Putting Waukesha's Voting 'Procedures' Into Context

Others made the correct comparisons:


Said The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

"If this had happened in Dane County and swung the election to Supreme Court candidate JoAnne Kloppenburg, Republicans would be screaming foul just as loud as Democrats are now."

Said The Madison Capital-Times:

Suppose the Democratic governor of Illinois had proposed radical changes in how the state operates, and suppose anger over those proposed changes inspired a popular uprising that filled the streets of every city, village and town in the state with protests. Then, suppose there was an election that would decide whether allies of the governor controlled the state’s highest court. Suppose the results of that election showed that an independent candidate who would not be in the governor’s pocket narrowly won that election.


Then, suppose it was announced by a Democratic election official in Chicago that she had found 14,000 votes in a machine-controlled ward that overwhelmingly favored the candidate aligned with the Democratic governor. And suppose the Democratic official who “found” the needed ballots for the candidate favored by the Democratic governor had previously been accused of removing election data from official computers and hiding the information on a personal computer, that the official’s actions had been censured even by fellow Democrats and that her secretive and erratic activities had been the subject of an official audit demanded by the leadership of the Cook County Board.


Now suppose that the number of additional votes tabulated for the governor’s candidate was precisely the number needed to prevent the independent candidate from demanding an official recount.


Would even the most naive Illinoisan simply accept at face value that the new count was “legitimate” or that the governor’s candidate should suddenly be presumed to have been “elected”? Not likely.

Said The Milwaukee-Area Labor Press:

The Republicans would instantly cry foul if such an explosion of uncounted votes occurred in Democratic leaning Milwaukee two days after Associated Press tallies...

...homespun, principled Wisconsin...has always prided itself in the fairness and incorruptibility of its voting system. We are not Chicago of the 1960s is a common cry from left and right.


But now? No longer do you find much confidence in the state that power and manipulation for political gain have not corrupted the basic ability to count votes honestly and fairly. That lingering skepticism now becomes the biggest consequence of the Walker legacy.

Final word, Mordecai Lee, via Rachel Maddow:

We're not Chicago in 1960 or Texas in 1948, when they stole elections.