Citizen Study Finds State Audit Flawed From the Start
Post-Election Audit Flawed from the Start by Inaccurate List of Election Districts
Based on concerns with the integrity of the random drawing in previous elections, the Coalition initiated a project to thoroughly check the integrity of the list of districts in the drawing for the November 2013 election.
Coalition spokesperson Luther Weeks noted, “The credibility of our elections depends on the integrity of the Post-Election Audits. The integrity of the audits in-turn depends on the integrity of the drawing.”
The report found,
Coalition Finds Continuing Problems with Election Audit and A New Flaw
Post-Election Audit Flawed from the Start by Highly Inaccurate List
of Election Districts
The report concluded, the official audit results do not inspire confidence because of the:
Coalition finds 31% of Official Audit Reports Lack Critical Data
Municipalities failed to report data critical to audit evaluation. Increasing numbers choose paper only elections, avoiding scanners and audits.
The report highlighted concerns with two increasing trends:
We conclude, based on our observations and analysis of official audit reports submitted to the Secretary of the State, that the August post-election audits still do not inspire confidence.
<Full Report (.pdf)> <Press Release> <Review detail data and municipal reports>
Based on the size and relative simplicity of this audit, we provide an abbreviated report. We summarize the statistical information and observations, while we make no new recommendations.
Readers of past reports will note little change in our observations and conclusions; and little progress by officials in improving post-election audit integrity. Compared to past audits there were significantly fewer ballot count and race count differences in this audit. The fewer number of ballots and the single race to be counted contributed to this improved result. We are skeptical that this audit is an indication of future improvement.
Items of note include:
<Full Report (.pdf)> <Review detail data and municipal reports>
Coalition finds continuing problems with audit integrity
Provides calculations and official data on the web for public review and verification
For the first time, in the interest of public information and transparency, we are making all official municipal audit reports and the data we complied available for everyone to review on the web. Citizens can see the reports from their own town, other towns, and perform their own audit of the Coalition’s data entry and calculations based on those official reports. The November post-election audits still do not inspire confidence because of the continued:
<Full Report, Press Release, Excerpts> <Review detail data and municipal reports>
Coalition calls again for legislature to act. Citizen observation and analysis show little, if any, improvement in November post-election audits.
The Coalition noted significant differences between results reported by optical scanners and the hand count of ballots by election officials across Connecticut. Compared to previous audits, the Coalition noted little, if any, improvement in the attention to detail and in following procedures in the November 2010 audits.
Votes were miscounted and miscalculated adding votes to each candidate, but not changing winner in the race for governor
Each candidate for the governor’s race gained votes in the recount when compared to the officially reported results, as follows: Foley (+174), Malloy (+761), and Marsh (+19). These differences parallel candidate shares in the initially reported results. Counting of all ballots in the governor’s race resulted in differences in many counts, totaling 1,520 votes miscounted, of these 1,236 were initially under reported and 284 were initially over reported.
Simply printing more ballots only reduces the chance of the specific problem that occurred in Bridgeport. There are other causes that could result in a municipality having to scramble to photocopy ballots or perform hand counting such as a massive power failure or ballots lost in a fire, flood, or accident shortly before or during Election Day.
Citizen observation and analysis shows some improvements along with a newly uncovered problem with the random selection process…We conclude that August post-election audits still do not inspire confidence
the list of polling districts for the random audit drawing was missing some districts and is otherwise inaccurate and ambiguous. The integrity of the audit requires an accurate list of districts that is verifiable by the public. We have extended our recommendations to the Legislature to include an efficient fix to this problem.
The Coalition noted significant differences between results reported by optical scanners and the hand count of ballots by election officials across Connecticut. Compared to previous audits, the Coalition noted small incremental improvements in the attention to detail, following procedures, and in the chain-of-custody.
In this report, we conclude that the November post-election audits still do not inspire confidence. We find no reason to attribute all errors to either humans or machines.
We conclude, based on our observations and analysis of audit reports submitted to the Secretary of the State that the November post-election audits still do not inspire confidence…Among our greatest concerns are the discrepancies between machine counts and hand-counts reported to the Secretary of the State by several municipalities. In many cases, these discrepancies are not thoroughly and reasonably explained. We believe that the ad-hoc counting procedures used by many municipalities were not sufficient to count ballots accurately and efficiently
In some cases as many as twenty-four (24) fewer ballots were counted by hand than recorded by optical scanners.
For individual candidate races, vote counts between hand counts and scanner tapes varied by as much as three-hundred-sixty-six (366) votes in one race or as much as 46% in another.
We find no reason to attribute all errors to either humans or machines.
