Ohio SoS Brunner calls for audits

[BillORightsMan]

@ Cincy Enquirer

Audit of primary votes asked
Brunner wants 11 Ohio counties to volunteer

Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner plans a first-of-its-kind audit of votes from the March 4 presidential primaries, saying the outcome should help ensure the integrity of future elections.

Brunner is calling on 11 counties to volunteer for the audit, in which at least 7 percent of the votes cast in each county would be rechecked by hand.

Miami County was the first to step forward.

Under the rules set by Brunner, the election audits must take place within five days of the official certification of the election results.

Brunner's audit would cover both paper ballots read by optical scanners and electronic touch-screen voting machines.

Brunner has proposed eliminating electronic voting before the November general election.

"During her campaign, Secretary of State Brunner talked about elections that could be audited or verified," spokesman Jeff Ortega said. "This is a further step toward that fulfillment."

The article doesn't mention which 11 counties she's asked. I'm in Lake County (NE OH) and will be first in line to volunteer for this, since Lake County uses DRE and optiscan. I'll send a letter to the Lake BoE to urge them to volunteer for the audit.

I think 7% is a pretty good sample. Is it?
And how do you audit votes cast on a DRE?

imbillogithsmanandiapprovethismessage
:patriot:

[Botany]

1. I loves me some Brunner

BTW Volunteer is a very nice way of saying to do it.

[OnTheOtherHand]

2. about the 11 counties

It isn't that she has asked 11 particular counties to do it. Basically, she wants as many counties as possible to volunteer, but to sweeten the deal, she has offered an incentive for the first 11. (The SoS will pick up expenses for staff from those counties to attend a summer conference.) I'm not sure how "sweet" that deal is. (ETA: I'm not being ironic there: I just don't know.)

At least, that's how I read it. People can read the directive here and see what else they notice. Here is a link to other directives in 2008.

[nels25]

3. Is any method of voting actually Fraud proof??

call my cynical but I doubt it. (To much watching Chicago in action for the last 40 years).

:hide:

[Wilms]

4. Have a look at New Jersey's Post-Election Audit Bill

This is a "risk-based" protocol unique in the nation. And it isn't a bill any longer. It's the law! (Though there's still machine's without VVPAT in NJ so the law won't be implemented yet. :( )

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=203&topic_id=488572

[L. Coyote]

5. Will there be an audit/investigation of 2004 and previous results?

Recently updated with new data/evidence/spreadsheets:

How Kerry Votes Were Switched to Bush Votes
http://jqjacobs.net/politics/ohio.html

Conclusions

The 2004 Ohio Presidential voting results do not accurately reflect voter intentions. In Cuyahoga County, the election was flawed and the design appears to have been manipulated. At locations with several ballot orders in use, many votes were cast by voters crossing precincts, hence counted other than as intended. At precincts with the highest Kerry support, the percentage of uncounted votes is inexplicably high. The obvious inference—intentional manipulation produced concentrated undercounting, cross-voting, and vote-switching in areas of highest Kerry support—cannot be ignored in the face of the evidence and statistics. The possibilty that ballots were switched to different precincts, post-voting to effect vote-switching, must be considered in a complete chain of custody context.

Many individual ballots resulted in a vote-switch, a two-vote margin difference from the intended result. Switched-votes cast for Kerry and counted for Bush had twice the impact as their actual occurence, by each subtracting one from Kerry and adding one to Bush. Bush and Kerry votes also went uncounted as non-votes or were miscounted as minor candidate votes. A high percentage of all Cuyahoga County votes were cast at locations with multiple ballot orders. The manner in which precincts and ballot orders were combined increased the probability of a Kerry cross-vote being recorded as a Bush vote. Quantitative analyses of candidate votes and of non-vote percentages evidence the cross-voting and the patterns of cross-voting and vote-switching.

Sorting locations and precincts to their specific cross-voting probability subsets reveals intended voting patterns and the degree of cross-voting. The combinations of ballot orders and precincts at polling locations enables quantitative analysis of cross-voting and vote-switching. .........