Milwaukee County has finally turned in their official canvass [XLS] of last week's Supreme Court election in Wisconsin, giving the almost entirely unverified results of the largely paper-ballot election to Justice David Prosser over Asst. Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg by 7,316 votes, according to the Wisconsin State Journal:

If Kloppenburg decides to opt for a "recount" the costs would be paid for by the state, since the canvassed results have her trailing by less than 0.5% statewide. Prosser's margin of victory, according to the currently reported numbers, should they become official, would be just 0.488%.

The official canvassing process in Milwaukee (and, indeed, the bulk of Wisconsin), is little more than a reconciliation of the number of voters who signed into poll books, plus the number of voters who registered at the polls on Election Day, plus any absentee ballots not scanned at the polling place (as in Milwaukee, where absentees are now scanned centrally, instead of at the polling place) plus a few provisional ballots later verified and counted, as matched against the number of votes reportedly cast, according to results tapes printed out by optical-scan computers such as those made by Diebold, ES&S, Sequoia and Populex.

Actual results reported by those computers are not verified by human beings as being accurate during the canvass process. Only the number of ballots cast is reconciled, not the actual votes for each candidate, in general. That, despite the fact that hand-marked paper ballots exist --- and could be counted for accuracy --- for the vast majority of the votes cast across the state on April 5th...

Guess what? As per our story published a few hours ago on the still-unexplained anomalies found in past Waukesha County, WI elections, it looks like the state's Government Accountability Board (the body which oversees elections in the state) can't understand County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus' explanations for the anomalous 2006 results either, where some 20,000 more votes were tallied than "ballots cast", according to her own reports.

Just in tonight from the Wisconsin State Journal: "State investigating vote irregularities in Waukesha County going back 5 years"

Our report from earlier this evening offers a great deal more detail on the anomalies in question, and includes explanation (of a sort) and comment from Nickolaus who, the Journal reports, "was unavailable for comment Wednesday and Thursday." She did, for whatever reason, manage to offer The BRAD BLOG comment on these concerns both yesterday and today, terse as it was. FWIW.

Waukesha County, Wisconsin's County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus was already known, for some time, to be among the nation's worst elections official. And that's saying quite a bit. But new information being discovered over the past several days suggests she may be even worse than previously known --- which is also saying quite a bit.

We noted last Friday that the stunning 14,000+ "new" votes she announced as having discovered in the state's Supreme Court election from the city of Brookfield last Thursday actually weren't "new" at all. In fact, they were independently reported late on Election Night by Lisa Sink of the Brookfield Patch, exactly as they were eventually included in Nickolaus' final canvass report [XLS].

If anything, as we indicated in the same article, it is perhaps more troubling that the city of Brookfield's numbers didn't change at all from Election Night, suggesting that the ballots have never been examined by any human beings in order to assure the accuracy of the oft-failed, easily-manipulated optical-scanners used to tabulate the paper ballots in Waukesha (and across most of the state.)

That's just one reason why a complete public hand-count of all paper ballots should be carried out in Waukesha right now, presuming the chain of custody for those ballots can be demonstrated as having been secure since Election Night. Given the razor-thin margin of the still unofficial final results in the race between Justice David Prosser (a partisan Republican and avowed Gov. Scott Walker supporter) and the independent Asst. Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg, a similarly public hand-count of all paper ballots across the entire state should be a no-brainer at this point in order to achieve some form of confidence in the results of the, reportedly, incredibly close contest.

The "Protect Our Elections" campaign of VelvetRevolution.us has now publicly called for exactly that --- a public hand-count of all paper ballots across the entire state. [DISCLOSURE: The BRAD BLOG is a co-founder of VR.]

Last week, The BRAD BLOG also detailed some of Nickolaus' horrific record as County Clerk, and just a few of the embarrassments she's caused for her county, including her practice of keeping election results only on a circa 1995 personal computer in her office; using the same user ID and password for all of the employees allowed to access it; and refusing to release city-by-city, much less ward-by-ward election results on Election Night. (The latter is one of the reasons the "missing" 14,000+ votes weren't noticed by anyone in the media or citizenry earlier.) Those were just a few of the troubling concerns highlighted in an independent audit carried out on behalf of the County Board of Executives last year after they'd discovered many serious deficiencies and security concerns in Nickolaus' election procedures.

