Last Monday, May 23rd, Wisconsin’s Government Accountability Board (G.A.B.), the state’s top election agency, officially certified [PDF] the controversial results of the extraordinarily close April 5th statewide Supreme Court election and its subsequent “recount”.
However, as The BRAD BLOG has learned, the agency certified those results without reviewing hundreds of official exhibits documenting wholesale ballot irregularities, on-the-record objections from the attorneys of the candidate who filed for the “recount”, and thousands of pages of official transcripts and minutes documenting the entire “recount” process from the election’s most controversial county.
Even more alarming, the agency doesn’t even yet have a copy of the hundreds, if not thousands of pages which make up the official minutes documenting the nearly month-long “recount” from Waukesha County — the last of the state’s 72 counties to complete their count, and by far the most controversial county following the late discovery there of some 14,000 votes not included in the county’s original Election Night results.
“Generally, we don’t have information about these things [ballot bag irregularities breaking the secure chain of custody] until we get minutes from the county,” the G.A.B. spokesperson told us in early May.
Indeed, the G.A.B. admits, they may not even havethose minutes for another two weeks, despite the already-issued certification of the election results, and despite the fact that the statutory deadline for a candidate to file a challenge to those certified results in court is tomorrow (Tuesday).
The official minutes from most of the other 71 counties, as documented during the “recount” of the razor-thin, highly contentious election for a 10-year term on the state’s high court between incumbent Republican Justice David Prosser and his independent challenger Asst. Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg, have been posted on the G.A.B.’s website for some time, with the 71st, Milwaukee County, finally posted late last week.