CA: Measure To Improve Election Audit Process Clears Senate

[Wilms]

California: Measure To Improve Election Audit Process Clears Senate

Senator Debra Bowen's Measure Clears Full Senate Over the Objection of Secretary of State

By State Senator Debra Bowen Press Release

May 30, 2006

Closing a loophole in California’s election auditing procedures is the goal of SB 1235 by Senator Debra Bowen (D-Redondo Beach, pictured at right), the chairwoman of the Senate Elections, Reapportionment & Constitutional Amendments Committee, which cleared the full Senate today on a bipartisan 38-0 vote over the opposition of California’s Secretary of State.

"Forty percent of Californians vote by absentee ballot and thousands of others take advantage of in-person early voting opportunities before every election, so the fact that some counties don’t include nearly half of the ballots cast in any given election in the auditing process undermines the integrity of the audit and the election itself," said Bowen. "The 1% manual audit is designed to ensure the electronic voting machines and the ballot counters tallied the results correctly, but there’s absolutely no way to conduct a meaningful audit if you’re only looking at half, or in some cases, fewer than half, of the votes."

Under California law, elections officials are required to conduct a public manual tally of the ballots cast in at least 1% of the precincts to check the accuracy of the votes tabulated by the electronic or mechanical voting systems. The law also requires the precincts subject to the audit to be randomly selected by elections officials, but it doesn’t define "random".

snip

http://www.votetrustusa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1318&Itemid=113

[fooj]

1. Right on!

Thank you, Debra. You've got MY vote. No question about that.

[emlev]

4. For those who don't know, Bowen is running for Sec of State in California

and *must* win!

[bleever]

2. K&R. One of Debra's opponents says in her official statement that

there's no need to refuse perfectly good technology because of some "hypothetical" possibility of fraud.

:eyes:


She's not just voted off the island; she's escorted.

[Wilms]

3. That would be anti-VVPAT Ortiz.

Ortiz has actually done a really good job with other issues, but shouldn't be allowed within ten feet of my vote. A few years back she opposed VVPAT on the grounds that it would disenfranchise Hispanic voters. I'm still trying to figure that out. (OK. I'm lying. :eyes: )

And, I guess McPherson wants to show how independant he is by opposing a measure endorsed by the full senate.

[cascadiance]

5. In addition to this bill, the best security is getting Bowen in at SOS!

This woman rocks! Too bad we didn't have her in last election instead of Shelley, though I'm glad Shelley had done what he'd done at the time.