Voting Blogs: Free & Fair to build risk-limiting audit system for State of Colorado | Free & Fair

We are proud to announce that Colorado has chosen Free & Fair to build a risk-limiting audit (RLA) system to be used statewide beginning with the November 2017 general election. First developed in 2008, RLAs promote evidence-based confidence in election outcomes by comparing a random sampling of paper ballots to their corresponding digital versions. This will be the first time anywhere in the United States that risk-limiting audits are conducted on a regular, statewide basis. Free & Fair has already prototyped an open source risk-limiting audit tool called OpenRLA, for RLAs of election contests in single jurisdictions. The production RLA system being developed for Colorado will facilitate statewide, multi-county and individual county audits. Like OpenRLA, the RLA system developed for Colorado will be released under an open source license (GPL Version 3). Risk-limiting audits provide strong statistical evidence that a jurisdiction’s voting system accurately interpreted and tabulated voter markings on paper ballots, with relatively little hand counting. The “risk limit” is the largest chance that an outcome-changing error in the initial tabulation will not be discovered and corrected in the audit. If the risk limit is 5% and the outcome wouldn’t match the result of a full, accurate count of the paper ballots, there is at least a 95% chance that the audit will correct the outcome.

National: How Applied Mathematics Could Help Democracy | The Atlantic

American voting relies heavily on technology. Voting machines and ballot counters have sped up the formerly tedious process of counting votes. Yet long-standing research shows that these technologies are susceptible to errors and manipulation that could elect the wrong person. In the 2016 presidential election, those concerns made their way into public consciousness, worrying both sides of the political fence. The uncertainty led to a set of last-minute, expensive state recounts—most of which were incomplete or blocked by courts. But we could ensure that all elections are fair and accurate with one simple low-tech fix: risk-limiting audits. Risk-limiting audits are specific to elections, but they are very similar to the audits that are routinely required of corporate America. Under them, a random sample of ballots is chosen and then hand-counted. That sample, plus a little applied math, can tell us whether the machines picked the right winner.

Rhode Island: Legislators consider making post-election audits law in Rhode Island | WPRI

Rhode Island’s General Assembly is currently considering legislation that would mandate post-election audits. The evaluations are conducted in order to ensure that equipment and procedures used to count votes during an election worked properly and also to ensure public confidence in the results. According to the Secretary of State’s office, 29 states and the District of Columbia require a post-election audit; typically the process is done by hand counting the results, usually by a random sampling of precincts.

Editorials: Using randomness to protect election integrity | Eugene Vorobeychik/The Conversation

Democratic societies depend on trust in elections and their results. Throughout the 2016 presidential election, and since President Trump’s inauguration, allegations of Russian involvement in the U.S. presidential campaign have raised concerns about how vulnerable American elections are to hacking or other types of interference. Various investigations – involving congressional committees, the FBI and the intelligence community – are underway, seeking to understand what happened and how. There are many potential problems with elections: Voters can be individually coerced or bribed into changing their votes; the public can be misled about important facts, causing them to draw inaccurate conclusions that affect their votes; and the physical – and electronic – process of voting can itself be hacked. Without conducting a full, vote-by-vote manual recount, which is impossible because many voting machines leave no paper trail, how can we be sure an election was conducted fairly and not interfered with?

Michigan: Stein: Election audits should be automatic in Michigan | The Detroit News

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein said Wednesday her abbreviated recount effort showed the vote “was not carefully guarded” in Michigan and should spur legislative action to require automatic post-election audits. Republican President-elect Donald Trump was poised to maintain his 10,000-vote margin over Democrat Hillary Clinton when Michigan’s hand recount was halted more than two million ballots in, but Stein suggested the rare glimpse under the hood of the state election system served an important purpose. “What we discovered is we do not have a system that we can trust,” Stein said in a radio interview on Michigan’s Big Show, citing complaints from Detroit election officials who said 87 optical scanner voting machines failed on Election Day, along with other documented vote count and ballot handling irregularities.

