Report

This morning Secretary of the State, Denise Merrill selected 34 district for audit with the help of students at Wethersfield High School:

Checks on State Voting Machines Do Not Make the Grade
Do Not Provide Confidence in Election System, Says Citizen Audit

From the Press Release:

Audits of the recent presidential primaries are so faulty that exact final vote tallies cannot be verified, says the non-partisan Connecticut Citizen Election Audit. Unless state and local election officials make changes, the same will be true for the November elections.

“State law requires audits to verify the accuracy of optical scanner voting machines as a check for errors and a deterrent to fraud. Local registrars gather officials to manually count paper ballots and compare their totals to the totals found by the scanners”, explains Luther Weeks, Executive Director of Connecticut Citizen Election Audit.

Issues reported by the group were:

• Incomplete or missing official reports of vote counts from town registrars;
• The lack of action on the part of the Secretary of the State’s Office to check that all required reports are submitted and all submitted reports are completed fully;
• Of 169 municipalities required to submit lists of polling places before the election, the Secretary of the State’s Office recorded only 68, with 101 missing;
• Poor security procedures to prohibit ballot tampering;
• Not following procedures intended to ensure “double checking” and “blind counting” rather than having scanner counts as targets while counting manually;

“The public, candidates, and the Secretary of the State should expect local election officials to organize proper audits and produce accurate, complete audit reports. The public and candidates should expect the Secretary of the State’s Office to take the lead in ensuring the audits are complete. Yet, due to a lack of attention to detail and follow-through the audits do not prove or disprove the accuracy of the reported primary results,” Weeks said.

<Press Release .pdf> <Full Report pdf> <Detail data/municipal reports>

Again accuracy declined and write-in votes handled incorrectly
November 2015 Post-Election Audit Report

From the Press Release:

The Connecticut Citizen Election Audit has released its report on its observation of the November 2015 official post-election audits. The audits, required by state law, are intended to verify the accuracy of elections at the municipal level.

Citizen Audit spokesperson Luther Weeks stated, “After 9 years of official audits, voters should expect accuracy. Yet the audits have gone from poor to worse.”

The group’s observers found that official audit results do not inspire confidence because of continued:

• Discrepancies between machine counts and hand counts of votes reported to the Secretary of the State by municipal registrars of voters.
• Lack of investigation of such discrepancies, and the lack of standards for triggering investigations.
• Lack of consistency, reliability, and transparency in the conduct of the audit.
• Weaknesses in ballot chain-of-custody and security.

The group’s report noted:

• 28% of official audits cited “Human Error” in counting ballots and votes. Registrars of voters should be expected to take the necessary effort to count accurately.
• Significant decreases in audit integrity, and accuracy.
• In three towns audits detected districts where officials fed write-in ballots through scanners a second time on election night.
• If the group’s recommendations from last year had been mandated and followed, all write-in ballots would have been counted accurately.

“Problems discovered counting write-ins two years in a row shows the value of the official audits. But the report also reveals the decline in official attention to the audits, demonstrating that independent citizen observation and reporting are essential to election integrity.” Weeks emphasized.

<Press Release .pdf> <Full Report pdf> <Detail data/municipal reports>

Review of 169 municipal election websites shows election
information lacking, yet easily remedied

From the press release:

February 25, 2015. The Connecticut Citizen Election Audit released a study evaluating election information provided to voters in all 169 municipalities across Connecticut. Information was collected by volunteer evaluators in the days just prior to the 2014 November election.

Citizen Audit spokesperson Luther Weeks stated, “Many towns do not provide the information most sought by voters across Connecticut, such as ‘What is on the ballot’ or ‘Where do I vote?’. Many also failed to inform citizens of online registration, which could have saved citizens time and municipal expenses.”

Municipal website findings include:

• Only 28% answered, “What is on the ballot?”.
• Only 56% provided the “Date of the next election”.
• Only 64% answered “Where do I vote?”
• Only 15% posted results for their 2013 municipal election.
• Many with broken links and obviously outdated information
• Many with up-to-date event calendars and front page bulletins, listing current events, and Ebola preparations, that did not list election-day.

The report also includes recommendations to municipalities, the Secretary of the State, and a low-cost sample website for a whimsical town, http://NutmegtonCT.wordpress.com

<Press Release (.pdf)> <Full Report (.pdf)>

Secretary of the State and her Office significantly improve integrity and transparency of the random drawing

Report findings included:

• Significantly fewer errors in the random drawing list in November 2014 compared to November 2013, finding:
  • One (1) missing district in 2014 vs. sixteen (16) missing in 2013.
  • Seven (7) non-existent districts on the list in 2014 vs. two (2) in 2013.
  • Three (3) municipalities incorrect in 2014 vs. fourteen (14) incorrect in 2013.
• Improvements largely due to the diligence of the Secretary of the State’s Office, in leading compliance in 2014, with a law intended to fix past problems.
  • A compliance failure rate of 2.4% in 2014 vs. 67% in 2013.
• We also appreciate that the Secretary and Secretary’s Office responded to our request to reverse past precedent and hold a public and transparent drawing of races to be audited.

Citizen Audit spokesperson Luther Weeks noted, “We applaud improvements made by the Secretary of the State and her Office. The drawing was significantly more accurate than last year and, for the first time, the Secretary chose races for audit publicly and transparently”

<Full Report (.pdf)> <Press Release> <Backup Data>