Rick "Shark and Shepherd" Esenberg, April 11:
Some of the writing in the aftermath of Thursday's developments in the Supreme Court race was either ignorant in cynical. Charges that votes were found, went unreported or were "manipulated" by the county clerk on her personal computer are demonstrably false. No ballotes were discovered. No votes were counted on Thursday that had not been counted on election night. No votes went unreported on election night although some were not included in the aggregate total reported to the AP. Whatever Kathy Nickolaus did or did not do on her personal computer is wholly without official impact. The votes that count reflected on ballots that were removed from the machines and secured on Tuesday evening along with absentee ballots that were also counted and sealed. Nothing on Kathy Nickolaus' computer has anything to do with the certified vote totals. Anyone who says otherwise doesn't know what he or she is talking about it.
(He was right, by the way.)
Rick "Shark and Shepherd" Esenberg, December 14 on the "threat" of massive recall signature fraud:
Are there enough such people to cause a problem? I don't know but here's a sobering thought. Let's assume that there are 5000 people who sign an average of 25 times. That sounds like a lot of people but it's less than 1% of the number needed to recall the governor. (Brawler's bold) Such a scenario would result in 120,000 invalid signatures - over 20% of the total required. While I would think that many signatures from one person would be caught even by the GAB, that's nor clear and there are other scenarios that would be more difficult to detect. The point is that a relatively small number of people can create a significant problem. When recall proponents are telling people that they can sign more than once and when the GAB says it won't look for duplicates, the problem cannot be dismissed out of hand.
In my reality-based world, it's difficult to get 5,000 people to do anything correctly once, much less 25 times. People will bend over to pick up a penny, but tell me what happens if you offer them a dollar to do a hundred knee-bends.
Posted by: John Foust | December 19, 2011 at 09:22 AM