Kathy Nickolaus says the vote numbers don't add up because some municipalities don't have modems to send the results. When the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel asked why the manual votes weren't added later, she told them, "We do not change the ballots cast."
Yeah, something doesn't add up:
Wisconsin Democrats are now crying foul over election administration in heavily Republican Waukesha County -- and not just in the recent Supreme Court race, in which County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus (R) announced the discovery of 14,000 untabulated votes from a whole municipality that put conservative Justice David Prosser ahead. In a letter to the state Government Accountability Board, which oversees elections, state Dem chair Mike Tate is now raising doubts about the county's tabulated votes in the narrowly decided 2006 state attorney general race.
Key quote from the letter:
The Waukesha County Clerk website Tuesday said there were 118,342 votes for Van Hollen and 55,608 votes for Falk, a total of 173,950 votes. (There are an additional 97 write-in votes tabulated for a total of 174,047 votes assigned to candidates from Waukesha County.)
However, at the top of the same page, the Waukesha County Clerk, under the heading "BALLOTS CAST - TOTAL," the number of total ballots reported is 156,804. This is an under-reporting of 17,243 votes. I note with serious concern that this discrepancy is more than enough to have swung the statewide election against the Republican and for the Democrat.
The Web page that Tate refers to can be found here.
Tate notes in his letter that the county's web site has been amended recently, in order to offer an explanation of how the number of "total ballots" reported is calculated, and how it can differ from the actual total number of votes.
