On November 8th, Donald Trump became the first
Republican presidential candidate to win Wisconsin in nearly 30 years. Due to the massive anomalies in the Wisconsin
election process since the GOP takeover of 2010, Green Party candidate Jill
Stein has requested a recount of the votes cast in the state. According to the Washington Post a recount of
the votes in Wisconsin will take place.
Excerpt:
Election recount will take place in Wisconsin, after Stein files
petition
An election recount will take place soon in Wisconsin, after former
Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein filed a petition Friday with the
state’s Election Commission, the first of three states where she has promised
to contest the election result…
Trump scored upset victories in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and
seems on the path to declare a victory in Michigan as well, though the result
of the election in that state will not be certified officially until Monday.
Had Clinton won those three states, previously seen as part of the Democrats’
“firewall,” she would have secured enough electoral votes to win the election…
While the group had no specific
proof of hacking, they noted anomalies
suggesting Clinton routinely did more poorly in Wisconsin counties that used
voting machines, as opposed to those that relied on paper ballots.
Election fraud committed at the highest levels in Wisconsin’s
government has been rampant since 2010 when the GOP took control of Wisconsin’s
government. In 2011 after the GOP
takeover of Wisconsin’s government, the right-wing extremist and former
Republican Speaker of the Assembly, Justice David Prosser was running for
reelection to the Wisconsin Supreme Court where he has been a Justice since
1998. Prosser whose violent outbursts
had made the high court a national laughing stock, lost his reelection to
Joanne Kloppenburg. But shortly after
the announcement, Waukesha county clerk Kathy Nicklaus, who had been an aide to
Scott Walker proclaimed Prosser the winner.
From Forbes:
Excerpt:
Something Smells In Waukesha
County, Wisconsin-- And It's Not The Cheese
Suspicious evidence is beginning to
emerge calling into question last week’s controversial state Supreme Court
election between incumbent Justice David Prosser and challenger, JoAnne
Kloppenburg.
Kloppenburg, the Democrat, had
initially been thought to be the winner by the narrowest of margins –
approximately 200 votes – in the election that was viewed as a referendum on
Gov. Scott Walker’s anti-collective bargaining policies.
However, hours after the challenger declared victory, the Waukesha County Clerk,
Kathy Nickolaus, announced that the votes of an entire city within her
county had been accidentally omitted in her counts. When those votes were added
into her totals, Justice Prosser emerged
with a victory margin of roughly 7,500 votes –almost precisely the number needed to deny Ms. Kloppenburg an
automatic, government-funded recount…
It turns out that there was a similar error in Waukesha County in 2006 during
a Republican primary for State Assembly. Candidate Christine Lufter had
been leading in the election until an alleged computer error discovered by
Nickolaus was found to be placing votes in the wrong candidate’s
column.
My, isn’t it interesting that every “mistake” uncovered by
Kathy Nickolaus favors candidates backed by the Koch Brothers. How is it that Nickolaus was able to control
the election results in Waukesha County during her ex-boss’ recall election? From Mother Jones:
Excerpt:
Will Scandal-Plagued Election Clerk Supervise Walker Recall in Key
County?
Republican Kathy Nickolaus may be
the only county clerk known by name across Wisconsin—and not for a good reason. Last year, Nickolaus, the top election official in Waukesha County, a
solidly Republican suburb outside of Milwaukee, blamed "human
error" for the late discovery of more than 14,000 missing votes in a
bruising state Supreme Court race. Those votes erased liberal favorite JoAnne
Kloppenburg's lead in the race, handed victory to conservative incumbent David
Prosser…
This April, Nickolaus resorted to posting election results on strips of
grocery-receipt-like paper after the county's reporting system failed on
election night. After the April
controversy, Nickolaus pledged to step down from handling the county's election
operations. But ahead of Gov. Scott Walker's recall election on June 5… recent
evidence suggests Nickolaus still has control over the county's vote-counting...
WTMJ news station reported that Nickolaus
"appeared to be very much in charge of the count…"
Kelly Steele, a spokesman for the
labor-backed We Are Wisconsin group, says it would be "criminal" to
allow Nickolaus to have any role in the county's June 5 election. "After Kathy Nickolaus earned her
reputation as the most incompetent or corrupt election clerk in America, Waukesha
County assured the world she would no longer administer elections…"
All evidence from the May primary
suggests she's fully in charge and
reporting out results to the world."
