By Kirsten Adshead Wisconsin Reporter

Incumbent Supreme Court Justice David Prosser now leads in the race against Assistant Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg after “human error” kept all votes from Brookfield from being counted in the initial tally.

The inclusion of Brookfield gave Prosser a net gain of 7,582 votes in Waukesha County.

“We discovered the data sent to me from the city of Brookfield was not transferred to the final report given to the media Tuesday night. … It was human error, which I apologize for,” Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus said Thursday during a news conference in Waukesha.

Kloppenburg held a 204 lead over Prosser Thursday, leaving her ahead by less than one-one-hundredth of a percentage point after nearly 1.5 million votes, based on unofficial results reported by the Associated Press.

Kloppenburg declared victory Wednesday.

Melissa Mulliken, Kloppenburg's campaign manager, said the campaign would be filing open records request for all documentation related to the Waukesha County vote.

"Just as Assistant Attorney General Kloppenburg has run to restore confidence in the court, Wisconsin residents also deserve to have full confidence in election results," Mulliken said in a statement.

The numbers quickly began to change Thursday as county canvassing boards met to certify the election results.

Prosser's campaign team announced earlier Thursday that it was assembling a "recount team" to address the expected legal efforts.

Prosser's campaign director Brian Nemoir, said Thursday night that he was encouraged by reports from county canvases.

"Our confidence is high, and we will continue to monitor with optimism, and believe that the positive results will hold," Nemoir said in a statement. "We’ve always maintained faith in the voters and trust in the election officials involved in the canvassing will reaffirm the lead we’ve taken.

The Waukesha County error was the most significant revealed Thursday.

Most errors concerned election officials transcribing vote totals incorrectly or misreading results.

In Trempealeau County, votes from 25 of 26 precincts have been certified.

But 426 votes need to be certified because, in one precinct that had two voting machines, election officials submitted voting totals from one machine twice, instead of submitting totals from both machines.

County election officials still are canvassing results.

But Wisconsin Reporter on Thursday totaled official results from 39 of the state’s 72 counties. Twenty-three counties reported changes from the unofficial tallies reported Tuesday.

Adding Waukesha County into those results, Prosser appears to lead Kloppenburg by 7,176.

Still, even after all the votes are certified, experts predict a recount is likely in what may be the tightest statewide race in Wisconsin history.

With nearly $3.6 million in ads purchased from interest groups, the campaign was the most expensive Supreme Court race in state history, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

What began as a quiet race that Prosser was expected to win easily a few months ago quickly gained national attention after Gov. Scott Walker and legislative Republicans pushed through widespread changes to collective bargaining powers for most state and local public employee union members.

That legislation hasn’t been implemented because of legal challenges — lawsuits that could be decided by the Supreme Court – after Prosser or Kloppenburg begin a 10-year term on the bench Aug. 1.

Prosser typically votes with the court’s conservative majority, and Kloppenburg has received significant support from those who hope she would turn the court in a more liberal direction — including, potentially, ruling against the collective bargaining bill.

It would be up to Prosser or Kloppenburg to request a recount of Tuesday’s election results.

Taxpayers will have to pay for the recount unless the margin of victory is at least one-half of 1 percent of the vote total, which is about 7,400 votes. Otherwise, the candidate requesting the recount would have to pay.

Other interested parties likely will continue to weigh in as the process continues.

Some liberals already are questioning the Waukesha County situation, given that it’s one of the most conservative-voting areas of the state and the new vote totals gave the lead to Prosser.

Liberal-leaning Citizen Action of Wisconsin is calling for a federal investigation into the "vote count irregularities" in Waukesha County.

“Given the shocking character of this afternoon’s revelations, and its tremendous importance for the perceived integrity of Wisconsin’s governmental institutions, it is absolutely essential that there be a full investigation which is so beyond reproach that all Wisconsin citizens can have faith in the validity of the outcome,” the group's executive director Robert Kraig said in a statement. "In the current political climate in Wisconsin, only an investigation by a U.S. Attorney can be seen by all citizens of the state as independent and above politics.”

Conservatives have their own concerns.

Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow and manager of the Civil Justice Reform Initiative at the Washington, D.C.-based conservative Heritage Foundation, said to avoid the appearance of voter fraud, members of public employee unions should not have been allowed to be a part of the vote-counting process.

"I think the fact that those individuals who are members of the unions who (were protesting Walker's union reform efforts) had an inherent conflict of interest and should not have been working this election," Spakovsky said. "I don't know how many of those people (counting votes) were represented by these unions, but (state officials) should have made some kind of provision to check on union membership of these election officials and take them out of the position where they were making decisions on ballots that can change the outcome of this election."

Bob Allen, a spokesman for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Wisconsin Council 24, declined to be interviewed and would not answer questions about AFSCME-Wisconsin members.