But now, thanks to some great citizen oversight --- to be sure, not easy to do in Nickolaus' county, as she makes it as absolutely as difficult as possible for citizens to oversee their own elections --- from a blogger at the Daily Kos, we learn still more troubling facts about elections and their administration in the very Republican-leaning Waukesha, including evidence suggesting 20,000 more votes than "ballots cast" were tallied by Nickolaus in the county's 2006 general election, and a remarkable 97.63% voter turnout there in the 2004 Presidential election.

We've been trying to get to the bottom of these anomalies since they were first discovered a few days ago, and we've been going back and forth with Nickolaus to try and clear them up. Here's what we've been able to figure out...

My show on KPFK/Pacifica today follows below. We featured a quick word on Obama's fiscal speech today at George Washington University; quick updates on both the Fukushima nuclear crisis (with the lovely Desi Doyen) and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce plot to use tools developed for the "War on Terror" against progressives (including me and my family!)

The main segment is detailed coverage of the Wisconsin Supreme Court election debacle, including some fresh news with my guest John Washburn of Fair Elections Wisconsin, himself a Justice David Prosser voter, a self-described "Ron Paul Republican" and someone who has even spoken on behalf of the hapless Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus in the past.

Even Washburn, as you'll hear, is unable to explain the holes in Nickolaus' explanation for the reason she failed to report 14,000+ votes from the city of Brookfield on Election Night, and for a number of newly discovered anomalies from previous elections in her county. (Though, since air time, we've finally been contacted by Nickolaus, and may soon have an explanation for some of those new anomalies as discussed during today's show.)

Download MP3, or listen online below [appx. 28 mins]...

P.S. We're still trying to decide on a name for my weekly, half-hour KPFK show (Wednesday's at 3:30pm PT). "The BradCast" has been suggested by a number of folks, and it's not bad. Whaddaya think? Got any other ideas? Still open, pondering...

P.P.S. Here's the podcast RSS feed for the KPFK show each week, in case you'd like to subscribe (for free) and get notifications or downloads of new archives often sooner than I'm sometimes able to post them here!

As several folks have requested, here is my "Special Comment" on "Democracy's Gold Standard" in the wake of Wisconsin's Supreme Election Debacle from my final night of the week guest hosting the Mike Malloy Show last Friday night. It's presented here in quick and dirty video form in hopes that it'll get a few more eyes and ears than just the audio would by itself...

Please see this article for more on "Democracy's Gold Standard." And here is Nancy Tobi's book: Hands-On Elections: An Informational Handbook for Running Real Elections, Using Real Paper Ballots, Counted by Real People.

A text transcript of the "Special Comment" follows below...

[Now UPDATED with audio archives from tonight below.]

What? The week is over already?! It's our last night for a while sitting in as guest host for nationally syndicated Mike Malloy Show. It's been a great, if exhausting week since we began last Friday. (We're schedule to return in June, if not before.)

Tonight, as ever, we'll be BradCasting LIVE 9pm-Mid ET (6p-9p PT), coast-to-coast and around the globe from the studios of L.A.'s KTLK am1150 in beautiful downtown Burbank. Join us by tuning in, chatting in, Tweeting in and calling in! Our LIVE and lively chat room will be up and rolling right here at The BRAD BLOG, as usual, while we are on the air. Please stop by and join the fun while you're listening! (The Chat Room will open at the bottom of this item a few minutes before airtime, see down below, just above "Comments" section.)

Scheduled tonight (so far):

• DAVID DAYEN from FireDogLake.
• NICOLE SANDLER of RadioOrNot.com.
• PLUS: The latest on the WI debacle, the DC Shutdown Showdown, everything we didn't get to, but wanted to, earlier this week, and whatever is on your mind tonight via calls to 877-520-1150 and tweets to @TheBradBlog!...

The Mike Malloy Show is nationally syndicated on air affiliates across the country and also on Sirius Ch. 146 & XM Ch. 167. You may also listen online to the free LIVE audio stream at affiliate GREEN 960 in San Francisco or via MikeMalloy.com.

