Additional Prosser votes are not that suspicious

News that some 14,000 additional votes had been added to the totals of conservative Waukesha County, netting David Prosser an additional 7,500 votes, was met with quite a bit of skepticism, esspecially considering County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus spotty history and refusal to follow state procedures.

None of this means that mistakes can't happen though, and anyone who has been following Minnesota elections for the last few years should know that unofficial results are just that, until a vote total is certified by the proper authority we can't be certain of the numbers.

I began working on this post this morning and because of the obligations of life some sports guy from the New York Times posted something very similar before I could finish. Undaunted, (or more accurately, not wanting to waste all the words I'd already written and charts I'd already made) I will post this thing anyway.

What I want to do is take a look at what these 14,000 additional votes mean in the grand scheme of things. For this analysis I'm going to use the number of registered voters from the 2010 midterm elections as the baseline to see what the turnout numbers looked like for all the counties in the Supreme Court election.

Here's an overview:



And here's Waukesha county isolated:



Before the Brookfield update was made, Waukesha county was right at the state average for turnout and with the update they move into the upper 75th percentile. This is high turnout, but still well within the bounds of normal. Here's the top ten counties in turnout percentage:



With the updated totals Waukesha county would be tied with Rusk county, in the lower half of the top ten. From a histroical perspective this makes sense though, let's look at Waukesha counties turnout versus the entire state over the course of the last few elections:



You can see that the updated totals more resemble the counties past performance than the initial results did. But what about the city of Brookfield itself, how do it's numbers look? That's what Joe Bodell wondered in a post earlier today. He had a hard time believing that Brookfield turnout could be 49%. As we have seen for the counties, 49% would fall within the established range, even if it's at the high side.

This is what Brookfield looks like compared to the county it's in:



So higher turnout than the county itself, but not to a huge degree. What about the votes themselves though, Prosser got 76% of those Brookfield votes, how does that compare to the vote distribution between the candidates in the rest of the county:



Even though the addition of these votes is disheartening news for the good guys, I don't see anything that would lead me to believe that something fraudulent is going on.