The successful recall of former state Sen. Van Wangaard by 834 votes has the Republican party struggling to portray itself as the victim once again. Wangaard requested a recount, citing the usual registration violations and lack of voter ID laws, along with people campaigning at the polls, while even the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel noted, “[Wangaard] offered no proof of any of those allegations.” Instead of accepting their lone defeat of the election, in a district that flips as often as Mitt Romney, MacIver Institute “news service” is floating the story “Did several Racine poll workers push for recall of Wangaard?” on the basis that some of these poll workers (presumably very politically engaged citizens), signed a recall petition.
Eye on Wisconsin neatly sums up the wasteful hypocrisy of a recount, but I would like to take MacIver’s angle — YES, the 78 of 189 poll workers that signed a recall petition petition actively campaigned on behalf of John Lehman, influencing the outcome of the election.
Each of these hyper-partisan poll workers influenced 10.7 voters each to push Lehman to 834 more votes than Wangaard, without their misconduct being noted even a single time. Not even by fellow poll workers, 111 of whom did not sign any recall petition.
Perhaps the margin of victory was due to identification not being required when casting a ballot, and that happened 200 times in Racine County. In that case, the poll workers only had to convince 8.1 people to vote for Lehman. Is that far-fetched? Not when you include the figure of 250 fraudulent same-day registrations I just made up. Now each poll worker only needed to convince 4.9 voters to fill in the arrow for Lehman.
MacIver knows the “news” they “publish” is absolute garbage, but they have no problem making baseless insinuations or telling outright lies. It’s dirty, pathetic, right-wing politics at it’s most obvious, on par with Media Trackers and Wisconsin Reporter. Sadder yet is that so many fail to understand this, and it’s only going to get worse.
