Nickolaus Won't Post Election Results on Waukesha County's Website

Even though she forgot to save and to post election results for one community that flipped the outcome of the Wisconsin Supreme Court Race in April, Waukesha County Clerk said Monday she still won't publish election-night results from individual municipalities on the county's website.

Nickolaus said she won't post the results because it isn’t required by the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board. She had posted the results for individual municipalities in the past, but when pressed by Waukesha County Board supervisors Monday to bring the practice back, she said it’s not something she’s interested in doing.

Nickolaus did change reporting results since the April election to include wards broken down by community but those results don't contain numbers for the municipal races.

“Obviously, the people in Brookfield who would have gone onto the site would have said ‘where are our results,’” Supervisor Dave Swan said.

Nickolaus came under fire in April after she forgot to include votes from Brookfield during the Supreme Court race on election night and waited two days before admitting to the mistake while canvassing the results. With the Brookfield results included, incumbent Justice David Prosser won by 7,006 votes, a razor-thin margin considering nearly 1.5 million votes were cast in the election.

Nickolaus told supervisors on the County Board’s Executive Committee Monday that she has made progress in making changes suggested by a county audit of her office, such as creating individual system IDs and passwords for office employees logging onto a computer with access to elections information. But she said staff will continue to use one password and ID to log onto the program, which tracks election results, until software upgrades are approved by the federal government.

“Right now this is a stop-gap measure and really it’s going to hinge on when (the new software) is approved and we can get that installed and set up,” said Lori Schubert, internal audit manager for Waukesha County. “Right now we really don’t have a lot of influence on having the feds get that approved.”

However, Supervisor Patricia Haukohl, who represents Brookfield, questioned Nickolaus if the inclusion of municipal results would work to prevent a mistake like the one from the April election. Nickolaus said she “couldn’t say for sure.”

“I’ll continue to work with the GAB … and follow what the GAB suggest for that procedure,” Nickolaus said.