Show Me Instittue / Audrey Spalding
JoAnee Kloppenburg has announced today that her campaign will be filing an open records request relating to the reporting of election resultsin in Waukesha County:
"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."
There is still a week before the deadline to request a recount. However, for a recount to be conducted at state expense, and for it to have a legitimate chance of changing the outcome of the election, the final result must be within 0.5%. Since it will not be that close if the new votes from Waukesha County hold up, this is the appropriate first step for Kloppenburg to take.
To recap, there are reasons why what happened in Waukesha County seems sketchy, and also reasons why it seems just like incompetence.
- This seems sketchy: This is not the first time that the Waukesha County clerk has found an error that swung an election—it happened in 2006 as well (PDF). Also, back in August, local officials were questioning the integrity of the clerk's method for tabulating and reporting votes. Further, in 2002, when the clerk was an employee of the Republican state Assembly caucus, she was granted immunity during the so-called "caucus scandal" that rocked Wisconsin state politics.
- But it could just be incompetence: The new votes were announced with the approval of the Vice-Chair of the Democratic Party of Waukesha County, who is on the county board of canvass. Also, the new votes now make the city of Brookfield about 11% of the total vote in Waukesha County, which is in line with its historic share of the county's electorate. Without the new votes, turnout in Brookfield would have fallen off dramatically compared to the rest of Waukesha County. Further, even if turnout in Brookfield had been much lower than the rest of the county, even one-quarter of the newly reported ballots would put Prosser ahead by 1,500+ votes.
No matter what you make of the apparent outcome, the open records request from Kloppenburg is a necessary step to provide more clarity on a bizarre and murky twist in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election.