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Justice Rears Her Head in Wisconsin As Kathy Nickolaus is Investigated by GAB
In case you were wondering where justice was hiding in Wisconsin, she’s reared her head in Waukesha County. County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus will be investigated by the Government Accountability Board, which certified the Wisconsin Supreme Court election in question.
A former Dane country prosecutor will finally be looking into Nickolaus’ conduct. And by conduct, I mean misconduct, including open ballot bags with no secure chain of custody, voter rolls with tags that don’t match ballot bags, a canvas called a day early which took place with Nickolaus never telling the other canvassers about the “lost” votes for two days during the canvas and much more.
This particular Nickolaus saga started when she announced that she had left the city of Brookfield off of the totals she initially reported, but this is hardly her first brush with being investigated. Nickolaus has a track record of criminal investigations and reprimands from county officials regarding the failure of security in her procedures, which she chose to ignore, preferring to keep all of the voting data on her computer and refusing to upload it per procedure to the county computers. Under this modus operandi, she suddenly discovered votes she had “lost” by forgetting to press “save” and hence, Nickolaus came under scrutiny. Normally in a canvas, those votes could be accounted for in real ballots by the canvassers, but they were not given an opportunity to verify Nickolaus’s found votes as she did not tell them about the error until minutes before they faced a press conference, long after the canvas was completed.
In 2005, Ms. Nickolaus was found to have sent out “sample ballots” to the voters that came premarked for a certain candidate. Ms Nickolaus’ many errors always benefit a Republican, but this should be no surprise as she used to be the computer analyst for the GOP assembly, during which tenure she was granted immunity in a criminal investigation resulting from said work.
The Post Crescent reports:
The complaint against Kathy Nickolaus was filed with the state’s Government Accountability Board by campaign officials for JoAnne Kloppenburg, who lost the April 5 election to Justice David Prosser.
Kloppenburg’s campaign manager said Wednesday that Tim Verhoff informed the campaign that he’d be investigating.
The wheels of justice can be slow and frustrating. It will be even more disturbing if the misconduct of Nickolaus proves to have swung the election results for the incumbent conservative Supreme Justice Prosser, who won after initial results had his challenger Kloppenburg winning. Since then, Prosser was the swing vote reversing Judge Sumi’s void of the bill that killed collective bargaining in Wisconsin and he has been accused of choking a female Supreme Court Justice during those deliberations. The choking incident is currently under investigation.
The good news is that the GAB did not turn their backs on the logs detailing the problems with the Waukesha County process provided by the Kloppenburg campaign.
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19 Responses to Justice Rears Her Head in Wisconsin As Kathy Nickolaus is Investigated by GAB
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DannyEastVillage
Jul. 15th, 2011 at 2:35 pm
Wow. Well–that didn’t take too long. But the Dane County prosecutor is risking his or her life by doing this: powerful forces are behind the campaign to denature the Wisconsin judiciary as part of the plan to destroy unions. Less powerful persons than the Koch brothers have had people killed for such things in other times and places–and I’m not talking about long-past history either.
DannyEastVillage
Jul. 15th, 2011 at 2:38 pm
The powerful are allowed to do anything they want to working people in the name of “free enterprise” or “the free market system.” But when working people begin to push back the powerful accuse us of “class warfare.”
Reynardine
Jul. 15th, 2011 at 2:46 pm
It’s called DARVO (Deny, Accuse, Recast Victim as Offender).
Dianne Lee
Jul. 15th, 2011 at 2:54 pm
This IS class warfare. I have my torch and pitchfork, and I’m trying to find a guillotine, but they don’t seem to be making them anymore. Need to start a business, because if the Republicans keep up this crap there could be a pretty good market.
AFM
Jul. 15th, 2011 at 2:44 pm
So what will happen? The judge still keeps his job even if they find out he actually didn’t win. This woman should pay a fine and be fired and never allowed to work any precints where there are computers or voters. Where there is smoke there is fire.
KatzKids
Jul. 16th, 2011 at 1:09 am
Pay a fine? She should go to jail for a good long time.
m-girl
Jul. 18th, 2011 at 12:00 am
How about SHE GOES DIRECTLY TO JAIL FOR ELECTION FRAUD and that judge is immediately removed and all his decisions nullified retroactovely? That is the minimum.
