Uppity Wisconsin

The City of Milwaukee spring primary has been canceled for lack of interest.

Not lack of interest by the voters (well, maybe the voters, too), but by the candidates.

The City Election Commission has officially called off the Feb.  16 primary because there are no primaries.

In fact, there are no races at all, even for the April 6 general election.

There are no municipal elections in the city this year.  There are eight Milwaukee County circuit court judgeships to be filled, but there's only a primary if more than two candidates file.

In fact, none of the eight incumbents even has a challenger. Here's the list. Congratulations on your reelections, your honors.

That saves some money, to be sure.  But doesn't it make you think that, given the tiny turnout even when there are spring elections, that maybe we'd be better off to have them all in the fall?

We are now about two weeks away from the November election in Washington State, and one item on the ballot that has national attention is Referendum 71, the so-called “everything but marriage” proposal that would give same-sex couples more rights and protections than they have today.

There has been a lot of conversation about whether it will or won’t pass—and a lot of conversation about whether it should pass.

I hope it does, and if you live here I encourage you to vote “yes” November 3rd.

But that said, you may not be aware that Washington has an electoral system in transition, and that as a result of the transition Washington has some idiosyncrasies that will make forecasting the results a bit tougher, and determining the results a bit slower.

We’ll talk about that today, and by the time we’re done you should have an appreciation of the odd way in which things can work out—and that, absent a landslide, we aren’t likely to know the results on Election Day.

These Are Not Normal Times

We have the strangest weather here: it is not quite 50 degrees F. as I write this, in midafternoon; but by tonight it’s expected to get warmer as the rain moves in.

Those who would like to reduce, inhibit, prevent, discourage and suppress the vote in Wisconsin’s urban (read Democratic) areas are in full cry over a Milwaukee Police Department report after investigating how the city conducted the November 2004 election.

Charlie Sykes and Brian Fraley were first to the hunt, but the pack of rabid right-wing commentators won’t be far behind. It has already made National Review online. (Sykes links to National Review, but it links back to his site to access the report. So guess where National Review got it.)

Sykes calls it “a bombshell,” and asks:

will the JS, the mayor, and Democrats in Madison continue to deny that we have a major problem with voter fraud?

We should certainly hope so, because the report from MPD’s Special Investigations Unit says nothing of the kind.

Saying “mistakes were made” does not equal “widespread voter fraud was committed.” Sykes and NR make much of this sentence, in the introduction: