For more information on the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board, see
its website.
The Supreme Court race isn't over yet in Wisconsin:
The agency overseeing Wisconsin elections will not certify results of Tuesday's state Supreme Court race until it concludes a probe into how a county clerk misplaced and then found some 14,000 votes that upended the contest.
Michael Haas, Government Accountability Board staff attorney, told Reuters on Friday the watchdog agency was looking into vote tabulation errors in Republican-leaning Waukesha County which gave the conservative incumbent a net gain of more than 7,000 votes -- a lead his union-backed challenger seems unlikely to surmount.
"We're going to do a review of the procedures and the records in Waukesha before we certify the statewide results," Haas said.
"It's not that we necessarily expect to find anything criminal. But we want to make sure the public has confidence in the results."
The Government Accountability Board is overseen by six board members. All of them were appointed by former Governor Jim Doyle, a Democrat.
David Prosser currently leads the vote count by 7,481. Without the new votes found in Waukesha County, he would be trailing by 101.
Still, it's probably best not to get your hopes up about Kloppenburg potentially winning the campaign as a result of this probe. There are, as I noted earlier today, good reasons to believe that this was gross incompetence rather than fraud, even if the clerk and circumstances involved are extremely sketchy.
No matter what actually happened, it's very important that an investigation will take place before the results are certified. The incident is disturbing on a number of levels. It should not be allowed to pass by without official inquiry.
For more discussion of this development, see Lefty Coaster's diary on the rec list.