You thought Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Prosser, a Republican and Scott Walker backer had lost the election to his Dem opponent yesterday by a narrow margin? Well, surprise surprise, a Republican County Clerk for Waukesha County, well known for her — let us say less than sterling reputation for honesty and competence — suddenly discovered “7,582 votes uncounted votes for Prosser” on her computer, or just enough to force the putative Democratic challenger, JoAnne Kloppenberg, to have to pay for a statewide recount, rather than have the state pay for an automatic recount.
And get this: she found all those missing votes on her personal computer, which, unlike any other county in Wisconsin, is used by her to tally votes from her county;s precincts. How amazing is that?
[L]ate Thursday, the county clerk in Waukesha, a Republican stronghold, said workers had found 7,582 votes uncounted votes for Prosser.
News of the uncounted votes came as officials throughout Wisconsin were conducting county canvasses, a final review of voting records that allows the state to certify this week’s bitterly contested elections. […]
Kathy Nickolaus, the Waukesha clerk, apologized for the uncounted votes and blamed “human error.”
She said at a news conference that she had failed to properly save a spreadsheet showing one town’s voting results. […]
Last fall, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel newspaper reported the Waukesha County Board had ordered an audit of Nickolaus’s office, citing concerns about the integrity of the equipment she used he backup system.
The newspaper said the move came after Nickolaus removed the election results collection and tallying system from the county computer network last spring and installed it on standalone personal computers in her office.
The newspaper quoted an official saying Nickolaus had been “uncooperative with attempts to have information technologists review the system and confirm the backups.”
Yes, you see, they are so brazen that they don’t care that we know this is an attempt to steal the election for Prosser and make it difficult for Kloppenburg to pay for a statewide recount:
In WI, an automatic recount at state-expense is triggered if an election is within .5%, and we have a fully verifiable paper trail to audit election results. That means in this election with approximately 740k for Kloppenburg and 739k for Prosser, the vote gets recounted at state-expense if the election is within ~7400 votes.
So the last 2 days the WI-GOP has been scrambling trying to figure out how they can still get Prosser into office. What was the result of their brain-storming? Add a few extra votes in a friendly area (Waukesha), and call it a clerical error. But in order to steal the election, they NEED to be able to keep a recount from occurring, because a recount would expose their attempted fraud to the light of day.
So they couldn’t just give Prosser a couple hundred to put him barely in the lead by 40. They had to give him more than 7500 in order to get above the threshold for automatic recount, so that the only way for a recount to happen would be if Kloppenburg ponies up the money for a state-wide recount, which could be expensive. Granted, all of us in WI would be happy to donate to a potential recount effort if it gets to that point, but the resolve of the Kloppenburg camp remains to be seen.
How very convenient that the only county in which the Republican County Clerk uses her personal computer to collect the election results suddenly discovers, after Prosser lost the race by 204 votes, on her personal computer, just enough previously unreported votes for Prosser to make him the winner, and not by a slim margin, but by one large enough to make a recount extremely costly and difficult.
I don’t know about you, but I can smell the stink of this blatant attempt at corruption and fraud in Wisconsin by the Republicans all the way over in Western New York where I live. Hell I bet that you could can smell it in Hawaii, too.
And you know what they say about not passing the smell test …
