John Nichols has a must-read column on the bare-assed attempt to steal the election vote discrepancies in Wisconsin. After pointing out the obvious — that if the clerk had been a Democrat and the “found” votes had favored a liberal candidate, we’d be hearing a different tune from a lot of people — he writes,

The Kloppenburg campaign has demanded “a full explanation of how and why these 14,315 votes from an entire City were missed.” As part of the search for that explanation, the campaign plans to file open records requests for all relevant documentation related to the reporting of election results in Waukesha County, as well as to the discovery and reporting of the errors announced by the County.”

The open records highlight concerns about the credibility of Nickolaus — whose secretive and suspicious activities led the Waukesha County Board’s executive committee order an audit of the clerk’s use of election equipment and her controversial approaches to counting and tabulating votes. …

… The circumstance lends legitimacy to the call by the advocacy group Citizens Action of Wisconsin for “an immediate federal investigation and immediate impoundment of all computer equipment, ballots, and other relevant evidence needed to verify a fair vote count in Waukesha County.“ Citizen Action says this investigation should include an accounting of all communications by “Kathy Nickolaus and anyone in the Waukesha clerk’s office with all outside actors, and all interested parties to the election dispute.”

It also demands a full recount, no matter what the ultimate margin of victory or defeat. Whether David Prosser or JoAnne Kloppenburg is elected, the only way that the high court will retain even a shred of credibility is if every ballot is recounted, every tabulation is reviewed and every citizen is certain that this election was legitimate.

What’s likely to happen is that Scott Walker will have the votes “investigated” by county officials that he controls. A federal investigation is warranted.

The claim is that Nickolaus failed to report 14,000 votes from Brookfield City. But in one of the posts I linked to yesterday, it was documented that on election night there were reports that Brookfield City had given Prosser 11,000 votes. Nickolaus appears to be trying to count some of the same votes twice.

Nichols added this detail —

Nickolaus claims that it was “human error” that caused her to “lose” the Brookfield results on her personal computer where she had secreted away the data. Yet, she apparently knew of the “mistake” for 29 hours before reporting it and then handed the information off to conservative bloggers and talk-radio personalities.

There is no way a known partisan would have missed those votes. She would have been watching the vote tallies like a hawk. I don’t think there’s any question these “found” votes were fabricated by Nickolaus in an attempt to steal the election.

David Dayan writes at Firedoglake:

As it turns out, this is not the first time something has gone askew in Waukesha County. Check this out from 2006. A primary for an Assembly seat had results shift on her mid-stream in that race, too. And certainly the process in the county, where Kathy Nickolaus keeps all the tallying on her home computer, is a bit unusual. Not to mention the fact that she sat on the revelation of the missing votes in Brookfield for 29 hours before revealing it. Nickolaus, incidentally, worked for the Assembly Republican caucus at a time when David Prosser was the Speaker of the Assembly, i.e. her boss.

The difference between the 2006 incident and today is that Waukesha does not use touch-screen voting systems any longer. There is a paper record of all of these ballots. And so, as a double-check given the highly unusual nature of the glitch, all of those ballots should be impounded and counted.

Who wants to bet that the paper record will be consumed in a fire that will start with an electrical short in Nickolaus’s personal computer?

Update: I’ve been looking for a conservative blogger with enough integrity to admit that the “found” vote episode at least warrants some suspicion. I have not found one. This include Ann Althouse, who earlier this week was pushing every rumor of Democratic voter fraud as hard as she could. But she has expressed no incredulity whatsoever over the circumstances of the “found” votes. Not that Althouse’s utter partisan hypocrisy should surprise anyone.