The Daily Camera's Laura Snider wrote a very good piece on the Boulder audit at New election audit targets close races - County is the first to use a 'risk-limiting' audit.
See all the data and results of Boulder's audit for lots more details.
I think we were the first in Colorado to do a risk-limiting audit, and one of the first in the nation, but I know that e.g. in California's Marin county last February Philip Stark did a risk-limiting audit of a ballot measure, and his team is doing them in 4 counties (Yolo, Humboldt, Marin and Santa Cruz) for the recent general election.
I should also update my previous article on Audit Problems in Colorado, where I said that the Colorado audit rule doesn't require an audit of the actual counting process. As a result of the lawsuit last year, the Secretary of State did require, as a special condition of certification for several election system in Colorado, that counties audit some contests for a single actual election-day mail-in batch. I'm looking forward to seeing how the counties actually implemented that. See the conditions of use for the details.
The best story I've seen so far on the "paper dust" investigation in Boulder is from Laura Snider at the Boulder Daily Camera. Or maybe I'm biased since she called me and put in a quote or two 8-)
http://www.dailycamera.com/news/2008/nov/05/boulder-countys-counting-crawls/
From the limited information I have, it seems to me that the magnitude of the problem is relatively small and might not be noticed by counties that don't look closely at their ballots via a good audit or the sort of screen images that the BallotNow system provides (despite its many flaws, that is an interesting aspect of the Hart system).
So how closely are other counties looking at their ballots, from systems known to have problems?
Snider writes:
Last winter, Secretary of State Mike Coffman de-certified all Hart scanning equipment because the scanners "failed to count votes accurately when there are extraneous marks on the ballot." ... Coffman's testing board recommended that he institute regulations requiring county officials to review every ballot, looking for the stray marks. Instead, Coffman chose to re-certify the machines, which are used in 47 Colorado counties, without the extra regulations.
That creates the possibility that some counties using the Hart scanners may be having dust problems and not know it. Improved audits were required by the conditions of use imposed by the Secretary of State.
But who besides Boulder in Colorado is really doing good audits of mail-in ballots?
Is your county addressing the many flaws in Colorado's auditing procedures (see my related article) ?
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