EAC - Voluntary Voting System Guidelines

Name : | Leslie Simmons
Organization : | ACLU of Northern California
Post Date : | 9/29/2005
Section Comments
Section : | 6.8
Page no. : |
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Comment : | The California Election Protection Network, a non-partisan organization of over 25 groups coming together to achieve their mutual election integrity goals, requests that Section 6.8 be amended to require the following: Gold Star Audit Protocol (in honor of those who have given their lives in the name of democracy) All state elections shall have (at State’s expense): • PAPER BALLOTS: Accessible, voter-verifiable, individual paper ballots on archival paper (that can be kept for years as proof the election result). • HAND COUNTS: A manual audit which relies on human eyes. • STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT SAMPLING: Select a minimum of 5% of all precincts (and precincts cannot exceed 1000 voters). Within these selected precincts, audit 100% of the paper ballots; or in their absence, the paper trails. • GENUINELY RANDOM: Genuinely random selected samples (not at the discretion of by election officials). • PUBLIC OVERSIGHT: Each political participating political party may form delegations to witness every step of the election process. Results of each tally posted publicly on a public-accessible posting at the precinct site, as well as on a public-accessible portion of the Secretary of State's website in a comma-delimited format (e.g. a format that may easily be extracted into a word processing or spreadsheet software), BEFORE the data is transferred (e.g. to the county’s central tabulator). • RECOURSE: Any discrepancies between the machine tally and the audit Gold Star audit protocol shall require the State to repeat this Gold Star Audit protocol; however, each time the sample size shall increase by 10%. The final result of this audit process supersedes the finding of the initial tally and is binding.