Waukesha County, Wisconsin’s County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus was already known, for some time, to be among the nation’s worst elections official. And that’s saying quite a bit. But new information being discovered over the past several days suggests she may be even worse than previously known — which is also saying quite a bit.
We noted last Friday that the stunning 14,000+ “new” votes she announced as having discovered in the state’s Supreme Court election from the city of Brookfield last Thursday actually weren’t “new” at all. In fact, they were independently reported late on Election Night by Lisa Sink of the Brookfield Patch, exactly as they were eventually included in Nickolaus’ final canvass report [XLS].
If anything, as we indicated in the same article, it is perhaps more troubling that the city of Brookfield’s numbers didn’t change at all from Election Night, suggesting that the ballots have never been examined by any human beings in order to assure the accuracy of the oft-failed, easily-manipulated optical-scanners used to tabulate the paper ballots in Waukesha (and across most of the state.)
That’s just one reason why a complete public hand-count of all paper ballots should be carried out in Waukesha right now, presuming the chain of custody for those ballots can be demonstrated as having been secure since Election Night. Given the razor-thin margin of the still unofficial final results in the race between Justice David Prosser (a partisan Republican and avowed Gov. Scott Walker supporter) and the independent Asst. Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg, a similarly public hand-count of all paper ballots across the entire state should be a no-brainer at this point in order to achieve some form of confidence in the results of the, reportedly, incredibly close contest.
The “Protect Our Elections” campaign of VelvetRevolution.us has now publicly called for exactly that — a public hand-count of all paper ballots across the entire state. [DISCLOSURE: The BRAD BLOG is a co-founder of VR.]
Last week, The BRAD BLOG also detailed some of Nickolaus’ horrific record as County Clerk, and just a few of the embarrassments she’s caused for her county, including her practice of keeping election results only on a circa 1995 personal computer in her office; using the same user ID and password for all of the employees allowed to access it; and refusing to release city-by-city, much less ward-by-ward election results on Election Night. (The latter is one of the reasons the “missing” 14,000+ votes weren’t noticed by anyone in the media or citizenry earlier.) Those were just a few of the troubling concerns highlighted in an independent audit carried out on behalf of the County Board of Executives last year after they’d discovered many serious deficiencies and security concerns in Nickolaus’ election procedures.
But now, thanks to some great citizen oversight — to be sure, not easy to do in Nickolaus’ county, as she makes it as absolutely as difficult as possible for citizens to oversee their own elections — from a blogger at the Daily Kos, we learn still more troubling facts about elections and their administration in the very Republican-leaning Waukesha, including evidence suggesting 20,000 more votes than “ballots cast” were tallied by Nickolaus in the county’s 2006 general election, and a remarkable 97.63% voter turnout there in the 2004 Presidential election.
We’ve been trying to get to the bottom of these anomalies since they were first discovered a few days ago, and we’ve been going back and forth with Nickolaus to try and clear them up. Here’s what we’ve been able to figure out…
Where We Stand on the Election At This Hour
The Badger State remains on edge as they await one last county, Milwaukee, to come in with their final canvass report. After which, the candidates will have just three days to determine if they wish to request a computer recount of ballots. In order to have a hand-count of ballots, they would have to receive a court order after somehow demonstrating evidence that the results of the election would be changed if a hand-count was carried out.
Those county canvass reports — it must be underscored again — include results which have not been verified by human beings. Rather, the vast majority of results represent unverified totals as reported by computers made by Diebold, ES&S, Sequoia and Populex, programmed for the election by people like Kathy Nickolaus. As of now, Prosser is believed to have a lead over Kloppenburg of just over 7,000 votes out of 1.5 million cast according to those computer-reported results.
In the meantime, as we wait, DailyKos blogger “yourguide” has done a bit of looking over previous election results in Waukesha County elections and has found what appear, in any case, to be some startling anomalies. One of those anomalies, as of last Tuesday night, resulted in a number of addenda — rather confusing ones, at that — added by Nickolaus to the Waukesha election results web page in hopes of offering explanation.
97.63% Voter Turnout in 2004?
Let’s start first with the 2004 Presidential Election turnout anomaly, as “yourguide” first detailed on Monday:
Of the 236,642 registered voters in Waukesha on Nov 2, 2004 apparently 231,031 of them came out in a hint of rain and drizzle and did their civic duty.
Just to put this in perspective, Australia has compulsory (mandatory) voting and their turnout is 95%.
