CA State Senator Bowen Looks To Improve Election Audit Process

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From Bowen's office:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT:Evan Goldberg
February 6, 2006 [phone]/[phone]

BOWEN INTRODUCES MEASURE TO IMPROVE ELECTION AUDIT PROCESS AND THE ACCURACY OF ELECTION RESULTS

SACRAMENTO – Closing a looping in the auditing procedures used by California’s elections officials is the goal of SB 1235, which was introduced today by Senator Debra Bowen (D-Redondo Beach), the chairwoman of the Senate Elections, Reapportionment & Constitutional Amendments Committee.

“Forty percent of Californians vote by absentee ballot and thousands of others take advantage of in-person early voting opportunities before every election, so the fact that some counties exclude more than half of the ballots cast in any given election from the auditing process is fairly unnerving,” said Bowen. “The manual audit is designed to ensure the electronic voting machines and the ballot counters tallied the results correctly, but there’s absolutely no way to conduct a meaningful audit if you’re only re-counting half of the votes.”

Under California law, elections officials are required to conduct a public manual tally of the ballots cast in at least 1% of the precincts to check the accuracy of the votes tabulated by the electronic or mechanical voting systems. The law also requires the precincts subject to the audit to be randomly selected by elections officials, but it doesn’t define “random.”

SB 1235 (Bowen) improves the election auditing procedures in two significant ways. First, it requires elections officials to include absentee, provisional, and all other ballots that are cast before Election Day or at satellite voting centers in the 1% audit. Second, it ensures the precincts subject to the manual audit requirement will truly be randomly selected by requiring elections officials to use either a random number generator to select the precincts to be manually counted or any other method set forth in regulations the Secretary of State would be required to adopt.

“This is about the integrity of our electoral system and at a time when significant questions are being raised about the accuracy of our voting equipment, this is a loophole that needs to be closed,” continued Bowen. “The mandatory manual audit law was created forty years ago when fewer than 4% of the state’s voters used an absentee ballot. Now, more than 30% of California’s nearly 16 million voters are registered as permanent absentee voters and nearly 40% of the people who voted in the November special election did so by absentee ballot.”

Last year, Bowen authored SB 370, which was signed into law over the objections of the Secretary of State and the California Association of Clerks & Elections Officials. It requires elections officials to use the paper produced by the accessible voter-verified paper audit trail (AVVPAT) that all electronic voting machines are required to have as of January 1, 2006, to conduct the 1% manual audit and to use the AVVPAT in the event of a recount.

SB 1235 will be heard in the Senate Elections, Reapportionment & Constitutional Amendments Committee later this year.

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