Strange election discovery in -- wait for it -- Wisconsin!

The Madison Cap Times is calling for a federal probe into the two-day delayed "discovery" of 7,582 votes for David Prosser, just enough to put the election out of the range of a state-funded recount for the "presumptive" winner Joanne Kloppenburg.
Without a federal investigation - given that Gov. Scott Walker loyalists would control an administrative State Board of Elections review - we can only maintain the deepest suspicions over what is occurring, and that it may be another theft of an election by the Republicans.
You have to go back to the 2000 Florida standoff to find a figure who so matches Katherine Harris as does Waukesha County clerk Kathy Nickolaus, who claims to have made a "mistake" unheard of before in the Badger State.
As the CapTimes and other Wisconsin outlets have noted, Nickolaus kept election results on her personal computer, even though she had been formally warned not to do so. She was given immunity from prosecution in 2002 for campaigning for Republicans on taxpayer's time. Furthermore, as the CapTimes notes, Nickolaus is "a former Republican legislative staffer who worked for Prosser when he served as Assembly speaker and with Gov. Scott Walker when he was a GOP rising star."
The Republicans have already brought in the lead attorney for the GOP in Bush v. Gore to ensure Prosser gets reseated on the high court.
But nothing short of the immediate impounding of the Nickolaus personal computer in question and the ballots of Waukesha County will ensure an untainted federal investigation - that is assuming the Obama administration has the resolve to ensure that election crimes were not committed. The email from Nickolaus's personal computer - if not yet removed from the hard drive - would be valuable enough in and of itself to see if there was coordination of this 48-hour "mistake."
BuzzFlash at Truthout was publishing during the 2000 Florida election - and we can say that, based on that experience, only the full force of a federal investigation can resolve the highly suspicious emergence of 7,582 votes for Prosser, after a considerable delay, by a county election chief with a history of not following vote-counting security measures and has personal relationships with both Prosser and Walker, not to mention an ongoing history with the Republican Party as an operative.
If the White House and the Department of Justice get weak-kneed about this one, it will be like letting Bush get anointed by the Supreme Court all over again.
Let the investigation into vote fraud in the Waukesha County election clerk's office begin with experts from DC.

Mark Karlin
Editor, BuzzFlash at Truthout