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发帖数: 29846 | 1 竞争激烈的威斯康星州法官选举，突然发现一个城市的选票没有输入数据库，目前共和
党候选人选票领先，之前民主党候选人已经宣布胜选
Corrected Brookfield tally puts Prosser ahead after 7,500-vote gain
In one explosive stroke Thursday, the clerk in a Republican stronghold
tilted the tight Supreme Court race in favor of Justice David Prosser by
recovering thousands of untallied votes for the incumbent.
Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus said Thursday that she failed to save
on her computer and then report 14,315 votes in the city of Brookfield,
omitting them entirely in an unofficial total she released after Tuesday's
election. With other smaller errors in Waukesha County, Prosser gained 7,582
votes over his challenger, JoAnne Kloppenburg, leaving the sitting justice
significantly ahead for now amid ongoing official counting.
"I'm thankful that this error was caught early in the process. This is not a
case of extra ballots being found. This is human error which I apologize
for," Nickolaus said, her voice wavering as she spoke to reporters.
The figures are still far from final in a race that had previously seemed
almost certain to see a statewide recount. Around the state, elections
officials Thursday were tweaking unofficial results from the day before that
had put Kloppenburg, an assistant attorney general, ahead of Prosser by a
razor-thin 204 votes.
But nothing compared to Brookfield, where the new totals give 10,859 more
votes to Prosser and 3,456 more to Kloppenburg.
"I'm encouraged by the various reports from the county canvasses," Prosser
said in a statement. "We've always maintained faith in the voters and trust
the election officials involved in the canvassing will reaffirm the lead we'
ve taken."
But Kloppenburg supporters reacted with alarm, pointing out that Nickolaus
had worked in the Assembly Republican caucus during the time that Prosser, a
former Republican lawmaker, served as the Assembly speaker and that
Nickolaus also had faced questions about her handling of elections as clerk.
"Wisconsin voters as well as the Kloppenburg (campaign) deserve a full
explanation of how and why these 14,000 votes from an entire city were
missed. To that end, we will be filing open records requests for all
relevant documentation related to the reporting of election results in
Waukesha County, as well as to the discovery and reporting of the errors
announced by the county," Kloppenburg campaign manager Melissa Mulliken said
in a statement.
Assembly Minority Leader Peter Barca (D-Kenosha) raised the possibility of
an independent investigation over the recovery of the votes.
"This is a serious breach of election procedure," he said. "We're going to
look further. She waited 24 hours to work this. And she waited until after
she verified the results, making it that much more difficult to challenge
and verify the results."
'We went over everything'
But at the news conference with Nickolaus, Ramona Kitzinger, the Democrat on
the Waukesha County Board of Canvassers, said: "We went over everything and
made sure all the numbers jibed up and they did. Those numbers jibed up,
and we're satisfied they're correct."
As a Democrat, she said, "I'm not going to stand here and tell you something
that's not true."
Waukesha County Executive Dan Vrakas, who sat in on Nickolaus' news
conference, said voters can be confident in the results because "all the
votes are in that office. If anyone wants to look at them and verify, they
can."
Kristine Schmidt, the clerk in the city of Brookfield, said in a separate
interview that she shared the results with the news media on election night.
She said she also sent the results twice to the county. After the first
results were sent she said the county requested a second set of data because
they wanted results tabulated in a certain format with fewer columns.
"We sent it to the county and called the county to make sure they got it,"
Schmidt said.
Nickolaus explained that when she got Brookfield's results the second time
in the correct format, she failed to save it. So when she totaled the
results for the unofficial final report Tuesday, Brookfield's total was not
included and she didn't realize it.
She discovered the error Wednesday when she transferred her data to a state
computer program for the canvassers' review. Brookfield's results showed a
zero. The Board of Canvassers started its work at noon Wednesday, but
Nickolaus said she didn't report the major blunder because everything had to
be verified first.
Nickolaus said the problem had nothing to do with her election system, which
has been criticized as outdated. Her election operation was the subject of
a county audit last year after complaints were leveled that she was not
cooperative with information technology specialists who wanted to check the
system's integrity and backup.
The audit concluded that while the clerk's system generally complies with
state and federal guidelines and accuracy of election totals was not at
issue, Nickolaus should improve security and backup procedures.
Although it was not among the audit recommendations, Nickolaus' decision to
no longer report municipal election results separately on election night, as
many other county clerks do, has raised questions. Nor does she show in the
running totals throughout election night what proportion of the voting
units are included in the tallies.
Could the error have been spotted sooner had municipal results also been on
her website? Nickolaus would not make herself available after the news
conference to answer questions.
Schmidt, the Brookfield clerk, said she watched the news conference. Does
she buy Nickolaus' explanation?
"Yeah, I do. I understand those kinds of things can happen," she said,
adding, "I was disappointed I was not informed. I should not have been
informed through the news agencies, kind as you people all are."
She said her lack of information left her and the city open to unwarranted
criticism.
She said if the municipal results had been individually shown on the county
clerk's website, the error may have been spotted.
The state's top elections administrator said he was surprised that such a
large mistake had been made but also said it was not entirely unprecedented.
"This emphasizes the need when counties are releasing information to the
press on election night that they double check their data," said Kevin
Kennedy, director of the state Government Accountability Board.