Indeed, “yourguide” appears to be correct. Here’s a screenshot from the report of the official 2004 results as currently posted on the Waukesha County government website:
While waiting to hear back from Nickolaus on our inquiry into that remarkable turnout number, we discussed the possibilities of an explanation for it with John Washburn of Fair Elections Wisconsin. Washburn, an Election Integrity expert and colleague who we’ve known for some time (he has guest blogged at The BRAD BLOG on several occasions over the years) is a self-described “Ron Paul Republican” and a David Prosser voter who has even spoken on Nickolaus’ behalf in the past. He’s also held her feet to the fire over the years at the same time, as an Election Integrity advocate and award-winning open records investigator. Despite his Right-leaning political preferences, we’ve found him to be an impeccable source on such matters.
During our interview with Washburn yesterday on KPFK/Pacifica, in response to our request for a possible explanation for those absurdly high turnout numbers, he joked, “I don’t know, Stalin came to Waukesha and got the compulsory vote there too?”
But Washburn had previously speculated off air, during a phone conversation we’d had on Tuesday night, that the “REGISTERED VOTERS = TOTAL” line, as seen above, could refer only to those voters who were registered prior to Election Day, as Wisconsin allows for same-day registration at the polls on the day of the election. So, in fact, he averred, the “TOTAL” number of “REGISTERED VOTERS”, as Nickolaus’ report describes them, wouldn’t actually be the total number of registered voters after Election Day, with a lot of folks signing up to vote at the polls, especially during the much-contested 2004 Presidential Election.
That, in fact, turns out to the explanation that Nickolaus is now offering as well. In a note added to her county election results website last night, following our pressing her for an explanation for this via email on Tuesday and Wednesday, Nickolaus now writes:
* Waukesha County is known for higher than State average turnout. In addition the turnout is calculated using the number of registered voters, prior to Election Day. As Wisconsin allows for Election Day registration the turnout number would be skewed dependent on the number of people that registered Election Day.
You may accept her explanation as you see fit, of course. We didn’t offer it to her, but it did match the one that Washburn speculated as a possibility on Tuesday evening, prior to Nickolaus’ Wednesday addendum to the county website.
“I don’t know how somebody could generate that report, see 97.[6]3 percent and just go ‘Oh, wow, we did really good!’,” Washburn noted during our on-air interview yesterday. “It just strikes me as someone who just doesn’t have a good sense and feel of what numbers ought to be, what ballpark we’re playing in. We should have been in the 45 to 65 range, not the 97 range.”
Indeed, if Nickolaus’ claim is true — that the appearance of the absurdly high turnout rate is actually explained by unlisted Election Day registrations — one can only marvel at an election official reviewing that “97.63” percent turnout number in a final election report, but not thinking that an additional line, listing the number of Election Day registrations, would be important to include before publishing. At the very least, changing the description of the line to “REGISTERED VOTERS (PRIOR TO ELECTION DAY)”, or some such, would seem to have been common sense.
We’ve now suggested as much to Nickolaus who has replied to say, “Thanks for the suggestion.”
As to the “RUN DATE” of “1/08/08” as seen on the top of that report (see the screenshot above), Nickolaus explained tersely via email: “Reports were in 2008 when webpage was updated.”
That may be, although the next anomaly noticed suggests otherwise.
20,000 More Votes Than ‘Ballots Cast’ in 2006?
“Yourguide” moved on from the 2004 issue, at Daily Kos, by citing a problem which occurred in Waukesha in 2006 and which echoes parts of Nickolaus’ explanation for her failure to report Brookfield’s 14,000+ votes on Election Night last week. She had chalked that matter up to an initial problem where the Brookfield city clerk had improperly added additional columns to the Excel spreadsheet that was subsequently sent to the county for importing into the master results database in Microsoft Access on Election Night:
http://suggest.wi.gov/docview.asp?docid=11008&locid=122
Final results later showed Lufter losing to fellow Republican Bill Kramer by a significant margin.
County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus said some returns from the City of Waukesha inexplicably had data recorded in the wrong column, which momentarily skewed results.
Nickolaus and her staff resorted to correcting the city’s results manually a process that continued until 1 a.m., with staffers poring over a blizzard of numbers on computerized printouts.
So Nickolaus has been to this rodeo before, but doesn’t seem to have taken to the necessary steps to have avoided a similar problem five years later.
But then “yourguide” notes another anomaly equally, if not more puzzling than the turnout numbers from 2004. In Waukesha’s November 7, 2006 general election, as reported at the county website here, there appear to be more votes reported than actual “Ballots cast” in the election.
Another DailyKos blogger, “Cieran”, neatly synthesized the numbers from that report this way:
176,112 – Total votes for Governor/Lt Governor race
174,244 – Total votes for US Senator
174,047 – Total votes for Attorney General
170,440 – Total votes for Secretary of State
168,861 – Total votes for State Treasurer
In other words, as each of the 2006 statewide races listed above reveal, there were some 20,000 more votes reported than the number of “BALLOTS CAST – TOTAL” in Waukesha county, according to the county’s own report.
