Move Over Cruella de Harris
The crown for corrupt elections may have been stolen by a County Clerk in Wisconsin.
Via Attaturk, the Wisconsin State Journal reports that the State [is now] investigating vote irregularities in Waukesha County going back 5 years
The results for the 2006 attorney general’s race, for example, show 174,047 votes for either Democrat Kathleen Falk, Republican J.B. Van Hollen or write-in candidates, a total that is 17,243 votes higher than the total ballots cast recorded elsewhere in the results.
In her note, [Waukesha County Clerk Kathy] Nickolaus said the reference to ballots 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” but does not include “any hand-entered results.”
The State is rather interested what Ms Nickolaus means about “hand-entered results”.
While it is very normal for the totals for any individual contest to be less than the total number of ballots cast, there is no legal way for it to be higher. Whether you are faking financials or election results, it is rather basic to make sure that the column totals reflect what you are reporting. This tends to make me believe that Ms Nickolaus wasn’t actually telling a “big lie” about losing data from not saving an ACCESS data base, but that she was too stupid to know her answer was wrong.
6 comments
Yes. That’s always a consideration.
The simpler answer, however, may be that she just didn’t care.
She certainly hadn’t been exposed before, had she?
And “they” always bail “theirs” out.
So why should she have cared?
It’s very strange. People have been complaining about the way she conducts elections for years, Republicans included, but she got re-elected and hasn’t been thoroughly investigated before now. It’s like no one thought it was important enough to do something about it.
Now that it is out in the public, there are going to be a lot of hard questions asked, not simply about her, but about the people who should have been monitoring her.
Well, she may have meant absentee ballots, which are processed at the elections office rather than at the polling places, to explain the difference. As you say tho, darn strange… she seems to have Box 13’s in favor of Republicans FAR too often….
Absentee ballots are scanned like all of the others and there is no reason not to poll that scanner the same way as those in the precinct. You just get the feeling that there is a major problem. The real question is misfeasance or malfeasance – is she stupid or crooked?
Bryan, why do you believe those two possibilities are mutually exclusive? 😈
They aren’t, but that’s too confusing for a jury, so you have to pick just one.
As I have been known to remark to more than one individual under arrest – “If you are so smart, why are you sitting on a bench with your hands cuffed behind your back?’