CT: Audits Accurate? How Many Votes Is A Handful?

If we dismiss every discrepancy as human hand count error, how would we know if there was an optical scanner error – caused by the scanner hardware, human error, or human fraud?

AP article in the Hartford Courant: Audits: Conn. voting machine counts accurate: <read>

Connecticut Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz (‘BYE-suh-wits) says audits of some of the state’s voting machines show they produced extremely accurate vote totals for last month’s elections.

Bysiewicz says her office reviewed results in 10 percent of the state’s voting precincts, as required by law, by comparing the machine totals with hand-count results.

Bysiewicz spokesman Av Harris says none of the totals were off by more than a handful of votes. He says past experience has shown that minor discrepancies are usually the result of human error during the hand counts.

The University of Connecticut will be doing a more thorough analysis.

Bysiewicz says Connecticut residents should feel confident that the optical scan machines are counting their votes correctly.

The Connecticut Citizen Audit Coalition will also be doing a more thorough analysis. In the meantime, we have reviewed some of the official audit reports filed by municipalities. Here is an image of one report from just one Connecticut city. <view>

To save you time, the discrepancies in various candidate counts in this one district are:
13, -2, 10, -11, 28, 13, 8, 16, 1, 12, 93
(we corrected for the one obvious error in the last column)

The discrepancy of 93 was in one of the Registrar Of Voters races, not one of those “challenging” cross-endorsement races.

Update: From NorwalkPlus: Results of 2008 post election audit show accurate Election Day machine counts <read>

By Secretary of the State’s Office

…“We set a record in Connecticut on November 4th with 1.64 million people casting ballots and Election Day went remarkably smoothly,” said Secretary Bysiewicz. “The results of this audit indicate, once again, that the optical scan voting system is secure and extremely accurate. Connecticut voters can be confident in the integrity of our elections and that their votes were counted correctly. Still, I’m not asking anyone to simply take my word for it: that’s why these post-election procedures are so important. We want to shine the light on the electoral process, before and after all votes are cast. So far, Connecticut’s new voting machines have passed the test every step of the way.”

As part of Connecticut’s audit law, believed to be the toughest in the United States…

While the audits did uncover accurate machine counts on Election Day, there were discrepancies in isolated cases involving the hand-count audits for some ballots marked with votes for major party candidates who were cross endorsed by minor parties.