WISCONSINREPORT.COM (04/08/2011) - The statewide canvass currently underway in 72 counties has provided several swings back and forth in the vote totals for the Wisconsin Supreme Court race. But a revelation announced yesterday afternoon in Waukesha County, where they say they found 14,000 votes that were accidentaly not reported, may be a game changer. The Kloppenburg campaign manager wants documentation of the discrepancy. Meanwhile, the county Dems Vice Chair is satisfied.

Thursday, Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nikolaus released the official numbers showing incumbent Justice David Prosser received 92,263 votes in the county, while his challenger Joanne Kloppenburg had 32,758. That netted Prosser 7,582 votes when compared to the initial tally reported Tuesday night.

The most significant discovery involved the results from the City of Brookfield. All the votes for Brookfield were not reported by the County Clerk to the State of Wisconsin Government Accountability Board. All of the City’s 14,315 votes were not included in the results sent to the state, 10,859 of them for Prosser.

“This was human error, which is common,” Nikolaus said at a press conference this afternoon. “I apologize.”

Kloppenburg for Justice Campaign Manager Melissa Mulliken says, "Wisconsin voters as well as the Kloppenburg for Justice Campaign deserve a full explanation of how and why these 14,000 votes from an entire City were missed".

"We will be filing open records requests 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," Mulliken said.

"We are confident that election officials in Waukesha County will fulfill these requests as quickly as possible so that both our campaign and the people of Wisconsin can fully understand what happened and why," Mulligen added.

"Just as Assistant Attorney General Kloppenburg has run to restore confidence in the court, Wisconsin residents also deserve to have full confidence in election results," Mulligen explained.

Democratic Party of Waukesha County Vice Chair Ramona Kitzinger participated in the canvass and said she was satisfied that this was an honest error by the Republican Nikolaus, and involved reporting, not the actual counting or handling of ballots.

“We went over everything and made sure the numbers jibed up and they did,” Kitzinger said. “We’re satisfied that it’s correct.”

The embattled County Clerk appreciated Kitzinger’s support.

“I’m thankful that this error was caught early in the process and during the canvass,” Nickolaus said. “The purpose of the canvass is to catch these kinds of errors.”

While the changes in the Waukesha County canvass was clearly the largest swing witnessed during the day, it was not the only one. There have been some other, much smaller, errors picked up by convasses in other counties, none of which, so far, have been sufficient to change the outcome, except for the Waukesha County announced flub.

If the current totals, following convassing in all 72 counties hold up, David Prosser will return to the Supreme Court seat he was attempting to be re-elected to.

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