I spent some time looking through data from the Wisconsin Blue Book. I looked at most of the major elections going back 20 years. Remember, Kathy Nickolaus has only been the County Clerk in Waukesha for about 10 years.

I collected the number of votes received by the two major candidates only, in republican-leaning Waukesha County vs neighboring democratic-leaning Milwaukee County. I've plotted the rise and fall of votes cast for these parties, along with the percent voting republican.









It's not conclusive, but I see nothing here that indicates foul play in Waukesha County. There's no obvious change in voting pattern vs Milw. County, before or after Ms. Nickolaus took office.

More from the Kossacks: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/04/11/965994/-Waukesha-voting-irregularities-go-back-to-2004

As shown here, a recent poster is trying to say that in 2006, there were 17,000-20,000 more votes than ballots cast depending on which race you look at..

They show 156,804 ballots cast, with ~ 176,112 votes cast for governor.

176,112 - 156,804 leaves 19308 ballots unaccounted for.
5 ballots were provisional. 19303 to account for.

81 military absentee ballots returned. 19222

27 overseas absentee ballots returned. 19141

20,846 election day registrations. Now we have 1705 more voters than ballots.

1934 "late registration" puts us back to 229 ballots to account for.

Guess what. To get those 81 military and 27 overseas ballots (108), we sent out 269+68 = 337 ballots. 337 - 108 equals....wait for it... 229.

All accounted for.

Source: http://elections.state.wi.us/docview.asp?docid=11077&locid=47

On other matters, as another blogger said, the Kossacks have made another series of errrors...

http://legalinsurrection.blogspot.com/2011/04/they-have-not-thought-through.html

The theory goes that the found "7500" votes put Prosser past the threshhold for an "automatic, free recount."

That's 4 lies for the price of one.

1: The votes weren't "found" - they were counted in Brookfield on 4/5 and submitted to the county. You can verify this through the Brookfield Patch .

2: It wasn't 7500 votes, it was a swing of 7583 - there were over 10,000 votes represented, and Ms. Kloppenburg received some 3,000 of them.

3: Wisconsin doesn't have any provision for an "automatic recount".

4: When the difference in an election is < 0.5%, a recount is free to the candidate. From 0.5% to 2.0%, the candidate pays a fee of $5 per ward.

Those last 2 points come from WI's recount manual, available here.

The current total difference is STILL under the 0.5% threshold, and even if it weren't...do you really think $5 / ward is going to stop anyone from requesting a recount? With millions spent on the campaign, they wouldn't cough up another $18,000? (3630 wards * $5 = $18150)

Kathy and her Access

So. I've seen posts from a lot of "experts" and "gurus" who are chuffed with their credentials claiming that Kathy's story "isn't possible". Well, I don't know the Waukesha vote tabulation system any better than any of those "experts" but I do know there are plenty of ways what is being said could happen. Here is what I think is most likely:

The system Waukesha Co. uses to tabulate the votes runs on Access. This we know.

We also know that Ms. Nickolaus received vote data in spreadsheet form, and was not expecting her "templates" to be changed.

I will agree with the other "experts" on one point - _if_ Kathy were, in fact, opening up Access and "pasting" data (or even using Access menus to import it), and there were a problem, she'd be notified. I doubt this is the way the system works.

More likely, when she gets those excel spreadsheets, they need to be saved to a given spot on her computer. From the discussion, it sounds like everyone else's spreadsheet is being compiled into one master Excel sheet.

Then when she wants to update the vote totals for AP, the state, whatever....there is an application written, using the access framework, that programmatically imports whatever spreadsheet data is saved in the required location. Why do it this way? Excel sheets are easier to pass from person to person than having the person send in their access .mdb files. Access has superior report generating functions.

So suppose she opens up, say, the Brookfield data and pastes it into her master Excel file. Then she gets distracted by something and having dealt with that she comes back and switches over to her tabulation / report generation software (never having saved the updated Excel master sheet...or however she was planning to save the Brookfield data). Access will only update her database / reports with the data that was out there as of the last save.