Author Archives: Warren Stewart

Verified Voting Blog: Report on second risk-limiting audit under AB 2023 in Monterey County California

The second risk-limiting audit under California AB 2023 was conducted on May 6 in Monterey County. The contest was a Special all-mail election for Monterey Peninsula Water Management District Director, Division 1.  Monterey uses Sequoia equipment. There were two candidates: Brenda Lewis and Thomas M. Mancini, and write-ins. 2111 ballots were cast in all.  The reported totals were 1353 reported for Lewis, 742 for Mancini, and 13 write-ins. The remaining 3 ballots were recorded as undervotes and overvotes.  Lewis was reported to have 64.18% of the valid votes.

Two members of the public observed the entire audit process, which took roughly 90 minutes including some preliminary explanation of the procedure. They confirmed that their interpretation of the ballots agreed with mine and the elections officials’, and they helped roll the dice used to select ballots at random.  In conversations afterward, they seemed quite satisfied with the transparency of the procedure (although perhaps not utterly convinced by the mathematics that justified the details).

The audit was performed as follows. After the ballots had been tabulated officially, elections officials Bates-stamped each with a unique serial number (1962 ballots that were scanned had been stamped prior to audit day; the remaining 149 were stamped as part of the audit). It is my understanding that stamping the ballots took about 5 person-hours in all.

Verified Voting Blog: Paper Ballots – New York Courts Don’t Get It

New York State’s highest Court has upheld lower Court decisions to stop any further counting of ballots and declare a winner in the 7th Senate District race. The decision is unfortunate on many levels, not the least of which is that it sets legal precedent in the State for how we verify election results by auditing and recounting paper ballots. New York’s Courts have now ruled, in essence, “We do not use paper ballots to verify elections.” The Court, displaying a lever-machine mindset, believed it’s okay to trust the machine. It never was of course, but New York has never had a way to verify election results before. The Court didn’t understand why we need to compare machine reported results with a manual inspection of ballots in the audit, failing to grasp that the way we get to the real result is counting the paper, not avoiding it at all costs.

Verified Voting Blog: New York SD 7: Count the Paper

In the first test case of how we verify election results using New York’s new paper ballots, the State Judiciary is in the process of setting an egregious precedent – Judges are free to nullify audits and recounts in the interests of having a quick decision. In Nassau County’s contested 7th Senate District (SD7) race, two State Courts that have heard the case to date have made very bad decisions. Ruling that even if New York’s audit laws require a further hand count of paper ballots, accepting the machine results and declaring a winner outweigh the public’s right to know who really won the election. [ See news reports here and here.]

The Johnson and Martins dispute demonstrates the typical dynamic in close political contests when paper ballots are available to inspect – regardless of party affiliation, the candidate in the lead wants to stop further ballot counting, the candidate behind wants to continue. And the Courts almost always become involved in one way or another. In the SD7 case, Johnson asks the Court to order a full manual recount, since several machines failed the initial 3% audit. Martin’s legal team on the other hand argues that “At the end of the day we must balance accuracy with finality”. The meaning here is hardly disguised – stop counting ballots, we’re more interested in winning than getting an accurate result.