In light of the increase in contested elections since 2000:
* the 18,000 missing votes in Sarasota, Florida in 2006
* the decertification of the lab that “tested” a majority of US voting machines
* the conviction of two Ohio election officials for rigging the 2004 presidential recount
concerned citizens are questioning the integrity of our voting systems.
A recent recommendation released by the National Election Data Archive (NEDA) suggests that a system for election audits may be the solution to ensuring the integrity of election outcomes.
NEDA’s new paper provides a small table to look up the margin between the leading candidates to find a percentage and a minimum election audit amount that would ensure that election outcomes are accurate.
For example, if we wanted to audit the Boswell-Lamberti election, the table says we would have to hand count the ballots in 6 precincts because the margin of victory was just over 5%.
There are two problems with this. First, some counties in the district are unauditable since their voting machines leave no paper trail. We know how to fix that, don’t we?
Second, the NEDA formula is so simple that it might miss some manipulated precinct results–even missing enough mischief that we have only a low degree of confidence that our audit has been effective. For example, the NEDA paper assumes 440 precincts in a Congressional district, whereas the Des Moines area district has only 330.
There are other formulas for selecting the number of precincts to audit, and I’ll look into them later. For now remember that getting a paper trail is only the first step if we want to guarantee election returns that are counted by software. Auditing is the second step. We need both.
If you can handle some math or like colorful tables, you might want to examine the NEDA paper.