Wisconsin Democrats are now crying foul over election administration in heavily Republican Waukesha County — and not just in the recent Supreme Court race, in which County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus (R) announced the discovery of 14,000 untabulated votes from a whole municipality that put conservative Justice David Prosser ahead. In a letter to the state Government Accountability Board, which oversees elections, state Dem chair Mike Tate is now raising doubts about the county’s tabulated votes in the narrowly decided 2006 state attorney general race.
Key quote from the letter:
The Waukesha County Clerk website Tuesday said there were 118,342 votes for Van Hollen and 55,608 votes for Falk, a total of 173,950 votes. (There are an additional 97 write-in votes tabulated for a total of 174,047 votes assigned to candidates from Waukesha County.)
However, at the top of the same page, the Waukesha County Clerk, under the heading “BALLOTS CAST – TOTAL,” the number of total ballots reported is 156,804. This is an under- reporting of 17,243 votes. I note with serious concern that this discrepancy is more than enough to have swung the statewide election against the Republican and for the Democrat.
The Web page that Tate refers to can be found here.
Tate notes in his letter that the county’s web site has been amended recently, in order to offer an explanation of how the number of “total ballots” reported is calculated, and how it can differ from the actual total number of votes.
From the county’s site:
What does Ballot Cast mean in the summary reports?
⢠Ballot Cast is the number of ballots that were fed through the election machines at the polling places and the results were collected using a modem in the office. It does NOT include any hand entered results.
Number of Votes in a particular contest or race is the number of votes certified after canvassing. The results collected using a modem and any results hand entered in the office on election night.
…
Why would the ballots cast be lower than the number of people that voted in a specific contest or race?
⢠The ballots cast would be lower if a portion of the results were entered by hand.
As the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel points out, this new claim appears to have originated from a reader post at Daily Kos on Tuesday — and since then, the county’s web site has been amended twice, to offer the clarification on how ballots are added up. The paper further reports:
Some results are counted by hand because some municipalities do not have modems, Nickolaus told the Journal Sentinel via email.
Asked why the hand-counted ballots could not be included in the ballots cast total, Nickolaus replied, “We do not change the ballots cast.”
Although there is an apparent discrepancy in the Waukesha County results report, the Government Accountability web site has results from the 2006 election that show 177,424 people voted in the election.
A call by TPM to the clerk’s office, asking for comment on the Dems’ letter and a further explanation of how their system is administered, was not immediately returned.
On Wednesday of last week, liberal-backed candidate JoAnne Kloppenburg declared victory on the basis of Associated Press figures showing 100% of precincts reported, with Kloppenburg enjoying the very narrow lead of 204 votes out of nearly 1.5 million. Then on Thursday — as counties were conducting the official canvass to check for errors in their election night spreadsheets that were reported to the media — Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus (R) announced the discovery of un-tabulated votes in the city of Brookfield. This gave Prosser a net gain of over 7,000 — with Nickolaus saying that her own error had resulted in them not being properly imported and saved into the county’s database.
Since then, Democrats have been strongly questioning the results, and calling upon Nickolaus to resign, which she has said she will not do: “I will serve the remainder of my term,” Nickolaus said. “I understand why people are upset and I am taking this matter seriously. Again, I am sorry for my mistake.”
