If you're a supporter of Assistant Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg and you're hoping that a recount could possibly turn up enough votes to secure her a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, brace yourself.
According to one recount expert, it's highly unlikely that Kloppenburg could win via a recount if the Government Accountability Board (GAB) makes Prosser's 7,000-or-so vote lead official and does not dispute Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus's actions.
I spoke to journalist Jay Weiner, author of This Is Not Florida: How Al Franken Won the Minnesota Senate Recount, who said it's nearly impossible to swing thousands of votes in a recount.
In fact, no recount in the modern era has moved more than 500-600 votes, he said. Weiner said recounts in the 2008 Senate race in Minnesota between Norm Coleman and Al Franken, the 2010 Minnesota governor's race between Mark Dayton and Tom Emmer, the 2004 race between Christine Gregoire and Dino Rossi for governor of Washington, and a 2010 race for the state Senate of New York all shifted a few hundred votesnot a few thousand.
"We had 3 million votes in Minnesota in 2008," Weiner told me about the Coleman-Franken race. "We had a hand recount, so every vote was looked at, sometimes three times because of absentee issues. And our entire election, until the trial [conducted in early 2009], only flipped 264 votes. That's with 3 million ballots, twice as many as you have [in the Wisconsin court race]. If you had a hand recount it would suggest to me that someone could pick up at best 180 votes."
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And 180 votes would certainly not swing the election in Kloppenburg's favor if the Waukesha results are valid.
He said that voting machines are highly reliable and simply re-running ballots through them will not create different results. A hand recount could potentially revise some tallies, but not on the scale of what's needed to put Kloppenburg over the top.
Weiner cautioned Kloppenburg against requesting a full statewide recount if Prosser's fairly commanding lead holds up.
Recounts are terribly expensive, he said. If Kloppenburg requests a statewide recount, she'd have to foot the bill if the vote was outside a 0.5% margin. Even if she didn't have to pay for the actual recount, she'd have to pay for highly specializedand highly expensiveattorneys and their staffs. Weiner said the Coleman-Franken recount cost $20 millionin addition to the $20 million the candidates spent on their campaigns before the election.
Weiner estimated that a recount of the Supreme Court race could cost the candidates $1 million, easily, which they'd have to raise from outside groups. Those groups, he said, would have to consider whether contributing to a recount fund is the best use of their money or if they'd rather contribute to the recall efforts or other campaigns.
Weiner said he would advise Kloppenburg to take a wait-and-see approach until the statewide results are made official by the GAB. If the GAB certifies the election with a 7,000-vote Prosser advantage and finds that Nickolaus did nothing fraudulent, then he said Kloppenburg's best bet is to concede the race or request a recount in Waukesha County to verify that the results are valid.
"I think [a Waukesha-only recount] would be a fine idea because it would show that the election was fair," Weiner said. "Kathy Nickolaus might still be viewed as an incompetent boob, which is what I think she's viewed asmaybe a mean-spirited incompetent boob."
I'll have more on the state Supreme Court battle in tomorrow's Shepherd.
