Wisconsin Supreme Court race flips as liberal challenger loses election

April 10th, 2011 11:18 am ET
Hans Bader






Earlier, I said that liberals had won the election for a seat on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court Tuesday, ousting an incumbent Supreme Court Justice backed by the GOP by a mere 234 votes. Well, I was wrong. The liberal, JoAnne Kloppenburg, now seems to have lost. On Thursday, the incumbent, Justice David Prosser, moved ahead by 7,000 votes after a clerk in a Republican-leaning County discovered more than 14,000 votes cast mostly for Prosser (10,859 additional votes for Prosser versus 3,456 additional votes for Kloppenburg).

I was probably wrong to draw conclusions from a mere 234-vote margin in any event, since such a margin is the statistical equivalent of a tie, and could be the result of all sorts of mistakes or shenanigans in voting.

One factor that affects extremely close elections won by liberals is voting by illegal aliens and non-citizens, who are not legally allowed to vote. Half the 9/11 hijackers were registered to vote. Hundreds of aliens are known to be registered to vote in Utah, and one estimate puts the number of aliens registered there at 5,000 to 7,000. This factor likely benefits Democrats, since immigrants are mostly from ethnic groups (such as Hispanics) that vote mostly for Democratic candidates.

Perhaps for this reason, the Obama Administration is not interested in enforcing laws against illegal aliens voting, notes former Justice Department lawyer Hans Von Spakovsky, who sits on Fairfax County Virginia’s elections board. While the number of illegal aliens voting is a tiny percentage of the overall electorate, it is certainly enough to produce the 234 vote margin initially claimed by the liberal candidate in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election.

Most aliens illegally registered to vote don’t actually vote, but since some do, so it is easy to imagine several hundred such votes occurring in Wisconsin – not enough to affect the current race, but enough to have affected some earlier extremely close Wisconsin elections (and perhaps, conceivably, the 2000 election, in which Al Gore beat George Bush in Wisconsin by a scant 0.22 percent of the vote, a narrower margin than the margin by which Justice Prosser currently leads Kloppenburg).

As I noted earlier, the Wisconsin election was cast a referendum on a recently-passed law limiting collective bargaining in state agencies, but there were actually more important issues at stake in the election, such as crime, judicial activism, and lawsuit abuse. I earlier explained why the law limiting collective bargaining was not unconstitutional or illegal, and why some policy arguments made in favor of collective bargaining are baseless.



http://www.examiner.com/scotus-in-washi ... s-election