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Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus was using a software program created especially for her by the state Government Accountability Board when she made the huge error in compiling results for the State Supreme Court race between incumbent David Prosser and challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg. The special program was revealed in an email sent to other county clerks and released by the Kloppenburg campaign to buttress her claim that an independent investigation of Nickolaus’ office is needed.

Nickolaus was at the center of the huge vote-reporting error that omitted the entire City of Brookfield from county totals reported to the media. Made public two days after the April 5 election, the revelation altered the results of the State Supreme Court race in Justice David’s Prosser’s favor.  The GAB, which oversees elections in the state, is currently investigating the mix-up and announced last week it would issue a final report within 60 days. Kloppenburg’s campaign asked for a special investigator, arguing the GAB works too closely with county clerks to be impartial. The GAB denied the request.

Kathy Nickolaus

The email, by Rusk County Clerk Denise Wetzel and addressed to other county clerks in Wisconsin, including Nickolaus, was sent on April 8, the day after Nickolaus revealed the vote-reporting error in a press conference.

It reads, “Please note that the program Kathy uses IS NOT the new canvass reporting program that is in the (Statewide Voter Registration System) that we all have been using as of late. It is a completely different program that was created by GAB for Kathy to accumulate her votes prior to uploading them into the program that the rest of us use.”

The Wetzel email, filed with the campaign’s request for an outside investigator, was “meant to indicate the GAB appropriately works closely with county clerks on a number of projects, and that close relationship makes it harder for the GAB to do a full and independent investigation,” says Kloppenburg campaign manager Melissa Mulliken.

The GAB declined to comment to NewsBuzz on what the program was or why it was created while the investigation is pending. Nickolaus’ office also declined to comment.

In her press conference, Nickolaus said that on election night, she had forgotten to save the vote totals from Brookfield, which had heavily favored Prosser, before releasing the county’s total results to news media, which were reporting that Kloppenburg had won by an ultra-slim margin.

According to the Wetzel email, Nickolaus had failed to save the Brookfield results on the program created by the GAB. “During this other process,” it says, “she thought that they were saved along with the other totals when she reported her election night results and had no idea that they were not in there.”

In the press conference, Nickolaus described the program, saying it was created by GAB. She said it was an Access database (referring to the database program included in the Microsoft Office suite) developed by the agency last Fall, when it was used for the November election, but not the primary. The database, she said, was “an accumulated software package so we could bring all those results in.”

“We ran this for the governor’s election,” she said, “and we ran the same system for the February election. We had no problems.”

Under the system, Nickolaus said municipalities, including Brookfield, are given a template spreadsheet to fill in with election results and email back to her. Municipalities are instructed not to alter the spreadsheet – but on the night of April 5, when Brookfield returned its form to Nickolaus, she noticed it contained “extra columns,” complicating the process of importing it into the database.

The clerk said she called staff in Brookfield to again stress the importance of not altering the template.

Nickolaus, however, didn’t say this complication was the cause of Brookfield’s vote totals being omitted from the initial results released by her office.

“The spreadsheet from Brookfield was imported into (the database),” she said, “but it was inadvertently not saved.”

In the press conference, Nickolaus didn’t explain, as stated in the Wetzel email, that the database was specially created for her office and not used by any other clerk in the state. Neither Nickolaus nor the GAB has offered any explanation why she was given a special software program, but she had a history of prior errors in compiling voting results.

In 2005, results from a ward in the county were counted twice in a state Assembly race by her office. Nickolaus attributed the mistake, which was caught during canvassing, to one of her employees hitting “the wrong button.”

And in 2006, computer malfunctions and other problems resulted in her office briefly listing the wrong winner in another Assembly race. Nickolaus said at the time data had been recorded incorrectly and skewed the results until the error was corrected.

Kloppenburg’s campaign has also questioned how the clerk calculated turnout in 2004. According to news stories, she said then that turnout in the general election that year had been 97.6 percent and possibly a national record. The campaign’s complaint says that is “a level of turnout so extraordinarily high as to raise questions as to its validity.”

Nickolaus’ election procedures, at the request of Waukesha county officials, were audited last year. A report released in January of this year recommended that Nickolaus improve backup and security procedures.

The clerk has said she won’t resign. “I will serve the remainder of my term,” she said in an April 12 statement. “I have immediately begun the process of reviewing my procedures. I have also asked the (GAB) and the Waukesha County Auditor to assist my office in a review and implementation of improved practices and procedures to make sure the process is more transparent and this mistake does not happen again.”

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