"It may take more than a month before any recount would even start" in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election.

"The Government Accountability Board has until May 15 to complete its canvas of the vote. No date has been set for the board to canvas the vote, which is dependent upon when the counties submit their results to GAB."

Settle in, people. It'll be just like the never-ending election night of 2000. Except that it's not a presidential election. It's just a state election. For a judge. How perfectly weird to get so intensely caught up in this matter. It got way too symbolic. Let's try to untangle the unresolved election from all the other things it had come to signify for us.

First, let's dispose of the "referendum on Walker" notion. Yesterday's voting did not produce anything that can be translated into a renouncement of last November's election. We can see that the people of Wisconsin are pretty evenly divided between conservatives and liberals, so we can't say that Walker and the GOP legislature have somehow lost their legitimacy. We've taken the temperature of Wisconsin and there is no fever. Normal politics should continue with the results of the last election intact.

The potential for the Wisconsin Supreme Court to invalidate the work of the political branches is relatively slight. Even assuming a Kloppenburg victory is sealed sometime next month or whenever the hell the election is finally over, there's a limit to what a court can do, especially without the boost of a landslide election that can be portrayed as the will of the people to stop Scott Walker and his minions.

The court might decide that the bill that stripped collective bargaining rights violated the open meetings law, but the GOP legislature can pass a new bill, without that procedural flaw, so what difference will it make? Indeed, such a decision, especially with Kloppenburg's participation, will open the court to the criticism that it is has over-leaped the bounds of judicial propriety, and that will undermine the court's legitimacy, making it harder to crank out the next self-aggrandizing decision and tipping the next judicial election toward the conservative candidate.

So... settle in... and settle down.