"Most of the 3000 runestones that still remain have some erratic forms. The "Kodex Runicus", a law book of 200 pages written in runes about 1275, has many new forms. An inscription written by King Waldemar of Denmark in the first half of the 13th century contains only six short words, but there are four runes which are different in form from those in other inscriptions of the same period. The Kingigtorsuak Stone of Greenland, dating from 1333, contains only 14 words, and four of the runes are different from those in common use in the 14th century. Yet no one has impugned its authenticity. These and many similar deviations are discussed by Prof. P.G.Thorson. It is therefore not strange if an inscription as late as the Kensington Stone (1362) should show a number of singular forms." (Nilsestuen - Kensington Runestone Vindicated, p 90-91)

To add to the above statement, it should be noted that if authentic, the inscribers of the KRS would have been away from any society for several years, and most previously only the outlying area of Greenland - a territory which was in little contact with the mainland. If you add to this the possibility that the member of the party who knew most about runes may have been killed, and that the inscription was done in a relative hurry with no books or references of any kind, it should not be suprising that some of the runes differ from more commonly known versions.
Of the 22 runes on the stone, 11 are identical to those used in the Codex Runicus. Others vary only in minor ways, such as bars being horizontal rather than at a slant, reversed, etc. and/or attested to in other runic inscriptions. There are perhaps a half dozen runes which require a deeper discussion, which I cannot duplicate due to a lack of space and graphics. Hall, Nilsestuen and especially Nielsen take this up at length and provide excellent discussion of forms which are very similar to those used in the KRS.
For example, the rune which stands for the umlauted 'O' in the inscription is an O with a cross in the middle and two dots above it. Nielsen notes in particular the Kingitorssoaq inscription (from Greenland) which had an O with a vertical line in the center with two dots on either side of the line. He also notes (with illustrations) several other examples of an O with a line of some sort in or through the middle and a dot above precedent to the KRS usage.
To this Nilsestuen adds:

"Of the 13 obituary notices shown in the "Obitarius Nestvediensis", dating from the 14th century, six or seven begin with an which is practically the same as in the inscription. Like the Kensington , they are made up of a large elliptic O, inside of which is a perpendicular line crossed by and oblique line. Above the O is a dot or short line. The same character appears in a Norwegian letter of 1321 in the nam Olingi. In old Scandinavian MS we find a very small inverted v above the O that may be traced as far back as 1230. In the "Flatyarbok" of the latter half of the 14th century, the occurs very frequently. The superimposed inverted v is written with a very light stroke of the pen and the arms are almost parallel. Sometimes the arms fail to meet at the top, and some times the lines are so short that there remain only two dots, exactly as in Kensington." (p 89)

Other seemingly aberrant runes are likewise given treatment, and while there are no direct attestations to these runes, the similarity to attested runes is great enough to be more than coincidence. Certainly this all falls within the margin of error we should give to our out of touch runesmith. Indeed, since a great deal of information which gives credence to the runes has only come forward since the discovery of the stone. This in itself gives a certain amount of proof to the authenticity of the Stone. Now, if there were only an 'aberrant' rune for which we had a direct attestation. But we will leave that for our next article.

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