After the November 2008 presidential election, Connecticut conducted its fourth large-scale post-election audit[1]. This was also the Connecticut Citizen Election Audit Coalition’s fourth audit observation. The coalition was formed to organize citizens to observe the audits. The coalition includes the League of Women Voters Connecticut, Connecticut Common Cause, Connecticut Citizen Action Group, and Connecticut Voters Count. The purpose of the observation was to demonstrate citizen interest in the process, increase citizen involvement in elections, provide feedback to the Secretary of the State and the legislature on the audit process, and provide the public with information necessary to determine their confidence in our elections.
By law, the Secretary of the State is required, in each election, to select at random 10% of Connecticut’s voting districts to participate in post-election audits, and, in a presidential election, randomly select three offices for audit in each of those districts. On November 13, 2008, Secretary Bysiewicz chose the 10% of districts to audit and decided to audit all five offices on the ballot.
In this report, we conclude, based on our observations and analysis of audit reports submitted to the Secretary of the State that the November post-election audits still do not inspire confidence because of the continued lack of
- standards,
- detailed guidance for counting procedures, and
- consistency, reliability, and transparency in the conduct of the audit.
We also note continuing failures to follow audit and chain-of-custody procedures.
Among our greatest concerns are the discrepancies between machine counts and hand-counts reported to the Secretary of the State by several municipalities. In many cases, these discrepancies are not thoroughly and reasonably explained. We believe that the ad-hoc counting procedures used by many municipalities were not sufficient to count ballots accurately and efficiently.
Several audit supervisors attributed discrepancies between machine counts and hand counts to human limitations; other supervisors attributed these to inaccurate scanners. We find no reason to attribute all errors to either humans or machines
In each of the last three audit observation reports we have made recommendations to the Secretary of the State and the Legislature. Our last report covered progress between November 2007 and August 2008 on the recommendations[2]. With this current report we have reorganized our list of recommendations, removing those that have been accomplished, while clarifying those that remain. Recommendations are grouped by topic.
[1] In this document we will frequently use the term “audit” when we mean “post-election audit” or “post-election audit counting session”. Technically we believe that the whole process encompassing everything from the preservation of records, random drawings, counting in municipalities, the report by the University of Connecticut, and the evaluation of that report by the Secretary of the State would be the “audit”. However, for readability we will usually follow the common practice of using “audit” to refer to parts of the whole.
[2] The August report with a review of progress on recommendations is available at: https://www.ctelectionaudit.org/Reports/ObservationReportAug08.pdf
