Saving ACCESS
By now you have read about the 7,000 votes that magically appeared on the computer of Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus. If not, Susie Madrak has the story which is encapsulated in this paragraph:
Wisconsinites should respond with equal skepticism to the news that Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus, a former Republican legislative staffer who worked for Prosser when he served as Assembly speaker and with Gov. Scott Walker when he was a GOP rising star, has found all the votes that justice needs to secure his re-election and that the governor needs to claim a “win” for his agenda.
Susie’s article mentions that Nickolaus claimed the problem was because she forgot to hit “save” after entering the data initially, and that computer people have already pointed out that you don’t have to “save” in ACCESS, it saves data automatically.
I go back so far that I used the first version of ACCESS. It was an ill-fated, terrible communications program, so bad that Microsoft expunged it from memory and reused the name for the data base component of the Windows Office suite.
If you want a taste for how thoroughly integrated into ACCESS the autosave function is, read this forum entry about stopping Access from autosaving. You can’t just turn it off, you have to program around it, and even then, you might not stop it completely.
I did some volunteer work for a group that used an ACCESS data base, and we really wanted to verify the data before it was entered because the people who were doing the entry were all volunteers. In the end it was easier to clean up the data after the fact than to fight with ACCESS.
If she entered anything into an ACCESS data field, it was saved. There are a lot of problems with ACCESS, but losing data isn’t one of them. With 15 years of IT experience, Nickolaus knows that.
17 comments
But no one else knows that do they?
Or do they?
I’ll bet all the Rethugs do.
And they are once again laughing up their sleeves.
Cause the Dims just love not to follow up the fraudulent voting results!
Or history since at least 2000 is no guide.
Thanks for the update!
S
It is time for someone to file a Federal complaint, and really investigate what’s going on in that county. This isn’t the first election where there were irregularities, and she doesn’t cooperate with auditors.
The “loser” for the judgeship is a prosecutor, so I doubt she’ll let it go.
Wow — a Republican blowing a lot of BS to cover their tracks — some things never change, do they.
I’m not sure it was even necessary. The race was too close to call, even closer than the Al Franken election, so I don’t have any idea who won, and neither does anyone else. A couple of hundred votes just isn’t enough in a state-wide election to show a clear trend, and less than a third of the voters made the effort.
That said, this individual has proved time and again that she is not competent to do her job. She just hasn’t managed to actually conduct a clean election since she has been in office, and isn’t enough of a manager to find an employee who can do it for her.
From my days in intelligence and then law enforcement, I have great appreciation for a well executed fraud, even when I know they are frauds. I appreciate the craftsmanship involved. This woman is a hack. She has clearly exceeded her level of competence. She even has Republican officials complaining about her.
You’re right, of course, they just can’t help themselves. A few hundred votes, and no one would have noticed, but she went for thousands in an attempt to prevent a recount. No art, no class.
So let me get this straight. She’s basically using Access like a giant spreadsheet to manually type in the votes into Access cells as precincts call in than have Access add up all the votes that were manually entered? There is no automated software program doing all this?
There certainly needs to be a recount here, because if she could forget one whole city when manually entering data into Access cells, what else did she forget? They need to go back to the precinct level and look at the actual signed vote books (the numbered and serialized one where the last page is the certified final vote count from the machines at that precinct, countersigned by representatives of both parties) and re-add all this again, because clearly this bimbo simply got distracted and didn’t enter the data, and now is saying she “forgot to hit save” when nothing of the sort happened. If she didn’t enter *that* data accurately, what *other* data did she enter inaccurately? Talk about your known unknowns!
– Badtux the “Math is hard!” Penguin
They are using the Optiscan system which will automatically “phone home” with the data at the end of the day, and it is stored on a data card. They have paper ballots which can be rescanned if necessary, and the local signature books, so this should be simple to verify.
We use scanners locally, and the votes are rescanned at the central site for a verification before the Supervisor of Elections signs off on the numbers. That’a how they catch any local problems with equipment. It has never happened, but our system makes sure it would be caught if it did,
I assume that the ballots are serial numbered, just like ours, and they can determine which ballots are from which precincts based on the numbers, also, how many ballots the precinct used.
I can understand plugging the numbers into a spreadsheet to see trends and totals, but don’t quite understand why you would use ACCESS to do this, unless she wrote the program.
In one of the articles about her past performance it was mentioned that she refused to use the existing system in the office, which I assume was the Optiscan software. It sounds like she does everything manually, using the computer as an adding machine. Not exactly rational behavior for someone with an IT background.
Apparently the rumor that Nickolaus innocently failed to save a file in Access was advanced (started? don’t know) by, of all people, Nate Silver. ellroon sent me a link to his post; here is the comment thread she began on my site, and here is my reply extracted from two comment posts:
Accidental failure to save? in Access? MFA!
Oops; I omitted the last of the three comments I made:
OT: I don’t know what is going on, maybe Blogger hates me, but I keep losing comments at your place. I preview them because half the time the code doesn’t appear, and they are there when I post, but when I come back later, they are gone. It isn’t consistent, so I can’t really give you a pattern to debug, but I do comment at your place more that you can see.
There is nothing innocent about claiming you lost something in ACCESS because you “forgot to save”. As soon as you make that claim, anyone who has ever used ACCESS knows you are lying. If she lies about that, she will lie about almost anything. She has a clear pattern of “playing games” with elections. and has been called on it by Republican officials as well as Democrats.
