Hundreds, if not thousands, of Milwaukee-area voters went to the polls Tuesday but did not vote in the hotly contested state Supreme Court race, according to local voting results.

And the issue of whether those people actually intended to vote for the high court could be a key factor in a looming recount that one expert says could bring back memories of Florida in the 2000 presidential election. More than 900 people in 16 southeastern Wisconsin communities cast ballots in Tuesday's election between Justice David Prosser and Assistant Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg, but did not register a vote in the final tally. With Kloppenburg leading Prosser by 204 votes, these "undervotes" and hundreds more in communities around the state will be an important part of the likely recount of the race's more than 1.4 million votes.

Reviewing Tuesday's results from Milwaukee-area communities, Patch found at least 985 incidents of ballots cast without a vote in the Supreme Court race. Observers said any number of reasons could explain why some ballots were cast, but do not have votes in the Supreme Court race. Most obvious, voters may have simply skipped voting in the race. But they may also have made a mark that wasn't recognized by the counting machine. Part of the recount will include reviewing ballots to ensure all votes are recognized.

"The totals could easily swamped by the number of unrecorded ballots," said Bruce Hansen, an econometrics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who analyzed the controversial Florida election results in 2000 between Al Gore and George W. Bush. "It could easily swing the results." John McAdams, a political science professor at Marquette, said the state Supreme Court race recount may be as messy as the Florida presidential election recount of 2000 or the Minnesota U.S. Senate recount in 2008.

Without looking at each ballot, it's difficult to decipher how many voters simply abstained from voting in the race, and how many voters meant to pick one of the candidates and botched it, he said.

If a vote was clearly meant for one of the candidates, the courts have previously ruled that vote should count, he said.

"I'm not an election law person, but in general the courts have said that if there is a perceptible intention to vote for X, it needs to count as a vote for X," he said. McAdams said there could be any number of reasons why someone cast their ballots for other races and skipped the state Supreme Court race, especially given the amount of money spent and mudslinging in the Prosser-Kloppenburg tilt.