“Yourguide” goes on to note that “After 2006 the Waukesha County election summaries no longer have the number of ballots cast or the turnout percentage at the top of the reports.”
“Cieran” then adds this disturbing note to the article [emphasis in original]:
In this 2006 election, Van Hollen won the election for Attorney General with these numbers:
1,065,453 – Van Hollen (R)
1,056,594 – Falk (D)
A difference of 8,859 votes STATEWIDE.
Waukesha county, Kathy Nickolaus’ playground, reports 17,243 more votes cast for the Attorney General race in Waukesha county than there were total number of ballots cast.
.
How many more of those “extra” 17,243 votes were for Van Hollen than were for Kathleen Falk?? I’m guessing it’s somewhere right about 8,900 votes 😛
Milwaukee’s Journal Sentinel picked up on this dKos-discovered anomaly on Tuesday and received a confusing statement from Nickolaus in response to their query about it.
“The answer to your question,” she told the paper via email, “is that the number of ballots cast on the summary report will not equal the number of votes cast. It only reflects the votes reported electronically to the office. I have added an asterisk with this clarification to the webpage.”
On the county website’s election results page on Tuesday evening, an equally confusing asterisked comment was added, as such:
(Ballots cast will not be equal to official votes cast).
In trying to make sense of this explanation, we again went to to Fair Elections Wisconsin’s Washburn. He was equally perplexed by Nickolaus’ cryptic explanations, though offered a possibility of what she could be referring to.
His best guess, he told us, was that she is referring to the two cities in Waukesha — Menomonee Falls and Mukwonago — which use optical-scan systems made by ES&S. All of the other cities there use optical-scan systems (and some touch-screen machines for disabled voters who choose to use them) made Sequoia Voting Systems, allowing her to receive results electronically via modem or Internet from those towns for direct import into Sequoia’s WinEDS election results tracking system to produce results reports.
Results from the non-compatible ES&S system, Washburn suggested, would have to be entered manually, somehow, into her reporting system database.
After further queries to Nickolaus, in our attempt to get better details on her original cryptic explanation, she removed the asterisk comment, and updated the county’s results webpage with more details, including:
* 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.
So what results, specifically, are entered by hand versus electronically? She does not say on the county webpage, and she has yet to respond to our follow-up query on this. Are they the results from the two non-Sequoia towns as Washburn suggested? And/or are there other reasons ballots may not be scanned and then included in the totals electronically?
Most of Wisconsin sends mail-in absentee ballots to the precincts (wards, as they call them) to be scanned along with other ballots on Election Day, so those are unlikely to be included among ballots “entered by hand.” [Note: Milwaukee now counts absentees centrally, not at the precincts, though the entire state did still did so in 2006.]
Moreover, as the state allows for Election Day registration at the polls, provisional ballots — in most states, given to voters who don’t show up in the pre-printed poll books for any number of reasons — are rarely used in Wisconsin. Such ballots, if cast, however, would have to be sent back to the city or county headquarters where officials later verify the voter as properly registered before tallying (or rejecting) the ballot. So provisional ballots could be included among those “entered by hand” in the final results database.
But Nickolaus confirmed to us in email, “You are correct we do no not have many provisional ballots in Wisconsin.”
Washburn has also confirmed that provisionals are extremely rare in Wisconsin are unlikely to account for that many “extra” votes.
Could the ballots “entered by hand” be write-in votes? Op-scan systems cannot read write-in votes, so those must be examined by hand and, perhaps, entered into the system manually. But 20,000 of them in a single county, in all five statewide races in 2006? Seems like a whole lotta write-in votes, and not likely to account for them all — not by a long shot.
So where do those approximately 20,000 votes in each of the five statewide races listed above specifically come from? We’re left to guess at this hour, until and unless we receive a specific explanation from Nickolaus.
In the meantime, we tried adding up the results from the 2006 Attorney General race in Menomonee Falls and the town of Mukwonago to see if that might give us those “extra” 17,243 votes in that race. The numbers still don’t jibe.
According to Nickolaus’ published ward-by-ward results report published for the November 7, 2006 election (listed with a “RUN DATE” of “11/16/06”, as opposed to “1/08/08” as seen on the 2004 report discussed above, credited to the date the county election website was supposedly updated), there were 3,471 votes counted for AG in Mukwonago and 16,907 votes counted in Menomonee.
That’s 20,378 votes total from the two cities, and that would exceed the 17,243 “extra” votes seen in Nickolaus’ 2006 Attorney General results report.
