The Cheddar Rebellion Part Three

[Shryke]

How do you figure "the Democrats pulled something like 3 times more extra votes out of their asses"? Are you assuming Prosser's voting base didn't splinter in the run up to this election?

I'm not clear on what you are trying to say. Prosser gained 200k votes, his challenger gained like 500k+. I'd say you'd have to assume some of Prosser's base went to his opponent, but unless you are predicting a huge amount, you've still got a heavy lean against Walker in new voters.

Much as I hate to say it, I think that FLOW has it right on this one. From the sounds of it, people didn't treat like a normal nonpartisan judicial election. With 72% turnout, both sides mobilized their respective base of support in a proxy battle over the new union law. And, if the current result holds, the Republicans just edged it.

I don't think you can look at this the way you would a normal nonpartisan judicial election when there is over seventy percent of people turning out. People are obviously energized and voting on the union battles. The actual candidates probably had little to do with it. Its pretty obvious that when Prosser was leading by 30%, the race at that point wasn't about the new union law. But now it is.

You can't assume everyone was being partisan here. In fact, I'd likely assume a huge chunk still weren't. The anti-walker people ran scads of ads trying to link Prosser and Walker specifically because most people didn't. There's no way to separate the 2 groups very well though, so you can just sorta look at the overall trend.

You can assume the core of non-partisan voters are gonna vote how you'd expect from the previous election and the primary (ie - heavily leaning Prosser), although some splintering there could lower that lean, but you'd probably expect some (though not as much) going the other way. The partisan voters then are gonna be the ones making up the difference. The ratio of one to the other is unknown, but the trend for the partisan voters is fairly clear, plus or minus how heavily you think the bases splintered.

[Shryke]

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/08/us-wisconsin-election-idUSTRE73766D20110408

The agency overseeing Wisconsin elections will not certify results of Tuesday's state Supreme Court race until it concludes a probe into how a county clerk misplaced and then found some 14,000 votes that upended the contest.

That's at least good to know.

[Alcibiades]

You can't assume everyone was being partisan here. In fact, I'd likely assume a huge chunk still weren't.

There's merit to this, I just don't think its as big a group of people as you do. I didn't think that they would turn out in support of the union law, but apparently they did. There may still be an enthusiasm gap, but I think that on the evidence of this election, we have to say that it's not as big as I thought. It may have taken a while, but they did manage to get people out in support of Prosser.

[Tempra]

I'm not clear on what you are trying to say. Prosser gained 200k votes, his challenger gained like 500k+. I'd say you'd have to assume some of Prosser's base went to his opponent, but unless you are predicting a huge amount, you've still got a heavy lean against Walker in new voters.

Prosser didn't "gain" 200k votes. The elections are not at all comparable. Prosser almost definitely received overwhelming support from conservatives and liberals in his 2001 election. Why? Because it was non-partisan. Because the 2011 election was partisan, those 550k votes likely split between liberals and conservatives. So, it is entirely possible that the conservatives and liberals both mobilized their bases equally (if Prosser's support in 2001 was equally split between libs/conservs). It is impossible to know for sure without considerably more information than a simplistic comparison of votes from 2001 and 2011.

[Shryke]

Prosser didn't "gain" 200k votes. The elections are not at all comparable. Prosser almost definitely received overwhelming support from conservatives and liberals in his 2001 election. Why? Because it was non-partisan. Because the 2011 election was partisan, those 550k votes likely split between liberals and conservatives. So, it is entirely possible that the conservatives and liberals both mobilized their bases equally (if Prosser's support in 2001 was equally split between libs/conservs). It is impossible to know for sure without considerably more information than a simplistic comparison of votes from 2001 and 2011.

Then compare it to the primary only a few months back. Your percentages of votes will be about the same. (ie - Prosser with a massive 30-point lead over his nearest competitor, who was the same person in this race)

I used the 2001 vote because it's got comparable-ish numbers. But where ever you look, Prosser had a commanding huge lead before and now it's a dead heat and with alot more voters.

A bunch of new voters came out and they came out heavily against the guy people have been trying to link to Walker.

[Swordfish]

3. Can be explained by geography. Waukesha Co is a heavy Republican area. The original results had a similar split (73/27 Prosser)

The other points were pretty much what I was coming here to make. There are far, FAR too many suspicious factors to this whole thing.

The only thing I don't see there is that, from what I've read, they were using an Microsoft Access database, which has no "Save" function. Changes are saved automatically. Though maybe this had something to do with the "off the grid" status of the clerk's computer. Or, perhaps, it was chosen just for that reason.

She's also been suspected of committing voter fraud in the past.

If they were keeping the official results in an MS Access database, those results should be thrown out just on general principle.

That's atrocious.

[Shryke]

Seriously. Fraud or no fraud, someone better be strung up over this.

[Sariel]

Didn't she already do this once before?

[gomez]

I've been more distanced lately out of disgust, but she did once send out the sample ballots for the newspapers already filled in for the conservative candidates.