Post-Election Audits

On Saturday October 1st, I was pleased to be a part of the The Future panel at the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project event, Election Integrity - Past, Present & Future. The event was to celebrate the 25th anniversary of a conference on voting integrity 1986.

UPDATED: Yesterday, members of the Coalition assisted in the drawing of districts for the Post-Election Audit of the September 13th Primary. New Haven, on average, expect to have 3-4 districts selected each time and Hartford 2-3 districts. However, since the law exempts districts from the selection that have recanvasses or contested races, the expected average is higher than 10% in each particular post-election audit. As random selection from a single collection of districts goes, the average seldom occurs.

Professor Stark's talk is centered on three big ideas which would produce audits sufficient to convince most of us that the losers lost. The talk is serious and lite covering election integrity from 10,000 feet.

We were surprised and pleased to open the following letter from Deputy Secretary of the State, James Spallone, clarifying/correcting some of the impressions left by the report. We appreciate the clarification. We remain concerned when the differences between machine counts and hand counts reported by several registrars of voters. We also continue to be concerned, that such differences are attributed to hand counting errors, without investigation. ADDENDUM ADDED.

Lack of transparency in the process, provides no basis for public confidence in the process, in the audit, and ultimately in our election system. The purpose of the audit is to determine the accuracy of the optical scanners, that purpose is negated when the accuracy is assumed. A statistical calculation based on randomly selected data, omitting some of that data not randomly chosen for omission, is invalid.