Waukesha County’s oft-failed election administrator, Kathy Nickolaus will not participate in the upcoming recall elections for Gov. Scott Walker, Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch and four Republican state Senators.
The BRAD BLOG first learned the news from a Wisconsin Election Integrity advocate late this afternoon, and it has now been confirmed with a statement issued by the office of Waukesha County Executive Dan Vrakas.
Her decision to recuse herself from the May 8th recall primaries and June 5th recall general elections comes on the heels of yet another embarrassing election administration failure this past Tuesday by the controversial County Clerk in one of the Badger State’s most Republican counties.
According to Vrakas’ statement, the elected Nickolaus — who will face her own re-election contest later this year — was given two choices by the County Executive, either resign or step aside for the upcoming recall elections.
“In a meeting this afternoon I presented two options to Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus,” Vrakas’ statement reads, “resignation, or designating the deputy clerk to run the upcoming recall election.”
“Kathy agreed to hand off her election duties to the deputy county clerk in order to avoid my public call for her resignation,” says Vrakas. “In stepping aside, Kathy also agreed to allow outside consultants and county staff to work side-by-side with the deputy clerk to help restore confidence in our election process. The county will move swiftly to examine the election night procedures in the County Clerk’s Office and make changes as necessary to restore public’s confidence in our elections.”
Calls for her resignation occurred once again following her failure to post local election results online in a timely fashion on the night of the April 3rd primary elections this week.
The BRAD BLOG has been reporting on the many election administration failures of Nickolaus going back as far as 2010 when she refused to change a number of procedures at the request of County Executives after an audit found serious deficiencies in her security processes, such as failing to post election results online, and tracking them only on a personal computer in her own office. But it was the April 5, 2011 election for state Supreme Court (exactly one year ago today) that brought national infamy to Nickolaus…
In the contentious race between her former colleague, Republican Justice David Prosser, and challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg, Nickolaus failed to include the results of the City of Brookfield in her reported election night totals. After Kloppenburg was announced the unofficial winner on election night by just 204 votes, Nickolaus claims to have discovered the results of 14,000 unreported votes from Brookfield.
She chalked the problem up to a computer failure, but the new results ended up flipping the election in Prosser’s favor by some 7,000 votes.
A lengthy statewide hand-count ensued, during which “widespread irregularities” were discovered, particularly in Nickolaus’ Waukesha, where ballot bags had been discovered ripped open prior to the counting, security seals were found missing or changed, and some computer results tapes were revealed as having dates indicating they’d been printed days prior to the election.
In the wake of that embarrassment, Nickolaus worked with the state’s Government Accountability Board (G.A.B.) to develop new Election Night reporting procedures. But those new processes failed once again last Tuesday night.
Among the new G.A.B.-approved procedures, Nickolaus determined to post poll result tapes printed out by the Waukesha municipalities’ paper ballot optical-scan systems before posting results online on Election Night.
In past elections she had refused to publish municipality results at all, posting only county wide numbers. That allowed the missing Brookfield totals to go unnoticed on the night of last year’s Supreme Court election. This year, she promised to change that by planned to post local results online immediately.
But that process seems to have failed as well on Tuesday night. The result, according to Laurel Walker of Milwaukee’s Journal Sentinel: “Reporters and data collectors for election reporting services resorted to tabulating contested races from yards of paper tapes hanging on walls around a meeting room. The process was akin to reading a long grocery receipt where, in some cases, the tape stretched down the wall and onto the floor in a heap.”
Meanwhile, as Nickolaus and her staff attempted to upload incoming results to the county’s website from the computer optical-scan memory cards, the process failed yet again.
“We were shocked,” Nickolaus said the next day, explaining that she had tested the system “many times” prior to Election Day. For some reason, her staff was simply unable to upload the results as she said they had practiced previously.
Results were not posted to the county website until after 2am Wednesday morning. Some results were not posted on the county website until 6am, according to Joe Petrie and Lisa Sink of the Waukesha Patch.
Earlier today, after calls — once again — for her resignation, Nickolaus told 620 WTMJ that she had “no plans on stepping down from the County Clerk position.”