Editorials: Amid national election concerns, Connecticut goes the wrong way | Luther CT Viewpoints

About half the states, including Connecticut, have both paper ballots and post-election audits. Because our audits were transparent and publicly verifiable, Connecticut Citizen Election Audit observers have been able to reveal multiple flaws in the process and in the official reporting of audit results. Earlier this year, however, the General Assembly unanimously cut Connecticut’s the audits from 10 percent of districts to 5 percent. Now there is more bad news: our already inadequate audits have been partially replaced by electronic “audits” which are not transparent and not publicly verifiable. Instead, we now have “black box voting” augmented by “black box auditing.” This should satisfy only those with blind trust in computers and blind trust in insiders with access to the “audit” computers. Last week, without public notice, seven Connecticut municipalities conducted electronic “audits” under the guidance of the UConn Center for Voting Technology and the Secretary of the State’s Office, using the Audit Station developed by the Voter Center. There is a science of election audits. Machine-assisted audits can offer efficiency and ease of use, but any audit process needs to be transparent and provide for independent public verification of the results. Machine-assisted manual audits in California and Colorado demonstrate how this can be achieved. Public verification begins with publicly rescanning the ballots and providing the public with a computer readable list of how each ballot was counted. Then selecting a small random sample of the ballots and comparing the actual voter verified ballots to the record of how the machine counted them.

National: Hacked or Not, Audit This Election (And All Future Ones) | WIRED

After an election marred by hacker intrusions that breached the Democratic National Committee and the email account of one of Hillary Clinton’s top staffers, Americans are all too ready to believe that their actual votes have been hacked, too. Now those fears have been stoked by a team of security experts, who argue that voting machine vulnerabilities mean Clinton should demand recounts in key states. Dig into their argument, however, and it’s less alarmist than it might appear. If anything, it’s practical. There’s no evidence that the outcome of the presidential election was shifted by compromised voting machines. But a statistical audit of electronic voting results in key states as a routine safeguard—not just an emergency measure—would be a surprisingly simple way to ease serious, lingering doubts about America’s much-maligned electoral security. “Auditing ought to be a standard part of the election process,” says Ron Rivest, a cryptographer and computer science professor at MIT. “It ought to be a routine thing as much as a doctor washing his hands.” … While there’s no indication that polling places in the three states Halderman calls out were hacked, it’s well established that electronic voting machines are vulnerable to malware that could corrupt votes. Many US voting machines today scan a paper ballot that the voter fills out by hand, and many electronic systems produce a paper record as well. In fact, Halderman notes, about 70 percent of Americans live in voting districts that leave a paper trail. record exists that can be used to check its digital results. But all too often, no one ever does, he writes. “No state is planning to actually check the paper in a way that would reliably detect that the computer-based outcome was wrong,” Halderman says.

National: Hillary Clinton urged to call for election vote recount in battleground states | The Guardian

A growing number of academics and activists are calling for US authorities to fully audit or recount the 2016 presidential election vote in key battleground states, in case the results could have been skewed by foreign hackers. The loose coalition, which is urging Hillary Clinton’s campaign to join its fight, is preparing to deliver a report detailing its concerns to congressional committee chairs and federal authorities early next week, according to two people involved. The document, which is currently 18 pages long, focuses on concerns about the results in the states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. “I’m interested in verifying the vote,” said Dr Barbara Simons, an adviser to the US election assistance commission and expert on electronic voting. “We need to have post-election ballot audits.” Simons is understood to have contributed analysis to the effort but declined to characterise the precise nature of her involvement.

National: Electoral Organizations Call For Nationwide Audit | Vocativ

Voting experts are pushing for a nationwide election audit stemming from citizen concerns as well as possible security risks that may have compromised the November 8 presidential election. Verified Voting, a nonprofit that promotes transparent elections, along with other like-minded groups, are leading the charge to check that this month’s election results are accurate and representative of the voting public. Verified Voting cited “unprecedented warnings” regarding the security of the election system and claims of a “rigged” election as reasons for the audit. More than 20 states’ voter registration systems, as well as a Florida voting system vendor, were targeted by foreign cyber attacks, while state election and law enforcement officials in Arizona and Illinois confirmed that voter registration systems were hacked. The Department of Homeland Security even stepped in to bolster voting system security after the attacks. A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found that a “significant minority” of Hillary Clinton supporters believe Trump’s victory was illegitimate. In all, 18 percent of voters reject the election results, with 33 percent of Clinton supporters and 1 percent of Trump supporters saying that Trump did not win the presidential election.