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
editorial board has also demanded Nickolaus' resignation… But
although Nickolaus has said she won't run for reelection, she remains in her
job—and, if the May 8 primary is any indication, she's still supervising elections.
Yep, in Wisconsin there’s no getting rid of the corrupt
Republicans, they control every branch of government. What’s particularly egregious has been the
takeover of the Wisconsin Supreme Court whose GOP majority was funded by the outside
groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Wisconsin Club for Growth. The Club for Growth’s funding of Wisconsin
Governor Scott Walker’s recall campaign was the subject of a John Doe
investigation.
Members of Wisconsin’s Supreme Court whose campaigns were
funded by CFG refused to recuse themselves when the high court ordered the investigation
be quashed. The corruption on the Wisconsin
Supreme Court has not gone unnoticed nationally. From Newsweek:
Excerpt:
CAN YOU BUY JUSTICE? IN WISCONSIN,
IT APPEARS YOU CAN
The Wisconsin Supreme Court is facing harsh criticism for a blatant conflict of interest in a July
16 ruling to shut down a campaign finance investigation of Gov. Scott Walker’s
2012 re-election campaign. One headline
referred to the court as a “crony
court.” A Wisconsin columnist called the justices “self-serving” and
concluded, “Justice bought is justice
denied.”
Why? The justices in the majority have benefited from $10 million in
spending by the same special interest groups that were suspected of
conspiring with Walker. The Wisconsin high court has become THE MOST
CORRUPT COURT IN THE NATION SINCE THE GOP MEMBERS TOOK CONTROL.
Yes, indeed another milestone for Republicans, according to
Newsweek “the Wisconsin high court has become the most corrupt court in the
nation since the GOP members took control.”
And what does Wisconsin look like under GOP control? Let’s start with the GOP’s 2010 “redistricting”
scam. From Riverwest Currents:
Excerpt:
It took Republican legislative leaders only 12 days to go from
unveiling their redistricting plans to passing them into law. The
consequences of the redistricting legislation, however, may affect politics in
Wisconsin for the next decade. After
presenting redistricting maps on July 8, the Senate passed the redistricting
legislation on July 19, and the assembly on July 20 along predictable partisan
lines…
When asked why the redistricting
legislation was being rushed to a vote, a representative of Sen. Scott Fitzgerald’s (R-Juneau) office
said the rush was necessary to proactively counter a lawsuit against the
Government Accountability Board (GAB), pending in US District Court for the
Eastern District of Wisconsin. The
lawsuit requested that a three-judge panel be appointed to redraw the district
lines…
Every ten years, after new census
data is released, the districts need to be equalized based upon the most
current population data. Under the new legislation, the chief
responsibility for redistricting falls upon the state legislature rather
than local official. The prior law required local officials and
state legislatures to perform these duties… and taxpayers incurred no special charges for this work.
Michael Best & Friedrich and
Troupis Law Office were hired by the
state at taxpayer expense to redraw the various districts. So far the law firms have charged the state
about $350,000. The redistricting
process was conducted secretly. On July 21, the 15 residents who filed the
lawsuit against the GAB in federal court amended their original complaint to
argue that the new maps violate the US
Constitution and the Voting Rights Act by carving up cities and splitting
minority communities.
So the GOP hired a special interest group to redistrict costing
taxpayers $350,000 and the process was done in secret. Isn’t that interesting, minorities were
forced to pay a private law firm to redistrict their communities to dilute their
vote. My, my, my. And diluting their
votes wasn’t enough for the GOP, they wanted to make sure any Democratic
leaning voter would be unable to vote at all.
And voila, the GOP “voter ID law” was born in the bowels of the American
Legislative Exchange Council, the Koch Brothers modern day version of the Ku
Klux Klan.
And years later what does Wisconsin look like after Walker
and the GOP redistricted the state and instituted their Jim Crow voter ID law? From Salon:
Excerpt:
The quiet, vicious racism of Scott Walker’s Wisconsin
With a voter-ID law passed by the GOP-controlled legislature and
signed by Walker and threatening to
disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of mostly minority voters in this election,
the last thing the Koch brothers’ favorite governor wants is people who are
going to say the quiet parts out loud…
The New Republic took a deep dive into Walker’s world two years ago.