So the specific and independently verifiable explanation for those 17,243 “extra” votes in the 2006 AG race at this time? We still don’t have one. If Nickolaus responds again, or updates the webpage a third time with an explanation, of course, we’ll update this item.
Final Thoughts for Now
As mentioned above, it is because of Nickolaus’ choice to not include city-by-city, much less ward-by-ward totals in her election results reports (a subject of many prior complaints by media, and a vexing problem for citizens attempting to oversee the results), that the 14,000+ votes said to have been cast, but not reported in the county numbers on Election Night, went unnoticed for a full 48 hours after polls closed, until Nickolaus finally announced it publicly (some 29 hours after she, apparently, had already discovered the problem herself) at her stunning press conference last Thursday.
Her refusal to offer such transparency, allowing the possibility of at least some citizen oversight, as other counties in Wisconsin — and, indeed, across most of the country — do, make her county even harder for all of us to provide checks and balances for democratic elections in Waukesha. It is those checks and balances that are key to the integrity of our system of democracy and our promise of self-governance, as we noted in our video “Special Comment” on “Democracy’s Gold Standard” as offered in the wake of the Wisconsin Supreme Court election debacle earlier this week.
While hand-marked paper ballots are used across most of the state, ultimately they do little good if the citizenry is not allowed to inspect them publicly, at the polls, on Election Night, in front of all parties and video cameras, with results posting at the precincts before ballots are moved, and the chain of custody becomes suspect. Instead, in most of Wisconsin, ballots are simply run through computer systems which often malfunction, are easily manipulated and impossible to verify as accurate without bothering to hand-inspect the ballots. Citizen oversight and, thus, self-governance become a chimera in the bargain, and we are all left instead to pick at the scraps and clues left behind years later to try and guess whether any given election was recorded accurately as per the voters’ intent.
That sort of election administration should be offensive to every American of any, all, or no political party.
Finally, we offer our kudos to the Daily Kos bloggers who have been digging into these matters, discovering these anomalies and forcing both media and election officials to do their jobs better.
We have had a long-standing complaint, documented in a number of occasions over the years on these pages and over the air, in regard to dKos’ (apparently) former practice of deleting diaries and banning users for investigating such election anomalies. If the articles by “yourguide” and “Cieran” indicate a change in policy over there, we are delighted to see it, and hope they will continue to focus on things that matter, such as the integrity of elections in our democracy.
All of the policy discussions in the world mean little if, at the end of the day, we don’t have a transparent, overseeable democracy in which every voter (or non-voter) can have complete confidence in the results. As this Wisconsin debacle demonstrates yet again, we’re still quite a ways off from that worthy goal.
As more and more citizens become interested in matters of Election Integrity, might we suggest “Democracy’s Gold Standard” for a quick primer on steps that can be taken now to fight for that important goal in the days, weeks, months and, yes, Presidential Elections ahead.
UPDATE, 8:45pm: Guess what? The WI Government Accountability Board, the body which oversees elections in the state, can’t understand Nickolaus’ explanation for the 2006 results either. Just in: “State investigating vote irregularities in Waukesha County going back 5 years”
It is definitely time to give Nickolaus a vaccime of a potent sort, because she is not going to take the medicine on her own.
The puzzling thing for me is that in 2006 she says that some returns from the city of Waukesha had inexplicably had data recorded in the wrong column. [emphasis mine] Waukesha County Voting Bedeviled I don’t see how it could be some and not all (or none) Weird.
The City of Waukesha accounted for 24,599 votes that night. If only some of them were double entered, that could account for the 17,243 “extra”, non-electronic votes. After all, it does say that she and her staff resorted to correcting the city’s results manually.
I don’t care if she’s found guilty or if she’s vindicated. I just want to get to the truth. Thanks for taking this up.
Excellent article! Thanks, Brad-fly! DIGGING and TWEETING it asap.
(*Love* the Monopoly graphic!)
Hmmm. Your tweet counter doesn’t seem to be working…
Brad,
This is to invite you to be my featured guest on “The Real Deal” on Wednesday, 20 April 2011, from 5-7 PM/CT. Let me know if that would work. I want to discuss the Waukesha fiasco and what you are reporting here. I reside near Madison and want to cover this.
Many thanks!
Jim
Email me and I will send you the details for linking up on radio.
Thanks for all the info Brad.
Imagine what it would take to get a voter role 97.63% ACCURATE, let alone fulfilled. The turnout exceeds the limits of accuracy. Amazing.
*roll
Thanks for the invite, Jim. Will touch base via email.
Thank you for the kind quotations.
