Kloppenburg requests recount in Supreme Court race

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Assistant Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg requested a statewide recount today of the ballots cast in the Supreme Court election 15 days ago. And Kloppenburg asked the Government Accountability Board to have a special investigator look into Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus.

It was the clerk's error that took away Kloppenburg's apparent victory of 204 votes from Election Night. Nickolaus forgot to include Brookfield's votes in her original tally. And when it turned up in the county's canvass, incumbent Justice David Prosser took a 75-hundred-vote lead. After all the counties were canvassed, Prosser had a 73-hundred-16 vote victory.

Wisconsin taxpayers will cover the cost of the recount, since the margin of Kloppenburg's defeat was less than one-half of one-percent. The next step is for Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson is to appoint a judge to hear whatever legal concerns are raised about individual ballots during what's expected to a long recount process.

Earlier this week, Prosser and his campaign advisors said the incumbent's margin of victory was such that Kloppenburg would not have much of a chance of overtaking him. They called the recount "frivolous," and said they would do what they could to stop it.

Should Prosser's victory be upheld, the Supreme Court's 4-3 conservative majority would remain in place. Observers had predicted an easy win for Prosser. But that was before public union supporters got behind Kloppenburg, with the hope of making it easier to kill the law that limits collective bargaining once and for all. As a result, the supposedly neutral Supreme Court race turned out to be a partisan-style referendum on Republican Governor Scott Walker's policies.

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