ElectionAudits Software News

Help audit the election!

We need better audits of our elections in order to promote confidence
in the results.  Thankfully, there are resources to make it easier
than it has been in the past, both in terms of procedures and statistical
research, and in terms of open source software.  If you are willing to talk to
your local elections officials, you can make a difference.  Read the
Background section below for more information.

You can:
 * See [how prepared your state is for the 2008 election](http://www.brennancenter.org/content/resource/states_get_mixed_reviews_on_readiness_for_voting_machine_problems/)
 * Ask your local officials if they follow the [Principles and Best Practices for Post-Election Audits](http://electionaudits.org/principles)
 * Attend a Logic and Accuracy Test (LAT) of the election system
 * Get data from the LAT and test this program
 * Ask when the report to be audited will be released
 * Ask when the random selection will be done and how

To do my part, I've worked with the Boulder County Clerk and started
the ElectionAudits open source software project to help us audit
elections, and I need help there too!  If you're skilled with Python or Django
(including how elections officials can run it on a Windows system),
database query optimization, xml, xslt, css, setuptools for packaging cross-platform easy_install eggs,
statistics, documentation or the like, see the ElectionAudits Software
Home Page and please lend a hand:

 http://neal.mcburnett.org/electionaudits/


Background:

We all know there are many questions being raised about the systems
used to count votes in our elections.  The bottom line, as noted in a
[paper by MIT voting and security expert Ron Rivest and NIST voting
expert John Wack](http://vote.nist.gov/SI-in-voting.pdf), is the need for "Software Independence":

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_independence

meaning that election software should not be a critical component
which, if it fails, can threaten the results of an election.

That is why we've moving from using unauditable DRE machines to
systems based on paper ballots that can be audited.  And we're slowly
getting there.  But even for optical scanner systems we also need to
check the software that does the actual tallying and reporting of the
results.

Those paper ballots are of little use if we never audit them.  And we
still have a long way to go on effective audits of elections: the
voting systems don't support audits well, the laws and regulations are
sparse and often inadequate, and the topic is confusing to many.

This prompted California Secretary of State Debra Bowen to establish [Post Election Manual Tally Requirements](http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/voting_systems/ttbr/post_election_req.pdf)

and issue [California proposed emergency regulations for them](http://josephhall.org/tmp/post_election_audit_regs.pdf)

Along with that, recently, experts in elections, statistics, computer
science, risk assessment and related fields have been working on
better audits, coordinated by [ElectionAudits.org](http://electionaudits.org/),
the nation's clearinghouse for election audit information.  The latest
results are the [Principles and Best Practices for Post-Election Audits](http://electionaudits.org/principles)

I've been very active in that effort, and convinced Boulder
County to do a complete audit, far better than what is currently
required in Colorado, starting with an audit of the 2008 Primary in
Boulder.

 http://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/elections/2008-boulder-primary-audit/

Based on that experience, it was clear we needed software to help deal
with the inadequacy of the reports available from our Hart InterCivic
BallotNow system, and to make it clearer how to base the work on good
statistics.  So the software includes the "varsize.py" statistical software
from Ron Rivest to guide efficient sampling of the audit units.

 [On Auditing Elections When Precincts Have Different Sizes, by Javed A. Aslam, Raluca A. Popa and Ronald L. Rivest](http://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/AslamPopaRivest-OnAuditingElectionsWhenPrecinctsHaveDifferentSizes.pdf)

See the demo and more at http://neal.mcburnett.org/electionaudits/