Posted on 06/06/2012 8:52:13 AM PDT by Laissez-faire capitalist
Democrats appeared to have assumed control of the state Senate with results posted early Wednesday showing former Sen. John Lehman (D-Racine) in a tight race defeating incumbent Van Wanggard, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is reporting...
(Excerpt) Read more at leadertelegram.com ...
Yeah, the dims should continue their tantrum. That will win over the voters.
SARC!
Huge union base in the City of Racine. Outside Milwaukee and Madison, it’s one of the most reliable Dem bases.
The 21st Senate District is wholly within but smaller than Racine County; it does not include the Town (Township) of Burlington or Wards 1-7 of the Town of Waterford, both of which are in Racine County. This is one explanation why the numbers do not jibe.
This being said, the city of Racine is around 18 miles north of the Illinois-Wisconsin border. One needs to check the “same day registration” numbers to see whether the bus convoys happened to stop in Racine. Also, one of the explanations for the slow roll by the Racine city elections people was that they had a large number of absentee ballots to process. One has to wonder where the ballot stuffing was an “inside job”.
The whole darn thing smells to high heaven. If I were the GOP, I might start an investigation into this like, right now, get a court order to enjoin anyone from swearing the ‘Rat “winner” Lehman into office, and try to preserve Van Wanggaard’s status as the sitting state senator for as long as possible.
But there does seem to be some discrepancies on the face of this. Just hope Republicans don't let Demwits slide, as they oft times do!
BTTT
bttt
StAnDeliver, the Walker/Barrett numbers you are providing are for Racine County as a whole, not for Senate District 21 (which contains most, but not all, of Racine County). That’s why it looks like 10,000 Walker voters forgot to vote for Wanggaard. In reality, Walker probably beat Barrett by a very small margin in SD 21 (the portions of Racine County excluded from SD 21 are heavily Republican), and enough Walker voters pulled the lever for the Democrat Lehman or left the senate question blank for Lehman to win by a tiny margin.
Racine County, like LaCrosse County in the western part of the state, is exactly the kind of blue-collar, “Reagan Democrat” county that I feared would give Walker less support than it did in 2010. Walker’s vote percentage dropped from 56% to 53% in Racine (looking at the county as a whole, not just the portion within SD 21) and from 49% to 47.5% in LaCrosse, and neither drop seems to me to be all that suspicious.
Did Democrats cheat by busing people in from Chicago to Racine (and/or from southern Minnesota to LaCrosse)? There was probably some of that, given the fact that Democrats usually do stuff like that and enforcement of Wisconsin’s voter ID law was enjoined by a liberal judge. Did Democrat cheating provide the margin of victory for Lehman? Hard to say, although Lehman won by such a small number of votes (less than 800) that it’s certainly possible. But the election results in Racine County and SD 21 (much less in LaCrosse County) do *not* establish a prima facie case of voter fraud, or even provide evidence of a possible fraud. The results in SD 21 are in line with what I would have expected, although I was certainly hoping for a Waggaard victory (and as late as last night thought that Waggaard might barely hold on—of course, I didn’t know that the City of Racine had so many precincts still out).
See my post number 47. Not all of Racine County is in Senate District 21, and there probably wasn’t a very big discrepancy between the Walker and Wanggaard votes within SD 21.
My thought would be that as the Senate is out of session, the replacement for the recalled member can’t be sworn in to change the Senate majority until it reconvienes. The old majority is still in place and able to fight an early session until such time as the next election which they claim may add other R members anyway.
Is this incorrect?
The State of Wisconsin has not yet declared a winner in this race. The demographics do not work. Either the Dems marched in dead or union goons from out of state, or......more likely, the Democrat election dirt bags lost some votes. Under normal voting patterns, there is no way the REpublican could have lost this race. There is no objective and reasonable explanation for the Dem win!!! time for a little fact digging.
However.....even if they uphold the election outcome, it means nothing politically!!! Methinks a troll is at work!!! I guess the Dems did not learn a thing about the beating they took last night. But....if you folks think the Wisconsin beating was bad....wait until you see what happens to Obama and the Democrat Party come November 6, 2012. It will make the Wisconsin recall look like a Sunday school picnic!!!
