Wisconsin’s Presidential recount is done and as everyone but Green Party candidate Jill Stein expected, there was virtually no change to the results first reported by county clerks around the state on election night and certified by Boards of Canvass a week later. With the $3.5 MILLION that Stein’s contributors wasted on this exercise they probably could have paid for electric car charging stations across Wisconsin and had a few bucks left over to give to the City of Milwaukee for a lead pipe replacement program. You know, the types of things that Greens and Liberals claim to support–but don’t seem willing to put up their own money to do. Easier to tax others to pay for their pet projects.
Regardless of the outcome, this was still “Mission Accomplished” for Stein. Here we are more than a month past the election and we are still mentioning her name–which is one month more than any Green Party candidate deserves to be mentioned. And she has a long list of donor email addresses that the party itself can use to pad its own coffers–or it can sell to other like-minded organizations to pay for their consultants and lobbyists. The “green” in the Green Party is about to represent “Cash” from now on.
This will be spun as “an exercise that restored America’s faith in its election process”. But who was really calling into question the legitimacy of the process? It certainly wasn’t Wisconsin voters themselves. Donald Trump started this whole thing with the “system is rigged if I lose” nonsense on the campaign trail. But he never once said that voting machines were “hacked” or that “ballots were intentionally left uncounted”. That garbage was spewed by Stein herself after the election was done in countless TV interviews claiming that the voting machines in Wisconsin were “highly susceptible” to hacking–even though none of them are ever hooked up to the internet. And yet, the New York and Washington-based reporters and TV hosts that have never been to Wisconsin to witness an election went right along with those claims and never “fact-checked” the process we actually use out here.
One thing that we should take from the recount–and this has been true since the very first election–is that the US and each individual state is not well equipped to handle a very, very close race. Wisconsin 2016 didn’t turn into Florida 2000–but that is mainly because the two major political parties both knew the result was not going to be changed in this recount (nor would it flip the Electoral College) so challenges to individual ballots were few and far between. But if the difference between Trump and Clinton had been 230–rather than 23,000–our newscasts would have been filled everyday with updates on the myriad of lawsuits, counter-suits and appeals that would have been taking place all across Wisconsin and the Federal Court system.
So enjoy “having your faith restored” in our election process here in Wisconsin–even if you never actually doubted it before.
