It’s two strikes and out for Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus, whose latest Election Day pickle led County Executive Dan Vrakas to relieve her of her duties for the historic recall elections in May and June.

According to a statement released Thursday from the County Executive’s Office, Vrakas posed an ultimatum to Nickolaus in an effort to restore confidence in the upcoming election: Either resign as clerk or she designate her Election Day duties to the deputy clerk.

Nickolaus chose the latter.

We can only hope her deputy clerk is more competent than Ms. Nickolaus has been shown to be.

Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus, who has been under fire for past election snafus, is at the center of attention again because new procedures in tallying votes resulted in lengthy delays in getting election results Tuesday.

Nickolaus, who garnered national attention last April when her office made a mistake that flipped the outcome of a hotly contested state Supreme Court race, said she introduced new procedures Tuesday to follow guidelines set forth by the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board, which oversees elections in the state.

As a result, some elections results were not posted on the county’s website until 6 a.m. Wednesday.

Her office, which said it would post local results online, posted few results and asked the media and political campaigns to hand-count the returns, using voting machine printouts taped to the walls around a room.

Wisconsin’s Government Accountability Board (the body which oversees elections in the state) can’t understand County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus’ explanations for the anomalous 2006 results either, where some 20,000 more votes were tallied than “ballots cast”, according to her own reports.

shihtzuman:

How Wisconsin GOP and Kathy Nickolaus Could Have Stolen the Supreme Court Election if They had Wanted to

Here’s the problem. Microsoft Access (any version) doesn’t ask you to save. When you enter data into a table, it automatically updates the underlying database. If you close the database accidentally, the data you entered (or imported, in the case of Nickolaus) remains. If you stop to take a phone call from your buddy the governor (for example), your data will still automatically save.