http://www.progressive.org/rc040711.html
April 7, 2011
The Progressive
Oops! Republican Clerk's 7,500 Extra Votes for Prosser
By Ruth Conniff
It really is Fitzwalkerstan.
Kathy Nickolaus, County Clerk in heavily Republican Waukesha, announced
in a press conference yesterday that she had made a "human error" in
recording vote totals, and that the real total is 7,500 more for
Justice David Prosser than reported on election night.
That just happens to put Prosser in the winner category, barely out of
range of a state-financed recount.
Nickolaus apologized for her mistake, but, on the positive side, said
she was "proud" of the higher turnout than previously reported in her
county.
What??!!
But wait, it gets better. Nickolaus worked for Prosser years ago when
he was a Republican assemblyman in Madison, Democratic Rep. Mark Pocan
reminds us. And she was granted immunity to testify during the 2002
Republican caucus investigations, concerning campaign finance
violations by Republican legislators and their staff.
Better yet, since taking her job as county clerk in Waukesha, Nickolaus
has insisted on keeping election data on her personal computer, under
her personal control.
Hence those awkward moments at the press conference when she switched
from using the word "we" to the word "I" as she described how she saved
the data as vote totals came in and really has no idea how it came out
wrong in the end but still accepts full responsibility for the "human
error."
How does she know it was human error if she thinks she did everything
right, reporters asked her.
Well, maybe some software feature wasn't enabled, she allowed.
Is there any way to figure out now what went wrong, reporters asked.
"Not that I'm aware of," Nickolaus replied.
The error turned up during the "canvass" process, in which paper
records from voting machines are compared to the computerized reports
of vote totals. Brad Friedman of the Bradblog points out the best part:
Nickolaus has insisted on keeping elections data on a personal computer
in her office--to which she alone has access--and rebuffed demands by
auditors that she upgrade to a safer and more tamper-proof system.
Friedman quotes a Journal-Sentinel article on the controversy around
the audit and Nickolaus's unorthodox practice of hoarding control over
elections data.
"Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus' decision to go it alone in how
she collects and maintains election results has some county officials
raising a red flag about the integrity of the system," the Laurel
Walker of the Journal-Sentinel reported. "Nickolaus said she decided to
take the election data collection and storage system off the county's
computer network - and keep it on stand-alone personal computers
accessible only in her office - for security reasons. 'What it gave me
was good security of the elections from start to finish, without the
ability of someone unauthorized to be involved,' she said."
The Journal Sentinel reported in January that Nickolaus was chastised
by county board member Jim Dwyer for sneering and smirking during a
hearing on whether she had adequate safeguards on the computer system
that keeps track of votes. As Walker reported it, county board members
got angry at her attitude. "'There really is nothing funny about this,
Kathy,'" [Dwyer] said, raising his voice. 'Don't sit there and grin
when I'm explaining what this is about. Don't sit there and say I will
take it into consideration,' he said, asking her pointedly whether she
would change the passwords. 'I have not made my decision,' she
answered."
As one outraged Wisconsin elections official put it:
"This woman has single-handedly destroyed the credibility of my entire
profession. The important detail here is not whether the numbers are
right or not (they very well may be, as the explanation from the board
of canvass is at least plausible). The real issue is how the process of
reporting was so distorted by secrecy that the public was denied access
to the raw data in real time." The damage to voter confidence in the
state is " irreparable."
Meanwhile, Prosser has hired Ben Ginsberg, a Republican lawyer who
worked on the Florida recount for George W. Bush.
Get enough people in the right places and this whole democracy problem
can be cleared right up.
Ah, Wisconsin, the civilized, clean-government, open-meetings state.
How we miss you.
If you liked this article by Ruth Conniff, the political editor of
The Progressive, check out her story "Wisconsin Leads the War on
Public Schools."
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