The vote totals in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race swung back and forth today, first with incumbent Justice David Prosser taking the lead, then with challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg taking it back by 125 votes.
The latest, and by far most disturbing, development is that a clerk in Wisconsin's biggest conservative country has suddenly "found" a huge amount of votes for Prosser. JS Online:
David Prosser gained about 7,582 votes in Waukesha County, according to a summary statement from the board of canvassers.
Canvassers around the state were updating their totals Thursday, with Prosser and JoAnne Kloppenburg each making gains.
Those changes pale in comparison to the change in Waukesha County, where Prosser's total increased by 11,008 and Kloppenburg's rose 3,426.
This seems more than a little strange. The clerk involved has some off history. Check out this story from August:
Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus' decision to go it alone in how she collects and maintains election results has some county officials raising a red flag about the integrity of the system.
Nickolaus said she decided to take the election data collection and storage system off the county's computer network - and keep it on stand-alone personal computers accessible only in her office - for security reasons.
"What it gave me was good security of the elections from start to finish, without the ability of someone unauthorized to be involved," she said.
Nonetheless, Director of Administration Norman A. Cummings said because Nickolaus has kept them out of the loop, the county's information technology specialists have not been able to verify Nickolaus' claim that the system is secure from failure.
"How does anybody else in the county know, except for her verbal word, that there are backups, and that the software she has out there is performing as it should?" he said. "There's no way I can assure that the election system is going to be fine for the next presidential election."
And this:
Waukesha Co Clerk Kathy Nickolaus was granted immunity after the state's caucus scandal. She was then an Assembly Republican Caucus employee.
So yeah, strange. More updates as they come.