© iStockphoto/R Rob M Ferguson

A 50-year old paralegal student accused of stealing up to 75 ballots and voting data is sitting in a San Francisco jail, a week after the alleged crime, unable to raise $100,000 bail.

But police and prosecutors have gathered little evidence that accused poll worker Karl Nicholas was the culprit in the bizarre heist.

At about 4 p.m. on Election Day, a fellow poll worker at a residential Knott Court polling place in the Crocker Amazon neighborhood called the city’s elections department to report that Nicholas had deserted his post and that election materials and a colleague's cell phone had disappeared.

Somebody had apparently broken into a voting machine, snatched an unknown number of scanned ballots, taken the machine’s memory card and walked off with the polling place's roster of voters.

"No one at the voting station at the time of the incident observed [Nicholas] tamper with the voting machine in any way, remove any ballots within the bin box of the voting machine, and remove any of the voting rosters from the tables," police wrote in a report, based on an interview with an election official.

The missing roster showed which neighborhood voters had cast ballots, making it difficult to determine how many were removed. Based on a count taken several hours earlier, the elections department says no more than 75 ballots, or up to 375 voting cards, could have been taken.

A 19-year old poll worker’s cell phone was also reported stolen.

About nine hours later, shortly after 1 a.m., police visited a nearby home where Nicholas rents a small room.

They rang the doorbell and rattled the home's security gate to rouse its residents.

A woman who rents a room next to Nicholas's opened the front door and showed two police officers to the suspect’s bedroom, the police report shows. The bedroom door was locked and, after knocking, the officers broke the door open and found Nicholas in bed.

“I heard you guys, but I wasn’t going to open the door,” Nicholas said, according to the report. “I didn’t know if you were real officers or what.”

While Nicholas dressed, the officers rifled through his collection of files, books, computer equipment and legal documents but couldn’t find the missing ballots or any other evidence linking him to the crime.

“None of these items resembled anything related to a ballot card,” police wrote.

A fellow poll worker was summonsed by police to the home and positively identified Nicholas, a 5’8," 180-pound white man with blonde hair and hazel eyes.

Nicholas is a paralegal student at City College of San Francisco who was working on Election Day in exchange for a stipend. He is not a permanent city employee.

Nicholas had not previously worked as a poll worker in San Francisco, although he told elections officials that he had worked as a poll worker in Marin County, local elections chief John Arntz said.

Police placed Nicholas under arrest, read him his rights and drove him to Ingleside Police Station for booking. Nicholas was uncooperative when he was interviewed.

The missing ballots and voter roster were discovered the day after Election Day, wrapped in a protective plastic bag, floating in a pond at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco’s Marina District, which is 25 minutes' drive away from the Knott Court polling place.

City and state officials are conferring to determine whether the votes can be counted, since they did not remain in official custody, but it’s unclear whether they will be legible anyway.

The votes won’t affect any supervisorial races because the ballots were stolen from District 11, which is represented by Supervisor John Avalos, who did not face reelection this year.

The plastic bag surrounding the roster and ballots contained holes, allowing water to seep inside and saturate the contents.

The soggy stash is considered evidence and will be analyzed by forensic police officers, meaning the San Francisco Elections Department has been prevented by the District Attorney’s Office from opening the plastic bag, according to Arntz.

Some of the ballot marks that can be seen through the plastic appear to be smudged, Arntz said.

Arntz said the bag is being stored in City Hall and that the ballot cards will not rot, despite the dampness, because they are made from thick paper. "It’s the highest grade card stock on the market, so they retain their fibrous value for a long time," he said.

Nicholas was charged with three felonies - tampering with election equipment, stealing election materials and disrupting a government computer system.

The Public Defender's Office said Nicholas could face up to seven years and four months in prison and a $10,000 fine if he's convicted on all three counts.

Public Defender Gregory Goldman, who is representing Nicholas, said the district attorney will struggle to prosecute his client because the office has gathered only circumstantial evidence.

“The evidence connecting him to the crime is somewhat tangential,” Goldman said.

The alleged cell phone theft is so disconnected to the elections-related crime that "one must wonder, at least, whether somebody else had been in there," Goldman said.

Prosecutors asked a judge to hold Nicholas on $150,000 bail, which was reduced in court to $100,000.

District Attorney’s Office spokesman Seth Steward declined to discuss the evidence or potential motive in the case, citing an ongoing investigation.

“I am confident that the facts presented at trial with show the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt,” Steward said in an email.

Nicholas is next due in court Nov. 19.