Verified Voting Blog: Still time for an election audit | Ron Rivest and Philip Stark

A Washington Post–ABC News poll found that 18% of voters — 33% of Clinton supporters and 1% of Trump supporters — think Trump was not the legitimate winner of the election. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., has called on Congress to investigate the Russian cyberattack on the Democratic National Committee and the election. There are reasons for concern. According to the director of national intelligence, the leaked emails from the DNC were “intended to interfere with the U.S. election process.” The director of national intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security, and the National Security Agency concluded that the Russian government is behind the DNC email hack and that Russian hackers attacked U.S. voter registration databases.

We know that the national results could be tipped by manipulating the vote count in a relatively small number of jurisdictions — a few dozen spread across a few key states. We know that the vast majority of local elections officials have limited resources to detect or defend against cyberattacks. And while pre-election polls have large uncertainties, they were consistently off. And various aspects of the preliminary results, such as a high rate of undervotes for president, have aroused suspicion.

Computers counted the vast majority of the 130 million votes cast in this year’s election. Even without hacking, mistakes are inevitable. Computers can’t divine voter intent perfectly; computers can be misconfigured; and software can have bugs. Did human error, computer glitches, hacking, or other problems change the outcome? While there is, as yet, no compelling evidence, the news about hacking and deliberate interference makes it worth finding out.

National: Audit the Vote Petition: Did Russia Hack Presidential Election? | Heavy

Thousands of people have signed a petition on Change.org demanding an audit of the 2016 presidential election to rule out any possibility that Russian hackers helped give Donald Trump his Electoral College victory. There’s no evidence of this, although some cyber security and intelligence experts have blamed Russia for hacks of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. Those acts benefited Trump, who has said he has never even met Vladimir Putin. The hashtag #AudittheVote was also trending on Twitter on November 17 as Clinton supporters passed around supposed election anomalies. Driving some of the suspicion: The fact that so many polls (pre-election polling but also exit polls) had the election completely wrong.

Editorials: Maryland voting audit falls short | Philip B. Stark & Poorvi L. Vora/Baltimore Sun

At the Board of Public Works Oct. 19th meeting, members passed without discussion a proposal by the State Board of Elections to pay Clear Ballot Group Inc. $275,000 for an “independent and automated solution to verify [the] accuracy” of the state’s election results. Seems reasonable, right? Especially now that the term “rigged” frequently precedes “election” in this year’s campaign rhetoric. The only problem is it won’t work. We have some experience to back this judgment: Between us, we have helped audit about 20 contests in several states and designed auditable voting systems. Methods developed by one of us are in laws in two states. It’s great that Maryland voters get to vote on paper ballots this year; paper ballots that voters can check are the best evidence of “the will of the people.” Maryland’s ballots will be scanned and then counted electronically. As required by hard-won state legislation passed in 2007, the paper ballots will be stored securely as durable evidence of what voters wanted.

Michigan: Experts: State should audit election results | The Detroit News

Since hackers have targeted the election systems of more than 20 states, cyber-security experts say Michigan should change its policy and routinely audit a sample of its paper ballots to protect against election fraud. Voter registration lists were hacked recently in Arizona and Illinois. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security would not acknowledge whether those particular systems were breached, but Secretary Jeh Johnson said hackers “in a few cases … gained access to state voting-related systems.” The department would not disclose whether Michigan was one of “a large number of state systems” scanned by hackers in preparation for possible attacks, but the Michigan Secretary of State’s office said the state’s voter registration lists have not been targeted or affected. … Audits in Michigan are only triggered in certain circumstances, according to the Secretary of State’s office. Automatic recounts for presidential ballot results happen when the leading candidates are 2,000 or fewer votes apart, while a losing candidate can request a recount for a district or certain precincts, according to the Secretary of State’s office. “It should be done routinely in order to provide a strong degree of confidence,” said University of Michigan cyber-security expert Alex Halderman. “That’s an opportunity for Michigan to improve its election procedures. You should audit every election.”

Pennsylvania: Cybersecurity expert: Pennsylvania most vulnerable to voting system hacks | CBS

The battleground state of Pennsylvania might as well have a target on its back as Election Day nears, the cybersecurity company Carbon Black warned in a new report released Thursday. “If I was a 400-pound hacker, I would target Pennsylvania,” Carbon Black chief security strategist Ben Johnson told CBS News, a reference to Donald Trump’s comment in Monday’s debate that the hacker behind the Democratic National Committee email leak could be someone “sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.” U.S. intelligence officials actually believe Russia was behind that breach and a number of recent intrusions into state voter databases. Across the state, most Pennsylvania counties use particularly high-risk electronic voting machines that leave behind zero paper trails, which could be useful to audit the integrity of votes cast. In addition, many of these machines — called “direct-recording electronic” machines — are running on severely outdated operating systems like Windows XP, which has not been patched by Microsoft since 2014, Carbon Black said in its report. In general, these complex machines are a headache compared to so-called fixed-function devices that perform just one task and are thus harder to hack.

