Charlie Sykes Graphic

There is a reason results are called “preliminary.”    Lost in the Waukesha bombshell was the fact that all over the state votes were moving back and forth all day.  Prosser was actually up before Waukesha County was announced, because of errors in other counties.  That is the nature of preliminary vote counts.  That’s why you were correct in saying the race was a tie and we didn’t know who had won.  It was why Joanne Kloppenberg was stupid and desperate to hold a press conference and declare victory and smarmily thank Prosser for 30 years of public service on the basis of a preliminary 200 vote margin.   Without Waukesha, this thing was going to be a roller coaster with more lead changes than the NCAA tournament.  Preliminary numbers are just that.  It is a bi-product of the media’s “need for speed” and their horserace obsession to call the winner.   They will take any number they can get and write a story around it.  The fact that AP, the Journal Sentinel and everyone else in the MSM jumped the gun and built huge storylines around vote totals they KNEW were not final and not accurate (no statewide canvass ever comes back vote for vote in synch with the preliminary data) is not an indictment of the electoral system, County Clerks or anything else.  It is indictment of the MSM’s rush to judgment obsession with being first and with telling us what to think.  It is simply not in their nature to say, “we don’t know, and we’re not going to pretend we do until we are sure.”  Ironically, today many of them will be bashing Kathy Nicholous for not double checking her work on election night, when the reason they are having to do such embarrassed and contorted analysis backflips and about faces right now is because they turned in their work without waiting for all the fact themselves.

Hear, hear.