There were 3,456 missing votes for Democratic-backed challenger Kathleen Kloppenburg and 11,059 for incumbent GOP-backed Justice David Prosser. Kloppenburg has previously been beating Prosser by just 200 votes of the roughly 1.5 million cast statewide. The new total puts Prosser on a significant path to victory, about 7,500 votes ahead of Kloppenburg.
Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus announced the news in a press conference at 5:30 p.m. local time, sounding nervous and, at times, on the verge of tears. She insisted that there was no foul play in the results and blamed the mess on her own "human error."
Nickolaus cited several reasons for the discrepancies between Tuesday night's unofficial vote totals and the new numbers. In the city of New Berlin, the total for one ward was recorded as 37 votes for Prosser, but it was actually 237, she said. In the town of Lisbon, a "typing error" resulted in both candidates losing votes. The most significant error, however, occurred in the city of Brookfield.
"The spreadsheet from Brookfield was imported into a database that was provided by the Government Accountability Board, but it inadvertently was not saved," Nickolaus said. "As a result, when I ran the report to show the aggregate numbers that were collected from all the municipalities, I assumed that the city of Brookfield was included. It was not. The city of Brookfield cast 14,315 votes on April 5 -- 10,859 votes went for Justice David Prosser, 3,456 went for JoAnne Kloppenburg."
"It is important to stress that this is not a case of extra votes or extra ballots being found," she added. "This is human error, which I apologize for -- which is common in this process."
The existence of the missing votes was first reported at National Review Online by Christian Schneider, a senior fellow at the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute.
Questions were immediately raised about the new announcement. As Schneider wrote, prior to the election, Nickolaus "was heavily criticized for her decision to keep the county results on anantiquated personal computer, rather than upgrade to a new data system being utilized statewide."
Added Schneider: "Nickolaus cited security concerns for keeping the data herself -- yet when she reported the data, it did not include the City of Brookfield, whose residents cast nearly 14,000 votes."
The Waukesha County Board also heavily criticized the clerk after she brushed aside their recommendations for improving election security. At one point during a hearing in January, board chairman Jim Dwyer grew exasperated with Nickolaus and said, "There really is nothing funny about this, Kathy. Don't sit there and grin when I'm explaining what this is about."
"Wisconsin deserves elections that are fair, clean and transparent," said Scot Ross, the executive director of the progressive advocacy group One Wisconsin Now. "There is a history of secrecy and partisanship surrounding the Waukesha County Clerk and there remain unanswered questions."
Neither the campaigns nor the Democratic and Republican parties in the state were immediately available for comment. An official recount may be sought as early as next week.
Prosser announced Thursday that he was assembling an all-star legal team for the recount, including Washington, D.C.-based attorney Ben Ginsberg, who was part of then-Gov. George W. Bush's 2000 recount team and former Sen. Norm Coleman's counsel in Minnesota in 2008. Ginsberg declined to comment to The Huffington Post.
With the corrected errors, the turnout in Waukesha County increased from 42 percent to 47 percent. The new county totals are 92,263 votes for Prosser and 32,758 votes for Kloppenburg.
WATCH THE PRESS CONFERENCE:
UPDATE: 9:05 p.m. -- Statement from the Kloppenburg campaign manager Melissa Mulliken:
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. To that end, 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. 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. 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.
Statement from Prosser:
I’m encouraged by the various reports from the county canvases. Our confidence is high, and we will continue to monitor with optimism, and believe that the positive results will hold. We’ve always maintained faith in the voters and trust the election officials involved in the canvasing will reaffirm the lead we’ve taken.
UPDATE: 9:17 p.m. -- For 13 years, Nickolaus worked for the Wisconsin State Assembly Republican Caucus as a data analyst and computer specialist. She resigned in May 2002. [AP, 6/3/02]
From 1989-1994, Prosser served as Minority Leader. From 1995-1996, he was Speaker. Nickolaus was a staff member during this time. As Wisconsin State Journal reporter Mary Spicuzza noted on Twitter, "Kathy Nickolaus worked for Assembly Republican Caucus when Prosser was Speaker. Caucus is controlled by speaker, so he is her former boss."
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