California: Secretary of state says counties don’t need to change their election audits | The San Diego Union-Tribune

As a court date for a lawsuit that could change how San Diego County audits its elections approaches, the California secretary of state has told officials across the state that they do not need to change their procedures for double checking the accuracy of their automated vote-counting equipment. The top lawyer for the secretary of state says counties do not need to include provisional and mail-in ballots when manually auditing votes. The “Secretary of State’s position is that neither provisional ballots nor all vote-by-mail ballots are required to be included in the one percent manual tally,” Chief Counsel Steven Reyes wrote in a September 15 letter. The memo was written in response to an effort by a San Diego-based organization that’s trying to get counties to use a different interpretation of the state’s laws on election audits.

Maryland: In West Baltimore warehouse, state begins its review of city election | Baltimore Sun

Elections workers from across the region descended Monday on Baltimore to launch a precinct-level review of the city’s primary — days after the state took the unusual step of ordering the results decertified amid irregularities. In a West Baltimore warehouse on North Franklintown Road, dozens of workers under the state’s direction began organizing documents. The state is investigating why the number of votes in the city’s April 26 primary election was higher than the number of people who checked in at the polls. The work began hidden from public view, drawing criticism. Workers told members of the public — including several reporters — they were not welcome inside to observe the process.

Philippines: Comelec asked to use paper audit trail | The Manila Times

A group of bishops, former military and police officials and IT experts is poised to file a petition asking the Supreme Court to compel the Commission on Elections (Comelec) to use the voter verification paper audit trail (VVPAT), one of the four minimum security requirements mandated by law, in the May 9 elections. The Reform Philippines Coalition on Wednesday said it will file a petition for mandamus at the High Court on the first week of March. The group is led by seven bishops from various denominations — former Ligayen-Dagupan Archbishop Oscar Cruz, Rey Santillan, Bernie Malitao, Boner Andaya, Larry Celda, Butch Belgica and Noel Pantoja and IT experts Glenn Chong, Toti Casiño and Greco Belgica. It is supported by former Bukidnon congressman Al Lopez and two former Philippine National Police chiefs—Roberto Lastimosa and Hermogenes Esperon—and former Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency head Dioniso Santiago, also a former Armed Forces chief of staff.

Kansas: Wichita State statistician casts vote for regular auditing of Kansas election returns | Topeka Capital-Journal

A Wichita statistician skeptical of electronic voting security endorsed Tuesday a recommendation by the Kansas secretary of state to allow post-election audits to determine whether mistakes or fraud occurred on Election Day. Elizabeth Clarkson, chief statistician at the National Institute for Aviation Research affiliated with Wichita State University, told the Topeka-Shawnee County League of Women Voters the conversation might be moving in the right direction with Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s proposal to amend state law to enable auditing of ballots. “I’m very pleased to see Kris Kobach propose legislation,” she said. “We do need post-election audits. Without them we don’t have transparency in our voting system.”

Arizona: GOP, Democrats nix county bid to cancel hand count of presidential primary | Tucson Sentinel

Local political leaders said “nay” Wednesday to a request by the Pima County elections director to call off a hand count to verify the local results of the upcoming Arizona presidential preference election. Brad Nelson asked to cancel the tally because it would take place over Easter weekend. Bill Beard, the chairman of the Pima County Republican Party, blasted the attempt to call off the audit. emailing an evening press release. “I take the constitutional responsibility for over site (sic) of elections in Arizona very seriously,” he wrote in response to Nelson’s request. “The Pima County Republican Party will have the adequate number of people to complete the Presidential Preference Election Hand Count at the appropriately legal time and place.”

