Wanggaard picks up four votes in two days of 21st SD recount

[a kennedy]

GOP Sen. Van Wanggaard gained a total of just four votes in the first two days of the recount in the 21st Senate District recall election, according to results released today by the Government Accountability Board.

Dem challenger John Lehman saw no overall change in his vote total during that span, which included 19,268 ballots out of the nearly 72,000 ballots cast in the June 5 election. Those included recounts in the towns of Dover, Norway, Raymond and Yorkville, along with 14 wards in Caledonia.

Lehman held a lead of 834 votes according to the original canvass. The recount must be completed by July 2.

http://wispolitics.com/index.iml?Article=272878

Look at the latest totals from GAB: http://gab.wi.gov/sites/default/files/page/totals_recount_06_2012_through_day_2_xls_20489.xls can't get this to post....sorry.

edit for explanation.

[hrmjustin]

1. At this rate he will not be able to win.

he will give up.

[bluestateguy]

2. There were two goals of the recall: Vote Walker out and recapture the state senate

It does look as if, however belatedly, the second goal has been accomplished.

[postulater]

3. If they can call the winner within an hour of the close of the polls, why does it take weeks

to recount the same ballots?

All they do is run them through the scanner again.

[roody]

4. Are they also recounting the Walker vote in this recount?

That would be interesting.

[a kennedy]

5. Lehman continues to lead Wanggaard in recall vote recount

RACINE — The recount in a Racine County recall race shows marginal progress so far for state Sen. Van Wanggaard. However, the Republican incumbent is nowhere near the pace he'd need to overcome an 834-vote deficit.

The latest results were released Tuesday. With more than half the ballots counted through Monday, Wanggaard had closed the gap with Democratic challenger John Lehman by eight votes.

At that pace, Wanggaard will fall well short. An official canvass showed him trailing Lehman by 834 votes out of nearly 72,000 ballots cast.

If Lehman wins, Democrats will have scored their lone victory out of six recall elections earlier this month. The win would also give Democrats at least temporary control of the state Senate, which currently has 16 Democrats and 16 Republicans.


http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/elections/lehman-continues-to-lead-wanggaard-in-recall-vote-recount/article_8f0e47ec-bfbd-11e1-a957-0019bb2963f4.html

[dragonlady]

6. The Senate is back to 17 Republicans, 16 Democrats

Republican Jerry Petrowski was sworn in Tuesday to replace Pam Galloway, who resigned in the middle of the recall process and left the Senate tied at 16-16. Since Wanggaard is still a member of the Senate until his successor is certified, the Republicans now have the majority.

Meanwhile, Wanggaard is making noises about appealing the result of the recount The supposed basis would be that some voters who registered at the polls didn't also sign the registration list (a substitute for signing the poll book). It was reported that in Ward 2 of Racine, "an estimated 116 of the 169 votes in the ward were cast by same-day registrants who did not sign the poll books." The GAB's position is that this is an administrative error on the part of the poll workers and cannot by law invalidate the votes. In fact, the only remedy would be to randomly pick out the same number of ballots and remove them from the count because there is no way to know which ballots were cast by those voters. (That method is used when, for example, the number of ballots counted somehow exceeds the number of voters, which rarely happens.) Wanggaard's only hope is that there was a lot of this happening all over Racine and he could get massive numbers of votes thrown out. http://www.wisconsinreporter.com/wi-recall-voter-missing-signatures-administrative-error-gab-says

An even more interesting thought: Wanggaard could go ahead with a frivolous appeal to tie up the result of the recount for weeks or months in order to let Scott Walker call a special session and ram through whatever he wants. Walker has mentioned in interviews that the legislature is out of session until next year, but why believe anything he says?