Kennedy said the state would review Nickolaus's figures but that no ballots
from the county would be examined unless and until there is a recount.
"We will go back and check her numbers and all of the numbers she made in
our system," he said.
He recalled an incident in 1982 when state elections officials had also made
a huge error in adding vote totals, but said that mistake was also caught
before official figures were compiled.
Recount rules
Once the final official numbers are in, either candidate - but no one else -
can request a recount. If the margin between the candidates is less than 0.
5%, the state charges nothing to conduct the recount.
But the added votes from Waukesha County could push the total far enough
toward Prosser that a free recount would no longer be available to
Kloppenburg, who on Wednesday had an unofficial 204-vote lead out of nearly
1.5 million votes cast.
If the final margin of victory is between 0.5% and 2% of the vote, the
candidate asking for the recount must pay $5 per ward.
Mike Maistelman, an election attorney who often does work for Democrats,
said he expected a recount would still happen despite Prosser's large vote
gain.
"Nobody knows what's up or what's down," he said. "One day we win and the
next day we lost by 10,000 votes? How do we know they did it right this time
?"
Nickolaus has had a long career in Republican politics.
For 13 years, she worked as a staffer for the Assembly Republican caucus,
one of four GOP and Democratic legislative groups that were shut down
following a criminal investigation into state staffers doing campaign work
on state time.
Prosser led Assembly Republicans as minority leader in that House from 1989
to 1994 and than as speaker in 1995 and 1996, giving him oversight of the
GOP caucus in that House.
"To my knowledge (Prosser) has not had any contact with Kathy since she left
the caucus," Prosser campaign manager Brian Nemoir said.
The caucus investigation eventually led to the resignations and criminal
convictions of leaders in the Senate and Assembly for directing caucus and
staff employees to engage in illegal political activity during their state
employment.
Nickolaus, who earned $54,000 a year as a data analyst and computer
specialist for Assembly Republicans, was granted immunity in 2001 by
authorities conducting the investigation.
In a criminal complaint issued in 2002 against then-Assembly Speaker Scott
Jensen and others, prosecutors claimed Nickolaus developed a computer
software program that was used by state officials to track donations.
According to a Journal Sentinel report, Nickolaus said she developed the
software on her own time because she wanted to sell it to the state
elections agency for use in automating state-required campaign reports. She
left the caucus around that time.
As county clerk, she is elected as a Republican and holds a four-year term.
She was first elected in 2002.
Vote changes elsewhere
The Brookfield bombshell was the biggest - but hardly the only - change as
counties across the state checked their election results Tuesday. Here's a
sample:
• In Winnebago County, officials now say Prosser received 20,701
votes to Kloppenburg's 18,887. On Wednesday, The Associated Press - which
gathers the votes for most of the media in Wisconsin - had 19,991 for
Prosser to Kloppenburg's 18,421.
• In Kenosha, Prosser picked up 33 votes in the Town of Randall
and 27 votes in the Town of Bristol, and the canvass is still going on.
• In Waukesha County, Prosser also picked up 200 votes in New
Berlin after a clerical error was discovered.
• In Grant County, Prosser lost 116 votes when officials
completed their canvass Thursday. The count was off in part because the Town
of Smelser incorrectly reported the count for paper ballots that voters
cast after the regular ballots ran out, County Clerk Linda Gebhardt said.
The town reported 294 votes for Prosser, but later corrected the figure to
194.
The list of changes rolled on in county after county, and reflected the
important distinction in such a close election between the preliminary set
of numbers and the final set. In most elections, the margin of error is such
that it doesn't really matter - there's a clear winner, and that doesn't
change days later when the final numbers come in and the state certifies the
results.
In this case, the preliminary numbers were so close that the margin of error
clearly matters.Any possible recount could be sought as soon as next week
in the race, in which on Wednesday Kloppenburg had her unofficial 204-vote
lead. But only after the county canvassers provide an official tally - and
an official winner - can a recount begin.
In all of the state's 72 counties except Milwaukee, the county clerk or a
surrogate serves on the board of canvassers along with two other people
appointed by the clerk, according to the Government Accountability Board's
procedures. County clerks in Wisconsin are elected as Republicans or
Democrats, but the clerk must appoint at least one person to the board of
canvassers who is from a different political party from the clerk.
To check the totals, the boards do tasks such as looking at how many votes
were cast in a given location and then checking those totals against the
figures on how many voters there were given a number and a ballot by poll
workers, Kennedy said.
The canvassers also check election results by looking at printouts from
polling place machines such as optical scanners for reading ballots. They
check provisional ballots, tally sheets prepared for hand-counted ballots
and certifications from election officials that voting machines haven't been
tampered with.
The boards have to reconcile and correct any errors or discrepancies. Any
returns that are too flawed for the canvass board to interpret are sent back
to the municipality that sent them in for clarification. Once the
information is checked, the canvass boards sign off on the results and send
them to the state.
In the city of Milwaukee, officials are reviewing ballots in a warehouse on
the city's north side, a process that will last into Friday, city election
commission Executive Director Susan Edman said.
The high turnout Tuesday for a typically sleepy spring election will create
extra difficulties in the counting.
Sue Strands, the city clerk in Fond du Lac, said there was 40% voter turnout
there, far above a normal spring election.
Sharif Durhams and Larry Sandler of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed
to this report. |
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