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Report: Widely Used Voting Machine Missed 0.4% of Ballots

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The only other known independent re-scanning of ballots cast using Premier AccuVote machines occurred in Humboldt County, California in conjunction with three recent elections. The independent scanning was done by the Humboldt County Election Transparency Project (click here)

Fortunately for Aspen, the official results of the election were the TrueBallot results, not the Premier results that were missing 11 ballots. The post-election manual audit of a random selection of 10% of the ballots confirmed that the TrueBallot system accurately recorded the votes. (click here)

Recommendations for Aspen:

Aspen immediately should undertake a detailed investigation to identify the source of the errors. This investigation may include interviewing poll workers associated with machines #4 and #5B to learn if there were any unusual events or lapses of proper procedures. For example, are they certain all of the ballots actually went through the tabulators? Could some poll workers have put some kicked-back ballots (that were wrinkled, or mis-marked) directly into the "emergency" side slot of the ballot box (that exists in case of power failures, etc.) and thus did not pass through the tabulator? If this possible error was combined with a second error when the ballots were removed after the close of polls, such that nobody noticed these 11 ballots were in the special compartment of the ballot box for un-scanned ballots, this could explain the error.

If the scenario above is ruled out, it is recommended that representatives from Premier and the testing laboratory that passed this AccuVote model be asked to explain how such an error could occur. Machines #4 and #5B should be secured and computer forensic experts should be employed by the Colorado Secretary of State to attempt to identify the source of the errors.

As to the matter of public release of the ballot images, we believe the city of Aspen should release these records, just as it has previously released all of the ballot data derived from the images. This was the practice in Humboldt County (Humboldt County election ballots can be found online here)

Broader Policy Recommendations:

Since both U.S. elections that have be tallied or audited in a transparent manner by scanning with commercial off-the-shelf scanners have proven to be more accurate than results reported by proprietary voting equipment, the fundamental assumption that vote tabulations should be conducted by non-transparent proprietary means should be questioned. The value for election integrity of having redundant records of each individual ballot (both paper and machine) rather than merely running totals from proprietary voting machines is evident. Colorado should require that voting machines purchased after 2010 record individual ballot records showing each voter's choices, rather than merely keeping running totals and establish manual audits of a statistically appropriate random sample of all ballots.

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Paul Fidalgo is the communications director for FairVote, the Center for Voting and Democracy.
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