An increasing number of Americans have become concerned with whether or not electronic machines accurately record and count votes. To require voter-verified permanent paper ballots and increase voter confidence and accessibility, U.S. Representative Rush Holt of New Jersey and U.S. Senator Bill Nelson of Florida have sponsored virtually identical bills (HR811 and S559) that are intended to correct some of the significant, if unintended consequences of the Help America Vote Act of 2002.
(PRWeb) March 3, 2007 -- An increasing number of Americans have become concerned with whether or not electronic machines accurately record and count votes. To require voter-verified permanent paper ballots and increase voter confidence and accessibility, U.S. Representative Rush Holt of New Jersey and U.S. Senator Bill Nelson of Florida have sponsored virtually identical bills (HR811 and S559) that are intended to correct some of the significant, if unintended consequences of the Help America Vote Act of 2002.
Election officials in most states have not subjected election results to independent outside audits - visual inspections of voter-verified paper ballots in randomly-selected precincts; nor are there any uniform audit procedures for elections.
Kathy Dopp, President of the National Election Data Archive, recently met with Congressional staffers in Washington, DC to recommend changes to proposed federal election integrity bills - statistically valid election audits and public access to election records.
When a race is close, a small number of miscounted votes can alter the election outcome and a robust audit is needed to find miscount which could be hidden in a few precincts.
Tiered election audits, like those proposed by Holt and Nelson, manually check more precincts in close races. While there are several identified concerns with the Holt and Nelson bills, Dopp has released a report \'Fooled Once: Checking Vote Count Integrity\' evaluating the effectiveness of the Holt and Nelson audit provisions (shown in table in pdf version of press release).
According to Dopp, the Holt and Nelson audit ignores the variety in the amount of precincts in U.S. House districts. For example, a 10% audit in an 800-precinct House district requires an audit of 80 precincts, whereas a 10% audit in a 150-precinct House district triggers an audit of only 15 precincts, resulting in statistically insufficient power to detect miscounts in a close race where fewer than 1 in 15 miscounted precincts could alter the outcome.
A group of university professors wrote a letter in support of Holt\'s audit proposal, \'Thoughts on Mandatory Audits\'.i Dopp\'s says that her calculations agree with the professors\' for the few cases that the professors evaluated but that their analysis was restricted only to U.S. House races with 400 total precinct vote counts for only a few selected margins; and did not consider House races with closer margins or smaller number of precincts.
\'Fooled Once: Checking Vote Count Integrity\' evaluates the effectiveness of proposed election audits by plotting colorful charts of the probabilities for protecting races with particular margins between the leading candidates against the total number of precincts for Congressional districts.
According to Dopp, the Holt and Nelson audit provisions would not protect U.S. House races in which there is less than a 50% chance of discovering miscount in cases when sufficient miscount exists to alter the outcome.
\'Fooled Once: Checking Vote Count Integrity\' suggests alternatives that would protect all U.S. House races, including an alternative to fix the Holt and Nelson audit by requiring minimum numbers of precincts to be audited. To protect all federal races, a larger audit rate is necessary for House districts with fewer precincts.
As with all legislation, cost is a consideration. Therefore an accurate cost estimate for conducting nation-wide manual audits of federal elections is needed. Dopp says that Congressional staffers asked her to calculate cost estimates for federal elections, but that election data, including the margins and number of total precincts for all recent U.S. House and Senate races, is necessary for each state and for recent elections in order to perform the calculations. States are not required to collect or publicly release precinct-level election results (or other vote counts and election records necessary for public oversight of elections) so that the data must be obtained from an organization like Election Data Services (EDS).
Tax-deductible donations to defray the $1,500 cost to obtain the data for a cost estimate for conducting audits of all federal elections from EDS are accepted at ElectionArchive.org. Please help NEDA provide Congress a cost estimate for conducting nationwide audits of federal elections.
The full report with charts and tables \'Fooled Once: Checking Vote Count Integrity\' is found at:
http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/paper-audits/TierElectionAuditEval.pdfThis press release with chart and table can be found at:
http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/press/Release-ElectionAuditEval-200703.pdf The National Election Data Archive urges people to contact their U.S. Senators and Representative to ask for sufficient nationwide audits of federal elections to protect all U.S. House and Senate races. See
http://senate.gov and
http://house.govPress Contact: KATHY DOPP
Company Name: US COUNT VOTES dba National Election Data Archive
Email: email protected from spam bots
Phone: 435-658-4657
Website: http://ElectionArchive.org
Press Release Source: EMediaWire
