Elections board addresses ballot bag issue as Kloppenburg raises concerns

As JoAnne Kloppenburg’s campaign continues to raise concerns about the condition of ballot bags pulled out for the ongoing recount, the Government Accountability Board says a hole in the bag or missing security tag “is not enough evidence alone to discard the ballots inside.”
“The ability to put a hand into a ballot bag is not by itself evidence of fraud,” the statement reads.
GAB spokesman Reid Magney said the statement wasn’t meant to address concerns raised by the Kloppenburg campaign. Rather, the agency had received several questions from bloggers and decided to address the issue at the site.
Waukesha County continues its second count of ballots with a May 26 deadline to finish the work.
Kloppenburg campaign manager Melissa Mulliken said anytime a ballot bag isn’t properly sealed, it begs the question why, and reasonable people should be concerned any time “bag after bag” in a recount was not properly handled.
She declined to say whether the campaign was preparing for a lawsuit to challenge any results from the recount.
“As I have carefully said and always said, we are going to wait until we see the record of all counties,” Mulliken said.
David Prosser’s campaign director Brian Nemoir said the GAB statement is “a clear and strong statement as to the value our state places on the ballot to make sure every legally cast vote is counted.”
Kloppenburg told WisPolitics.com she expects the final results this weekend and will decide whether to pursue a legal challenge after that.
The recount, she said, is a test of our electoral system.
“Our elections will be better as a result,” she said. “People will be more confident that their votes will be properly counted. Clerks will know what to do better than they’ve known before. At a time when we’re having so many elections, it’s really important that our electoral process runs well.”
Kloppenburg said most of the clerks in the state do a good job.
“They have learned a lot from this recount. They have uncovered things that need to be fixed, improvements that need to be made, but people can be confident that, in most parts of Wisconsin, elections are run fairly,” she said. “Waukesha, however, has been one anomaly and irregularity after another — bags completely open, seals completely torn apart, numbers written over. There are reasons for all those requirements to preserve votes, and those requirements are not being met in Waukesha.”
– WisPolitics.com