The audio is about an hour. It is in a format I couldn't stop/pause/slow/back up on. So these notes are brief and may contain errors. Although written as if these are quotes, don't depend on the accuracy. If you need quotes, listen to the audio, which is why I supply approximate times below.
The audio is available at:
http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/post_e/audit_standards.html
We've always wanted to keep the canvass process open to the public.
We use a computer generated program in which we draw precincts the day after the election, at nine o'clock.
"randomly generated Windows based program"
For Santa Clara County's 1% manual tally, we tally 9-10 full precincts, and 4-8 additional precincts for specific contests. Start the VPATs immediately. It takes 20-30 people 7-10 days for the tally. It is a standard tally, using paper and hash marks.
Once the precincts are selected, we start pulling the Sequoia VeriVote paper tapes from the VeriVote printer at the warehouse. This takes a day or day and a half.
Santa Clara uses 5 DREs per precinct. The DRE serial number is printed on the bottom of every ballot/VPAT.
Then Santa Clara prints the canvass report aggregate totals of each machine selected. We do the manual tally by DRE machine.
The ballot from the VeriVote in Chinese was 5 pages per ballot.
Sequoia has a control number on the ballot right above the first race as to whether or not the ballot will be counted or not.
If numbers don't match, we recount the paper trail and optical scan ballots. Provisional ballots are counted as regular ballots.
We have had a printer malfunction, overprinting, only once.
Sequoia paper is guaranteed for storage for 7 years
Santa Clara must have ballots in 5 languages: English, Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Tagalog. The VPAT lists candidates both in English and a foreign language if one is being used. However the phrases "provisional accepted", "Yes", or "No" on the VPAT is only in one language, the foreign language if one is being used.
The VPAT rolls are long and tedious to use, but we don't cut the VPAT.
Santa Clara has Pitney-Bowes Olympus 2 sorting machines. The precinct numbers are printed on the outside of the ballots, then there is the signature comparison, then the ballots are run through the sorter to sort on accepted/rejected and by first digit of precinct numbers
Santa Clara sorts absentee ballots by precinct number.
There are 300,000 permanent absentee voters and that number is growing. Everything is counted by election night that came in by Monday morning. Paper ballots are 18 1/2 inch ballot cards
The precinct canvass teams count one contest at a time. If after the count, the numbers don't match, they rerun the ballots through the 400c optical scanner.
Occassionally a ballot card ends up in the wrong precinct.
The counting teams do not know what the machine count numbers are. If a precinct is recounted, it is often by a different counting team.
A ballot on a VPAT is 4-5 feet. There may be 80 ballots per roll, plus more space is used by voided ballots.
More people would require a lot more space.
The 28 day canvass limit was pretty tight for November.
Expand the manual tally to 3%? Owie! This would be next to impossible. It would have to be a huge, huge operation. The problem is not just the people tallying, but also resources from the warehouse and other places to prepare for the work.
Processes are open to observers, but they usually get bored and leave.
Napa has 20,000 permanent absentee voters of 60,000 registered voters.
50% vote on DREs. Napa uses Sequoia systems; the DRE is the Edge 1 with VPAT.
The workers look at every paper ballot before it is put into the box to be counted. If looks like it can't be machine read, then the ballot is duplicated.
In the last election, Napa had to duplicate almost one fourth of the paper ballots.
The duplication is not currently observed, but could be.
The 400C optical scanner spits out overvotes for the staff to look at.
There are 99 precincts, so only one precinct is needed for the 1% manual tally.
Napa puts 99 numbers in a box and then someone pulls out a precinct number for the VPATs, and then this is repeated for the absentee ballots.
Napa cuts the VPAT into separate ballots for the precincts in the manual tally. Ballots are segregated by DRE for electronic votes, and by precinct for paper absentee ballots.
Napa uses four person manual tally teams:
The tally teams are not staff; they are hired from the general population.
Napa bills the jurisdictions for election costs. The cost for a recent election, which took 2 days to count 2 precincts, was $1500 or $3/ballot tallied.
For a recount in a race in a smaller city, 2059 VPAT ballots and 1800 paper ballots were counted for $3300, or 85 cents per ballot. This took 5 days.
(Ed: the relative costs in the above two paragraphs don't appear to make sense, but that's what he said)
The manual tally sometimes finds real problems. In one close race (2004?), the machine count of paper ballots counted 12 votes in one precinct; the manual tally counted 18 votes. The optical scanner wasn't reading gel ink marks and red ink properly. 6,600 out of 180,000 vote marks were lost because calibration was off on the optical scanner.
