Investigating, fixing Nickolaus election errors to cost $256,300

July 09, 2012

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Kathy Nickolaus

Election 2012

Visit our election section for complete coverage of the 2012 spring, fall and recall elections.

By Larry Sandler of the Journal Sentinel

A consultant's report traces problems in reporting Waukesha County election results directly to mistakes by outgoing County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus - mistakes that will cost county taxpayers more than a quarter of a million dollars to fix.

Nickolaus had promised to post timely results online and update them periodically for the April 3 election. But the public didn't learn the results of contested local races for hours, while reporters and election reporting service representatives were forced to tabulate the vote totals themselves from long paper tapes hanging on the walls of a meeting room.

The embattled county clerk already was under scrutiny because of her role in the 2011 state Supreme Court race, when she left the entire city of Brookfield out of countywide vote totals. When those 14,000 votes were added in, two days after the election, Justice David Prosser had won by 7,000 votes, instead of narrowly losing to Assistant Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg, as the original count showed. But the uncertainty over the Waukesha County vote led to a statewide recount that confirmed Prosser's victory.

Nickolaus, a Republican, agreed to withdraw from directly overseeing this year's gubernatorial recall election after County Executive Dan Vrakas, a former GOP legislator, threatened to call for her resignation if she didn't hand off her election duties. She also announced she would not seek re-election in No vember.

After the April election, Vrakas told the county Department of Administration to hire a consultant "to get to the bottom of what the problems were," said Norm Cummings, director of administration. The full report from SysLogic Inc., a Brookfield consulting firm, was not immediately available Monday, but some of its findings are briefly summarized in a funding measure being considered by the County Board.

SysLogic linked the April problems to an upgrade that Nickolaus ordered in the county's election software before the balloting. The firm found that Nickolaus was the only person trained to program the upgraded software, but she "did not follow the proper protocol, resulting in the failure of the functionality to compile election results," the fund transfer ordinance says.

At the time, Nickolaus had said that when her staff tried to upload results from voting machine memory packs into the reporting program, it wouldn't work.

"We were shocked," she said, because she and her staff had tested the reporting program "many times."

Both in the April election and in the 2011 high court race, the problems were compounded by the lack of backup for Nickolaus and her system, the firm found. That echoes long-standing complaints from Cummings about the way Nickolaus has managed her computer systems.

"She didn't allow anyone to help," Cummings said. "With every election, there's a huge risk that something will go wrong."

Nickolaus and Vrakas did not return telephone calls seeking comment.

After Nickolaus stepped aside, Command Central LLC, the Minnesota election software vendor, wasn't able to arrange training for other county staffers until late August, Cummings said. That led the county to hire Command Central to program the software itself for the May 8 recall primary, the June 5 recall general election and the upcoming Aug. 14 primary, at a cost of $237,300, he said.

Later in August, Command Central will train Deputy County Clerk Kelly Yaeger and a county information technology staffer in programming the software for $4,000, the funding measure says. Without that training, the county would have to spend another $67,600 for Command Central to handle the programming for the Nov. 6 general election, the measure says.

"We can't take the chance with only one person knowing it (the programming)," Cummings said.

Cummings stressed that the consultant report found only errors and poor procedures, with no evidence of fraud. The problems are confined to how vote totals are compiled by the county clerk's office, and have nothing to do with how voting is administered by municipal clerks' offices, he said.

The SysLogic report cost $15,000, for a total of $256,300 to investigate and fix the election reporting problems, the funding measure says. That money will come from the county's contingency fund, if the County Board agrees.

In addition to that $256,300, supervisors are being asked to take another $131,000 out of the contingency fund to cover the costs of the recall elections. Together with $60,000 previously appropriated, that would bring the county's share of recall election costs to $191,000.

The fund transfer is to be considered July 17 by the board's Personnel Committee, July 18 by the board's Finance Committee and July 24 by the full board.