Utah's new audit procedures are an internal audit, conducted without permitting public observation or verification, by the same election officials who count the votes and handle the ballots.
Is there any other industry that permits industry insiders to conduct its own audits, yet determines who controls such large budgets?
Since Utah's new audit procedures allow the Lt. Governor's office to select the voting machines that will be audited during Election Day, before the election is over, this information could be used by unscrupulous individuals within the Lt. Governor's office to manipulate the vote counts on unselected voting machines.
Kathy Dopp, Founder and President of Utah-based National Election Data Archive, and Joycelynn Straight of Utah Clear have developed an alternative election audit proposal and are seeking sponsors in the Utah legislature for independent election audit legislation that meets the transparency, verifiability, and sufficiency conditions.
Utah's election officials reiterated in their October 17, 2006 "Election Policy" that their plan to keep secret all the detailed election records, including the two electronic and two paper records of Diebold vote counts and then destroy them after 22 months - never to look at them. Without access to these records, Utah election officials will not be able to do their job of ensuring that Utah election results are accurate and auditors will not have access to all the detailed election records needed to conduct a thorough investigative audit. Utah Count Votes has an appeal scheduled on November 9th at 1:30 p.m. before the Utah State Archives and Records Service to try to gain public access to these election records needed to evaluate Utah election integrity.
This detailed response by the Utah's Desert Greens Party and Utah Count Votes to the Election Policies implemented on October 17, 2006 by the Office of the Utah Lt. Governor can be found at
http://utahcountvotes.org/ltgov/Response2LtGov-Audit-Recount.pdf
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