Justice David Prosser's campaign said Saturday that it was open to a recount of votes in Waukesha County as the state Supreme Court race remained without a declared winner.
"If you need to do a recount in Waukesha (County) and Waukesha (County) alone to satisfy heightened interest, that's fine," said Prosser campaign manager Brian Nemoir. "We believe it will only affirm the margin of victory we now enjoy."
In Waukesha County, thousands of votes from the city of Brookfield were not reported by the county clerk on election night but were discovered the day after. Prosser's margin of victory in Brookfield helped push him ahead of challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg.
Kloppenburg's campaign manager, Melissa Mulliken, said of the proposed Waukesha County recount, "That is their talk. Once again, we're evaluating the data, looking at what we've got."
Updated but not yet final results compiled by the Journal Sentinel on Friday showed Prosser ahead by 6,744 votes out of nearly 1.5 million cast.
If either candidate requests a recount in Waukesha County, his or her campaign would have to pay for it, said a Government Accountability Board spokesman. But if Kloppenburg remains close enough to Prosser in the statewide tally - within half a percentage point - she could ask for a statewide recount and not have to pay the cost.
Both campaigns have sought advice from top recount attorneys in the nation as Wisconsin remained poised for the possibility of the first statewide recount in two decades.
For now, the focus remains squarely on the results in the Republican stronghold and the way they were handled by Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus.
On Thursday, Nickolaus apologized for not properly counting the city of Brookfield results in the initial unofficial tally. She blamed human error but waited a day before informing state election officials and the public of the mistake.
The Kloppenburg campaign made an open records request with Nickolaus for the election records, as well as her emails.
"We do think there are legitimate questions to be asked," Mulliken said.
U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) announced Saturday that she had sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder asking for a federal investigation into the handling of vote records in Waukesha County.
Baldwin wrote Holder: "Following this week's election for the Wisconsin Supreme Court, numerous constituents have contacted me expressing serious doubt that this election was a free and fair one. They fear, as I do, that political interests are manipulating the results."
Baldwin asked Holder to assign the Justice Department Public Integrity Section, which oversees the federal prosecution of election crimes, to investigate.
"We, the people, must be assured that our votes are fairly counted and reported and our democracy remains intact and untainted," wrote Baldwin, of Madison.
The Prosser campaign said a federal investigation was unnecessary.
"We don't believe there is need for that," Nemoir said. "It's certainly well within their rights to ask for that. In the end, now that the canvassing results have been reported to the Government Accountability Board, it will be evident that the mistake that was made was a reporting error to the media. That hardly seems like a punishable crime."
State Sen. Alberta Darling (R-River Hills), in remarks to supporters at her campaign office in Glendale on Saturday morning, said there needed to be a "full-court press" to get to the bottom of the mistake made in the Waukesha County count.
"We need that," said Darling, co-chair of the Legislature's Joint Finance Committee. "We need people to understand what happened."
On Saturday, in a windowless meeting room at the Waukesha County Courthouse, Kloppenburg campaign volunteers completed their initial inspection of the vote totals there. They compared data from poll books to the tape from voting machines. The actual ballots remained locked away in sealed bags.
Nickolaus was there and said she was focused on making sure the poll books and voting machine tapes were properly accounted for.
"There's a complete chain of custody from the time it leaves my locked office (to when it) returns to my locked office," she said.
Elsewhere Saturday, hundreds of people turned out for a rally in New Berlin to drum up support for the recall effort against Sen. Mary Lazich (R-New Berlin) and other Republican senators, and to raise concerns about the vote-counting problems in Waukesha County.
Stephanie Bloomingdale, secretary-treasurer of the Wisconsin state AFL-CIO, said she was there to energize the Lazich recall "and to demand clean and fair elections in Wisconsin."
Tom Tolan of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this report.