Waukesha County Allowed Election Data Storage On Antiquated, Personal Computers

Still an inexplicable finding about an authoritarian elections chief as reported eight months ago by Laurel Walker in the Journal Sentinel:

Waukesha — Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus' decision to go it alone in how she collects and maintains election results has some county officials raising a red flag about the integrity of the system.

Nickolaus said she decided to take the election data collection and storage system off the county's computer network - and keep it on stand-alone personal computers accessible only in her office - for security reasons...

... Director of Administration Norman A. Cummings said because Nickolaus has kept them out of the loop, the county's information technology specialists have not been able to verify Nickolaus' claim that the system is secure from failure.

"How does anybody else in the county know, except for her verbal word, that there are backups, and that the software she has out there is performing as it should?" he said.

Cummings stressed that the voting process at local polling places is not in question. However, municipal clerks send their election night results by dial-up modem to the county clerk, where they are tabulated and stored. That prompted Cummings' concerns...

Mike Biagioli, the county's manager of information technology, sees risk in Nickolaus' action.

"What happens if something goes wrong on election night? We don't support her at all on election night. She was pretty clear about that. If something goes wrong, what do you do?" he said. "I would love to be able to go in and verify that everything is OK..."

Backup debated

The tug-of-war between Nickolaus and administration is evident in a March 8 memo from Cummings to Nickolaus in which he said hardware and software on the clerk's computers were "obsolete, not repairable and unsupportable." Without improvements, he worried that the elections system could be "inoperative and irrecoverable."

Nickolaus and Cummings both said the problem stems from when Waukesha County moved its network from an old, outdated Novell server - the processing unit that multiple personal computers tap into for shared services - to a Microsoft platform. Among other things, the conversion saved the county $500,000 a year, Cummings said.

Nickolaus' election system, however, depended on the old platform, so technicians restored a lone Novell server for her use, without a backup....a major upgrade to the election system was recommended, but Nickolaus has said it's unnecessary.

In March, Nickolaus said, she moved the data off that server and into her own stand-alone system. She has a backup on a second computer, she said. In addition, she said, as she programs for elections, she does frequent backups during the day.

Nickolaus said she was a programmer for 15 years before becoming county clerk. And she said her staff knows how to operate the system, so "if I get hit by a bus, this election is going to run just fine."