Kloppenburg filing for special investigator alleges Prosser met privately with Walker on night after election, Nickolaus may have committed felonies

Both camps agree to hand counts in parts of 31 counties…

April 22, 2011- On Wednesday, Wisconsin's Asst. Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg announced that she will be exercising her right to file for a statewide "recount" following the April 5th election for state Supreme Court against the incumbent Justice David Prosser. She also said that she intended to ask for a special investigator to be named to look into a number of still-unanswered questions about election results that were misreported by Waukesha County's Clerk Kathy Nickolaus, a former employee of Prosser's when both served in the state's Assembly Republican Caucus.

Kloppenburg's complaints have now been filed, and The BRAD BLOG has been reviewing both them, and several additional points of note since yesterday's dramatic presser, in advance of the count which is scheduled to begin next Wednesday, April 27, according to the WI Government Accountability Board (G.A.B.), the state's top election agency.

Details included in Kloppenburg's request for a special investigator in Waukesha — including the curious point that Prosser "was observed entering the Governor's Office late in the evening and attending a private, one-on-one meeting with Governor Scott Walker" on the night following the election, on the very same day in which the controversial new GOP Governor publicly stated that there might be "ballots somewhere, somehow found out of the blue that weren't counted before." — are certainly compelling.

Moreover, information and questions about the "recount" process itself have naturally emerged — including a noteworthy, video-taped exchange between a citizen activist and the head of the G.A.B. on Wednesday, as well as concerns about which districts will hold court-ordered hand-counts, and which will simply run ballots through oft-failed, easily-manipulated optical-scan computers again (or worse, simply push a button to produce the same printed reported by the same 100% unverifiable touch-screen voting machines)…


WAUKESHA INVESTIGATION: The Call for a Special Investigator

The Kloppenburg campaign's request to the G.A.B. that a special investigator be appointed to look into whatever malfeasance or misfeasance may have happened in Waukesha County is a compelling one. As you likely know by now, on Election Night, Kloppenburg was reported to be ahead of Prosser by a razor-thin 204 vote margin out of some 1.5 million cast. The election itself had become a referendum for Republican Gov. Scott Walker's controversial legislation removing a great number of rights for state employees to collectively bargain with their employer.

Two days later, on April 7th, in a 5:30pm press conference, Clerk Nickolaus announced that she had left some 14,000 votes from the city of Brookfield out of her Election Night tallies as given to the media. With the additional votes from Brookfield, Prosser gained the unofficial lead by some 7,500 votes. After the post-election canvass was completed in each of WI's 72 counties late last week, Prosser's lead was 7,316 votes — or 0.488% — over Kloppenburg, entitling her to a state-sponsored "recount" since the margin was less than one-half-of-one-percent.

Though The BRAD BLOG was among the first to note that those 14,000 Brookfield votes seemed to be legitimate (not necessarily the unverified results themselves, but the existence of the votes), as they were independently reported by a local media outlet in Brookfield on Election Night, many questions persist in regard to what happened, why they were not reported by Nickolaus initially, and why it took her a full two days to notify anybody — and only via a press conference — about what she described as "simple human error".

FULL STORY HERE:

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