Wisco's Supreme Court Recount - If You Can Call It That

While Minnesota has the execrable Bachman, at least they know how to do a recount.  Wisco, not so much.  This is so frustrating to me, a person who always believed that Wisco was a stand-up, ethical state.  Sure, we've had our problems - McCarthy, well, that's enough for any state, but I foolishly thought that we were also completely transparent.  Fucking Walker has really poisoned the water.  I hope he & the Fitzgeralds ultimately wind up in prison. Plus what was Kloppenburg thinking in agreeing to not allow video cameras by observers, what was she thinking?

Where Minnesota's post-election hand count of the 2008 U.S. Senate election between then Sen. Norm Coleman and now Sen. Al Franken was, as we wrote at the UK's Guardian at the time, "one of the longest and most transparent election hand-counts in the history of the US," Wisconsin has made it extremely difficult (putting it nicely) to know what the hell is actually going on in their statewide "recount" of the April 5th, 2011, state Supreme Court election between Justice David Prosser and Asst. Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg.

Where Minnesota's chief election official, Sec. of State Mark Ritchie, oversaw a process to ensure that updated and accurate numbers were easily tracked and transparently shared with the media on a daily basis, Wisconsin's chief election authority, their Government Accountability Board (G.A.B.), has posted (and even sometimes removed) confusing, misleading, and unclear updates, often with inaccurate information, on various schedules, and frequently with little or no explanation for wholesale changes and deletion of data.

Where Minnesota counted every vote by hand with full public scrutiny, including photographs and video cameras, Wisconsin is tabulating ballots, often by the same oft-failed, easily-manipulated computer systems that counted them in the first place, behind barriers that preclude broad public oversight, under an agreement between both campaigns which disallows the use of video cameras by observers.

My emphases.