California: Excessive Absentee Votes May Hamstring Auditors

[Bill Bored]

by Joseph Lorenzo Hall:

Doing Post-Election Audits of Paper Records in California Right

As part of my dissertation research and the research agenda of our NSF ACCURATE center, a number of us have been working with two California jurisdictions to design the procedures for their post-election manual audit. This audit, required under California election law, involves comparing manual tallies of paper records with electronic totals.

In this post, I'd like to discuss some existing practices seen in other California jurisdictions that are not ideal and how California's Election Code could be strengthened to address these shortcomings. I hope this brief post about our larger body of work gives some insight into these issues to those that may be interested. We'll be publishing more on this in coming months.

Summary of Current Problems

Briefly, the problems cluster around the following issues:

* The strain on jurisdictions due to increasing numbers of absentee voters drastically compresses the time available for audit activities during the canvass process.
* Many jurisdictions conduct the Random Selection of precincts to be included in the manual audit weeks before the actual audit activity.
* The Random Selection process is very often not random, independent or publicly-verifiable.
* Selection of additional precincts to audit in order to cover all contests on the jurisdiction's ballot is not required to be done randomly.
* All paper records or ballots that are tallied by computerized or electromechanical equipment should be included in the audit.

-snip-

<http://josephhall.org/nqb2/index.php/2006/11/16/caaudits>

[Wilms]

1. But, but, but...

This was supposed to "Bust the Machines".

No? :shrug:

[Bill Bored]

2. Beats me dude. Where I live absentee voting is considered fraud!

And it's also the preferred method for providing Accessibility.

But hey, what do we know?:shrug:

[Wilms]

4. New Yorkers are like sooo iconoclast-y.

Why do they hate HAVA? :sarcasm:

[Einsteinia]

3. Have you seen the Titanium Standard?

Check it out, because is was designed to address these problems and others:

http://www.califelectprotect.net/Titanium.pdf