The Next Step: Audits
Last week as the legislature was dumping touchscreens and mandating paper ballots, the American Statistical Association was getting into the debate. Their board adopted a “Position on Electoral Integrity” that reminds us to actually look at the paper ballots.
“It is critical that the integrity of central vote tabulations be confirmed by audits of voter-verified hard-copy records in order to provide high - and clearly specified - levels of confidence in electoral outcomes… Certification of any electoral outcome should require substantiating evidence that the putative winner was the intended selection of the plurality of voters.
That’s a clumsy way of saying, “Don’t let the scanner do all the thinking.”
A bill to require audits languishes in the legislature today. We’ll have the ballot system we wanted but we’re still using an insecure, fallible computer to read the votes and add the votes. We need to get our pollworkers eyes involved, too.