Florida: State law hinders vote audits | Palm Beach Post

Candice Hoke votes, but with some skepticism: “There’s truly no legitimate basis for trusting this election software when we know it is erratic, that it sometimes produces valid results and sometimes not.” Hoke, founding director of the Cleveland-based Center for Election Integrity, said a ballot count after the election is one key way to sidestep vulnerabilities in technology. But there’s a problem. Under Florida law, supervisors can audit only a tiny slice of ballots after an election – typically no more than 2 percent of precincts – and only after the winners are formally declared. “In defense of the legislature in Florida and elsewhere,” Hoke said, “they are not trained in software; they have often been told software and computers can’t make mistakes.”

National: Simple steps could catch technical failures in vote counting | Palm Beach Post

Carolyn Crnich likes to be second-guessed: The registrar of voters in Humboldt County, Calif., scans every ballot and makes the election results available, online or on disk, so that anyone, anywhere, can count them. Community activists do just that. The result: 100 percent audits of the supervisor’s results, a sharp contrast to Florida, which limits vote counts to a small number of ballots in a single race. “I don’t like saying to my constituents, ‘Hey, just trust me,’ ” Crnich said. “Now, I don’t have to. Count them yourself, and if you find anything out of the ordinary, I want to know.” In 2008, the Humboldt County Election Transparency Project did find something out of the ordinary: 197 ballots dropped by machines. That led to an examination of the elections software used in Humboldt, about 200 miles north of San Francisco. So many problems were found, the system was decertified for use in California. It continues counting ballots in two Florida counties without incident, although a state Division of Elections advisory urged counties to get an upgrade. But elections supervisors shouldn’t get too comfortable with any system, experts say.

Florida: Tangled Web: Wellington, Florida Drama Highlights Complexity of Technology, Value of Audits | Election Academy

An extraordinary story is emerging from an election from the March 13 municipal election in Wellington located in Florida’s Palm Beach County. Election Night returns indicated that two hotly-contested council elections had been resolved in favor of two candidates, but then a routine post-election audit suggested that their opponents had actually won due to errors in tabulating the county’s optical scan ballots. Following a court-ordered manual recount, the revised totals were confirmed. As if that weren’t extraordinary enough, a battle is now underway between the county clerk and her vendor about who was responsible for the error. The clerk is blaming the vendor, saying that the error – which appears to have been caused by a “synchronization” problem between vote-counting and tabulation machines – is something she and her staff have never seen before and thus could never have been expected to catch, let alone fix.

Connecticut: Secretary of State’s office selects precincts for post-primaries audit | NorwalkPlus.com

Deputy Secretary of the State James Spallone today joined Connecticut voting rights advocates from CT Voters Count and Common Cause for a public drawing to randomly select 12 precincts that will have election results audited following the September 13, 2011 municipal primaries that took place in 21 Connecticut communities. A complete list of the precincts selected is below. Precincts from Bridgeport, where municipal primaries were held on September 27th, will be drawn at random for a post election audit at a later date.

“On September 13th voters went to the polls across Connecticut to choose nominees to run in November’s general election to fill very important roles in local government,” said Deputy Secretary of the State James Spallone. “Our audit law exists to hold our election process accountable and reassure the public to have continued confidence that all votes were recorded accurately. We will repeat this process again in the near future for the city of Bridgeport, whose primary was held two weeks after other cities and towns.”