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Probe: Wis. clerk likely violated law in Supreme Court election, but conduct wasn’t criminal
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| Contributor | Homegrown Democrat |
| Last Edited | Homegrown Democrat Sep 29, 2011 06:40am |
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| Category | Investigation |
| Media | Newspaper - Washington Post |
| News Date | Wednesday, September 28, 2011 12:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | MADISON, Wis. — A county clerk likely violated the law when she failed to report thousands of votes in this spring’s tightly contested Wisconsin Supreme Court election, but her conduct wasn’t criminal, state investigators said Wednesday.
Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus touched off a firestorm in April when she revealed she hadn’t reported 14,000 votes in the race between conservative Justice David Prosser and challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg.
The contest evolved from a sleepy race between an incumbent justice and a little-known state attorney to a heated referendum on Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s collective bargaining law, which stripped almost all public workers of most of their union rights. The measure’s opponents made Kloppenburg their champion, hoping she would replace Prosser and help strike the law down.
Nicholaus couldn’t explain how she failed to report the votes, investigators said, but they concluded she probably loaded a blank template into a reporting database rather than a template that contained the vote totals. Wisconsin law requires county clerks to post all returns on Election Night.
Former Dane County prosecutor Timothy Verhoff, who led the probe, said Nickolaus’ flub wasn’t intentional and she wasn’t trying to conceal votes. |
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