Huffington Post -WASHINGTON — After the bombshell announcement that a Waukesha County clerk forgot to report thousands of votes in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election, Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) is asking U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to involve the federal government in the ongoing investigation.

Last Tuesday’s election, which pitted conservative incumbent David Prosser against progressive candidate JoAnne Kloppenburg, appeared to end with Kloppenburg winning by a razor-thin margin, with initial results showing her just a couple of hundred votes ahead. But on Thursday, Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus held a dramatic press conference and admitted that she had forgotten to report the votes of the city of Brookfield. The adjusted total gave Prosser a 7,500-vote advantage.

On Friday evening, Baldwin sent a letter to Holder, saying that many of her constituents had expressed concern about the announcement. She requested that the Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section, which oversees the federal prosecution of election crimes, investigate the handling of Waukesha County’s vote records.

“For our democracy to endure, we, the people, must have faith in its laws and system of justice, including faith that our elections for public office are fair and free from any manipulating or tampering,” wrote Baldwin. “Following this week’s election for the Wisconsin Supreme Court, numerous constituents have contacted me expressing serious doubt that this election was a free and fair one. They fear, as I do, that political interests are manipulating the results.”

Huffington Post – Faith in America’s electoral-tabulation processes took a hit late this week when a Wisconsin county clerk who announced a bombshell correction: nearly 15,000 missed votes, which dramatically upended the state’s supreme court race.

The clerk described her mistake as “human error … which is common in this process.” While an ongoing review by state election officials will ultimately provide the best evidence, both turnout statistics and historical precedent generally support her claim.

Unofficial tallies for Tuesday’s special election gave Democratic-backed challenger JoAnne Kloppenberg an extremely slim lead over incumbent Wisconsin Justice David Prosser — just 204 votes out of nearly 1.5 million cast. But on Thursday, Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus announced that the early counts had missed roughly 15,000 votes, mostly due to the omission of the entire city of Brookfield. Kloppenberg’s revision put Prosser ahead by 6,744 votes, leaving Kloppenberg hard-pressed to catch up.

Reviews of the election turnout statistics by Craig Gilbert of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and by FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver show that the revised Waukesha results appear more plausible than those initially reported. As Gilbert wrote, the addition of nearly 15,000 votes “puts that county’s turnout rate more in line with the neighboring GOP strongholds of Ozaukee and Washington counties.”

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