Feb 12 2010
Good Gets Better
After each election, we conduct a retabulation of 5% of our precincts pursuant to state law. As post election audits go, it’s not much. We’ve beefed ours up a bit by adding a redundant hand count of a race in each of the 6 precincts retabulated in Champaign County.
Each time we do this, we find a few ballots that have been irregularly marked by a voter and which don’t count correctly, either on election day or on the day of the retabulation. For example, if you go back to the retabulation we conducted for the April 2009 election, you’ll see that we found 8 irregularly marked ballots that explain the discrepancy between the two counts.
Today, out of 1178 ballots containing 18,227 votes we found ONE ballot with ONE mark that didn’t read accurately. That’s a voter error rate of .005%.
The full results of our retabulation are available here.
This post by Champaign County Clerk Mark Sheldon does not make logical sense to me. Perhaps Clerk Sheldon can help me by explaining the seeming inconsistencies between his post and the data he provides which claims to be the “full results of our retabulation” showing “ONE ballot” that “didn’t read accurately” for a “voter error rate of 0.005%
When I looked at the link to “The full results of our retabulation are available here” what I found was a list of six precinct counts with a total altogether of 672 votes counted [*not* 1178 ballots with 18,227 votes] and there was no documentation of the “ONE mark that didn’t read accurately”, since all three columns with the counts matched exactly, as if the persons conducting the manual audit did not correctly record the one discrepancy (then how do we know that they recorded other discrepancies if they occurred?)
Also, if there were only 672 votes that were manually counted and checked, and there were “ONE mark that didn’t read accurately” out of the vote counts that were checked, that error rate is 0.1488% *not* 0.005% as claimed above.
I would like to see the actual data that supports the assertions of the County Clerk or know why “The full results of our retabulation” do not support the assertions about the manual audit made by the County Clerk.
I appreciate that Clerk Sheldon is willing to open a discussion on and involve the public on this very important topic and wish that more County Clerks would do the same.
Thanks.
Kathy
Sorry for the confusion. There are two issues here. The first is how the machines counted the ballots in the first and second instance. In those cases, they counted the same for 18,226 out of 18,227 votes cast on the entirety of each ballot. The one discrepancy on the two computer counts is noted in the St. Joseph 2 retabulation and the ballot which is likely the source of the discrepancy is copied and attached.
The second case is the hand count. In the hand count there was 100% accuracy for the six races picked between the computer count and the hand count. Since there was no discrepancy there, there is nothing to document.
Got it now. Thanks. And thanks for doing those manual audits that will discourage vote tampering shannanigans in your county.
FYI, the EAC is going to be seeking proposals for pre election testing programs and post election auditing soon. I’ll be interested in the guidelines and hoping that we can participate.
Can you tell us a little more about “retabulation”? What is it, when and how it’s done, and what is the goal?
Paul, retabulation is defined in the Illinois election code. I think it was written by someone who wanted to provide some measure of security to the voting process but really lacked familiarity with what was needed. It merely requires us to run ballots through a tabulator again in 5% of the precincts. It accomplishes little to nothing, since the same software drives the election day tabulation and the retabulation.
We have expanded that process voluntarily to include a redundant recount in a number of races. While limited, it’s a start and hopefully begins the groundwork for a post election audit process in the future.