POST-SHOW UPDATE: Thanks all for a great, if exhausting week on the Mike Malloy Show! We're scheduled to be back for Mike in June (if not before). See ya then! Tonight's fun Friday audio (and chat room) archives follow below...

Here is an update, along with some important thoughts on the WI Supreme Court election debacle which exploded out of Waukesha County yesterday, plunging that important election into utter disarray --- an election seen by many as a referendum on Gov. Scott Walker and the state GOP's legislating away many of the rights of state citizens to collectively bargain.

I am writing quickly as I scramble, once again to get to the studio on time to finish up my week tonight as guest host of the nationally syndicated Mike Malloy Show. I will, of course, speak again about these matters in greater detail on air this evening. So please forgive any typos or lack of clarity in the following for now.

First, some of the latest related news of note, and then some quick thoughts on this entire fine mess.

The campaign of Asst. Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg, now said to be trailing incumbent Justice David Prosser by some 7,500 votes, announced their intention last night to file an open records request "for all relevant documentation related to the reporting of election results in Waukesha County, as well as to the discovery and reporting of the errors announced by the County."

That's good. In addition, they ought to apply for an immediate court order for the quarantine, sequestration, and confiscation of all ballots, electronic voting systems (optical-scanners, Direct Recording Electronic machines, tabulators, etc), memory cards, and the computer systems of County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus as well, in hopes of assuring a complete, independent, transparent forensic investigation of the entire election by an independent party.

At the same time, the State Government Accountability Board (GAB) has announced today they are "dispatching officials to the Waukesha County Clerk's Office Friday afternoon to review procedures used in tallying results of Tuesday's Supreme Court election."

That's good too, and if they have the authority to confiscate the election materials as described above, they should exercise it immediately as well. Nickolaus should no longer be allowed anywhere near this election (or, frankly, any other, given her years of reckless behavior in her role as County Clerk.)

Others, including Citizen Action of Wisconsin, have called for a full federal investigation into "irregularities" in Waukesha County's vote-counting system. That would be both welcome and appropriate as well in this case.

With all of that said, and with full recognition of the absolutely shameful way the Right would have behaved had 14,000+ votes suddenly "appeared" in a Democratic stronghold, as they did in the heavily Republican Waukesha enclave (and as they had already begun to do prior to yesterday's stunning announcement, as can be seen in the Fox "News" appearance yesterday of the always shamefully irresponsible liar John Fund), there are reasons to regard the "new" numbers announced yesterday as "legitimate." Or, at least as "legitimate" as any of the other results announced based on ballots counted only by oft-failed, easily-manipulated computer systems in the state. (See our detailed explanation about those systems, and the very serious concerns about them, as we published on Wednesday, when the unofficial results had the race at a 204 vote margin.)

Here's why I feel that way. (Though, mind you, how I feel has nothing to do with what should or shouldn't be done here to restore integrity and appropriate oversight to the woeful election system in place in Waukesha. To be sure, there are many remaining questions that demand answers at this time in both Waukesha and elsewhere in the state.)...

[Now UPDATED with audio archives below.]

Late breaking news out of Wisconsin, and the continuing fight over a federal government shutdown in DC means we're going to have an even busier night than usual as my week guest hosting on the nationally syndicated Mike Malloy Show continues.

As usual, we're BradCasting LIVE 9pm-Mid ET (6p-9p PT), coast-to-coast and around the globe from the studios of L.A.'s KTLK am1150 in beautiful downtown Burbank. Join us by tuning in, chatting in, Tweeting in and calling in! Our LIVE and lively chat room will be up and rolling right here at The BRAD BLOG, as usual, while we are on the air. Please stop by and join the fun while you're listening! (The Chat Room will open at the bottom of this item a few minutes before airtime, see down below, just above "Comments" section.)

