Ballots, Ballots, Where Are the Ballots? Or " I Was Lost But Now Am Found"

With the Kloppenprosser race bouncing back and forth by the hour and - eh, hmm - missing votes being found here and there and everywhere, I found myself where do missing ballots go before they are found?

Down the rabbit hole?

The memory hole?

Where would you go if you were a lost ballot? Waukesha County, perhaps.

"Waukesha — Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus' decision to go it alone in how she collects and maintains election results has some county officials raising a red flag about the integrity of the system."


Guess what? That story was published on August 10, 2010.
But, hey, at least they know where Wisconsin is now....

http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=9b5b2d5e2b3cdf6ac9db08568976f960

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-wisconsin-election-20110408,0,5633870.story

http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2011/04/07/135224999/wisconsin-supreme-ct-shocker-error-fix-gives-gop-judge-big-lead

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Where else might Nickolaus have misplaced votes? Some possibilities:
This pamphlet has some excellent ideas for building your own secret hiding places. These folks have some nifty ideas too. Stuff your ballots in a PVC tube and bury them in the garden, wait for spring, harvest the ballots at the appropriate moment.

And way back when - after Luther nailed his ideas up - there was a need for "Priest Holes" to, yep, hide priests.

These folks suggest hiding stuff in a Tampon box. Nah, you really couldn't hide that many ballots in a tampon box.

By now, bad faith is presumed all around. Let's hope it's just incompetence. But maybe they took a page out of LBJ's 1948 Brazos election. First, you wait until the votes are counted so you can figure out how many votes short you are and then you 'discover' a box full of just enough ballots to win! This plan was so obvious that even the New York Times figured it out - in 1990.

Are election officials more honest in 2011 than 1948? I really do hope so.

But this count/recount/de-count is getting off to a Florida-like start rather than a Minnesota-like start.

Anybody want to bet that this Brookfield thing is the last episode? Not me. Out of the 1850 towns, villages, and cities in Wisconsin that handle the election duties, there are going to be at least a few more oopsies.

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For the young'uns, LBJ was Lyndon Baines Johnson, President of the United States of America, who could've been one of the greatest Presidents of all time except for a place and a war called Vietnam. (Sort of like Clinton, except Bill's problem was a little - well, we know what his problem was and it wasn't as deadly as LBJ's.)

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(I'd swear "I'se lost before I'se found" was a lyric on on the great Circle album, but can't track it down. Oh, duh, try Amazing Grace "I once was lost but now am found").