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Court recount proceeds locally with few changes

JANESVILLE — Rock County Clerk Lori Stottler has 37,325 votes to recount in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race.

For those of you who are bad at math, that’s 18,662 fingers and 18,663 toes.

On Friday morning, Stottler reported that she, her staff and volunteers had completed about 33 percent of the total ballots cast, or 12,406.

“Things are going smoothly and we have plenty of volunteers,” Stottler wrote in a news release.

The race between JoAnne Kloppenburg and Justice David Prosser brought out an unprecedented number of voters for a state Supreme Court race.

Initial returns gave the victory to Kloppenburg, but two days after the election, Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus said she had failed to report 14,000 votes. Those votes gave Prosser a lead of 7,316 votes.

Kloppenburg’s campaign requested a recount.

As of Friday, Prosser had lost one vote in the recount in Rock County and Kloppenburg had gained 11.

Stottler said that six of the Kloppenburg votes were due to one machine being poorly calibrated. She suspects that the machine read them as “under voted” when they were clearly voted. “Under voted” means that the voter did not make a choice in a particular race.

Or, the machine might have been too sensitive, picking up ink marks that were not votes.

Also, some voters, for some reason, wrote in Kloppenburg’s name instead of voting the traditional way.

By Friday afternoon, the Walworth County Clerk’s office had finished nine of 40 reporting units, including the towns of Lafayette, Darien, Delavan, East Troy, Geneva and LaGrange, and the city of Whitewater.

To date, the Walworth County recount has given Prosser two additional votes. Kloppenburg received one additional vote.

Statewide, the Government Accountability Board is providing daily updates on the recount’s progress by precinct. Here’s a look at where the recount stood as of early Friday afternoon:

- Precincts recounted and given a preliminary review by board staff: 318 of 3,602

- Prosser’s current total: 54,730

- Kloppenburg’s current total: 43,083

- Board spokesman Reid Magney said the board hadn’t heard of any major anomalies around the state on Friday, although the board continues to field questions from local clerks about procedures.