The Verified Voting Foundation has written a letter to Secretary of the State, Denise Merrill, supporting expanded audits based on Connecticut’s expansion of absentee ballots: <read> Their support was based on the Citizen Audit’s recent Op-Ed. in the CTMirror.
Verified Voting writes concerning the exclusion of absentee ballots from Connecticut’s post-election audit. Connecticut made the right decision for election integrity when the state passed legislation in 2007 mandating post-election audits. Christopher Krebs, director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, recently testified that “the ability to conduct post-election audits is critical to establishing the integrity of the election.” Unfortunately, the anticipated massive surge of absentee ballots in 2020 threatens the credibility of the audit. As you know, Connecticut generally exempts absentee ballots, along with hand-counted ballots and election day registration ballots, from its audit. We urge you to broaden the audit this year to include absentee ballots…
An audit’s credibility depends on whether the audit sample is reasonably representative of all ballots cast. Excluding absentee ballots is undesirable even when they comprise less than ten percent of ballots cast…
We understand the pressures facing state and local election officials this year. Fortunately, as Luther Weeks of Connecticut Citizen Election Audit has pointed out, Connecticut’s machine-assisted audit system can facilitate conducting audits that include absentee ballots…
An increase in absentee voting inevitably will raise questions about ballot handling, adjudication, and security as well as tabulation. Accordingly, we agree with Weeks that an independent audit of all absentee ballot processes, culminating in tabulation, should take place.
Read the entire letter here: <read>