Scheduled tonight (so far):

• DAVE WEIGEL Slate.com journalist/blogger and MSNBC contributor with the latest on the DC budget standoff.
• JOHN WASHBURN Award-winning Wisconsin election integrity citizen advocate (and self-professed 'Ron Paul Republican' and Justice David Prosser voter!) of Fair Elections of WI with the latest news out of WI today and on GOP-floated rumors about "fraud" in the Supreme Court election. .
• TYSON SLOCUM Director of Public Citizen's energy program on the latest out of Fukushima and the dangers and pitfalls of nuclear power and other fossil fuels. Award-winning Wisconsin election integrity citizen advocate (and self-professed 'Ron Paul Republican') with the latest news out of WI today and on GOP-floated rumors about "fraud" in the Supreme Court election. .
• PLUS: Isn't that enough? Yes, there will be more! Plus your calls at 877-520-1150 and tweets to @TheBradBlog!...

The Mike Malloy Show is nationally syndicated on air affiliates across the country and also on Sirius Ch. 146 & XM Ch. 167. You may also listen online to the free LIVE audio stream at affiliate GREEN 960 in San Francisco or via MikeMalloy.com.

POST-SHOW UPDATE: Wow. What a show. Especially on Wisconsin revelations tonight. The audio (and chat) archives all follow below...

[Updated 4/8/11, 12:22am PT at bottom of article.]

As word was floating around this afternoon about a possible "book keeping error" discovered during canvassing of Tuesday's incredibly close Wisconsin Supreme Court election, an error that might give thousands of votes to Justice David Prosser in a race which he trailed by just 204 votes based on unofficial Election Night numbers, we idly wondered if the county in question might turn out to be the very controversial Kathy Nickolaus' Waukesha County.

And, whaddaya know...

The above comes from the Rightwing National Review Online and is similarly reported at this hour at the similarly Rightwing Weekly Standard where Stephen F. Hayes adds that Nickolaus is also "a Republican activist":

As Schneider notes in the NRO piece, Waukesha's County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus had indeed come under scrutiny for her election procedures in the past. As The BRAD BLOG flagged back in August of 2010, it was discovered that Nickolaus keeps election results on her personal PC in her office, and only on her personal PC.

At a press conference moments ago, Nickolaus is said to have attributed the confusion in numbers to "save error" in Microsoft Access on her computer.

As we noted, quoting the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel last year in regard to questions about Nickolaus', um, unusual election procedures:

An audit of Nickolaus' election procedures was subsequently performed by the county and a number of recommendations to improve the security and accuracy of her system were made by the auditors. Among them, the recommendation that she stop using the same ID and password for three different employees in her office. Nickolaus claimed, in opposing that recommendation, that it would take too much time for one employee to log off before another one logged on with a different user ID.

When presented with the results of the audit at a County Board meeting in January after Nickolaus had refused to implement the recommendations, saying only that she would take them "into consideration," she was taken to task for what the Chairman of the Executive Committee described as her "smirks" during the discussion. Here is how the Journal Sentinel reported that meeting in January of this year...

Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning
• UPDATED 2:59pm PT with additional reporting from Brad Friedman

With 100% of the precincts now reporting unofficial results, Assistant Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg leads Justice David Prosser by a remarkably thin 204 votes out of some 1.5 million ballots cast in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race --- according to the computers that count votes in the state.

The unofficial numbers at this hour, according to AP's spreadsheet of those computer results, give Kloppenburg 740,090 votes to Prosser's 739,886.

Despite Kloppenburg's tiny reported lead, the race is virtual dead heat in what might otherwise be a little-noticed state Supreme Court election. The race, however, has been turned into a proxy battle between supporters of the state's controversial new Republican Gov. Scott Walker (who Prosser has allied himself with) and union workers and their supporters who oppose Walker and the state GOP's attempt to legislate away the freedom of citizens to collectively bargain through public worker unions. Outside groups, according to NYU's Brennan Center for Justice, are said to have spent a record $3.5 million on so-called "issue ads" to support their favored candidate in the closing days of the election.

For proponents of Election Integrity, there is both good news and bad in the Badger State. The good news: most of the state's voters used verifiable hand-marked paper ballots to record their votes yesterday. The bad news: Those ballots are counted by easily-manipulated, oft-failed computers instead of human beings; 100% unverifiable Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, usually touch-screen) voting machines are used by some voters with disabilities across the state; and, given close results, even if a hand-count of paper ballots occurs, as is likely, the number of votes cast on unverifiable DREs could end up being larger than the final margin between the two candidates --- meaning that it will be, literally, impossible to know for certain who actually won the election...

