Wisconsin Supreme Court recount “efforts” are troubling with only 43% of ballots counted by hand
Something bad is happening under the mainstream media radar regarding the Wisconsin Supreme Court recount. The General Accounting Board had requested that electronic voting machines used during the election were to have the ballots printed out and hand counted. That’s not happening. Ballots in unmarked bags, confusing count numbers making votes magically appearing and other oddities are not being reported. Even Barb Hansen, hired by Waukesha County after County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus recused herself from the recount has stated the recount “is not pretty” regarding how recounting procedures are being done.
It is suggested that anyone interested in the specifics of how the recount efforts are “not pretty” should pay a visit to The Brad Blog. Here are some troubling snippets from the article:
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.
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Equally troubling, another ballot bag from Delafield was later found to have been torn, reportedly, with the serial number scratched out and replaced with another.
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Waukesha County officials discovered that all three ballot bags from a precinct consisting of wards 4, 5, 6, 14 and 22 in Oconomowoc had nothing written on the bag labels.
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In the Town of Royalton, Kloppenburg’s original count was 80, but the hand count tallied 95 votes for Kloppenburg. According to Robbins, Royalton’s Town “Clerk had no explanation other than the election officials forgot to count a stack of ballots cast for Kloppenburg when they reported.”
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…the Town of Sumner (Wards 1 & 2) in Barron County, shows 653 votes cast as counted during the “recount”, but just 145 votes were reported from that “counting unit” in the original post-election canvas.
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Making matters worse, many counties are failing to report the number of “Total Ballots Cast”, crucial to overseeing the process, to the G.A.B., as requested in their April 26 directive to Wisconsin County Clerks on the day before counting was to begin.
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Unfortunately, in parts or all of 14 counties (Ashland, Bayfield, Burnett, Chippewa, Crawford, Green, Marquette, Menomonee, Monroe, Sauk, Sawyer, Taylor, Vilas and Winnebago) the “recount” totals are given, but the “Total Ballots Cast” column remains blank as of the latest spreadsheets.
More evidence of suspicious ballot counts (mostly in Waukesha County) is documented here. It’s a long list with thousands of votes with questionable concerns.
Here is a reminder about how the electronic voting machine procedures are to be followed and how the recount efforts are not following the procedures correctly:
In Wisconsin, a typical recount consists of a machine recount of ballots cast on an optical-scan machine using the same type of machine used in the election programmed to count just the race being recounted, and a hand recount of ballots cast on a Direct Recording Electronic machine and paper ballots that were not cast on an optical-scan machine. Because the Sequoia Optech III-P Eagle optical-scan machine used by muncipalities in at least parts of 31 counties, by far the most-popular optical-scan machine used in Wisconsin, must have a blank memory cartridge to allow for the reprogramming, the memory cartridges used in the April 5 election must be preserved as-is under state law until after the recount process was completed, and there are no longer enough spare memory cartridges to allow for the preservation of the April 5 election data, both campaigns asked for and received a court order for the hand counting of ballots cast on the Eagle optical-scan machines.
The General Accounting Board has a web site titled “Supreme Court Recount Results, County by County”.