If the Republican Party has any brains at all, it will highlight this race in Racine county across the country, so “all” American voters can see the low life Democrats doing their illegal dirty work to steal elections. End of story!!!
Having a majority of one seat essentially empowers if not encourages each Democrat State Senator to be very open to the idea of cutting a sweetheart deal of some sort with the GOP, the Governor and/or Republican minority. This is a very fragile majority indeed because all it takes is one of them to flip. A lot of these Dems will be in tight races in just a few months and it is not hard to read the tea leaves regarding the favorable conservative/GOP trend in the state and national politics.
Thanks for the insight
If close, go dem and demand a recount, whats good for the goose is good for the gander.
Anyway, I still am somewhat confused over the time elapsed from ballot casting to tabulation. Being from MO, I know full well what goes on in St.L...
Well, I don’t think they got a judge to keep the polls open in Racine until midnight à la St. Louis 2000. Supposedly a large number of absentee ballots and a power outage contributed to the delay in releasing results. Lord only knows if they cheated in the vote tally, but if they did it wasn’t something obvious from the vote totals.
so they know how many votes they need to manufacture. It was obvious very early on in the evening that is what they were going to do
*********************************************************
Why can’t the ballots be challenged? If there were a huge number of new registrations why can’t they be checked against the addresses and contact made asking if they did in fact vote for a certain candidate?
OK, here’s a quick analysis of the information available at http://www.elections.racineco.com/voting/election.aspx.
The areas in Racine but not in district 21 are all republican leaning and Walker had a 5289 vote lead overall in the county with 2855 coming from those few precincts outside of district 21. If you add the difference plus the approximate 800 vote lead Lehman pulled off that leaves about 3200 voters that voted for Walker and didn’t vote for Wanggaard or it would take 1/2 as many if they didn’t vote for Wanggaard and did vote for Lehman. they did report 1127 undervotes in the district and 91 write-ins and 0 overvotes whatever that means. If we assume all these were Walker voters that would leave about 1,000 people that split their ballot.
This works out to around 53 votes difference each over the 60 wards and the difference is spread out pretty evenly as ward after ward the dem got a few more votes than Barrett and the Rep. got a few less than Walker, some a little more than others but it’s pretty consistent across the board.
One ward in Racine showed a change of 87 votes total out of about 1200 votes and one Republican area Norway Wds 1-11 showed 101 less votes for The R and 28 more for the D out of about 4300. In my opinion there doesn’t seem to be any smoking gun in this evidence but perhaps comparing it to the other areas where senate recalls were taking place you’d see much less difference in the governor vs senate votes. Haven’t had time to do that yet.
Does this rule out tons of people being bussed in to the area ? Absolutely not, if they voted for Barrett and the dem candidate it wouldn’t show up in this kind of analysis. I just don’t personally know if there is a way to manipulate the numbers to cause split ballots, but if it was done it was done pretty evenly over the districts. Perhaps someone that knows the local politics can explain why there might have been so many undervotes/split votes.
I was up all night watching this district and I checked my cell phone about 50 times for the results. These were the last precincts in the entire state to report and we had a significant lead until the last 20% or so of the district 21 precincts reported. I had no doubt this was going to happen from experience staying up late on election night and I knew the labor unions were not going to go home empty handed after all the effort they put into this race.
In my opinion this was their fall back strategy once they realized they wouldn’t get Walker. They were probably under less scrutiny than they would be in Madison or Milwaukee and if the vote was close enough for Barrett they probably would have manufactured votes in Racine for that. When that failed basing operations in Racine could at least be used to steal one of the state senate seats as they knew it would be closer. Once everyone was done celebrating and happily asleep that might be what they did.
We really need the precinct by precinct run down of what percentage of registered voters cast ballots in district 21 vs. the rest of the state and vs. previous years. Also, it would be nice to know what percentage registered at the polls.
Or, they might spend their time more productively with their families at the lake. No one will be listening. When the weather turns warm up here, everyone is outside doing something fun or going somewhere else to have fun.
I suppose all the republicans could simply not show up, and deny them a quorum......
Aren’t the Republicans expected to pick up 1-2 seats due to redistricting in November?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.