The September issue of NCSL’s elections newsletter, The Canvass, addressed what I thought was a sleepy topic: post-election audits. (As a way to double-check that the procedures, voting equipment and vote-counting software yielded the correct result, election officials run a post-election audit by hand-counting the ballots from a random set of precincts or machines.) So I was surprised that this issue received more responses than politically-charged and publicly debated issues, such as those on Voter ID or Voter Registration.
A professor of state and local government affairs, wrote, “I had never heard of “post-election audits” or the idea that such things might be mandated by state law. I would guess a lot of legislators have never heard of such things either. ” Kim Alexander, president and founder of The California Voter Foundation, wrote, “I really appreciated the list of reports and studies featured in the newsletter relating to PEA’s.” And she added a report that I had missed: Post-Election Audit Standards Working Group Report, from California’s Secretary of State.
Full Article: Readers Debate the Merits of Post-election Audits – The Thicket at State Legislatures.