Nov 2011 Election Audit Observation Report – Data Available for Public Review
Coalition finds continuing problems with audit integrity
Provides calculations and official data on the web for public review and verification
For the first time, in the interest of public information and transparency, we are making all official municipal audit reports and the data we complied available for everyone to review on the web. Citizens can see the reports from their own town, other towns, and perform their own audit of the Coalition’s data entry and calculations based on those official reports. The November post-election audits still do not inspire confidence because of the continued:
- Lack of integrity in the random district selection and race selection processes.
- Lack of consistency, reliability, and transparency in the conduct of the audit.
- Discrepancies between machine counts and hand-counts reported to the Secretary of the State by municipalities and the lack of standards for determining need for further investigation of discrepancies.
- Weaknesses in the ballot chain-of-custody.
<Full Report, Press Release, Excerpts> <Review detail data and municipal reports>
Nov 2010 Election Audit Observation Report
Coalition calls again for legislature to act. Citizen observation and analysis show little, if any, improvement in November post-election audits.
The Coalition noted significant differences between results reported by optical scanners and the hand count of ballots by election officials across Connecticut. Compared to previous audits, the Coalition noted little, if any, improvement in the attention to detail and in following procedures in the November 2010 audits.
Bridgeport Recount Report and Recommendations
Votes were miscounted and miscalculated adding votes to each candidate, but not changing winner in the race for governor
Each candidate for the governor’s race gained votes in the recount when compared to the officially reported results, as follows: Foley (+174), Malloy (+761), and Marsh (+19). These differences parallel candidate shares in the initially reported results. Counting of all ballots in the governor’s race resulted in differences in many counts, totaling 1,520 votes miscounted, of these 1,236 were initially under reported and 284 were initially over reported.
Simply printing more ballots only reduces the chance of the specific problem that occurred in Bridgeport. There are other causes that could result in a municipality having to scramble to photocopy ballots or perform hand counting such as a massive power failure or ballots lost in a fire, flood, or accident shortly before or during Election Day.
Aug 2010 Post-Election Audit Observation Report – Incremental Improvement – New Integrity Concern
Citizen observation and analysis shows some improvements along with a newly uncovered problem with the random selection process…We conclude that August post-election audits still do not inspire confidence
the list of polling districts for the random audit drawing was missing some districts and is otherwise inaccurate and ambiguous. The integrity of the audit requires an accurate list of districts that is verifiable by the public. We have extended our recommendations to the Legislature to include an efficient fix to this problem.
Sign-Up for our Mailing List to Observe Future Post-Election Audits
Our observers are committed to democracy, including election integrity. Without their participation nobody but a few local officials would know what occurs in the audits.
Nov 2009 Observation Report – Improvement, Yet Still Unsatisfactory
The Coalition noted significant differences between results reported by optical scanners and the hand count of ballots by election officials across Connecticut. Compared to previous audits, the Coalition noted small incremental improvements in the attention to detail, following procedures, and in the chain-of-custody.
In this report, we conclude that the November post-election audits still do not inspire confidence. We find no reason to attribute all errors to either humans or machines.