While prepping for tonight's Mike Malloy Show (which I will be busy guest hosting all week), here are just a few of the items which caught my eye so far today...in no particular order...

• Record amounts of cash being spent by labor unions and the (supposedly grass-roots) "Tea Party" on tomorrow's Supreme Court election in Wisconsin, as the race between the unabashedly pro-Walker Justice David Prosser and Asst. Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg has turned into a proxy battle between the two clashing ideologies right now in WI. A defeat of Prosser would tilt the court's 4-3 majority from Right-leaning to not Right-leaning. The race is also seen as a bellwether for upcoming recall elections of GOP state Senators likely to occur there in the near future, as Ernie Canning reported on earlier today at The BRAD BLOG.

• Nuclear triage. Workers at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan are dumping 11.5 tons of "low-level" radioactive water into the ocean to make room in filled storage containers for the more radioactive water leaking from reactor Unit 2. They say they have "no choice," but to dump that water (with radiation levels 100 times over the legal limit) as they must continue injecting new water to cool the plant's four crippled reactors, even as the radiated water floods out. Over the weekend, workers were unsuccessful in their attempt to use polymer, sawdust and newspaper (BP "JunkShot" anyone?!) to plug an 8 inch crack in a flooded tunnel at Unit 2 said to be gushing highly radioactive water, at 100,000 times legal levels, into the ocean.

• Transocean, the owner of the BP oil rig which blew up last year in the Gulf killing 11 workers (9 of them from Transocean) has apologized for referring to 2010's safety record as the company's "best year ever". They have not, however, apologized for issuing enormous bonuses to their executives in the bargain.

• A sweeping new election law in Florida is working its way through the GOP-controlled state legislature along predictably partisan lines, just in time for the 2012 Presidential election there. Some of the proposed changes will make it much more difficult for non-partisan voter registration groups, such as the League of Women Voters, to do their work, and will likely lead to a huge increase in "provisional" (and, therefore, frequently uncounted) ballots. Leon County's highly-respected Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho has called the bill "a travesty".

• Former U.S. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley --- recently forced to step down for referring to the treatment of alleged WikiLeaks leaker Bradley Manning as "stupid" --- compares WikiLeaks to the New York Times. The paper's Editor-in-Chief, who has been bashing Julian Assange and WikiLeaks themselves of late, even though the "paper of record" has written hundreds of stories based on WikiLeaks documents, will not be happy. Good. (Coverage at RAW STORY courtesy of BRAD BLOG alum David Edwards.)

• After relentlessly bashing Democrats for cuts to Medicare vis a vis the 2010 health insurance reform bill, Republican Congressman Paul Ryan plans to largely do away with the program entirely as part of the GOP's proposed budget plans to be revealed shortly.

• Even Republican state Senators in Maine are beginning to become uncomfortable with the radical statements and extremist behavior of the state's new GOP Governor Paul LePage and are asking him to "tone it down". Beginning to see the writing on the wall, boys?

So what's on your radar?

In addition to some of the above possibly coming up for discussion tonight, we will definitely be discussing the U.S. Chamber Plot (which was to have targeted, among others, myself and my family) with my guest U.S. Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) who is trying to see some accountability in that horrific affair after House Republicans refused his request for investigative hearings into the matter.

Please tune in at 6p PT (9p ET) tonight --- and all week! We'll have live listening links and a lively chat room right here at The BRAD BLOG during those hours as usual!

Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning

While it should hardly be necessary, given the extent to which the GOP's billionaire-funded direct assault on workers' rights has exposed the Orwellian deceptions of the so-called 'Tea Party' movement, there are times when the adage, "sex sells," seems unavoidable, especially when it involves exposing the vast gap between the right-wing's professed "family values" and "fiscal responsibility" and a reality that includes infidelity and an eager willingness to squander public funds on friends and the billionaire sociopaths who fund their campaigns.

No doubt, Chris Bowers, the Campaign Director of the Daily Kos, understood this when he sent out a fund-raising email which, as reported by Rich Mitchell of the Conservative Daily News, reads, in pertinent part:

Mitchell denounced the salacious allegations as a "smear", though he offered no evidence in support of that claim to counter what appears to be an accurate account of Hopper's infidelities and the questionable hiring of his girlfriend, the GOP operative Valerie Cass, by the new administration of Gov. Scott Walker.