She told WTMJ’s John Mercure, however, that she’d “be making some major steps in making sure that people feel comfortable with the way that the election administration is done in the office.”
By this evening, the embattled County Clerk had agreed to not participate in the state’s upcoming, controversial and historic recall elections.
Local Election Integrity advocate, John Washburn (who, in 2010, sat in for Nickolaus at a County Executive meeting to answer questions about her security protocols) tipped us off late today to the news.
He also pointed out his concerns about the accuracy of election results themselves as reported by Nickolaus’ office.
Washburn’s worries stem from recent revelations following March 13th elections in Palm Beach County, FL where the computer optical-scan systems, made by Sequoia Voting Systems (which has since been purchased by Dominion Voting), reported the incorrect results of three different races leading to losing candidates being declared as “winners” by the central tabulating software known as WinEDS.
Dominion has since admitted the erroneous results were due to a flaw in their software, and a full hand-count of the incorrectly tallied races was carried out last weekend to determine the correct winner.
“Waukesha uses the exact same version of WinEDS as used in Palm Beach,” Washburn told us. The same software is also used elsewhere in the state, he says, and yet, according to a conversation he says he had with a G.A.B. official, state election administrators hadn’t been made aware of the company’s “Product Advisory Notice” [PDF] detailing the software failure (as issued after the Palm Beach debacle) until late this week.
The fact that losing candidates had been named as “winners” was only discovered after a manual examination of a small sample of paper ballots in Palm Beach, where Florida law now requires a 2% post-election spot-check. Wisconsin has no similar audit requirement for their elections. Therefore, whoever the computers report as “winners” in Waukesha will be the winners, barring results close election enough to trigger a recount — which is carried out in WI by those same failed computers, unless a court order is given.
If the computer tabulators name the wrong winners, as they did in Palm Beach, Wisconsin residents would likely have no idea.
Following the recall elections, Nickolaus herself will also face her own re-election race later this year. The election will be tallied by the very same flawed computer systems and she, presumably, will be back on the job once again by then to oversee the administration of her own re-election contest.
Nickolaus has not yet responded to our request for comment on her decision to step aside for the recall elections.
UPDATE 4/30/12: Incredibly enough, weeks after the above news was published, Nickolaus now indicates she is not planning to step aside for the recall elections, even as she announced that she no longer plans to run for re-election this fall. Untangling the fine mess here…
Must assume they have the “winners” programmed and nothing to worry about.
The message seems to be: “good idea but bad execution.”
And in other breaking important WALKERGATE NEWS
Walkergate: The Russell Gambit. There has been yet another new twist in the tale of Tim Russell and his role in Walkergate. Russell, a long time close personal friend of Scott Walker and a GOP operative, was among the first arrested and charged in the ongoing John Doe investigation commonly referred to as Walkergate. He was arrested and charged for embezzling funds from the program Operation Freedom. Operation Freedom was the political stunt thrown by Walker on the pretense of honoring veterans and their families by having supporters contribute to a free day at the Milwaukee County Zoo.
Scott Walker’s Former Top Aide Stalls Veterans-Funds Embezzlement Trial
Tim Russell, longtime Scott Walker crony and follower, stole more than $60,000 in donations intended for Operation Freedom, an annual event honoring veterans. WisPolitics is reporting that Tim Russell, accused of stealing $1,000s from wounded veterans and families of military servicemembers who died in Iraq and Afghanistan, among other crimes, made a motion this week seeking his third lead counsel since January.
That is one weird county.
Kathy Nickolaus ought to have been removed (and possibly in prison) for her previous conduct. However, it strikes me as somewhat ironic that she is asked to resign only for this week’s incident, which was at least a step in the right direction. Making the raw tapes of local results available, which awkward, is at least a measure of transparency. Delays in posting results should be less important than implementation of transparent procedures. If we let the narrative be that the DELAY was the offense, we potentially shoot ourselves in the foot.
In this case, I have a suspicion that the delays and awkward posting of long tape rolls may be a passive-aggressive attempt at getting out of the restrictions put on her in future — that backfired. But George W. Bush proved beyond any doubt that corruption and incompetence can go hand in hand.
