the recount. We were trained by her staff as to what her and our rights were during the recount as observers. She had a legal team lined up. If we, the team of observers all across WI, checked in with irregularities that would have changed the vote totals, she would have taken whatever action she could.

Again, if you could direct me to the article in which Kloppenburg said these things, I'd like to read it.

Poll workers get to inspect paper ballots as they are being handed out, at the end of the day as they are being processed in the poll closing (counted to make sure the ballot total matches the machine count and the number of voters in the poll book, then as write-ins are sorted out). They are guarded carefully and never out of the presence of fewer than two people until after they are locked securely in bags with numbered single-use locks duly noted on all paperwork both leaving the polling place and arriving at the county clerk's secure office.

Recount workers get to inspect every ballot. Any time there is any deviation from the election day numbers during a tabulator recount, the ballots are individually inspected to figure out which ballot is throwing off the tabulator count. Also, all ballots during the day of recount are inspected to ensure they have the initials/signatures of the poll workers that day or the municipal clerk if absentee. They are verified to be legitimate ballots.

You can believe someone who has studied this for two decades and actually works polls and recounts. OR NOT. But please bring the receipts. I want to see what you are seeing.

You won't catch me saying it's a perfect system. It is, however, a pretty good system, considering the GOP in this state have been trying to fuck with it since 2011.

[questionseverything]

8. i had to change to my puter i can't copy/paste from my phone so i don't usually play google monkey

https://bradblog.com/?p=8548

Citing a "cascade of irregularities," thousands of tabulation errors discovered during the statewide "recount," and tens of thousands of ballots found to be unverifiable or otherwise having been in violation of the secure chain of custody, Wisconsin's independent Asst. AG JoAnne Kloppenburg conceded the Wisconsin Supreme Court Election for a 10-year term on the bench to Republican incumbent Justice David Prosser this afternoon at a press conference held in Madison.

"Votes were found to be miscounted in every county in the State," Kloppenburg said in her prepared remarks. [Her complete remarks are posted at the end of this article.].

"Over 150 ballot bags containing tens of thousands of votes were found open, unsealed or torn. Waukesha County had twice as many torn, open or unsealed bags as every other county in the state combined. In many cases, municipal clerks in Waukesha testified the bags weren’t torn when they left cities, towns and villages so the security breaches occurred sometime when the bags were in Waukesha County’s custody."

https://bradblog.com/?p=8507

er Election Integrity veteran was forced to reach for a "bright side" by saying: "It may be worse than Minnesota, but, hey, at least it's no Florida!"

We've not written here about WI's Supreme Court "recount" since it began last Wednesday, largely because we've had such a difficult time making heads or tails of the progress, the accuracy, the integrity of the ballots or the counting, or even of the various reports of bizarre anomalies which continue to occur, often with little explanation for their resolution...


'Necessary and appropriate light'

Two Wednesdays ago Kloppenburg announced her intention to request this count after the unverified results of the state canvass placed her some 7,300 votes behind the incumbent Republican Prosser. The 0.488% margin out of some 1.5 million ballots cast allowed for the state-sponsored count to take place at Kloppenburg's option. The unofficial and unverified canvass results followed on the startling and still-unexplained revelation of some 14,000 votes which were not initially included in the Election Night tallies by Prosser's former colleague, Republican Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus. Those ballots changed the unofficial results from a 204 vote lead for Kloppenburg to a 7,316 vote lead for Prosser.

When Kloppenburg made her announcement that she was exercising her right to a statewide recount, she declared, appropriately enough: "A recount may change the outcome of this election or it may confirm it, but when it is done, a recount will have shed necessary and appropriate light on an election that right now, seems to so many people to be suspect."

Unfortunately, the process to date risks those hopes being dashed, unless changes are made broadly and quickly in the state's current "recount" process. If not, there is a great possibility that little if any "light" will ultimately be "shed" on the April 5th election results and they are likely to remain "suspect," sadly, for a long time to come.

Just 31 of Wisconsin's 72 counties are counting some or most of their paper ballots by hand. The others counties are running them back through the same machines that counted them --- either accurately or inaccurately --- in the first place, offering little assurance that the results are correctly tabulated.

Where ballots have been counted by hand over the last week or so, a number of anomalies have occurred and/or irregularities been discovered.

Let's review a few of the most noteworthy incidents, in no particular order...

97 uncounted, unsecured ballots in the city of Verona

As reported by the Capitol Times last Friday...

On Thursday afternoon official "tabulators" [which is what they call the people who are counting] were busily counting ballots from the city of Verona when the votes came up more than 90 short of what the electronic readout from the voting machines said they
///////

this is just a tiny sample, early articles showed open bags, bags labeled from different towns ,on and on

btw velvet revolution had a great interview from joanne also

is wisconsin better than some places? sure , but is it open, honest and transparent as you describe.?.. not what i have read or heard from volunteers i worked with

[questionseverything]

9. just another tidbit

COMMENT #26 [Permalink]
... hearya said on 4/7/2011 @ 6:36 pm PT...


It seems like the perfect setup. Writing about recent election in February, Kelley Smith points out that parts of Waukesha County hadn't used touchscreen voting machines in years. But There was a shortage of ballots ordered and delivered by the same Kathy Nicholous. You could either wait until a ballot might arrive, or vote on the touch screen machine. So Rovian.

"More ballots ordered in Waukesha County communities
By Laurel Walker of the Journal Sentinel

Feb. 15, 2011

Waukesha - Several Waukesha County communities ran out of ballots early and had to ask for a re-supply Tuesday, County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus said.

However, voters still have had the chance to vote on a paperless touch-screen machine at each polling place until new paper ballots arrived, she said.

Nickolaus estimated a 10% voter turnout, and municipal clerks could order ballots based on that estimate or order more or less. She asked clerks to re-order by noon Tuesday if they thought they'd need more.

Clerks in Menomonee Falls, Delafield, Summit, New Berlin and the towns of Oconomowoc, Vernon, Waukesha and Genesee called for more ballots. Nickolaus said a printer on standby provided the additional ballots. The largest number went to Menomonee Falls, which initially ordered 2,900 ballots and then asked for an additional 2,000. Most needed only a couple hundred more.

Nickolaus said she didn't think the temporary shortage would delay voters or cause polls to stay open later than the 8 p.m. closing."

AND here is an article from the following day, written by Kelly Smith.

"Ballot shortage in primary election

Some voters used touch machine for first time