Last Tuesday there was a Supreme Court election in Wisconsin. And it had a surprise result, showing that Wisconsin voters were very unhappy with the Republicans running the state. An incumbent Republican justice, David Prosser, who over a month ago was considered a shoo-in for re-election wound up losing to his Democratic opponent, JoAnne Kloppenburg, by a very slim margin. As county voting administrators canvassed their votes today the race totals changed by by a small margin, but Kloppenburg still had a small lead.
That is, she had a small lead until County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus (of heavily Republican Waukesha County) informed the state that she had made a mistake. She said she had forgotten to count 14,315 votes -- 10,859 of them for Republican Prosser and 3,456 for Democrat Kloppenburg. This gave Prosser more than a 7,000 vote lead in the race.
Nickolaus (pictured) said it was just human error and a common mistake, and said, "I apologize." She said she had entered the votes from the City of Brookfield but "forgot" to save them to her database. That sounds like an amazing and very convenient bit of forgetfulness, especially for a Republican public official in a close race lost by one of her Republican cohorts.
Now forgetting to count nearly 15,000 votes would sound suspicious enough, but there are a couple of other things about Nickolaus that makes it look really bad. When she was an employee of the Republican Assembly Caucus there was a state scandal regarding that caucus. Nickolaus was granted immunity in the scandal (and innocent people don't need a grant of immunity).
There is also the question of her taking the county's election data collection and storage capability off of the county's computer system, and put it on a computer system that only she has access to -- meaning she could do anything she wanted with the vote and it would not be discovered by the county computer system. Here's How the online version of the Milwaukee Journal put it:
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.
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.
Nonetheless, Director of Administration Norman A. Cummings said because Nickolaus has kept them out of the loop, the county's information technology specialists have not been able to verify Nickolaus' claim that the system is secure from failure.
"How does anybody else in the county know, except for her verbal word, that there are backups, and that the software she has out there is performing as it should?" he said. "There's no way I can assure that the election system is going to be fine for the next presidential election."
Could this Republican official with a dubious past be stealing the election for her party? It sure looks like that could be what she's trying to do.
Could this Republican official with a dubious past be stealing the election for her party? It sure looks like that could be what she's trying to do.
ReplyDeleteEvidence?