What the magazine found was a city and its suburbs even more segregated than
most, where the chairman of one county’s
Republican Party could still refer to one mostly African-American neighborhood in
Milwaukee, in 2014, as “the colored
section.”
Where white flight between 1960 and
2010 was so high it tripled the population of three formerly rural counties
around Milwaukee, while the percentage of African-American residents in those
three counties is under 2 percent. Where
the black poverty rate within the city is the second-highest in the country. This is the world that has coddled Walker
as he traveled up through the ranks of the Republican Party.
As a member of the state Assembly,
the executive of Milwaukee County, and now governor, he has spent his entire career deeply slicing budgets for programs
that benefit inner-city African-Americans, such as public transportation.
He has also pushed for private-school
vouchers that decimate public education and advocated for privatizing prisons, all while cutting
taxes to ensure that funding levels for these civic outlays are unlikely to be
restored anytime soon, if ever…
That this is all happening during the first election in which Wisconsin’s new
voter-ID law is in effect only increases the irony. The law is part of the broader effort by Republicans
both in Wisconsin and other states to limit the voting power of traditional
Democratic constituencies. The
Wisconsin law could disenfranchise as many as 300,000 mostly minority and
student voters who want to cast votes today…
That’s right, in Wisconsin if you are a minority or a
student why even bother to try to vote?
Republicans in Wisconsin control the elections and if you are lucky
enough to overcome the onerous hurdles laid out by the GOP and actually cast a
ballot, your vote won’t be counted anyway.
Election after election, as the GOP increases their control through election
fraud, the Democrats just stand down and capitulate to the GOP.
If the Democrats refuse to fight for your right to have your
vote counted, why should you? That is what
happened in Wisconsin in the 2016 presidential election. The voters were abandoned by the Democratic
Party. From the New York Times:
Excerpt:
Many in Milwaukee Neighborhood
Didn’t Vote — and Don’t Regret It
MILWAUKEE — Four barbers and a
firefighter were pondering their future under a Trump presidency at the Upper
Cutz barbershop last week... They
admitted that they could not complain too much: Only two of them had voted. But
there were no regrets.
“I don’t feel bad,” Mr. Fleming
said, trimming a mustache. “Milwaukee is
tired. Both of them were terrible. They never do anything for us anyway.”
As Democrats pick through the
wreckage of the campaign, one lesson is
clear: The election was notable as much for the people who did not show up,
as for those who did. Nationally, about
half of eligible voters did not cast ballots.
Wisconsin, a state that Hillary Clinton had assumed she would win, historically boasts one of the nation’s
highest rates of voter participation; this year’s 68.3 percent turnout was
the fifth best among the 50 states. But by local standards, it was a
disappointment, the lowest turnout in
16 years. And those no-shows were important. Mr. Trump won the state by
just 27,000 voters.
Milwaukee’s lowest-income neighborhoods offer one explanation for
the turnout figures. Of the city’s 15 council districts, the decline in turnout from 2012 to 2016 in the five poorest was
consistently much greater than the drop seen in more prosperous areas — accounting for half of the overall
decline in turnout citywide.
The biggest drop was here in District 15, a stretch of fading
wooden homes, sandwich shops and fast-food restaurants that is 84 percent black. In this district, voter turnout declined by 19.5 percent from 2012 figures… It is
home to some of Milwaukee’s poorest residents and, according to a 2016
documentary, “Milwaukee 53206,” has one
of the nation’s highest per-capita incarceration rates.
So what do you think a recount in Wisconsin will show? Why even bother, the only votes to be
recounted are the ones that the GOP allowed to be counted in the first
place. I for one believe that Donald
Trump won the vote in Wisconsin. Donald
Trump came to Wisconsin several times, even while he was dissed by Paul Ryan
and the Republicans. Hillary Clinton
didn’t even bother to visit Wisconsin even once during the campaign.
Donald Trump earned the votes he received in Wisconsin. If you really want to see the kind of
corruption happening in Wisconsin, bring in the U.S. Justice Department to
investigate the voter suppression laws and the constitutional violations that
are taking place along with the re-segregation of Milwaukee. A recount of the votes will show what the GOP
wants it to show, there’s nothing to see here folks. Everything is hunky dory.
By Patricia Baeten
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