Thorncrest
Jul. 15th, 2011 at 2:53 pm
If the ‘found votes’ were actually never justified….how can the results be justified?
And how many previous elections are perhaps invalid?
Should she be barred from any future elections until cleared?
How do we know the GAB is not infiltrated with anomalies after they judged Prosser the winner even with so many ballot bags that were obviously tampered with? FOR TWO DAYS
Shouldn’t the federal government be involved with such serious allegations?
Wendy W.
Jul. 15th, 2011 at 4:21 pm
Before even one more ballot is counted, election law should prevent the counting of any ballots that were not properly secured at the proper time. Ballots simply cannot come strolling in from somebody’s desk or computer. There is NO WAY to verify whether the ballots were changed, because, for instance, a Kloppenburg vote could be made into an overvote by adding a vote for Prosser; and a ballot that was legitimately an undervote could be converted to a Prosser vote. Any wayward ballot MUST consequently be disqualified. Otherwise, why bother with an election at all? Machine-rigging must be eliminated, too, by never using a voting machine ever again. It’s not that hard to hand-count ballots, and it’s the only way to assure that the easily rigged machines play no part in deciding elections.
Barb T
Jul. 18th, 2011 at 3:10 pm
I couldn’t agree more Wendy! HCPB is the only way to protect ourselves!
Shiva (Moderator)
Jul. 15th, 2011 at 4:23 pm
The choking incident should have taken 1 week to investigate.
But one has to wonder how this woman could have so many counts against her and remain on the job to ruin the justice system
She is the Clarence Thomas of Wisconsin
Sarah Jones
Jul. 15th, 2011 at 4:36 pm
Yup.
Susan
Jul. 15th, 2011 at 6:32 pm
What always bothered me is when the 14,000 votes were “found”, why didn’t any of those votes affect the outcomes of the other races? If they were truly found votes, wouldn’t they have skewed the outcomes of many of the races? This was never addressed and I wonder if Kathy spent 2 days making these fake ballots and didn’t think through how to include the other candidates.
Barb T
Jul. 18th, 2011 at 3:11 pm
Good questions Susan! I hope someone has some good answers!
Laurel
Jul. 15th, 2011 at 7:46 pm
Hearing how elections are handled in WI makes me wonder if the GAB shouldn’t take a trip to CA and see how elections are handled there. When I still lived in CA I worked the elections and we checked and doubled checked the numbers until they matched up. If we received 1000 ballots then we returned 1000 ballots, used and unused. If for some reason a ballot was unaccounted for we went through everything and recounted until it was found. Voided ballots were placed in an envelope that was sealed and signed by all the poll workers and they were never mixed up with valid ballots. The valid ballots were counted and placed in a box and sealed with a sticker that was signed by all the poll workers and if it was tampered with, it was easy to tell. Two people always went to the police station or city hall to turn in the ballots. It was time consuming after working the polls all day but we were certain that the votes wouldn’t be messed with and all votes would count.
m-girl
Jul. 18th, 2011 at 12:05 am
this is EXACTLY the reason that Texas went to electronic voting without a paper trail receipt – so the republicans could rig the elections on the Diebold voting machines.
Barb T
Jul. 18th, 2011 at 3:13 pm
It was my understanding that only Diebold people were allowed to install/repair the Diebold machines. Are some or all Diebold techs 4 sale to the highest bidder??
Rick Shreiner
Jul. 15th, 2011 at 7:56 pm
Just one more of the many reasons I will NEVER spend my tourist dollars in Wisconsin as long as this woman remains at large.
How the election could possibly have been certified, with the unsecured ballot bags, the failure to transfer results to county computers, and the “found” votes, which should have been automatically saved by the “Excel” app that was running the vote tallies, is just WAY BEYOND ME.
And that this travesty of OBVIOUS voter fraud was allowed to stand is more than preposterous, it is borderline criminal.
Doris
Jul. 16th, 2011 at 12:13 am
Kloppenburg really won…bottomline. this was just a samle of what the rethugs would do on November 2012.