Was it rigged on June 5?

Figured I'd go with the provocative headline here, but it is something that I've wondered since the recall election. Given that there were huge discrepancies between the conservatives being overampled in polls before the election vs. the actual people who voted on June 5, it didn't really add up that Walker's reported winning margin of 6.8% was in line with what those pro-conservative polls were showing.

Then I noticed several online articles pointing out that Wisconsin seemed to be susceptible to voter irregularities and noticed that many rural counties gave voting machine contracts to Command Central at the behest of Waukesha Co Clerk (and GOP hack) Kathy Nickolaus. In addition, many Wisconsinites have been working with Wisconsin Wave and other organizations to hand-count the ballots, so much so that Wisconsin Wave is now reporting that they have no many volunteers they have to turn people away, and that a demonstration of voting machines at GAB that the GAB's Reid Magney described as "standing-room only" (at the bottom of the WSJ report).

Clearly, a lot of people aren't taking the retaining of Scott Walker at face value. So I decided to look at the election numbers themselves, compare them to the last 2 statewide elections (Walker vs. Barrett 2010 and Prosser vs. Kloppenburg, 2011), and see if there was something out of the ordinary in places with these Command Central machines.

Using info from a Wisconsin Wave meeting I attended, I had 30 counties that had significant usage of Command Central machines outside of the Milwaukee area. I then compared those results to 36 other Wisconsin counties that didn't have as many Command Central machines. I also put in a third category that included Milwaukee County, the 4 counties that border Milwaukee, and Dane County, because as I've mentioned before, those parts of the state have unique voting patterns that don't really change much from election to election (they're a turnout game). Plus, Racine County had a heated Senate election between Lehman and Wangaard that could skew election results a bit.

You run the numbers, and here's what you get. I will use the "Dem" candidates (Barrett and Kloppenburg) as the benchmarks:

Command Central Counties
Barrett '10- 43.21%
Klopp- 47.94% (+4.73%)
Barrett '12- 40.52% (-2.69% vs. 2010, -7.42% vs. Klopp)

Non-Command Central
Barrett '10- 43.10%
Klopp- 48.85% (+5.75%)
Barrett '12- 42.67% (-0.43% vs. 2010, -6.18% vs. Klopp)

Milwaukee-Madison area
Barrett '10- 50.95%
Klopp- 51.16% (+0.21%)
Barrett '12- 52.02% (+1.07% vs. 2010, +0.86% vs. Klopp)

So you can see in the non-Milwaukee Madison areas, there was movement to Kloppenburg in 2011, and then movement back to Walker in 2012. But the Command Central Counties had a larger bounce back for Walker and lower share for Barrett, as shown by this graph.

So it looks like the Command Central counties flipped more than 2% for Walker vs. the non-Command ones. If you plug in that difference back into the election, and assume that the Command Central counties voted the same as the non-Command Central ones, Walker still wins, but by about 153,000 instead of 171,000, or about 6%. Not really a significant effect here. (late edit: I did not look at touch-screens vs. optical scan machines, like Richard Charnin did here, and he says there's a clear pro-Walker rigging. I don't have an optical scan vs. touch-screen list, so I'll hold off on this)

The real story when you look at numbers like this is how badly Barrett got beat in the parts of Wisconsin outside of the Madison and Milwaukee areas. If Barrett would have held near 50-50 for those 1.45 million votes, he'd be governor today. Instead, he only got 42.0%, and that was the difference-maker. And these areas were the most likely to fall prey to the Walker meme of "a recall isn't necessary", and it is not hard to imagine that 5-10% of those voters disapproved of Walker but also disapproved of the recall process, and cast their votes for Walker.

In addition to not explaining the need for a recall good enough, it also illustrates the failure of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin to get out into the other parts of the state and show the destruction of Fitzwalkerstan. They have to stop assuming that people will just get it on their own, and instead should show that progressive ideas and investments in social goods like education and the environment work and are a much more likely pathway to success than expecting corporates to take of you out of the goodness of their hearts.

But I do appreciate Wisconsin Wave and others continuing to draw attention to the issue of black box voting and the potential for election fraud. Just because the "Command Central effect" wasn't big enough to be the deciding factor in the June 5 election doesn't mean that can't be the case in November, particularly when combine with other GOP rigging such as voter ID and absentee ballot fraud where GOP officials send ballots for voters.

We need to keep this issue of election integrity front and center, because as shown in Racine recount of Lehman-Wangaard, the GOP will do anything in their power (legal or not) to deny a legitimately-elected Dem by any means they can. We should also remind people that just because Scott Walker got more people to vote for him on June 5, it doesn't mean they agreed with his policies, and that it means little for November or for 2014.