Monday’s Wisconsin State Journal editorial, “State needs streamlined count,” calls for a website to fix our vote counting situation. Actually, Wisconsin needs to pay more attention to assuring that the vote count is correct.
Wisconsin falls well short of having a reliable end-to-end system. We need to improve the method of appointing the members of the boards of canvassers, elect county clerks in nonpartisan elections and evaluate whether recounts should always include partial or full hand counts of the ballots. Technical aspects of counting votes have been neglected. We should update the administrative rules for approval of voting machines and for security of ballots and voting machines, improve the biannual hand-count audits of ballots and improve guidelines for pre-election testing of voting machines.
A website for aggregating election night results needs a public discussion of security and spot checking against paper records. For more information, go to www.fairelectionswi.com and click on “counting.”