While Supreme Court candidate JoAnne Kloppenburg’s campaign sifts through papers documenting the vote process in Waukesha County, the clerk responsible for making the error that caused the incumbent justice to take the lead in the race has rebuffed Democrats who called for her resignation earlier this week.

The Waukesha County Democratic Party called for the immediate resignation of Clerk Kathy Nickolaus Tuesday. Waukesha Democrats said the incident damaged the public’s trust in elections and Nickolaus should resign in order to restore a degree of integrity back to the voting process.

Nickolaus was responsible for failing to hit the “save” button on her computer after entering in vote totals from the Supreme Court election held last week Tuesday. Upon reexamining the data the next day, Nickolaus saw that all the result fields for the City of Brookfield were blank.

The missing data amounted to roughly 14,315 votes and changed the narrow margin of victory the challenger Kloppenburg enjoyed into a sizable 7,500 vote lead for incumbent Justice David Prosser.

Nickolaus said the mistake was a human error and apologized publicly for the incident. But she said she would not be resigning, despite the Waukesha Democrat’s request, but would work with the proper election authorities to make sure public trust is restored and the matter would not happen again.

“I have … asked the Government Accountability Board and the Waukesha County Auditor to assist my office in a review and implementation of improved practices and procedures to make sure the process is more transparent and this mistake does not happen again,” Nickolaus said in a statement.

She added she would be using the remainder of her term to restore the voters’ confidence in her professional duties as county clerk and had begun the process of reviewing her election procedures.

Those procedures may have caused the problem, Waukesha County Democratic Party Chair Victor Weers said. Nickolaus, a past data analyst and computer specialist for the Wisconsin Assembly Republican Caucus, designed the program she used to store the election data over the summer, Weers said.

He was aware of Nickolaus’ apology and refusal to resign issued after his organization requested her to leave the position, Weers said. 

He added he would have understood if the vote tally problem was Nickolaus’ first mistake, but she had been questioned before about her practices. 

“It’s not the first occurrence, and there have been pleas made by the county board that she be more open with the process,” Weers said. “In the business I work in, I’ve seen it happen multiple times where folks outrage a customer, apologize the first time but turn around and do it again.”

The Kloppenburg campaign did not comment on whether it supported Weer’s request for Nickolaus’ resignation. Spokesperson Melissa Mulliken said the campaign is still in the process of analyzing data from the clerk’s office obtained through an open records request.

Staff from the Government Accountability Board were in Waukesha last Wednesday, Thursday and Friday to verify the results posted in Waukesha County. Spokesperson Mike Hoss said the GAB’s Wednesday activities were the most intensive, but he had not received any report of their findings.