Florida: Leon County among first to automatically audit election | Tallahassee Democrat

With essentially the press of a button, Leon County became one of the first counties in the nation to conduct an independent, automatic audit of election results. In the past, the Supervisor of Elections Office was required to audit a randomly selected precinct and race as part of a post-election, state-mandated audit. The manual audits would take days to complete using temporary workers and result in audits that were not statistically reliable, said Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho. But on Wednesday, the elections office used new technology called ClearAudit, developed by a Boston-based company called Clear Ballot, to audit 100 percent of the Aug. 26 primary-election results in just moments. Florida is the first state in the nation to allow the use of the technology for audits, and Leon County was among the first four counties in the state to use it. The others are Bay, Putnam and St. Lucie counties.

Afghanistan: Kerry announces ‘comprehensive audit’ of disputed Afghanistan election | The Guardian

Secretary of state John Kerry said on Saturday both of Afghanistan’s presidential candidates were committed to abiding by the results of the “largest and most comprehensive audit” of the election runoff ballots possible. Kerry stood with the two candidates who are disputing the results of Afghanistan’s presidential election. He announced that finance minister Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai and former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah had agreed to abide by a 100%, internationally supervised audit of all ballots in the presidential election in Kabul. “Both candidates have committed to participate in and abide by the results of the largest and most comprehensive audit; every single ballot that was cast will be audited,” Kerry said. “This is the strongest possible signal by both candidates of the desire to restore legitimacy to the process.” The audit is expected to take a “number of weeks” and will begin with ballot boxes in Kabul. Ballot boxes from the provinces are to be flown by helicopter to the capital by US and international forces and examined on rolling basis. Observers from each campaign as well as international observers will be involved in the oversight of the review, and the candidate with the most votes will be declared the winner and become president.

California: Law sought to prevent recount fights | Fresno Bee

In 2010, California lawmakers approved legislation meant to reduce the incentive for expensive and contentious ballot recounts of the sort looming in the exceedingly close race for second place in the state controller’s primary. But the law went dormant at the end of last year and will have no bearing on the controller’s contest between Betty Yee and John A. Pérez. In a statement Tuesday, the Pérez campaign said it is conducting a review to “determine whether a recount is warranted. After nearly a month of counting votes and a vote margin of just 1/100th of one percent, out of more than 4 million votes cast, nobody would like to the see this process completed more than we would,” the statement said. “Since this is one of closest statewide elections in the history of California, we have an obligation to review and ensure that every vote cast is accurately counted. During our review, we will also determine whether a recount is warranted.”

Editorials: Technology key to improving New Jersey elections | NJ.com

In New Jersey, politics is a contact sport. It should come as a great disappointment that New Jersey was just ranked 37th in the nation for the administration of our elections. The Pew Charitable Trusts assembled a panel of experts to rank each state and the District of Columbia. The newest rankings came out last week. Not only did the experts score New Jersey poorly, but the Garden State was one of only 10 states that saw a decrease in their score from 2008. Worse, the Garden State got mowed by some of its neighbors. Pennsylvania came in 16th, Connecticut was 10th and Delaware was ninth. As a small comfort, the Garden State did beat New York, which came in an abysmal 47th. … So, how can New Jersey improve its ranking? First, the state could implement an online voter registration system. This innovation, which has been adopted in 16 states thus far, has made it easier for citizens to register quickly and securely, while allowing for instant verification of eligibility. Four additional states have recently passed similar measures. New Jersey should follow their lead.

Ohio: Columbus Democrat wants voting rights cemented in Constitution | Columbus Dispatch

Saying he wants to better secure the right to vote in the Ohio Constitution, Rep. Michael Stinziano is proposing a ballot issue that he says would establish that the right should be paramount above other administrative issues. The Columbus Democrat said he wanted to throw the idea out there as lawmakers begin preparations for the new General Assembly, which is likely to feature another debate over election law changes. Stinziano said 21 states have different right-to-vote issues in their constitutions. “It struck me as a little peculiar that Ohio isn’t one of those states,” he said.

National: Despite e-voting improvements, audits still needed for ballot integrity | Computerworld

Technology and process upgrades implemented since the controversial 2000 presidential election have made electronic voting machines more secure and reliable to use, the Caltech-MIT Voting Technology Project said in a report last week. Even so, the only way to ensure the integrity of votes cast with the systems is to have mandatory auditing of the results and of all voting technologies used in an election, the 85-page report cautioned. Rather than setting security standards for election equipment, the better approach for safeguarding ballot integrity is to hand-count a sufficiently large and random sample of the paper records of votes cast electronically, it said. “The 2000 United States presidential election put a spotlight on the fragility and vulnerability of voting technology,” the report said. “It became clear that providing robust, accurate, and secure voting systems remained an important open technical problem” for the United States. The Voting Technology Project is a joint initiative between MIT and Caltech and was launched originally to investigate the causes of the voting problems in Florida in 2000 and to make recommendations based on the findings.