After the calibration was fixed, the ballots were recounted and it worked.
In one case, there was one VPAT ballot missing out of 2059 ballots. Napa had 30 DREs, reloading the VPATs resulted in 60 VPATs.
Napa cuts the VPAT for the manual tally, and removes the voided ballots. Napa has less than 4% void rate (out of 20,000 electronic ballots)
In case there is a major problem with the VPATs, the back up is to print ballot images from the machines, although those are not voter verified.
There were about 13,300 paper ballots.
Staff visually look at every ballot, both sides first, before the paper ballot is put into a box to be counted by the optical scanner.
The optical scanner also checks and kicks out any ballots with overvotes.
The scanner may miss voter intent, e.g. if the voter circled the bubble instead of filling in the bubble.
In one recount, the requestor had to pay $3300.
Napa cuts the VPAT rolls into separate ballots to avoid the repetitive motion for rolling and unrolling the VPAT. Otherwise the rolling and unrolling must be done many times on each VPAT because only one race is counted at a time. Also people are used to counting separate pieces of paper.
Napa is a monolingual county for elections.
I have experience from two counties:
I'd like to emphasize the post election process depends on the preelection process. In San Bernardino County, in an election a while ago, in the post election canvass, the results were flipped in 13 contests due to inadequate preelection testing. The preelection Logic and Accuracy test is a check on coding the election. Staff do not have much time to code the election, and the Logic and Accuracy testing is very useful.
I believe the parallel monitoring is really useful, and has verified the accuracy of the process.
In 1986, we updated the 1% manual tally. I was in the Secretary of State office at the time. There was an article in the New York Times, above the fold, by David Burnham. It noted that all jurisdictions had ELA source code for the Vot-a-matic system, and it would be easy to rig an election. I asked Roy Saltman, then at NIST, to look at our 1% manual tally.
I wrote into law additional precincts for races not otherwise being auditing and also the escrow requirement
Solano County has 220 precincts using precinct count optical scan, with no foreign language requirements. There are 165000 registered voters.
To pick the precinct for the manual tally, we put precinct numbers on poker chips. Then with the permission of the citizen observers, we pick one precinct from each of the three main areas in the County: Vallejo, Fairfield-Suisun, and Vacaville.
Then there are three teams of three people, and each team is sent to a separate room to work. We also had three observers, and sent one with each counting team. One observer promptly fell asleep.
Since Solano is a small county, we had the luxury of waiting until everything was counted, provisionals, etc.
We didn't roll the absentee ballots into the 1% tally. We offered to observers that we could also do the absentee ballots, but they politely said you don't need to do that.
I am new in San Diego. San Diego has 1650 precincts and 54 contests. We select 17 precincts for the 1% tally, plus 37 more for races not included. There are three vote by mail precincts.
Each team consists of 3 people, 1 reads and 2 record. The tally took 3 weeks, 6 days a week, 10 hours a day to complete.
Increasing the 1% would be extremely difficult, we'd need to go to 24 by 7.
We currently use a random generator; I want to switch to citizens choosing the random precincts.
San Diego doesn't wait for end of canvass. We select precincts the day after the election. We run a report out of the central tabulator at a certain point in time. It is not complete.
We have sorting equipment for absentee ballots and are sorting absentees and roll these into the process.
We can't roll in the provisionals.
In Solano County, it was difficult for poll workers to balance the roster book at the end of the day. With 2 card ballots, the poll workers have to balance each separately. Even a budget analyst precinct inspector didn't balance. That precinct was off by one. Exhaustion after a long day is a factor.
When a voter must vote provisionally, they are given a paper ballot and a pink envelope. Some voters slipped their provisional ballot into the optical scanner, before poll workers could stop them. This appeared to be intentional. We provided incentive pay for perfectly balanced rosters, and this helped.
There are some problem with voter intent and optical scanners. The scanner will kick out what it believes is a completely blank ballot. The voter may have used a red pen or circled bubbles instead of filling them in, etc. Sometimes the voters don't bother correcting the ballot.
For write-ins, the voter must bubble in next to the name that the voter wrote in. We are legally not allowed to count that vote, even though voter intent is clear.
Expanding the 1% tally to 3% would mean going to 24 by 7. There are space and management issues. I couldn't work 24 by 7 and would have to trust others. Oversight would be an issue in 24 by 7 operations.
Things doable in Solano are much harder in a large county like San Diego - not impossible, but very burdensome.
Some states have automatic recounts for real close races.
There is no escallation procedure. In a really close race, I would invite in both parties to watch the 1% tally.