7,582 Prosser Votes Discovered in Waukesha County. Clerk Kathy Nickolaus blames human error. My notes from the press conference.

I just watched TMJ4 on the internet to hear/watch a press conference delivered by the Waukesha County clerk. County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus delivered a press conference at approx. 5:30PM today 4/6/11.

David Prosser gained 7,582 votes in Waukesha County, according to a summary statement from the board of canvassers.

Canvassers around the state were updating their totals today, with Prosser and JoAnne Kloppenburg each making gains.

Those changes pale in comparison to the change in Waukesha County, where Prosser’s total increased by 11,008 and Kloppenburg’s rose 3,426.

My notes from that prses conference:

What are the reasons for the discrepancy?

1) City of New Berlin: total for 1 ward was recorded at 37, but total showed 237

2) In the Town of Lisbon, a typing error resulted in a change of vote totals. Both sides lost votes there.

3) Finally, and most significantly, the data from the City of Brookfield was not transferred to the media on Tuesday night.

The spreadsheet was imported into a database that was provided by G.A.B. (the Government Accountability Office) but that was inadvertantly not saved. When I ran the report I assumed the City of Brookfield was included

Brookfield delivered 14315 votes on April 5th.

10,859 votes went for Prosser

3,456 went for Kloppenburg

These #’s will be reflected in official results to GAB

“This is not a case of extra votes or ballots being found. This is human error, which I apologize for. Which is common in this process. Which is why the state requires us to conduct a canvass. Every person in Waukesha County that voted, on April 5th –  their votes were counted.”

Verified all of the results. We are confident that they have been properly recorded to the accountability board.

This was an access database file that was on our regular system. It was just human error.

Chris Schmidt (of Brookfield?) said that she was asked for the results a 2nd time. On election night, all the people that were asked to …when the city of Brookfield’s results came in, extra columns were put into the spreadsheet. I called them and stressed that they needed to keep the same # of columns that were in the template.

I saved them but when I imported them into the access database, I thought they were saved at that time, I had no reason to believe that they weren’t.

We sat through an open transparent meeting for the last day and a half. We sat with people from both side of the aisle. We then proofed those numbers again. We were counting each one of those votes.

(A reporter states: “That’s a huge number!”)

“Normally we get a 30% turnout, I came out with 42% That was an amazing amount of votes. I had no reason to believe I was missing anything. With this change, our turnout in Waukesha was 47%.”

The access database we used is brand new. It was created in August 2010 for September primaries. It was not off the ground until November.

A reporter asks “Is it possible to see the physical original spreadsheet?”  That is possible.

Questions- Weren’t there other races in Brookfield?

We had state and county races there. The circuit court race and state race were on the ballot in New Berlin. We do not canvass municipal elections.

Can you tell me the difference between uploading and saving? (She goes into this…doesn’t really makes a hill of beans to me.)

Do you take responsibility for this error? Yes.

Can you explain what it was that you saw that pointed out the error?  I came in to upload the file, when I opened it up, it said all the city of Brookfield columns were zero. I called the GAB and said there was a problem.

Was there a representative of the Democratic Party in the room? We do have a Democrat and a Republican

Ramona Kitzlinger, Democratic representative, steps up to the microphone to say that they went through the numbers methodically said that the numbers did match. She is satisfied that the numbers submitted to the G.A.B. are correct. Kitzinger said she is the Vice Chair of the Democratic Party of Waukesha.