First, the contribution totals for both candidates (up to Oct 17, 2012):

In dollar totals, Obama has a slight edge over Romney and, taken alone, would indicate numbers similar to the polls — a narrow edge in Obama’s favor. The number of contributors, however, reveal a substantial difference — Obama has almost five times as many individuals contributing to his campaign.

As maps, these numbers tell a similar story. The first maps show the difference between total dollars contributed and number of contributors by zip code in Wisconsin. Zip codes with blue circles indicate more contributions or contributors for Obama while those with red circles indicate more for Romney.

Difference in total dollar amount of contributions by zip code:

Difference in number of contributors by zip code:

I’ve watched several unemployment reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) roll by without diving too much into the details. What I have seen is both the Democrats and the Republicans cherry picking data at times to highlight either job losses or gains in the state. What’s a trend? …well, it usually depends on how you define your baseline. Democrats start counting in June while the Walker administration likes to start from January of last year — presumably the time period he’s influenced those numbers.

The recent data from the BLS is different. It covers the period from March 2011 to March 2012. Given when Act 10, the Budget Repair Bill, was unveiled and publicly debated, this March to March period reflects when Walker’s policies have been in place. Arguably, this is the best measure of the effectiveness of his key policies in creating jobs and turning the Wisconsin economy around. Wisconsin was the only state in the union to have statistically significant job losses over this period.

Here’s an initial look at the recall effort against Senator Scott Fitzgerald compared to his 2010 campaign contributions. On the left are the mapped addresses of each recall petition circulator (with the size of the circles indicating the relative number of signatures collected); on the right is Fitzgerald’s campaign contributions (with the size of the circles indicating the relative size of campaign contributions):

Link to larger interactive maps (may take a while to load)

While we could perform statistical analyses on distance-weighted averages, standard deviation ellipses, or the like, the distributions are fairly clear. Unlike most of Fitzgerald’s campaign contributions, most of the petition circulators come from his own district — his own constituents collected the vast majority of the signatures to recall him.

Data sources: petition circulators from Karen Tuerk via the GAB; campaign contributions from Wisconsin Democracy Campaign database

Full disclosure — my wife, Lori Compas, organized the recall effort in Fitzgerald’s district.

Short version of procedure

1. Collect addresses in spreadsheet (LibreOffice).
2. Modify date of signature to conform with Time Manager’s format and add random offset (so all signatures on the same day don’t appear at exactly the same time).
3. Geocode using GPSVisualizer’s batch geocoder (built on Yahoo’s geocoder).
4. Import delimited text (*.csv) file into QGIS. Export layer as shapefile.
5. Create three versions as suggested by underdark and set Time Manager settings.
6. Export sequence to series of images.
7. Use AviSynth and VirtualDub to create video.

Several weeks ago I heard Mike McCabe from the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign (WDC) talk about the growing power of money in our state politics and, in his words, its equivalence to modern-day bribery. My attention had mostly been on the role of Citizens United in our national politics and not the details of state politics. I also discovered, in subsequent searching, that there’s a treasure trove of data the WDC’s campaign finance database. Here’s an initial look at my state senator’s, Scott Fitzgerald, individual contributions for the last election cycle (starting from Nov 5, 2009):

Click here for the full interactive map.

What is really interesting is how little of his money came from his own district. Approximately 86% of his contributions were from outside the 13th — only 14% came from within his own district. He received more money (15% of the total) from outside the state. Look over those out-of-state donors, I ran across the name “W. Preston Baldwin” who shows up as the chair on ALEC’s Private Enterprise Board.

Who, then, is he accountable to?

Note: only free and publicly available data and software (QGIS and LibreOffice) was used to generate this map on my personal computer.

Here’s a quick map of the area closed to parking (lines in blue) and the Diamond Precision Products facility (red plus sign):

View larger map

Given that parking legally required nearly a quarter-mile walk along a couple of busy county roads and both elderly and parents with small children were attending the protest, improving public safety was obviously not the prime reason for the parking restrictions.

Even if protecting Governor Walker was a prime concern (removing parking from any potential sight lines?), these restrictions were excessive. Many of the closed streets were well beyond any location where the Diamond facility was visible.

The obvious conclusion: the police restricted access to hinder protesters.

Just felt I had to document the fact.

As the governor is poised to sign the controversial voter ID bill in Wisconsin, what seems to be lacking on both sides of the discussion is evidence of voting irregularities or fraud. An article from yesterday’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel cites 20 prosecutions of voter fraud from the November 2008 election (none of which involved voting in someone else’s name), but citizens have been presented with little additional evidence of voter fraud.

Of far greater concern for voter confidence is the state’s ability to count votes correctly. Here, we do have evidence from the recount currently underway from the Supreme Court election in April. Certified results from every county except for Waukesha are available here from the Government Accountability Board. Adding up the total number of changed votes for each candidate reveals 1,271 votes that were missed or incorrectly counted in the original vote. Here’s what the distribution of changed votes looks like across the state:

Obviously, the totals are larger in more highly populated counties. Below is another map showing the percentage of the total votes cast — highlighting counties within the state with the highest proportion of discrepancies. The highest percentage was 0.76% change in Waupaca County — almost every one out of a 100 votes was counted incorrectly.

If we’re looking to instill greater confidence in the electoral process, shouldn’t we start (as Senator Lena Taylor noted) by getting the count correct? Surely in our age of technology we could do substantially better.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Interpretation of this map requires caution for several reasons: 1) it doesn’t include all forms of ID that can be used (e.g. military IDs) for which detailed data isn’t available, 2) many drivers have licenses without a current address, 3) many drivers are not of voting age, and 4) the data are not from the same year.

Several counties (Dane, Milwaukee, Ozaukee, and Door Counties) have more voters than drivers, meaning that currently registered voters within these counties will have to obtain new IDs to vote. The total voters without drivers licenses within these counties, 20,162 voters, is well within the margin of recent elections. The largest numbers are from Dane and Milwaukee Counties which have traditionally voted heavily for the Democrats. Will there be a differential impact on future elections?

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.