The core problem though with these anomalies is there is no evidence with which to settle the questions. We are like the “Kemlinologists” from the 70’s. From the Wikipedia article [emphasis mine]:During the Cold War, lack of reliable information about the country forced Western analysts to “read between the lines” and to use the tiniest tidbits, such as the removal of portraits, the rearranging of chairs, positions at the reviewing stand for parades in Red Square, the choice of capital or small initial letters in phrases such as “First Secretary” and other indirect signs to try to understand what was happening in internal Soviet politics.
The 1970’s Kremlin is an open book compared to the administrative details of a US Election. Waukesha county Wisconsin is just latest in a long line of anomalies; Alvin Green in SC, CD-13 in Florida, Franklin county Ohio, Max Cleland in GA.
And yet again we, the supposedly sovereign citizens, are left with a lack of reliable information about the election which forces us to “read between the lines” and to use the tiniest tidbits and other indirect signs to try to understand what was happening during the election.
This lack of information, this lack of transparency is the core problem. The questions which arise and are documented in this article are the symptom.
Again the core problem is the lack of reliable information on how this election (or any election in America for that matter) was administered.
Here’s what happened: CHEATING, LYING, STEALING. Any questions?
RE: Here’s what happened: CHEATING, LYING, STEALING. Any questions?
Yes, just one. Where is the evidence?
Mistake, malfunction, and malice all look the same when there is no information with which to answer questions. That’s the problem.
Mistakes can be falsely attributed to malice (i.e cheating).
Machine malfunctions also can be deliberately mis-characterized as mistakes.
Thus, malicious manipulation (when caught) can be attributed to mistake or malfunction with plausibility.
It is the fact that election are administered from within an impenetrable fog with only the dimmest outlines of the precess being visible, which is the core problem.
There is no evidence at this time to know if there was cheating.
There is no evidence at this time to know if there was human error in the reporting.
There is no evidence at this time to know if there was mistake in the reporting software.
There is no evidence at this time to know and I fear there never will be any evidence available at any time in the future.
US Elections currently do not lend themselves to creating a permanent record of evidence on how the election was administered.
Here’s my question.
This might be nothing…but I was just looking at the City of Waukesha totals.
On April 6, the Waukesha Patch carried an article specifying that 15002 people cast votes in the City of Waukesha (which was 31.4% of the registered voters in that city).
http://waukesha.patch.com/articles/waukesha-voter-turnout-higher-than-2010-mayoral-election
However, when I add up all the City of Waukesha wards in the subsequent official canvas results posted at the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board site
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CBQQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fgab.wi.gov%2Fsites%2Fdefault%2Ffiles%2Fpage%2Fcontests_by_reporting_unit_for_county_use_waukesha_10084.xls&ei=SvSnTYufMMTagQf96fnzBQ&usg=AFQjCNEmLKBP91JRfv3bQ9KpuDmVkPjaFA
I come up with a total of 15729 votes for the Supreme Court race. Where did the extra 727 votes come from?
Brad, I know we Amurrikins have a really really short attention span (nuclear meltdown anyone? has anyone heard a story on the lamestream media about Japan in the last 24 hours?) But you must feel like the biggest broken record on this issue. I have decided I am gonna read every word of every article you write about this subject, for penance if nothing else. (No I am not a Catholic.) I am being forced to move to Canada and they have a totally different system that I’m gonna have to learn so as not to sound stupid & ignorant, but geez, how can you sound anything BUT stupid and ignorant with this bogus ‘system’ we’ve got set up here?? I commend you for your patience, the level of detail in these articles, the clarity, and the committed, dogged pursuit of fact! I have been involved in the California Clean Money Campaign, which I hope you can provide your faithful readers with more coverage: this is a SOLUTION to many of the problems we are facing as a country. If California can make the shift, the rest of the country may follow. People are becoming painfully aware that not only is something wrong ‘over there’ it is screamingly wrong RIGHT HERE RIGHT NOW in our own neighborhoods. I live (for two more weeks) in a tiny town near Oakland, CA, formerly reminiscent of Mayberry. I moved here 18 months ago. It was a passably vibrant little community. It felt reasonably safe. Clean. Busy. Charming. Well, over the past year, storefront after storefront has a for rent sign in the window. There are vacant buildings everywhere that are literally disintegrating before my eyes. A few new businesses take over something that had been established for decades, and they close within a few months due to insufficient business. It’s like watching a civilization die. Consumer culture ain’t my thang, but every store that closes impacts hundreds if not thousands. It HURTS to watch! My car got broken into a month ago on a bright Sunday morning at 9:30am! And a week later our neighbor’s apartment