It is past time for a serious, independent investigation into what she is doing, because there is something really wrong in that county.
My understanding is that they use the Optiscan system, so there are paper ballots. There are also documents from the precincts that will indicate how many people voted. Everything associated with the election needs to be reviewed and verified.
OT: I wondered where you’d gone, Bryan. The comments you lost never ended up in my spam bucket, either; they were just gone altogether, at least from where I sit. I’ll research the problem, not that I’ll necessarily be able to fix it. After all, we’re talking about Blogger here…
Back on topic, I can’t help being reminded of your Kathryn Whatshername… I know I’m blocking on it, but you know who I mean, the gal who facilitated the theft of Florida in 2000, who was eventually rewarded with a congressional seat but soon lost it. Nickolaus appears to want to follow the same path, and so far, she seems to be getting away with it.
MS Access is obsessive about saving data that is viewed in any kind of form, whether it’s an image of a table, a query (of the kind designed to do updates or appends) or an actual Form sitting atop one or more tables or queries. Move a cursor onscreen… the row(s) you touched are updated. Close any sort of view of a table, a query, a Form… all the rows you changed or added are updated. In fact, it’s damned difficult to prevent Access from updating if you want to. In a lot of office settings, this is not such a bad approach, but it wreaks havoc if you’ve used Access as a front end for, say, a SQL Server database, and didn’t get every detail exactly right.
I think this county clerk needs to spend some quality time in front of, say, an investigation by a congressional committee, or perhaps just a state-level court would be sufficient. How ironic that people like her are called “Republicans” when what they do is the antithesis of desired official behavior in a republic.
Re: your problem leaving comments… I found the following on a Blogger help thread from last December…
This is not exactly your problem, but it sounds related, and I can imagine that you in particular may have disabled third-party cookies for some reason. Most people have no problems, and I use Firefox exclusively (hey, I’m on Linux), with AdBlock+, but I haven’t tried putting up comments in Private Mode, for example. You might also try commenting from IE or Chrome just to see what happens.
I temp’d at our local Elections office for many years and it amazes me at the detail that we had to go through to make sure EVERYTHING was counted correctly….ESPECIALLY during recounts. (Went through a particularly nasty one). Votes didn’t just “magically” appear. One person could NOT declare that they “found” votes. For anyone to believe this cr*p, is beyond me.
Jill, if 20 votes had showed after the fact in this county under our former supervisor of election, even if they changed nothing, she would have conducted an internal investigation – involving fireants, noon-time sun, snakes. I rarely liked the results in this county, but never doubted the validity of those results.
The only touch-screen voting machines we have for the use of the handicapped, and it took a court order to get them used in an election. Pat wanted paper. We have no guarantee that electricity will be available for voting during the hurricane season, and the dates are firmly fixed.
OT: It is probably the cookies, Steve, because I dump them every time I shut down, and restrict those those that I will accept. I don’t like being tracked.
It isn’t a big deal to tweek that, and, at least I know why it happens.
Steve, you are thinking o0f Cruella de Harris, Princess Kate of the Griffin Empire in Central Florida. The seat in Congress was hers by birthright as a granddaughter of Ben Hill Griffin, who created the agribusiness that employs most of the people in her former Congressional district. The only candidate that would have had a chance to defeat her in an election would have been a first cousin, and the family doesn’t allow that sort of thing.
The Republicans stiffed her. The reward was supposed to be the Senate, but they talked her into taking “her” seat in the House, and ran Mel Martinez for the Senate instead when Bob Graham retired. And then they gave her zero support when she finally won the primary fight to face Bill Nelson.
Nickolaus should look at what happen to Katherine Harris, who had her own power base and money, and see how the Republicans treat women who do the “dirty jobs” – they may use them, but they don’t reward them.
The certification of the vote has been delayed pending an investigation by the state, and everyone has “lawyered-up”. Let Franken part doh begin.
Bryan, back in 2004, when I was still able to walk blocks, I was a volunteer deputy voter registrar. All such deputies in my county must be trained by the elected Assistant Voter Registrar, who holds several short classes around the county for the purpose. Of course in this county the Voter Registrar is always a Republican, but that didn’t matter; she would schedule classes for anyone interested, including our neighborhood Democratic club. At the class, to us, she privately admitted that she simply disapproved of what happened in Florida in 2000, and emphasized that we were not going to do that kind of thing in Harris County, TX. As far as I could ever tell, she ran a clean shop, and I think I’d have known: on another occasion I had to do battle with an earlier Voter Registrar over some lost registrations. But the Assistant was living proof that not all Republicans are liars, cheats and thieves. You may have to look long and hard to find one who is not…
While you do get politicians running for voter registrar or supervisor of elections, I think the majority are professionals who take pride in what they do. Obviously we have had Republicans for a long time here, but you wouldn’t notice if you looked at the way things were conducted.
In the 2000 election the Bush campaign challenged the way absentee ballots were handled in Okaloosa County. Miss Pat was livid at the implication that she wasn’t counting every absentee vote, because they are almost all from the military in this county, and her husband is retired military. There were people who wondered if she would quit the Republican Party or even her job over what she saw as an insult to her integrity.
The local party put a lot of effort into calming her down, because she was the most trusted elected official in the county. She has since retired and her deputy was elected to the post.