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.
Just over the margin of victory. As I've reread the posts on the big live thread from Tuesday, the union leaders knew the top of the ticket was lost, so the theory goes they targeted the most likely flippable State Senate seat.
If I was bussing in let's say, 500 goons, I would tell them, 'hey just soes you know, we're not voting strictly for that Barrett there, 'cause Falk (the union candidate) got stiffed in the primaries, so youse in the front of the bus, don't vote for nobody for governor, youse in the middle votes for Walker, and youse in the back of the bus, goes ahead and votes for Barrett.'
You could easily subsume the fraud that way between Barrett, Walker, and overvotes.