Wisconsin’s Going to Get Ugly [scratch that] Uglier

Hoo Boy, Wisconsin’s Going to Get Ugly Uglier
April 11, 2011 3:09 P.M.
By Daniel Foster

I heard Ramona Kitzinger, the Democratic observer at the Waukesha County canvass, say on Friday that the numbers announced by county clerk Kathy Nickolaus at the end of the canvass “jibed.” Now, by all appearances, she’s lawyered-up, and released a statement largely recanting her Friday comments and sowing doubt about what Nickolaus may or may not have done with the 15,000 missing votes. The whole thing is worth a read, but this is my favorite part:

“. . . with the enormous amount of attention this has received over the weekend, many people are offering my statements at the press conference that the “numbers jibed” as validation they are correct and I can vouch for their accuracy. As I told Kathy when I was called into the room, I am 80 years old and I don’t understand anything about computers. I don’t know where the numbers Kathy was showing me ultimately came from, but they seemed to add up. I am still very, very confused. . . “

The thing people need to understand about this is that there is — if Nickolaus is telling the truth — a clear chain of custody of the vote numbers in question. The unofficial database sent by Nickolaus to the state the night of the election either has Brookfield votes or it doesn’t. More crucially, Brookfield either sent their vote totals to Nickolaus or they didn’t. If they did, there should be an electronic paper trail and the numbers that came out of Brookfield city hall should match the numbers Nickolaus reported after the canvass. If you still think this was fraud, you’re implicating not just Nickolaus but the city of Brookfield itself.

The other thing to remember is that the discrepancy, as I understand it, is between official and unofficial numbers. The unofficial numbers were wrong. The official ones were right. The unofficial numbers were unofficial precisely because they were electronically transferred from municipalities to the counties and eventually to the state, in large part so that outfits like the Associated Press could call the election on Tuesday night. The official numbers were official precisely because they depended on a thorough examination — observed by Republicans and Democrats — of the actual voting tapes.