Epic fail (for liberals) in WI as finalized state vote totals confirm Prosser’s almost-victory

Too bad, so sad – for liberals, that is:

Liberal and pro-union groups failed to oust a conservative judge from Wisconsin’s Supreme Court in an April 5 election, according to state vote totals finalized Friday.

Based on county canvassing totals, Judge David Prosser leads challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg by 7,316 votes out of close to 1.5 million votes cast. Election officials will not declare Prosser the official winner until Wednesday, Kloppenburg’s deadline to call for a recount.

The race was cast by activists on both sides as a referendum on Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s controversial law limiting collective bargaining rights for the state’s public sector unions — a law currently being reviewed by the state Supreme Court. In a nonpartisan primary held just as the labor battle was heating up in February, Prosser won 55 percent of the vote, while Kloppenburg, an assistant state attorney general, came in second with 28 percent.

[…]

At one point on the day after the vote, Kloppenburg declared victory. Prosser and his handlers were more cautious, saying they were bracing for a recount.

But a big breakthrough came for Prosser at the end of last week, when the Waukesha County clerk’s office announced that it had made an error when sending voting data to The Associated Press and had not sent a set of nearly 15,000 votes, most for Prosser. In all, he netted 7,582 votes from the “human error” that clerk Kathy Nickolaus, a Republican, admitted she had made.

Neither candidate made an immediate statement about the final vote totals, and Kloppenburg has not indicated whether she will ask for a recount. Because Prosser’s margin of victory is less than 0.5 percent, Kloppenburg would not have to pay for the recount.

Ok. Well, it’s not officially official, but we’re getting pretty close to it. No doubt Kloppenburg will be strongly urged (and likely already has been) by Democrat union masters to exercise her option for a recount, but unless a miracle of some sort happens – like thousands of dead voter votes are mysteriously discovered, Prosser can pop the cork on a champagne bottle … and so, perhaps, could Gov. Scott Walker, seeing as this election was turned into a proxy battle over the union bill.

As they say, stay tuned …