Panicked GOP files lawsuit to stop Wisconsin recount

Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

George Bernard Shaw

My, my, my, what a conundrum we are in.  Jill Stein, the Green Candidate for President, requested a recount of the votes cast in the State of Wisconsin in the November 8^th election.  Wisconsin’s GOP thought they were immune to any scrutiny over their fraudulent elections and now they are panicking.  In June of 2016, Republican Governor Scott Walker replaced the non-partisan Government Accountability Board who oversaw elections in the state, with a partisan Election Board.  From Journal Sentinel:

Excerpt:

Wisconsin GAB in final days as state's elections authority

Whether Wisconsin's unique nonpartisan elections board was a failed experiment or was so successful that it became a political target, this much is true: It goes away this week.

Targeted for elimination by Gov. Scott Walker and fellow Republicans who control the Legislature, the Government Accountability Board officially disbands as of Thursday. It was the only nonpartisan elections and oversight board in the country.

In its place are two new commissions made up of partisan appointees that will regulate Wisconsin's elections, ethics, campaign finance and lobbying laws.

The Election Board is overseeing the recount in Wisconsin that is currently taking place.  Jill Stein had unsuccessfully sued the Board’s decision to allow machine recounts in Wisconsin’s 72 counties, pursuing “hand counts” of the ballots.  Hand counts are considered the most accurate and uniform method of counting the votes.  From Milwaukee Patch:

Excerpt:

Campaign urges counties to follow recommendation of the judge and "conduct a hand recount, which she called the ‘gold standard.’”

Jill Stein, the Green Party presidential candidate who requested a recount of Wisconsin’s nearly 3 million presidential ballots to quell hacking fears, doesn’t plan to appeal after a judge rejected her lawsuit requesting a hand-count, the campaign said Wednesday…

Dane County Circuit Judge Valerie Bailey-Rihn said in her ruling that the Stein campaign hadn’t met Wisconsin’s high threshold for a hand-count of the ballots, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported…

Bailey-Rihn said there were good reasons for a hand-recount, but neither the Stein nor Clinton campaigns showed a legal basis — such as fraud — for her to mandate it.  “I follow the law. That’s who I am despite my personal opinions," Bailey-Rihn said. “It’s (the counties’) decision. It’s their discretion. I may disagree with it…but I must follow the law.”

Under Wisconsin law, county election officials may decide whether to recount the ballots by machine or order a hand-recount. At least 56 of Wisconsin’s 72 counties, including Dane, plan a hand-count.

Donald Trump didn’t help the GOP’s cause on Sunday morning when he assured the nation a recount of the 2016 election wouldn't change the outcome and was a waste of resources.  In a tweetstorm, he quoted Hillary Clinton’s concession speech and made his own claims of election fraud.  From The Washington Post:

Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump:

·        Trump is going to be our President. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead." So much time and money will be spent - same result! Sad

·        In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally

·        Serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California - so why isn't the media reporting on this? Serious bias - big problem!

·        On Sunday morning, President-elect Donald Trump assured us all that a recount of the 2016 election wouldn't change the outcome and was a waste of resources.

Given the acknowledgement by Donald Trump that there was massive fraud in the 2016 election, I would think that the Republicans as well as the Democrats would insist on a nationwide recount to assure Americans as well as the world that American elections are legitimate.  But, alas I would be wrong as a matter of fact, the GOP has now filed a lawsuit requesting a judge stop the Wisconsin recount.  From the Journal Sentinel:

Excerpt:

Trump supporters file suit to stop recount

Madison — Using a famous legal precedent, supporters of Republican Donald Trump filed a federal lawsuit Friday to stop a recount of the presidential vote in Wisconsin and safeguard the president elect's Nov. 8 victory here.

The lawsuit contends, in part, that the state's recount process is unconstitutional because ballots aren't treated equally in all cases — a standard established in the 2000 U.S. Supreme Court case that halted a recount in Florida and left Republican George W. Bush as the winner of that year's presidential race with Democrat Al Gore.