was broken into, also broad daylight, midweek. The times are getting desperate. Soon, nowhere will be safe if you don’t live in a gated community with armed security personnel. Do we wanna wait until our lives resemble the people in Mexico, where kidnappings, gang wars, thousands of deaths due to drug dealer conflicts, are a daily matter? Really folks, it’s gonna go there fairly soon. I keep writing these diatribes here, hoping to bring some fire into your reader constituency. Usually, my post stops all further comment (just sayin’). Have we gone numb? Are we so discouraged? Am I missing something? I am really PISSED that I have to leave the Bay Area, where I’ve lived for 20 years, and California, where I’ve lived for 33 years, and the United States where I’ve lived for most of 54 years (except two in the Phillipines as a tyke), because my husband is ill and we can’t afford to stay here. And we’re LUCKY! Because we CAN go to Canada. All those who don’t have this option, who DIE because there are no health care options available in the RICHEST nation in the world? Really. I am outraged! And you just keep writing and writing and writing. Well, Brad, I’ll keep reading, paying attention, and doing what I can to bring an end to this planned mayhem. It’s not a matter of which party to defend-they are BOTH complicit, or SUBJECT to the manipulations of a few hundred voracious sociopaths. It is time we put a stop to the machinations and put their legion of brain dead, idiot minions in JAIL! If we have to start all over, create an entirely new justice system, electoral system, health enhancement system, educational system, and political self-governance system, then let’s get to work! It’s got a better chance of helping us survive the coming global warming changes if we take back our country than just sitting and waiting for the other guy (like you, Brad) to explain just WHY there are so many voting anomalies in Waukesha or wherever. Anyone who subscribes to the Voting News e-list should have white hair, realizing how widespread this disastrous nonsense is. There apparently are thousands, if not millions of willing co-conspirators are following the orders that are the basis for taking down our country. Even if I must leave, I will NEVER stop fighting for the rights of human beings and other living things to live a decent, healthy, sustainable life. Too many have died for our soon-dead freedoms. I will not waste another moment of my life on absurd arguments, activities or distractions. If not now, when? If not us, who? Ok. Soapbox is clearly squashed from me stomping all over it. I shall go take a nap now. Be well. Threadkilla would be my new name, if someone else hadn’t taken it first. Ciao!!!
Thanks for the mention! I’ve got a new diary on DKos tonight too, a Badger’s perspective on Kathy Nickolaus’ new explanations.
My follow-up blog on Kathy’s explanation
I’d like to point out that she asterisk’d 8 elections, but only ONE of those asterisks had ballot totals listed on the election data, the Nov ’06 election.
There are TWELVE (12) elections, 10 before Nov ’06 and 2 afterwards that DO have ballot totals listed in the data, but all 12 do NOT have votes exceeding the ballot totals.
ONLY the Nov ’06 election data has votes exceeding ballots, and only the Attorney General race was close enough for the mysterious 17,243 votes to flip it.
Here’s a conservative blogger who claims to have resolved the 2006 votes vs ballots discrepancy
http://justmyopinion-mickey.blogspot.com/2011/04/more-stupidity-from-kossacks-httpwww.html
the biggest problem here to p[roving causality and a pattern other then inferentially is the retention schedule for the election data from both 2006 and this election. The law allows Nickolaus to erase the original tapes etc 22 months after an election. So good luck proving anything from 2006, which was a trial run IMO for the 2008 General election…
I think the thing that most people misunderstand about conspiracies is that they rarely involve people sitting down and planning something.
What generally happens is that a anomaly occurs and if that event appears to work against the interests of the people in charge it is investigated and the problem addressed. On the other hand, if it appears to work in favor of those same people they can often come up with a rationalization not to question. It is unlikely that Kathy Nicklaus has committed vote fraud, but her bumbling may have cast unprecedented scrutiny on a county with an anomalous voting record.
A 97.63% voter turnout? 20,000 more votes than cast? Why, its a MIRACLE!!
Using the True Vote Model to Analyze the Wisconsin 1988-2008 Presidential Elections
Richard Charnin (TruthIsAll)
April 15, 2011
With the news of an incredible 97.3% turnout of registered voters in the 2004 Waukesha County presidential election, we need an analysis of the Wisconsin 2004 presidential election.
Of the 236,642 registered voters in Waukesha, apparently 231,031 voted. That is unheard of turnout.
https://bradblog.com/?p=8472
The True Vote Model (TVM) is a spreadsheet that anyone connected to the internet can use to analyze presidential elections from 1988 to 2008..
https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=tpsLLEzC1Ccb7FsEN-EgZhQ#gid=0
In the six elections from 1988 to 2008, the Democrats won the average Wisconsin presidential recorded vote by 49.2-43.7%, a solid 5.5% margin.
In 2004, Kerry barely won the recorded vote by 49.7-49.3%., a measly 0.4% margin.
But Kerry won the unadjusted exit poll by 52.1-46.9%, a solid 5.2% margin.