Voting Blogs: Readers Debate the Merits of Post-election Audits | The Thicket

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.

Editorials: Crying wolf about voter fraud in Montana | Linda McCulloch/Ravlli Republic

We’re all familiar with Aesop’s Fable, “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” The cautionary tale taught us that intentionally lying about something has its consequences, and that those consequences can negatively impact the people around us. Crying wolf about the security of Montana’s elections is an intentional and deliberate attempt to decrease voter turnout by gaining support for laws that will restrict your right to vote. These false allegations of massive voter fraud have been tediously repeated despite all evidence to the contrary, and it’s time for the deceivers to start bearing the burden of proof. As your secretary of state, and chief elections officer, I take every allegation of election fraud seriously. I launched the “The Fair Elections Center” early in my term so that every Montanan could easily report a potential state election law violation. Every allegation is documented, reviewed and, if warranted, passed on to the appropriate authorities.

Editorials: Saving throw: securing democracy with stats, spreadsheets, and 10-sided dice | Ars Technica

Armed with a set of 10-sided dice (we’ll get to those in a moment), an online Web tool, and a stack of hundreds of ballots, University of California-Berkeley statistics professor Philip Stark spent last Friday unleashing both science and technology upon a recent California election. He wanted to answer a very simple question—had the vote counting produced the proper result?—and he had developed a stats-based system to find out. On June 2, 6,573 citizens went to the polls in Napa County and cast primary ballots for supervisor of the 2nd District in one of California’s most famous wine-producing regions, on the northern edge of the San Francisco Bay Area. The three candidates—Juliana Inman, Mark van Gorder, and Mark Luce—would all have liked to come in first, but they really didn’t want to be third. That’s because only the two top vote-getters in the primary would proceed to the runoff election in November; number three was out. Napa County officials announced the official results a few days later: Luce, the incumbent, took in 2,806 votes, van Gorder got 1,911 votes, and Inman received 1,856 votes—a difference between second and third place of just 55 votes. Given the close result, even a small number of counting errors could have swung the election. Vote counting can go wrong in any number of ways, and even the auditing processes designed to ensure the integrity of close races can be a mess (did someone say “hanging, dimpled, or pregnant chads”?). Measuring human intent at the ballot box can be tricky. To take just one example, in California, many ballots are cast by completing an arrow, which is then optically read. While voters are instructed to fully complete the thickness of the arrow, in practice some only draw a line. The vote tabulation system used by counties sometimes do not always count those as votes. So Napa County invited Philip Stark to look more closely at their results. Stark has been on a four-year mission to encourage more elections officials to use statistical tools to ensure that the announced victor is indeed correct. He first described his method back in 2008, in a paper called “Conservative statistical post-election audits,” but he generally uses a catchier name for the process: “risk-limiting auditing.”

Connecticut: Polling places chosen for Connecticut post-election audit | The Register Citizen

Pearson Middle School will be the subject of state scrutiny, now that the voting precinct has been chosen as part of a statewide audit. Secretary of State Denise Merrill released the list of precincts to be audited on May 15, the first day of audits. These post-election audits are mandated by state law, and Merrill said the audits are necessary to keep public trust. “Registered Republicans had their say on April 24th about who they want as their 2012 presidential nominee,” said Secretary Merrill in a press release. “Now, it is our duty to audit the machine totals from the Presidential Preference Primary to ensure the accuracy of our optical scanners. We are committed to making sure Connecticut voters have continued confidence that their votes were recorded accurately and that’s why these independent audits are so vital.”

National: Congressional Democrats Push Voter Empowerment Act | Roll Call News

House Democrats on Thursday unveiled new voting rights legislation designed to modernize voter registration while cracking down on practices that could discourage certain populations from voting. The Voter Empowerment Act appears to be a direct counter to a growing movement within the GOP at the state and national level to require voters to present a photo ID when voting. “The ability to vote should be easy, accessible and simple. Yet there are practices and laws in place that make it harder to vote today than it was even one year ago. … We should be moving toward a more inclusive democracy, not one that locks people out,” said Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), one of the bill’s sponsors and a 1960s civil rights icon.