Auditor was completely dumbfounded, and used the "F" word.

[garybeck]

In my "other" life I work at a large corporation. In an ironic twist of events, the business process I work on was selected for a random Audit. There's Karma for you I guess.

After demonstrating a few things, providing documents and records, and answering some questions to the auditor, I mentioned that it was funny this is happening now, as I've been working with election rights people to promote audits of the election system.

I described to her that our system here in Vermont uses paper ballots, but they're all scanned by proprietary code to count the votes, and there are no audits in place to make sure things are working right.

Her response?

She was literally speechless. She couldn't believe that a system could be set up like that and there wouldn't be regular audits in place, as part of the design, from the very beginning. I told her, you think that's bad, then we have the touchscreen voting machines that can't be audited even if we wanted to. She, an auditor by profession, who understands why there are audits and how they are done, was completely dumbfounded.

I started to agree how they should have audits, in case the machines aren't working right, and she jumped right in and said the "F" word. "Fraud" she says, "you'd need audits on those systems to prevent Fraud." It wasn't 30 seconds into the conversation until she brought it up, all on her own. It really is a no-brainer.

So here I am spending several hours of time, at the expense of my employer, to provide information for an audit, which would have no bearing on the life of any person should the audit find some kind of problem. The auditor is one of several full time employees who do that sort of thing all year round. And the audit is *internal* meaning no one outside the company is requiring us to do this. It's being done just because the company wants to make sure things are working as they should.

And at the same time, our election system which affects the lives of virtually everyone on this planet is going unaudited and in many cases unauditable.

What does it mean, that a company should care more about their internal processes than election officials care about the integrity of the elections they administer?


She was completely dumbfounded, and even though I've been doing this for over 2 years now, I'm still dumbfounded.