While there is always a legitimate question as to whether marital infidelity should disqualify an individual from holding public office, here the issue arises in the context of allegations of nepotism and hypocrisy, not to mention the issue of whether the Fond du Lac Republican could lawfully cast a vote opposing his own recall, now that, as his estranged wife admits, he no longer resides in his own district. He lives with Cass elsewhere.

This new sex scandal adds to a powerful, substantive recall message which has gained a great deal of momentum over the last several weeks...

Tony Pierce, filling in for Andrew Malcolm (columnist and Laura Bush's former press secretary) at Los Angeles Times' "Top of the Ticket" blog picks up (with attribution, gracias) on our scoop earlier this week about the 100% unverifiable, yet highly hackable Diebold touch-screen e-voting machines out of Van Wert County, Ohio, now for sale, on the cheap, at eBay...

Pierce offers more information in his piece on that landmark Princeton hack from September 2006 and the hackability of these systems in general.

Long time readers of The BRAD BLOG likely recall the Princeton hack came about when VelvetRevolution.us (as co-founded by The BRAD BLOG) gave the Diebold touch-screen system to computer scientists there for the --- at the time --- highly secretive, first-of-its-kind examination, after we'd received the machine from a source of ours. We originally broke the story of that hack exclusively both here at The BRAD BLOG and in a slightly shorter version at Salon.

The alarming hack --- which demonstrated how a virus could be inserted into one of these systems and invisibly flip the results of an entire election --- received a great deal of attention from the mainstream media at the time, and was even covered in a live video demonstration on Fox "News". (See that video at right.)

Though the Princeton hack was on a Diebold AccuVote TS (with no so-called "Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail" printer) versus the TSX model (with VVPAT) being sold now on eBay, the many ways available to game them in order to flip election results with very little possibility of detection are essentially the same...

Because practice makes perfect...

With 2012 just around the corner and these babies still in use at polling places all over the country, why not get one or more of them now for your very own?! With one of these future door stops, you too can learn all the ins and outs of "voting" before the pressure of Election Day, when that "vote" will really "count"!

Great for social clubs, like political parties, or even terrorist groups! Why wait? They're sure to disappear fast! Just like the 100% unverifiable "votes" cast on them!

Because they were made by Diebold, you know it comes from a company you "trust," whether you'd like to or not. And with bids starting as low as, well, anything you like, this tens-of-thousands-of-a-kind e-voting machine is sure to be a "steal"!

More from the Ebay ad (cached here for history's sake):

UPDATE: The seller tells The BRAD BLOG the systems, more than 100 of them, come from Van Wert County, Ohio! And from a state like Ohio, you know the machines work just as they are supposed to! Get yours now and become the life of the party!

UPDATE 3/31/11: Thanks to Tony Pierce, filling in for Andrew Malcom at the Los Angeles Times "Top of the Ticket" blog for picking up on this story, adding some helpful details to it (and for giving appropriate attribution in the bargain.)

The GOP voter fraud epidemic continues unabated. The latest alleged felon? Outgoing U.S. Ambassador to China, former Utah Governor --- and potential 2012 GOP Presidential candidate --- Jon Huntsman Jr.

Teddy Partridge at FireDogLake charges (accurately) that Huntsman "Pulls a Coulter," as The Salt Lake Tribune reports:

Of course, Huntsman is a Republican, so different "voter fraud" laws apply to them, in general, than to other Americans.

"It is generally illegal for voters to cast ballots using a residential address where they no longer reside," the Tribune notes before giving Huntsman a pass. "But state and federal law seem to back Huntsman's ability to still vote using the governor's mansion as his home because that was his last address before he left for Beijing to serve as an employee of the U.S. government."

Despite that, as the very same article notes, "Last June, Huntsman purchased a $3.6 million home in a tony D.C. neighborhood." So while he may have had cause to specify his last U.S. address as Utah prior to last June, one wonders why officials are overlooking the fact that he owned a D.C. home well prior to last November's general election, when he voted using a registration at a residence where he hadn't lived for more than a year and a half.

One doesn't have to "wonder" for long, however...