(Part 3 of a 3-part series)
In previous articles in this series, I’ve explained that any member of the public can witness the poll tapes printed by voting machines when the polls close—in at least 30 states. Other states have more restrictive rules.
To make this practice effective, we need these three things:
- Election officials should promptly publish election results, broken down by polling place, in a format that makes it possible to compare with poll tapes.
- There should be a clear and understandable audit method that volunteers can use to collect (copies of) the poll tapes and correlate them with the published election results. Ideally this method should be supported by computer software.
- Independent groups should organize volunteers to actually do the observations and upload the poll-tape data for comparison. Historically these were the local political party organizations, but nonpartisan election-transparency groups could do it too.
The good news is that all three of these things are happening. America Counts is a nonpartisan nonprofit initiative that has been (1) understanding best practices in election-results reporting and (2) building software for citizen-auditors to use in scanning an uploading poll-tape printouts. With the Actual Vote phone app, a volunteer video-records the poll tape by moving the phone camera slowly along its length. The video is uploaded automatically to America Counts and published on av.democracycounts.org, where anyone can watch it. America Counts then compares them with the official election results. (3) Scrutineers is a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that trains and organizes volunteers to do this observation and recording of poll tapes. In several states and particularly in metro Atlanta, Scrutineers will be using America Counts software to do poll-tape auditing, and in several jurisdictions these organizations have gotten cooperation from election officials in improving results reporting to make the audit more effective (see below at “It would be much better” for an example of what they’ve done).
Many election administrators are supportive of these efforts. They see this as a means to demonstrate to the public that their elections are run fairly and accurately. These poll-tape audits are independent evidence, visible to the public and understandable by the public. It can find errors if they occur, and can demonstrate the absence of fraud where there isn’t any.
Reporting results from vote centers
If an optical-scanner poll-tape in election-day precinct #2 says, “Fred M. got 180 votes”, and the County Clerk’s web site reports “Fred M. got 180 votes in precinct 2”, then it’s easy to understand whether the numbers do or do not match. But in a vote center, during the early voting period, one optical-scan voting machine can accumulate results for all the precincts in the county. Each ballot that’s scanned has a bar code that indicates the precinct number (or “ballot style”), so the scanner can keep the subtotals organized by precinct. There may be multiple scanners in the vote center, and several vote centers in the county. What will the poll tapes look like, and how should these results be reported so that we can make sense of them?
The election administrator can configure the voting machine to print out a poll tape broken down by precinct. You might think—I used to think—that this fine-grain information is necessary and useful to compare with election results published on a web site. But no! A precinct-by-precinct report would be literally hundreds of feet of cash-register tape. Each precinct might report on 20 election contests, each with 4 or 5 candidates, so that’s perhaps 3 feet of tape; and there might be 200 precincts in the county, for a grand total of 600 feet. Not practical to print, and not practical for election workers to display, not practical for citizen-auditors to read or scan.
Instead, it’s best to configure the voting machines (in the vote center) to report per-tabulator, that is, one report, covering all the contests, per optical scanner. This will work as long as the results-report on the web site is organized correspondingly. That is, look at the results report from Mercer County NJ, shown in part 1 of this series. It clearly separates the Early Voting numbers from the Election Day numbers and the Vote-by-Mail numbers. This is very important. But notice that it does not break down the Early Voting numbers by precinct—that is OK, since the poll tapes in the vote centers aren’t broken down by precinct either.
It would be much better if the report on the web sites had separate columns for each of the Early Vote Centers in the county, because each of those will produce its own separate poll tape. As it is, citizen auditors would have to add up the numbers from these 8 poll tapes to check against the published totals; and if they didn’t have volunteers to cover every one of the 8 vote centers, there would be no way to check the total. Publish the numbers for each individual vote center!
Early reporting
As vote results arrive from vote centers, from election-day polling places, and from scanning of mail-in ballots, election administrators upload these data into the county’s Election Management System. Then they double-check that each voting machine’s data is accounted for, and that there aren’t any anomalies. This double-checking can take a few days, but meanwhile the public and the news media want election results Right Away. The solution, for well over 100 years, is that Unofficial results are announced as soon as possible, and (after the election administrator has made sure everything is in order) Certified results are reported a few days later.
In some states, such as New Jersey, state law requires county clerks to post Unofficial totals, updated every day, but does not require those to be broken down by precinct; and requires county clerks to post Certified results broken down by precinct. Where that is the practice, it means that poll-tape comparisons are quite difficult before certification. It is a “best practice” to promptly report Unofficial results broken down by precinct; that’s a way of catching problems before Certification. The Mercer County Clerk goes above and beyond what’s required by state law; she posts Unofficial results broken down by precinct. We should encourage election administrators in other jurisdictions to do the same.
Even better would be to post those results in a common machine-readable format, so that citizen apps (like America Counts) can automatically compare the poll tapes. Mercer County’s system, via a service at clarityelections.com provided by soesoftware.com, gives the choice of XML, XLS, or TXT formats.
Conclusion
Remember, poll tape auditing cannot protect against hacks or misconfigurations inside the optical-scan vote tabulators that alter number before the poll tapes are printed. To detect and correct such errors, the best protection is Risk-Limiting Audits. RLAs examine a carefully chosen random sample of the original paper ballots that the voters marked, using a strong enough statistical method to be able to detect if a recount is needed.
Poll-tape auditing can protect against errors or hacks in transmitting results to the EMS computers and aggregating results in those computers. Since the EMS computers are at least as vulnerable to hacking as any other part of the system, poll-tape auditing is an important safeguard.
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