Vote results from throughout Waukesha County should be available online more quickly in the recall elections because municipal clerks will be entering unofficial results directly into a state vote canvass reporting system, rather than leaving it to the county clerk’s staff. Those results will simultaneously be available to the Waukesha County clerk’s office, which is still responsible for posting results on election night. In a statement Tuesday, Kevin Kennedy, director and general counsel for the Government Accountability Board, said the agency created Wisconsin’s canvass reporting system using a federal grant in 2010 so county clerks could use it to report canvass results – the official totals that are checked several days after an election – to the state electronically. However, the Web-based system was built with a tool for municipal clerks to enter unofficial results on election night. Kennedy said all Waukesha County municipal clerks will be asked to use that tool for the May 8 primaries and the June 5 recalls.
The process means that local clerks do not have to drive voting machine tapes into the county clerk’s office in Waukesha after polls close, as they did April 3, so that she and her staff can enter the data. At the April 3 election, that’s the hitch that delayed vote reporting for many hours. Once voting tapes were delivered to the county clerk, an attempt to upload vote totals from the machine memory packs failed. Instead, a few staff members had to manually enter every vote total for every candidate in every district before a report could be issued.
Meanwhile, reporters and others wanting more timely results were left to manually calculate contest totals from voting machine tapes hung from walls by the yard. After two elections in which the county clerk’s vote reporting snafus attracted widespread criticism, Waukesha County Executive Dan Vrakas pressured County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus, who is independently elected, to either resign or hand off her election duties to her deputy clerk. Nickolaus turned over the election duties to her deputy, Kelly Yaeger. Nickolaus, however, is assisting Yaeger. In the upcoming recalls, it’ll be up to municipal clerks to manually enter the vote totals.
Full Article: GAB announces plan to speed Waukesha election reports – JSOnline.