Waukesha — The state Supreme Court recount got off to a wobbly start in Waukesha County Wednesday.

After more than a half-hour of meticulous instructions and ground rules from Waukesha County's chief canvasser, retired Judge Robert G. Mawdsley, questions were raised about the very first bag of ballots to be counted, from the Town of Brookfield.

As canvassers and tabulators compared a numbered seal on a bag with the number recorded for that bag by a town election inspector who prepared the paperwork on election night, the numbers didn't match.

"What a great way to start," one tabulator said.

Observers from the campaigns of Justice David Prosser and Assistant Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg both agreed, however, that the error seemed to be in the inspector's use of a "2" instead of a "3." Numbers on the sealing tag and on the bag did match. Both sides and the Board of Canvassers agreed that the bag should be opened and the votes counted.

Statewide, election officials recounted 36,794 ballots on Wednesday. By the end of the day, Prosser was leading, 19,489 to 17,420 for Kloppenburg, with 65 votes cast for write-ins. That left 1.46 million more ballots to count.

Kloppenburg requested the recount after a canvass showed her losing the Supreme Court race to Prosser by 7,316 votes, a margin of less than 0.5% of the 1.5 million ballots cast. The initial count on election night ended with Kloppenburg up by 204 votes, but that was before Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus announced she had accidentally left the entire City of Brookfield out of her original vote total.

Mawdsley, who retired in 2009 as a judge after 21 years on the bench and now does mediation work, was tapped Friday to sit in as canvass board chairman for the recount after Nickolaus recused herself.

In her letter announcing the decision to County Executive Dan Vrakas, Nickolaus said that the state's elections chief, Kevin Kennedy of the Government Accountability Board, "reminded me of the appropriateness of this method under the current circumstances." The state board is investigating Nickolaus' election collecting and reporting procedures after her 14,000-vote mix-up and will report findings within 60 days.

No problems marred the opening of Milwaukee County's recount at the county Sports Complex in Franklin, as sheriff's deputies escorted election officials wheeling in bags of ballots.

State officials said the first day of the recount went smoothly in all but two counties. Chippewa County did not receive new voting machine memory units until Wednesday, and Menominee County Clerk Ruth Waupoose told the state board, "I was unable to begin the canvass today because I had to go over to the School District and get the election material." Both counties will start their recounts Thursday.

The recount in all 72 counties faces a deadline of May 9.

Three blips in the Town of Brookfield's records came to light Wednesday in Waukesha County, and while Kloppenburg's lead campaign observer, Darcy Gustavsson, said the issues raised concerns, neither side filed any official objections. Prosser's lead representative at the Waukesha County recount referred questions to campaign headquarters.

In addition to the misnumbered inspection sheet, another matter was the absence of three applications for absentee ballots - detected when all the "R's" of an alphabetized collection were missing. The applications were summoned from the town hall, and they were reconciled with the absentee ballots, Mawdsley said.

The final question of the morning involved a missing "remade" ballot - a copy of an original absentee ballot that could not be fed through the ballot-reading machines. That occurs, for example, if the voter used pen instead of pencil. The canvass board had five original ballots that could not be fed through machines, but only four copies. Officials were asking the Government Accountability Board for advice.

Mawdsley said no objections were filed by the campaigns, but they could be filed at any time during the recount. Records were kept on every anomaly.

Ellen Nowak, Vrakas' chief of staff, said tabulators did not finish the third of four reporting units in the Town of Brookfield because they found a "few discrepancies" in a poll book, "probably minor," which will be resolved Thursday morning.

Under a settlement reached in Dane County Circuit Court, most Milwaukee County municipalities must count their ballots by hand, because they would have to erase their voting machines' election-night data to use the machines for the recount.

Laurel Walker reported from Waukesha and Larry Sandler reported from Franklin.