Wisconsin recount: officials admit to double counted votes, wrong color pens, other absurdities

| 2:44 pm EST December 7, 2016
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Now that the statewide recount in Wisconsin is underway, it’s still difficult to predict whether the final vote totals will significantly shift to the point of taking the state away from Donald Trump and awarding it to Hillary Clinton. The bulk of the suspicion of cheating is now focused on Waukesha County, which is thus far refusing to do a hand recount. But even so, Wisconsin’s official website is now admitting to a number of initial errors in various other counties – some of them reading like a bad sitcom.

The official Wisconsin election website has posted its latest recount updates as of December 7th. The list, which you can visit by clicking the above blue link, includes some rather stunning admissions. For instance Racine County is admitting that its vote totals have shifted in various precincts during the course of the recount because “Votes were not counted on Election Night due to non-standard pens used to mark ballots.” What does this mean? Did poll workers give voters red pens, or magic markers? But it gets stranger.

Sheboygan County now admits (on the same source link above) that it’s reducing its vote totals because “Absentee Ballots run through tabulator twice on Election Day in error.” Vernon County is now admitting that it accidentally counted nineteen extra votes for third party candidate Gary Johnson, and as he only got 447 votes in the county to begin with, it means his vote total was overstated by nearly five percent.

Meanwhile, Washburn County admits that the vote total for Jill Stein “should have been 11 instead of 1.” And then there’s Shawano County, which is now having to admit that its “Original election results were inadvertently entered as recount results.” Some of these counties don’t even appear to be competent enough to do a recount, let alone be trusted to have gotten it right the first time.

None of the above embarrassing and sloppy errors will close the current twenty-thousand-plus vote lead which Donald Trump currently holds in the state. If a wildly incorrect vote total is hiding anywhere it’s Waukesha County, which Donald Trump supposedly won by a whopping 66,320 votes but is refusing to do a recount – and now the Stein campaign claims that county officials are illegally hiding the ballots from designated election observers. Stein would do well to go back to the judge who ordered the recount and petition him to order Waukesha to do a hand recount.