Say what??  The GOP demands that the uniform, accurate “hand count” be denied and then claims the recount unconstitutional because the counts aren’t conducted “accurately and uniformly.”  What a load.  And not only that, they are claiming a violation of Trump’s rights under the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, using the Supreme Court’s 2000 decision in Bush v. Gore as precedent.  From Wikipedia:

Excerpt:

Equal Protection Clause

Bush argued that recounts in Florida violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, because Florida did not have a statewide vote recount standard. Each county was on its own to determine whether a given ballot was an acceptable one. Two voters could have marked their ballots in an identical manner, but the ballot in one county would be counted while the ballot in a different county would be rejected, due to the conflicting manual recount standards. [24]

Gore argued that there was indeed a statewide standard, the "intent of the voter" standard, and that this standard was sufficient under the Equal Protection Clause.[25] Furthermore, Gore argued that the consequence of ruling the Florida recount unconstitutional simply because it treated different voters differently would effectively render every state election unconstitutional [26] and that each method has a different rate of error in counting votes… If Bush wins, Gore argued, every state would have to have one statewide method of recording votes to be constitutional.

It was a bulls*&t argument in 2000 and is now.  The partisan Supreme Court could have ordered a uniform method of recount such as a “hand count” like the Florida Supreme Court ordered but was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.  The decision was not based on the constitution and was bogus.  So much so that the Supreme Court ordered that their decision “COULD NOT BE USED AS PRECEDENT IN ANY OTHER ELECTION CASE.”

Some critics of the decision argue that the majority seemed to seek refuge from their own logic [46] [47] in the following sentence in the majority opinion [48] "Our consideration is limited to the present circumstances, for the problem of equal protection in election processes generally presents many complexities…"

Critics, however, interpreted the sentence as stating that the case did not set precedent in any way and could not be used to justify any future court decision, and some suggested that this was evidence the majority realized its holding was untenable.

So what is going on here?  What is the GOP trying to hide in Wisconsin?  Maybe the answer can be found in Alternet:

Excerpt:

Pressure Builds for Presidential Recounts in a Key 2016 Swing State

Pressure is mounting to re-examine the presidential vote in Wisconsin, where a series of screenshots posted Tuesday showed electronically tallied countywide counts erroneously added in thousands more votes to the totals than the ballots cast.

“It doesn't garner public confidence to see errors like this in election results, especially in a close battleground state,” wrote Michael McDonald, a University of Florida professor and voter turnout expert, who on Tuesday posted an image of the electronically calculated count in Sauk County, Wisconsin, showing 2,700 more votes tallied than ballots cast…

McDonald’s tweet was not the only one surfacing Tuesday showing this over-counting anomaly. As Susan Eraslan wrote after posting similar screenshots, “The numbers display that in 3 precincts in Outagamie County, all won by DT, more votes were counted for president than cast. Follow-up tweets found 1,500 more votes tallied than ballots cast, but soon after those screen shots were posted they were said to be corrected—or deleted.”

“To be clear: Certified results in just one Wisconsin county bring Trump’s margin of victory down almost 7 percent. We don’t know about others,” tweeted Dan Solomon, who followed up with more vote-count tabulation screenshots. “Okay, this is very significant…

The vote count snafus in these two counties are among a dozen counties identified by election integrity activists as reporting improbably high turnout levels—above 85 percent—in the presidential election. “Either these voter turnout percentages are an historic achievement, unparalleled in my experience, or the unofficial results are not true and correct,” wrote Richard Hayes Phillips, a PhD statistician, in an early analysis of 12 Wisconsin counties, including Sauk and Outagamie counties.

Later Tuesday, McDonald tweeted that 10,000 votes were added to Trump's totals in Pennsylvania, increasing his lead from 58,000 to 68,000 votes. Here, too, it's not clear if that was a tabulation error or would be corrected, he said. "Most likely this was a bonafide error corrected in a county canvass. But if one is of this magnitude, who is to say there aren't others?"

This recount isn’t about Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, this is about America’s elections.  This recount is about a corrupt two party system that is out of control.  This recount is about Republican control of the Senate and House as well as the Supreme Court.  If the American people cannot hold their “elected” officials accountable through an honest election system, then America doesn’t exist.  Our American soldiers are dying in foreign lands for nothing if we have lost the ability to determine our own destiny. 

The GOP is claiming they have a mandate from the American people to slash Social Security, Medicare, Veterans’ benefits, infrastructure spending and gift the savings to their banking benefactors and the Democrats are letting them.  The GOP claims this mandate was given to them during the 2016 election when we “voted them into office.”  

We must have the truth or else everything we believed in was a lie.  That is why the GOP is panicked about the Wisconsin recount as well as the recounts in Michigan and Pennsylvania.  We must know the truth about our elections and the millionaires who determine our destiny.

By Patricia Baeten

Wisconsin recount futile in Koch Brother’s Dismal Dairyland of GOP corruption

On November 8^th, 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