The Census Bureau survey indicated that in Wisconsin approximately 13,000 more votes were cast than recorded (net uncounted votes).
Net Uncounted Vote = 13,000 = Uncounted – stuffed ballots.
We do not know how many ballots were uncounted or stuffed – only that the uncounted ballots exceeded stuffed by approximately13,000.
Consider three scenarios, assuming that the unadjusted exit poll was a close approximation of the True Vote.
1) 1% of total votes cast (30,000) were uncounted:
Then 17,000 ballots were stuffed and 56,000 votes were switched (electronically?) from Kerry to Bush.
2) 2% of votes cast (60,000) uncounted:
Then we have 47,000 stuffed ballots and 34,000 votes were switched.
3) 3% of votes cast (90,000) uncounted:
In this scenario 77,000 stuffed ballots were stuffed and 11,000 switched.
There are two statistics mentioned I think, even at this late date, can help point in the right direction.
The first mentioned was the difference between Ballots Cast vs Votes and this was partially addressed. If the total number of votes from the two cities not reporting electronically exceeds the difference between BC vs V, then her explanation is BS. Any number of things can add to the total of manually entered votes, but for the total of these two cities to exceed the difference would mean “something” had to subtract from their reported total. That doesn’t “jibe”.
Second is the remarkable turn out numbers. Nickolaus claims this rate is due to same day registrations adding to the number of voters as compared to the pre-election number of registered voters. If this were true, then some 100k people must have registered and voted in that election. Follow my logic: If they had a turnout of 50%; then ~118k pre-registered voters showed up and voted and ~113k would have had to register that day and voted. There should be a corresponding increase shown in the voter registration roles once they are updated after the election. Do the voter registration roles show this increase?
Note that this was an off year election, where historically, you don’t have an INCREASE in voters. I don’t think a 10 person ward in Vermont has ever demonstrated a turn out number like that.
ballots cast not meant to be a factual statement*
lol
ok from the comments in todays kos dairy,
she was elected in 2002; who said “hand-counted”? (3+ / 0-)
Recommended by:standingup, Red Bean, On The Bus
What Nickolaus wrote was that some results were “hand entered,” not that the ballots were hand-counted.
Incidentally, that is what the Milwaukee Journal-Bulletin reported happening in the primary. The article says, “Because Menomonee Falls and Mukwonago use a different brand of equipment than the rest of the county, those two municipalities were unable to file Tuesday’s returns electronically with the county.” It also says that Nickolaus hoped to have this fixed by November. Let’s suppose for a moment that she didn’t.
OK, so the canvass report shows 156,804 ballots cast and 176,112 votes in the governor’s race, a difference of 19,308. The state turnout report shows 177,424 voters, including 17,265 in Menomonee Falls and 2,591 in Mukwonago — that’s 19,856 votes. Am I a complete tool for suggesting that those two villages probably materially account for the “ballots cast” discrepancy? Even Kathy Nickolaus may be right once or twice a week.
Assuming for a moment that that is wrong, what is the implication? That Nickolaus changed some or all of the vote counts without the municipal clerks or the canvass board noticing, but didn’t bother to change the “ballots cast” number, even years later? That is logically possible, but I’m not sure why anyone thinks it is the most likely alternative.
by HudsonValleyMark on Fri Apr 15, 2011 at 06:33:44 AM PDT
i dont post at kos (or even know how) but brad has already examined why this theory does not hold water
from brads article
john said,
everything you said is true however there is one thing the evidence in the 06 results does point to….the results are impossible(the sum of the parts can nevr be greater than the parts) since they are not possible they are inaccurate
Most of the precincts in Waukesha use Sequoia. Sequoia has a history of modem transmission problems. Another Sequoia County, Indian River, Florida the SOE stopped using the Sequoia modems because when the results were transmitted they doubled the election returns.
When the SOE realized the double reporting she had to correct the results. Kay Clem, SOE of Indian River has recently resigned. But Palm Beach County’s Susan Bucher, who is blamed for late returns (because the cartridges and election materials are driven to the central voting center. Palm Beach is a huge county.) has promised to buy new modems in time for the 2012 Presidential elections. However, she refuses to purchase so far any of the modems offered to her by Sequoia, early on because of Indian River’s transmission errors and her county’s election administration needs.
An old saying about computers is “Garbage in, garbage out. Like garbage, our election system is so dirty nobody is really willing or able to sort through things later. Mainstream media enables the destruction of ACORN based on faux news stories, but avoids reporting on ELECTION FRAUD. Thanks Brad for being one of the few brave truth tellers and not letting this theft go quietly into the night.
Ed Schultz got mad at me when I tried to bring up Wisconsin and the problems with electronic voting. He was not going to talk about the electronic voting machines..”Obama won on the machines”. I am so furious with him..He cut me off and was totally rude… No more TIVO for Ed.
