Executive Summary

After the November 2009 municipal election, Connecticut conducted its fifth large-scale post-election audit.  This was also the Connecticut Citizen Election Audit Coalition’s fifth large audit observation.  The coalition includes the League of Women Voters of Connecticut, Connecticut Common Cause, Connecticut Citizen Action Group, and Connecticut Voters Count. The purpose of the observation was to demonstrate citizen interest in the process, increase citizen involvement in elections, provide feedback to the Secretary of the State and the legislature on the audit process, and provide the public with information necessary to determine their confidence in our elections.

By law, the Secretary of the State is required, in each election, to select at random 10% of Connecticut’s voting districts to participate in post-election audits.  In a municipal election, municipalities with selected districts randomly select races to audit in each district – a minimum of three races or a minimum of 20% of races, whichever is larger.

In this report, 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 because of the continued lack of

• standards for determining need for further investigation of discrepancies,
• detailed guidance for counting procedures, and
• consistency, reliability, and transparency in the conduct of the audit.

Compared with previous reports of November post-election audits:

• The bulk of our general observations and concerns remain.

• The accuracy of counting has improved.  There was a significant reduction in the number of extreme discrepancies reported. However, there remains a need for much more improvement.
• There was a significant improvement in counting cross-endorsed candidate votes
• The number of incomplete reports from municipalities has significantly decreased.

Among our greatest concerns are the discrepancies between machine counts and hand-counts reported to the Secretary of the State by municipalities. In many cases, these discrepancies are not thoroughly and reasonably explained. We believe that the lack of organization, planning, and ad-hoc counting procedures used by many municipalities were not sufficient to count accurately and efficiently.   We find no reason to attribute all errors to either humans or machines.

We note continuing failures to follow audit and chain-of-custody procedures.  We emphasize that this report does not question any individual’s integrity. However, a safe, credible system of security procedures should not permit a single individual to have any extended opportunity to handle records unobserved.