If I dare add to Brad’s excellent reporting, there are a couple of other events relating to Kathy Nickolaus’ “election administration” that are worthy of note.
There are what Brad previously described as the Waukesha, WI Follies: 97.63% Turnout in 2004? 20,000 More Votes Than ‘Ballots Cast’ in 2006.
Then there were these interesting observations that occurred during Brad’s live coverage of last August’s recall elections.
and:
Brad, thanks for all you do reporting on these stories. The arrogance of not doing hand counts is simply stunning.
It seems that even the residents of Waukesha County are beginning to take notice. What confidence would you have in your local races with irregularities such as that going on? I can only hope WI will take a lesson from this and enact real change.
SHOREWOOD:
Last number handed out to voters: – 2305
Number of ballots on the scan machine: – 2298
Number of ballots on the touch screen-HAVA machine: – 7
Number of absentees(from inspector’s statement) – 505
11. RESULTS AS ANNOUNCED BY ELECTION OFFICIALS: Enter the number of:
Candidate #1: – Sandy Pasch
Votes: – 1715
Candidate #2: – Alberta Darling
Votes: – 583
Number of write-ins: – 5
“Overvotes”(voted for more than one): – 0
Blank votes: – 3
VILLAGE OF MENOMONEE FALLS:
Last number handed out to voters: – 1690
Number of ballots on the scan machine: – 1973
Number of absentees(from inspector’s statement) – 283
11. RESULTS AS ANNOUNCED BY ELECTION OFFICIALS: Enter the number of:
Candidate #1: – Alberta Darling
Votes: – 1351
Candidate #2: – Sandra K. Pasch
Votes: – 605
Number of write-ins: – 2
“Overvotes”(voted for more than one): – 0
Blank votes: – 15
earnest ty for posting the extra bits and peices from brads live report on the sen district recalls…the second report i posted above came from that late breaking menomonee falls counting unit,as you can see they have more votes than voters according to the volenteers report i recieved (the last number handed out to voters should include abs but clearly does not)….to be fair i have no idea if the volenteer made a mistake or if kn added 283 abs she didnt have because no one from wisconsin ever lets me know if they follow thru on these irregularities but i did think it was interesting since you mentioned kn was looking at more abs in ur report…
The below comment was just posted on another story. However, I’ve reposted it here after discovering Mr. Friedman’s article. Unfortunately the concerns addressed in Mr. Friedman’s article aren’t limited to Waukesha County
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From someone who has an interesting connection to the Bush-Gore debacle I can tell you that the country needs to keep a watchful eye on Florida. Multiple things are amiss in the supposed “Sunshine State” and the sun isn’t shining so brightly on malfeasance that is being committed in the dark of secrecy. In at least one Florida jurisdiction (and I suspect possibly others), in a move that has somewhat of a Katherine Harrisesque feel, a proven criminally-corrupt public official has been appointed involvement in the 2012 election process. This is 100% true and it is supported by two irrefutable and evidence-laden reports that span more than 100 pages that are in the possession of various entities, including those within Florida’s judicial branch (and Chief Judge Martha Lott and State Attorney’s Office Chief Investigator Spencer Mann). At the heart of the issue is a proven criminal/judge by the name of David P. Kreider. It is a fact-supported assertion that Chief Judge Martha Lott, Alachua County Supervisor of Elections Pam Carpenter, and others have some serious explaining to do. At the “end of the day”, unless this wrongful appointment is promptly corrected, this issue is most certainly going to rightfully be the source of yet another dark and ugly “black eye” for the state of Florida. Take a look at
http://www.complaints.com/2012/...ele_264712.htm
for more information. I’m no gambler, but I’m willing to bet another round of election-related frustrations are headed our way largely due to various Florida authorities.
Because the following relates to Mr. Friedman’s article I must add that the Alachua County Clerk’s Office, which is under the administration of Clerk J.K. “Buddy” Irby, has recently come under fire for various transgressions.
There is always another republican willing to jump at the chance to take her place in stealing elections.