Affinis @ 12 asked:
Good eye. I looked into it. Spoke to the city’s Deputy Treasurer Clerk, reviewed their official numbers (they track only number of voters, not results, allowing the County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus to do that instead), as well as to the reporter at the Waukesha Patch who reported that 15,002 number on election night.
It looks like that unofficial number left out District 7, which resulted in the additional numbers.
The Waukesha Patch reporter, Sarah Millard, has now posted a new article with more details on the updated numbers.
That all seems to check out. But, of course, that refers to votes cast, not who they were cast for. On that, we’ve still got to rely simply on the computer-reported results from the op-scan systems.
While these numbers seem out of order I’ve been a poll worker in Madison WI on and off for 11 years (chief inspector for 7 yrs) and these situations aren’t beyond reason.
2004 was a strong election year that brought out a lot of new voters. Some wards in Madison had over 100% turnout via this calculation method since there were a lot of new registrations.
The ‘more votes than ballots cast’ can occur when cities and counties underestimate turnout and run out of standard ballots that can get fed into the tabulators. When this happened in two different wards I worked we received emergency replacement ‘photocopied’ ballots on 8.5″x14″ office paper (normal ballots were 9.75″x22″ card stock). These had to be hand-tallied and added to the official count later. In one election our ward alone was short by over 200 standard ballots and we spent over two hours tallying these emergency ballots (resulting in a rather late return).
The key number to look out for is whether the number of ‘voter slips issued’ matches the number of ‘ballots used’ (both ‘cast’ [fed into the tabulator] and hand-counted). I don’t know how long election paperwork is kept after an election (I know ballots aren’t kept very long if there are no recounts or investigations) but in Madison we record information like this in the election paperwork. If votes were added later there would be irregularities in that paperwork.
I still believe there were enough irregularities in Waukesha to warrant an investigation of Kathy Nickolaus’ procedures however the problems mentioned in this article have valid explanations and I think are within reason.
Bev Harris (blackboxvoting.org) notes that Wisconsin “uses an idiotic system for no-fault absentee voting, in which no validation of the envelope is performed except to see that it contains a name and address from the voting rolls. Thus, anyone with access to the voter history list could whip out a mailmerge program and, with blank ballots, could create their absentee blitz.”
In other words, anyone with access to the voter rolls can manufacture absentee votes. Absentee votes are almost 30% of the total.
What sort of trail of clues would that sort of election fraud generate? Impossibly high turn out rates, even greater than 100% if the scammer needed the extra votes to swing the election. Or, if the election was close enough that a recount might be possible, including an examination of poll books, it might be necessary to be careful to remove people who voted in person from your manufactured absentee vote mail merge — that might even take a few days to accomplish…
I’m surprised you didn’t look at the actual population numbers for Waukesha County.
The population increased more than 6% between 2000 and 2009. As of 2009, there were just over 383,000 people in Waukesha. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to estimate that the real population in 2004 was lower (possibly by quite a bit) but we can stick with the 2009 numbers to make a point.
http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/55/55133.html
Now, that link tells us how many people were 18 or under.. 23.4%. That number is ALL people, not just citizens. That’s a decent base line to use to generate the number of potential voters in the county in 2009.
Long story short (aka. do the math yourself 😉
If you consider the number of votes supposedly CAST in 2004 with a decent estimate of the total number of voters in the county in 2004, you get about 78-79% turnout.
Even if you accept that voting was heavy, and that the county usually has high voting rates, that’s still remarkably and suspiciously high. 2004 did post some high voter turnout for the US.. but the national average was only 58% according to the census bureau.
I would think, with a fairly large population.. nearly 400,000 total residents (of all ages).. It’s pretty remarkable to get roughly 80% turnout of voting age residents for an election in a year where the national average was 22% lower. I mention total residents at nearly 400K [not voting age] because there’s a lot of under 18 year olds.. and having kids is just one more deterrent to getting to the polls.
oops.. it’s a minor detail but I should amend my above comment for clarity…
I said..
I should have said…
That is.. 78-79% of every person who could have potentially voted because they were a resident and of the appropriate age. fudging up and down with the 2009 numbers but if there is a lower population in 2004 than 2009, that would increase the turnout percentage.. of course not including people who were actually 18 years old lowers them a small fraction. We also ignore all the people who can’t make it because they’re busy.. or because they’re incapacitated. The number of people that can make it to vote will always be less than the number legally capable of voting. Those turnout percentages would be even hire if we reasonably assume a certain percentage of people qualified to vote simply couldn’t because they worked late, or the baby sitter called off.. or they’re confined to a nursing home..